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Streaming Is Laying Bare How Big ISPs and Big Tech Work Together Against Users
- fuf7rurehfr 6y agoI don't get how someone can label big tech as anything but an extension of the DNC. Literally every major platform has had employees actively protesting and engaging in workplace campaigns in support of what are clearly DNC ideals. If you think the problem has political roots then there's no avoiding the reality that American tech needs to find a way to become politically agnostic again if the situation is going to improve.
- CogitoCogito 6y agoDoes your comment have anything at all to do with the linked article?
- stingraycharles 6y agoYeah we have similar things here in The Netherlands. Vodafone acquired one of the major cable internet providers (Ziggo), and are giving benefits to people who are customers of both; effectively a discount on the bills + a free cable tv package, which includes HBO Go. The good thing is that it’s not expensive (I’d argue that they are giving a deal that’s cheaper than anything else out there), but they do make it nearly impossible for eg ADSL providers to compete. I’m not sure how to feel about this. I consider the root problem the monopoly the cable providers have, as its by far the fastest way to driver internet compared to ADSL. As such, I’ve put my hopes on fiber optical arriving soon, which exposes a much larger market on which multiple providers can compete. Incredibly annoying by the way that HBO Go is not available for Apple TV, so it’s pretty much worthless to me and I just end up torrenting anything of HBO I want to watch. Not sure about the legality about it, but it sure as hell is a better experience.
- dtech 6y ago> I consider the root problem the monopoly the cable providers have, as its by far the fastest way to driver internet compared to ADSL. As such, I’ve put my hopes on fiber optical arriving soon, which exposes a much larger market on which multiple providers can compete. Not that this a grave KPN - the ex-state phone and copper network company - dug entirely for itself. There were a lot of fiber companies and rollouts happening over the last decades, but KPN all bought them out and stopped the rollout, to prevent competition with its aging copper network. So now the result is Ziggo - the merger of all the ex-state cable companies - has a virtual monopoly on fast internet, as xDSL/copper hasn't kept up with DOCSIS/cable by a long shot, and KPN controls all the FtH but has a dismal coverage percentage.
- exar0815 6y agoSo the situation below the ground is not better than in Germany. We call the former monopolist with the violet T the "World champion in cramming data on a bell wire". Here its also just the choice between rather slow xDSL via ancient Copper, mostly older DOCSIS with abysmal upload speeds by Vodafone (Which bought out all Cable companies and is slowly rolling out D3.1) or some vey specialized construction when you are living in a rural area. For my Parents, I built a 7 GHz Microwave Link to a neighboring Town with goodish network access. Luckily, there is direct LoS and we get 18-25MBit of the 30 through. I am astonished tho, as I always had the impression that your mobile network is pretty good. In fact, as I work about 300m away from the dutch border, we regularly use VodafoneNL as Benchmark Network for our RF Products, as there atleast we get full 4G and not only 3G as on the german Vodafone Network.
- tremon 6y agoMobile data is not a flat fee per month, they all have data caps above which you either start to pay extra or get a throughput comparable to POTS modem speeds. So it's not a viable replacement for the wired Internet connection everyone has at home.
- exar0815 6y agoThe "problem" everywhere is streaming. 4G/5G would be a decent replacement for basically everything else. But streaming breaks every data cap, sadly. Oh, and games. I just read that some modern games have patches(!) of over 100GB. What the hell?
- fyfy18 6y ago> I’ve put my hopes on fiber optical arriving soon, which exposes a much larger market on which multiple providers can compete I live in Lithuania which has a pretty good fiber rollout, and has fair rules for consumers on common access to physical infrastructure by different providers. In reality though it means you still only have one choice on who your internet provider is. It's not worth it for multiple providers to wire up an apartment or neighbourhood when there is already an existing provider there.
- blooalien 6y ago"It's not worth it for multiple providers to wire up an apartment or neighbourhood when there is already an existing provider there." Except that it is kinda worth it if they'd think for a moment just how many folk would instantly switch to any competition that arrived in an area that's been consistently screwed over by the only provider there… All they'd have to do is offer honest services at a fair price and they'd steal a massive chunk of the area's subscriber base.
