18 ms·

Exempting popular apps from data charges is anti-competitive

204 points by steven 12y ago

SixSigma 12y ago
My mobile contract in the UK is $20 per month for 1000Gb on 4G with tethering permitted, 5000 voice minutes to the same carrier, 2000 voice minutes to any other carrier and 5000 text messages. It is not just the Zero Rating that is evil.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  I'm paying $50/month in the states on T-Mobile for unlimited text/voice and 2.5GB of data, no tethering permitted. EDIT: Yes, I still tether, I stated it for completeness. You can get around the tethering nag by using SSL or VPN when tethered.
  - khuey 12y ago
    FWIW, T-Mobile's tethering ban is fairly easy to circumvent.
    - mrtron 12y ago
      Just change your browser agent (or at least that worked til Sept 2014)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - jaronheard 12y ago
      I have that plan and the WiFi calling on my iPhone used the minutes. Are you using some sort of VOIP app?
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    Is that a grandfathered plan? They don't seem to offer that right now. Plus most current plans come with SOME tethering (even the unlimited plans have limited tethering now).
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    There's a tethering nag? I'm not paying for tethering either, but I'm still able to do it without T-Mobile yelling at me (as I've had to do several times due to network issues with my ISP).
    - ac29 12y ago
      I never saw it until I used over 1GB in a day (out of my total 5 per month).
  - jschwartzi 12y ago
    Tethering is included in your rate plan if you have a Simple Choice plan. I pay the same amount per month and tethering is included in my rate plan.
- eterm 12y ago
  I'm in the UK and get nowhere near that for a similar price, who are you with? I've just checked and the recurring charge I pay gets: £12 goodybag: will include UK 3GB, 500 minutes, unlimited texts (was 250 minutes, unlimited data) So thanks to your post I've just discovered I'm no longer getting the service I thought I was! It seems they sent a "changes to your service" email which I didn't read because I assumed it was ToS changes. edited to add: This is 3G and not even 4G!
  - SixSigma 12y ago
    Three, it's the same deal on PAYG as well. £17, my $20 is slightly off
    - eterm 12y ago
      Thanks, I thought it might be them, I've just ordered a sim from them!
- phillc73 12y ago
  Exactly. I thought this article dealed with a very specific problem in a very specific geographic region. I’m talking about the issue of “zero rating”: the practice being followed by mobile carriers around the world to provide Web access “for free” to their users to certain chosen services. But all other OECD countries have some flavor of zero rating in place. I've never heard of a UK or European carrier implementing "zero rating" services, so I'm not sure how far around the world this occurs and the only concrete examples given are in the US. I'm with a dinky little PAYG plan in Austria at the moment, and I just pay EUR3.95 for 1GB as I need it, which I never seem to use very fast because the majority of the time I'm connected via WiFi. Even when I was moving house in the UK and tethered my phone, I think I only used about 6GB in the course of a month. Of course I was slightly careful with video streaming and other data heavy activities, but I didn't really restrict my Internet use. Anyway, my point is, "zero rating" even if it did occur would have very little relevance when data is so cheap anyway. It seems to me that the root of the problem is overpriced data, and not the "zero rating" of some services. Edit: As for voice and text. I use Telegram for all my heavy "texting" and a SIP provider for all calls. I think my total monthly mobile telephony bill is only about EUR10 with the Austrian PAYG plan and another $10 with the SIP provider. I used to have massive mobile phone bills, sometimes in excess of £100 per month (average around £70), when I lived in the UK and traveled around Europe a lot. This was all down to charges while abroad, and apart from not accept incoming calls, there wasn't a lot I could do about it if I wanted to continue operating my business.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    > I've never heard of a UK or European carrier implementing "zero rating" services, so I'm now sure how far around the world this occurs and the only concrete examples given are in the US. Historically it has happened in the UK. For example, "daily passes" of data coming with unlimited Facebook (on O2 PayG I believe) and some streaming music all over the place (Orange pre-EE, Virgin, et al). I don't see anyone doing it currently as frankly data prices have become so inexpensive that it isn't as interesting of an offering. The UK is largely about price wars right now, who can offer the cheapest service. The gimmicks have mostly fallen by the wayside. I'm talking back when 150 MB was a "lot" of data and 1 GB was over £35/month with a 12 month contract).
- super_sloth 12y ago
  Can I ask what network and what plan you're on? I am clearly on a vastly inferior one with t-mobile and should switch.
  - SixSigma 12y ago
    three 17 quid a month on contract or payg
anindyabd 12y ago
I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia. Also, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and doesn't really make more money by having more people use the site. It's strange to claim that Wikipedia is being anti-competitive. Personally, I think Wikipedia Zero is a great program. The article also says: > The reason that the Chinese, Russian and Cuban governments fear an open Internet more than anything else is that it allows users to gather and speak to one another. But users of a walled-garden “zero-rated” Internet can’t even click links that go outside the garden. It's true that users can't go out of the sites they have free access to. But services like Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp do allow people to "gather and speak to one another". In fact, Twitter and Facebook were prominent in the lead-up to the Arab Spring.
