4 ms·

here's a real life example that's happening right now: tmobile will cap your 4G data on certain plans. UNLESS you're using that data to access their approved

here's a real life example that's happening right now: tmobile will cap your 4G data on certain plans. UNLESS you're using that data to access their approved partners. that's clearly anti-competitive because a new streaming service now needs to negotiate with tmobile to be competitive on top of actually having a better service.

tzs 12y ago
I don't see that as a net neutrality issue, although some who take a stricter view of net neutrality do. You buy a capped plan from T-Mobile, and you can use up to your cap's worth of data anywhere you want, and they don't selective block or throttle your data. Net neutrality, I think, should be about making sure you get what you pay for, free of interference. If an ISP, or anyone else, wants to give you free or reduced cost services beyond that, fine. Their Music Freedom service gives you extra, free, data for music streaming separate from your plan for many major music streaming sites (and they have said they intend to expand to all legal music streaming sites). If objection is to be raised to that, I think it should be under antitrust, not under net neutrality. What it comes down to is a question of whether or not an ISP can use their own network to offer services in addition to the service of "general internet connection". I don't see any good reason to disallow this), as long as these services do not interfere with the general internet connection service (and do not run into antitrust issues). I think this is clearest in the case of cable ISPs. Most of these are also cable TV providers. Almost no one objects that your bandwidth for watching cable broadcast television does not count against any limits on your cable internet bandwidth, even though at the physical layer it is all coming from the same bandwidth pool. They do not have a separate TV cable and a separate internet cable running into your home. If the cable company decided to use all of the cable bandwidth to run an IP network, and then run their broadcast TV service over that, would we expect them to suddenly start counting your cable TV service against your internet bandwidth usage? I doubt it. TV would still be a separate service from internet access--they just happen to be delivering both over their IP network now. I see Music Freedom as being similar. T-Mobile runs a mobile device network. It includes an internet data service, and it includes a cellular phone service, and a text messaging service. Those all use the same physical layer (cellular radio), but I believe they have different network layers (and maybe different data link layers?). They are now also offering a service to access music from many streaming music providers. If they had somehow made this run over the cellular phone service part of their network, or the text messaging part, there would be little objection. Hence, I see no reason to object that they are doing it over the IP part of their network--if they keep it from interfering with the general internet access service, than that's just an implementation detail. I think eventually the cellular voice network and the text messaging network and whatever else they currently run will go away. Each company will run just an IP network, and their logically separate services (telephone, messaging, internet in the case of mobile, and telephone, broadcast TV, internet in the case of cable/fiber) will run over that.

tzs 12y ago

I don't see that as a net neutrality issue, although some who take a stricter view of net neutrality do. You buy a capped plan from T-Mobile, and you can use up to your cap's worth of data anywhere you want, and they don't selective block or throttle your data. Net neutrality, I think, should be about making sure you get what you pay for, free of interference. If an ISP, or anyone else, wants to give you free or reduced cost services beyond that, fine. Their Music Freedom service gives you extra, free, data for music streaming separate from your plan for many major music streaming sites (and they have said they intend to expand to all legal music streaming sites). If objection is to be raised to that, I think it should be under antitrust, not under net neutrality. What it comes down to is a question of whether or not an ISP can use their own network to offer services in addition to the service of "general internet connection". I don't see any good reason to disallow this), as long as these services do not interfere with the general internet connection service (and do not run into antitrust issues). I think this is clearest in the case of cable ISPs. Most of these are also cable TV providers. Almost no one objects that your bandwidth for watching cable broadcast television does not count against any limits on your cable internet bandwidth, even though at the physical layer it is all coming from the same bandwidth pool. They do not have a separate TV cable and a separate internet cable running into your home. If the cable company decided to use all of the cable bandwidth to run an IP network, and then run their broadcast TV service over that, would we expect them to suddenly start counting your cable TV service against your internet bandwidth usage? I doubt it. TV would still be a separate service from internet access--they just happen to be delivering both over their IP network now. I see Music Freedom as being similar. T-Mobile runs a mobile device network. It includes an internet data service, and it includes a cellular phone service, and a text messaging service. Those all use the same physical layer (cellular radio), but I believe they have different network layers (and maybe different data link layers?). They are now also offering a service to access music from many streaming music providers. If they had somehow made this run over the cellular phone service part of their network, or the text messaging part, there would be little objection. Hence, I see no reason to object that they are doing it over the IP part of their network--if they keep it from interfering with the general internet access service, than that's just an implementation detail. I think eventually the cellular voice network and the text messaging network and whatever else they currently run will go away. Each company will run just an IP network, and their logically separate services (telephone, messaging, internet in the case of mobile, and telephone, broadcast TV, internet in the case of cable/fiber) will run over that.