- fyfy18 6y agoI think the issue here is there isn't much profit to be made though. This isn't the US where you pay $100/mo for slow DSL with a ridiculous datacap.... I pay €19/mo for FTTH at 1gbit up/down and no data limits. My apartment building has 20 properties, so if a competitor came in offering the same for €15/mo and managed to convert half of the properties that would be... €150/mo revenue. How long would it take to even pay back the GPON hardware they need to install in the building? My provider hasn't attempted to screw us over at all yet (been with them for 4 years), but I am concerned that they are our only choice, so if they wanted to double prices we'd probably pay.
- michaelt 6y agoImagine the cost of providing fiber is $50/month, and Company A has wired up a town and charges customers $100/month. You're the CEO of Company B, and you have two choices: You can wire up the same town, charge $60/month, Company A will drop their prices to match, and you get to make a profit of $10/month from half the town. Or you can wire up a different town, and charge $100/month - giving you a profit of $50/month from the entire town. Which one would you do first?
- Marciplan 6y agoThe rest of your point still stands but, plz, do your research. Vodafone did not acquire Ziggo. VodafoneZiggo is a joint-venture where Liberty Global (owner of Ziggo) and Vodafone Group are both 50% owners.
- dzdt 6y agoFYI the downvotes are for the phrasing. If you had written "Small correction:" instead of "plz, do your research" it would have gone the other way.
- mosselman 6y agoI live in the Netherlands as well and I have had diner for many years. Your comment makes it seem as if there is no fiber in the Netherlands yet.
- sandermvanvliet 6y agoLiving in Rotterdam it does appear that way. Lots of announcements over the years but no actual fiber availability
- dtech 6y agoGood for you. If you live in the Randstad or most cities, FtH is nonexistent outside of recently build suburbs [1] [1] https://www.kpnnetwerk.nl/netwerkkaart https://www.kpnnetwerk.nl/netwerkkaart
- jrochkind1 6y agoWhere I live, a medium-sized city in the US, there is NO fiber option. One cable broadband provider is the only choice.
- spiderfarmer 6y agoI live in a rural part of Drenthe. One of the most sparsely populated regions of the Netherlands. I have Gigabit internet through a small ISP, over the fiber that is owned by our local coop, for just 50 euro/month.
- radicalbyte 6y agoThe crazy thing is that the rural areas all seem to have fiber whilst the towns are stuck with Ziggo.
- stingraycharles 6y agoIt’s policy, the towns already have Ziggo so they already have fast internet. Rural areas typically don’t have that yet. At least, that’s how I understood it.
- stingraycharles 6y agoI think the policy is that they’re first adding fiber to these regions, as people living in larger cities / more populated areas typically already have access to fast cable internet. Or is this something that you guys did totally independently?
- spiderfarmer 6y agoIt’s totally independent. The local government is backing the loan though. But they knew they had to after they realized their mistake of giving commercial parties a permit to lay fiber in the village centras, without connecting the outside area. Now thanks to us all houses are connected to fiber, even if they don’t use it. People who do use it pay 11 euro/month to help pay back the loan. There are many more projects like this throughout the country. But this doesn’t work in areas where people are not seeing (or don’t care) how this will benefit their environment. Maybe Covid will help a lot of these projects achieve their threshold.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
- hinkley 6y agoWait, HBO Go isn't available on Apple TV? Last I heard they were discontinuing support for older Apple TVs, not all Apple TVs. Are they gone entirely in your region?
- sukilot 6y agoAssuming you haven't rooted your Apple TV, how does piracy help with the lack of an Apple TV app (aside from bypassing paying for the content, which is independent of Apple TV)? To watch on your computer, HBO works fine. To watch on your Apple TV, you have to stream from a computer z whether you use AirPlay (supported) or piracy.
- LockAndLol 6y agoAh... zero-rating. Somehow that also slipped through the cracks here in Europe. I was terribly surprised the union could even agree upon some form of net-neutrality. For some time European citizens somehow made some good choices at the voting booths AND there must've been some strong business reason to introduce it. Without economic incentive it never would've passed.
- philjohn 6y agoIt's odd - one of the selling points of my plan with Three in the UK is "Go Binge!" which doesn't count any data used for Netflix et al ... but I'm on an unlimited plan, so it seems rather pointless.
- dspillett 6y ago> but I'm on an unlimited plan, so it seems rather pointless. It makes sense if you read the smallprint. Your unlimited plan will have traffic controls that vary with how much you use. For instance look at GiffGaff's current offers of £20 for 80GB and £25 for "always on" (in an unusual instance of a provider not disengenuously using the word unlimited). If you have the hotter option and go over 80GB you are throttled down to 0.3Mbps for the rest of the billing period (if you have the £20 option you instead start inviting expensive per-MB charges at your usually throughputs). So what Three are saying is that your "unlimited" plan has traffic shaping based on how much you use (backdoor limits to "unlimited", though in the more common less honestly portrayed form) but that traffic to & from Netflix does not get added to the counters which affect those traffic shaping rules. I've not read Three's relevant smallprint, hence using GG as my detailed example above because I have encountered their's recently, but I'm confident the above holds because that is how "unlimited" generally works in this context these days. Ah, memories of all the hoo-haa in the 00s & 10s when ISPs were scrabbling to find imaginative ways to kick off people who used too much of their "unlimited" resources workout breaking contract law...
- jakub_g 6y agoThere's "unlimited WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook" in data plans in some EU countries. Which is kinda nice, but probably only cements their monopoly.
- nottorp 6y agoThat's one problem. The other problem is that the fragmentation of streaming (HBO has 3 streaming services now ?!?) will make the pirate bay popular again.
- verylittlemeat 6y agoI wish I could find that viral image passed around for decades demanding the ideal à la carte cable tv - just want a handful of good channels not 1000 channels of crap. I guess we got what we wanted but not quite the way we expected.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoPeople want high quality content that takes risks, but don’t want to pay for it. I find it a lot cheaper to just pay the $2 to $20 to rent/buy the media from the various vendors since I consume so little of it. The situation is vastly improved from my childhood when you had to deal with one company having control of delivering all the media into your home, and it was on a schedule you couldn’t control and with ads. Now I just tap a few buttons and it’s on.
- nottorp 6y ago$2 to $20 sounds reasonable. But the trend now is to have 20 services with different content, each costing $2 to $20. Will you subscribe to them all?
- lotsofpulp 6y agoNo, I won’t. But people who find value in it can, and it’s still leaps better than the previous normal of not being able to watch anything at anytime, anywhere. Efforts to complain about monopolies and price would be better directed at reducing copyright durations.
- Mindwipe 6y agoIt means $2 - 20 per title. Streaming services are a bargain compared to that. Netflix really did give everyone daft pricing expectations while it burnt venture capital to price itself artificially cheaply.
- croes 6y agoWe are living in the times of digital oligarchy. Guess we need to start a revolution to reach democracy.
- gitgud 6y agoIs this because ISP's can see DNS traffic? as it's in the clear over UDP... If so, then perhaps DNS over HTTPS would make it impossible for an ISP to rate-limit certain services. Since all DNS requests would be encrypted too... (apologies for all the acronyms!)
- Olreich 6y agoTraffic shaping can still occur as they see your data volumes and the networks your connecting to. Sure it might not be as specific to the streaming service, but it should be decently possible to identify other streaming services, and any ISP-owned one.
- csunbird 6y agoThey can also do a reverse DNS lookup of the IP addresses that you are connecting to, since you can not hide that.
- ti_ranger 6y ago> Is this because ISP's can see DNS traffic? as it's in the clear over UDP... Not necessarily. It could very easily be done via IP address matching (think BGP communities that advertise specific subnets between one part of a network and another, as are typically used for optimal CDN routing etc.).
- Shivetya 6y agoAT&T fiber customer here, I didn't even know I had HBO* until I got a paper mailing from them. I would never have purchased it otherwise as I find their pricing out of line with their content; pretty much what I think of every offering other than Disney+ Yeah, no app on my LG C9 but I can stream perfectly fine from my Verizon connected phone with the AT&T app and it looks and sounds great. If anything the HBO debacle isn't a Net Neutrality issue but more of how bad a management team can fuck up a product launch. It is a product people know exist but don't know exactly what it is or how you get it and the confusion multiplied by too many names. fwiw, my neighbor has three kids and between him and his wife they stream everything under the sun. Neither he nor I have ever seen cap issues so these might be regional or softly enforced. also, be careful what you wish for, all utilities are metered and there is no guarantee a final construct for internet being a utility does not inflict that along with all sorts of associated fees to insure access beyond those we have now.
- cromulent 6y agoSewage isn't normally metered, but yes.
- Rychard 6y agoIn my experience, sewage is billed based on water usage, which makes sense to me. If you use some water, presumably it has to go somewhere.
- gruez 6y agoWhat if you're just watering your plants?
- treis 6y agoYou usually can get a credit for la large water usage that doesn't go in the drain. Most commonly done for filling swimming pools.
- lostapathy 6y ago
- bregma 6y agoI live in a country in which all internet is divided by a vertically-integrated duopoly. One of the companies (let's call is "Bell") owns a national fibre network, the last mile of copper or fiber to the home, ISP service, mobile phone service, and several national content networks. It receives significant subsidies from the federal government for providing national backbone service, fixed wireless service in rural areas from its extensive network of towers, and content production on its networks. The other duopolist is similar, but started in the cable TV business instead of the telephone business. These duopolists are required by law to allow third-party ISPs to use their backhauls and last-miles in exchange for some of the government subsidies. They do this grudgingly, using loopholes like providing twisted copper pairs to the third-party offices even when fibre passes outside their door. Regulations allow (and there is plenty of admission of, and lawsuits over) deep packet inspection to allow "traffic shaping" based on content and connection. At one point the cable company was successfully sued because they throttled all encrypted traffic on the assumption that it was VPN streaming pirated video content in competition with their own service., causing gaming to be useless for half the country. I understand these are first-world problems. I own shared of some of these companies, and they pay good dividends. It doesn't mean they are not unethical.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mattnewton 6y agoSounds nearly indistinguishable from AT&T and Comcast in the states.
- HelixEndeavor 6y agoyeah, gee, it sure does doesn't it...
- mrcarruthers 6y agoI'm assuming he's Canadian and the other company is Rogers.
- tomp 6y agoI recently switched from a 3G wireless router to a copper ADSL-like physical line (not fiber). To be honest, ... I don't notice a lot of difference. Some days it's better (less ping, more bandwidth) other days it's worse (remote desktop being barely usable). I'm using it for remote work / remote desktop, video conferences, and streaming (movies), but not gaming. Whenever I get too frustrated I switch to my iPhone's hotspot. The service is always better, but maybe that's because the line is less contested then (unfortunately I have low data caps on my phones).
- austincheney 6y agoLet me give you an example of expensive. At home in Texas I pay $70 for 1gbps internet. It actually performs at around 890-920mbps both up and down. Perhaps that is expensive compared to other countries, but I am happy with the price and the customer service/response is fantastic. I am currently in Kuwait (modern first-world nation) where the pricing tiers in my location are $30 for 1.5mbps, $50 for 3mbps, or $90 for 6mbps.
- ab_goat 6y agoLet me give you an example of expensive. I live in MA USA where my only option is Verizon DSL 3mbps down and 0.8mbps up for $74.57
- ti_ranger 6y agoThat's impossible. In my country, our anti-ISP media claims that we have the most expensive internet in the world, but 10/5Mbps FTTH (in most cases with free upgrades to 20/2Mbps for the duration of COVID-19 WFH guidance mandated by the government) is quite commonly available at < $20-$25/month, and where it isn't, 10/1Mbps ADSL is available for $25-$30/month (including POTS voice service). Thus, it is impossible that you, in the country of ~$20 1Gbps service, have worse and more expensive service. </sarcasm>
- briffle 6y agoUntil I moved west in 2017, I lived 4 miles from Madison, WI (one exit south of the beltline) and the best I could do was a WISP that was $62/month for 2 Mbps down and 250Kbps up
- sukilot 6y agoIs this a rental building, or why is there no cable offering? Rural?
- cptskippy 6y agoI moved from suburban GA to suburban CA recently and my plan/price stayed the same but my service went from 75/25Mbps to 1/1Gbps.
- treis 6y ago>AT&T is already making money hand over fist on you, AT&T doesn't make that much money. Their profit margin is consistently around 10% which is pretty much dead on average for the S&P 500. Half of what Apple does and about 1/3 of Facebook.
- bjo590 6y agoAmazon's profit margin is small, but only a fool would say they aren't making money hand over fist. Profit isn't the only measure of 'making money'. ATT's revenue was $181B in 2019.
- rhino369 6y agoYou could looks at return on capital, but AT&T isn’t that great in that measurement either. It makes a pretty fair return in a very large investment. They certainly work for their money.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoAll the more impressive when they're also one of the better dividend stocks out there.
- donmcronald 6y agoWouldn’t it be better to measure $profit per customer. 10% margin doesn’t sound like much, but as you increase costs with anticompetitive measures like having the government sell you exclusive access to infrastructure related resources, that 10% increases in value. Ex: I’d rather pay $100 to an ISP making 20% margin than $200 to an ISP making 10% margin.
- treis 6y ago>Ex: I’d rather pay $100 to an ISP making 20% margin than $200 to an ISP making 10% margin. But you can't because it costs $180 to provide the service. If it could be provided cheaper they'd keep charging you $200 and pocket the extra profit.
- ti_ranger 6y agoIn my opinion, there is really only one valid complaint in the article: > We need more choices for our ISPs If you fix this, e.g. by requiring all last-mile owners to offer the last-mile access at or below their (audited, sufficiently-profitable) input cost to their retail products, most of the remaining problems would sort themselves out, without having micro-managing of ISP features. Unless you are going to start regulating OTTs in what features/value they can provide, I think it's unfair on (non-monopoly) ISPs to prevent them from providing innovative features because of "net neutrality should trump all" opinions.
- sumtechguy 6y agoThere is two sides to this. The ISP basically becoming a monopoly (or duopoly in many cases). Your idea could have the effect of creating a third one. I think it would need to be something where all the ISPs have some sort of financial stake in making that company/gov org work correctly. That could however create more regulatory capture (which we already have). The other side is the giant walled gardens these companies have created. To fix that would mean that each of the companies would have to want to be federated. I do not see that happening. These are the same companies that are heavily filtering everyone and they said the ISPs would do it. What is the point of having a 'freedom ISP' if the other end is not? We have to have the whole chain working.
- ikeboy 6y agoThe article conflates mobile and home internet. It correctly claims that most people don't have a significant choice for home internet, but doesn't say that for mobile because it's obviously not true - there's at least three major carriers plus over a dozen resellers. But then the article complains about zero rating, which as it concedes only applies to mobile, and tries to argue it's a result of lack of competition.
- gsich 6y agoResellers aren't going to change the performance of the underlying network.
- ikeboy 6y agoBut they often have different practices around what data gets billed, prioritized, etc, so they count as competition when discussing those features.
- cbsmith 6y agoThe trend is within the next year that at least in major metropolitan areas, wireless 5G providers will compete for home Internet. It's a dumb way to solve the problem, that becomes the smart way to solve it once the regulatory/protective measures around the last mile overwhelm the other inefficiencies.
- ikeboy 6y agoIt won't be cheap enough for a couple of years, I think, but agreed. Tech solving thorny political problems is always my favorite.
- cbsmith 6y agoHere in LA, Verizon's 5G Home Wireless plan is $50/month if you already have a Verizon mobile plan that is $30/month or more. It includes a year of Disney+, and the first three months free. That's very competitive in the LA market.
- AlexandrB 6y agoI'm still shocked that AT&T's acquisition of Warner Bros and HBO was approved. I think a fair rule would be that if you're a company that wants to be a "natural monopoly" like AT&T, you shouldn't be allowed to enter other verticals like content production or advertising.
- 3pt14159 6y ago(Disclosure, my mom works for AT&T.) For better, or for worse, content is the new strategy at AT&T. The physical layer of the internet is a margins game and it's getting harder and harder for large organizations to compete. I'm not for it either, but it is understandable that AT&T would want to be more like Disney than the reverse.
- maxsilver 6y ago> The physical layer of the internet is a margins game and it's getting harder and harder for large organizations to compete This is only true because AT&T arbitrarily decided it so. AT&T could easily make more money by offering a better internet service. They just willingly gave away their market to Comcast, and have decided it was easier to compete against Comcast in content than compete against Comcast in infrastructure.
- awinter-py 6y agoin the 60s the DOJ stopped the 3rd largest grocery chain in LA from buying the 6th-largest not so much these days
- wnissen 6y agoPeople don't realize that antitrust did not originally apply only to the largest few companies in a market. Sure, it was used to break up Standard Oil and Ma Bell, notorious monopolies that openly used their monopoly powers to charge sky-high prices. But it was also used against companies large and small that were engaging in practices judged "anti-competitive". E.g., "Brown Shoe Co. v. United States (1962) invalidated a merger between two shoe producers and retailers because it would have created a market share of 5 percent that might have tended to “lessen competition substantially in the retail sale of men’s, women’s and children’s shoes in the overwhelming majority” of the relevant markets." 5%! Pretty amazing that a few retailers now control a huge percentage of all retail sales. To be fair, Amazon and Wal-Mart have mostly grown organically, but still. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/19-110_e21447ad-d98a-451f-8ef0-ba42209018e6.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/19-110_e2144...
- daniel-s 6y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but aren't the ISP monopolies in the US all/mostly the result of government monopoly protection/non-compete agreements with cities? When governments grant monopolies the consumers get screwed. There's nothing new or mysterious about this.
- Teknoman117 6y agoYou are correct - but also note government in this case also includes city, county, and state governments, not just the federal government. If you ignore the cases in which a town has granted a monopoly to any given provider, we also have many cases where the ISPs own the poles the lines are on, or own the underground cable channels. They are not required to provide a way to buy or rent space on the poles or in the underground channels. You end up in a situation where any upstart competitor has to duplicate the entire infrastructure in order to begin competing. It's one of the reasons the ISPs have been super freaked out by the high bandwidth microwave links (AirFiber for instance), because it significantly reduces the cost of establishing baseline service. I'm fairly envious of the European countries that forbid ISPs or cell providers from owning (or at least having a monopoly on) the infrastructure (such as poles, cell towers, underground channels, etc.)
- supergeek133 6y agoThis is a little bit of my ignorance to public works and how much these companies invest in infrastructure. Please correct me. But the way I understand it, the ISP pays for right of way access to the city/county/state to put in infrastructure to deliver internet access, right? They also pay for the labor/material cost to get the work done, right? If we really want net neutrality and a stop to the pseudo monopolies, wouldn't the municipality have to buy the infrastructure from the private company?
- phkahler 6y agoOr install and maintain it's own infrastructure. With all the upgrading that's gone on for the last 25 years it probably would have been bad, but now progress is slowing and it seems more appropriate.
- supergeek133 6y agoSure, this is another thing, but I just keep going back to all the trouble Google Fiber had to make them stop.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago> If we really want net neutrality and a stop to the pseudo monopolies, wouldn't the municipality have to buy the infrastructure from the private company? Not necessarily. From a legal perspective, no. Laws could be passed mandating someone as long as it’s not unconstitutional. Additionally, there are two different things you’re conflating here. First is the forcing of someone who is grated a limited monopoly to lease their infrastructure to competitors. The infrastructure doesn’t have to be public to mandate some kind of sharing. The company that seeds the investment still gets some form of limited exclusivity and gets to charge competitors a (regulated) fee for their use. Net Neutrality is different. It’s stating that the service you provide must be neutral in nature. This doesn’t seem directly relevant to an investment in infrastructure. It’s just consumer protections because these companies are grated limited monopolies. In my mind, any further public sale of spectrum, copper, fiber access should come with a neutrality clause. If any traffic they want to send over the new property must be neutral, then it could start to change things without help from our toothless FCC.
- Vorh 6y agoHere's hoping that Starlink will resolve some of these problems instead of just making them worse.
- jeffbee 6y agoThis article is using a really unusual definition of "Big Tech", isn't it? Isn't AT&T alone the only bad actor here?
- tzs 6y agoThe EFF continues to conflate zero-rating and "sponsored data". Both can be anti-competitive, but in different ways. Zero-rating is an ISP not charging for data from a particular source. Sponsored data is someone other than the user paying the ISP's charge for user's data from a particular source (usually data from the entity paying for it). (In cases like HBO and AT&T, where the company paying for the data and the ISP are part of the same company or subsidiaries of the same company, I'd count that as a form of disguised zero rating rather than sponsored data). The case for regulating zero-rating is much stronger than the case for regulating sponsored data. Note that a company could in effect do sponsored data without even having an arrangement with an ISP. E.g., a company could keep track on its end of how much data from them each customer used each month, map that to ISPs based on IP address, and then give each customer a discount on their monthly bill based on that ISPs rates and that customers use. Let's call this "manual sponsored data". It's hard to make a case that manual sponsored data is automatically bad, of even usually bad. Companies are usually allowed to bundle products from other companies or provide discounts on products from other companies that go well with theirs. In particular, its hard to make a case that even if someone does do manual sponsored data in a way that is bad, we need separate regulation for it instead of letting it be dealt with under antitrust just like you do for other third-party bundling arrangements. But if manual sponsored data is allowed, it is then hard to make the case that it is bad to allow ISPs to facilitate it by offering a service where they track the usage for you, and then bill you for your customer's data usage instead of billing the customer. Zero-rating, on the other hand, because it is the ISP itself choosing what to zero-rate, and because the ISP is providing last mile infrastructure for which there is very little competition in most areas, is much more likely to be anti-competitive. It could still also be dealt with by antitrust, but because it is already taking place under highly constrained competition you can make a decent argument that it is worth specialized regulation. Conflating the two just makes it much less likely that such regulation will happen.
- donmcronald 6y agoBoth are bad. They hide the real cost from the user. The manual thing would never work because the rates I pay as a user are astronomically higher than the rates that would get paid for sponsored data. That’s half the reason the huge companies like it. It costs very little to sponsor data where I’d normally pay inflated rates, so it’s “good value” for me. The problem with that is you need to be a huge business to have a chance of negotiating those deals, so it disadvantages anyone who wants to compete as a startup. Both are bad and should be illegal imo. Let users pay for their data. There’s no reason to obfuscate the costs.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoin india, the recent internet boom due to reliance JIo and others like airtel have brought incredible change in a short amount of time but sadly, FUP remains. This is somehow seen as "part of the game" when it need not be. https://www.jio.com/fiber/en-in/plans https://www.jio.com/fiber/en-in/plans here speeds range from 100 mbps to 1 gbps but with stupid stupid data caps. like seriously, what is the need for 1 gbps when you can only use high speed internet till 5 tb? same for smaller plans as well. stupid. https://www.airtel.in/broadband/delhi https://www.airtel.in/broadband/delhi here the word "unlimited" is used but defined in FAQs as meaning "3 TB" of data.