- kassemi 12y ago
  I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia. Any other encyclopedia and any wiki-formatted knowledge store could be considered close competition. Wikipedia's in the business of providing high-level (and often low) level information, and there are tons of players in that space - just perhaps not as generalized and overreaching. Wikipedia is a non-profit. They don't really make more money by having more people use the site Which doesn't mean that it can't compete with other entities, just that it does so under a special set of rules. It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic.
  - anindyabd 12y ago
    > It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic. That interest is clearly not "making more money". Can you explicitly explain what those interests are? I may be naive in believing that Wikipedia's goal is "making all the world's information freely available to everyone". But if they have some other ulterior motive for expansion, I would like to know what that is.
    - crazypyro 12y ago
      At the very least, each of their employees' has a selfish reason to keep Wikipedia the de-facto encyclopedia. For instance, they have over $20 million in salary they need to pay every year and without traffic, they lose donations (over $45 million a year) and therefore could lose their jobs. Seems a monopoly would be in their interest. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit_Report_-_FY_13-14_-_Final_v2.pdf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit_...
nkangoh 12y ago
Though I agree that in many situations it is anti-competitive, I think it would be difficult to tell someone who has a small data to work with that you're going to take away their currently free access to Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  So don't. Facebook and Wikipedia don't require a huge amount of bandwidth, that's how they can be free. Just stop discriminating. Give people a mode they can switch on where they don't get charged for data but get capped at 0.5Mbps.
  - mmebane 12y ago
    This is my preference. I think the only reason T-Mobile offers unlimited music streaming is that it typically consumes <= 256 kbps. I would much rather they offered an "economy mode" switch where I could throttle my entire device and browse whatever I wanted.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      T-Mobile offers unlimited music streaming because it is marketable. They are a third-wheel carrier, so they are hustling hard in search of a way to differentiate themselves, and "Unlimited Music" is going to be a much more successful ad campaign than "Unlimited 256kbps Browsing" FWIW I am a T-Mobile customer.
      - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
        So market it as "Unlimited Music" and implement it as "Unlimited 256kbps browsing".
sliverstorm 12y ago
Since when has sweetening your offerings been viewed as anti-competitive? That's all "data sponsoring" is; making your product more compelling through the use of cash. Is using money to make your product attractive now anti-trust? I flipped through Wiki for a refresher, just to make sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices
- seattlegal 12y ago
  It's anti-competitive to app devs, not other wireless providers. Classic "pull the ladder up behind me" behavior.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    I'm expressly talking about the app devs. It might be truly anti-competitive "ladder-up-behind-you" if all app devs were forced to sponsor client-side traffic. Think of taxi tokens- a fixed barrier to entry. But even then, to be an anti-competitive barrier to entry it must also be high. The cost of a postage stamp on your government paperwork is a barrier to entry, but it is not anti-competitive.
    - IshKebab 12y ago
      Yes on of the nice things about the internet is that there are no barriers to entry. Or at least there weren't...
    - ksk 12y ago
      To me, its similar to a supermarket only allowing already-popular brands to be on their shelves. From their POV I guess it makes sense, but if you're out there selling a new brand of peanut butter, you can either start your own supermarket, or target the mom-pop stores and hope for the best. I think this kind of stuff is highly regressive. The Internet was this place where you succeeded on your own merit and not because you pay-to-win. A place where a tiny company like Google was able to sell their service because it was on the same playing field as lycos/yahoo/altavista. If accessing Google cost you money while lycos/yahoo/altavista were free, nobody would have ever tried Google. And without enough people searching and clicking on links there will never be enough seed data for a good ranking algorithm to work.
spost 12y ago
The article calls out AT&T and Sprint for their programs, thought I'd mention that T-Mobile has something similar going on with their Music Freedom program: http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html
- Someone1234 12y ago
  I was going to point out the same. I really like T-Mobile's program since a lot of my data usage was disappearing into streaming music (namely Google Music/Play Music). However I will fully admit it is anti-competitive since if you're a new music streaming service just trying to make it, you won't get onto T-Mobile's free list (and even Google Music/Play Music wasn't until extremely recently, like even two months ago it wasn't). However as much as I like and benefit from this program, I think the world would be a better place if all data was treated equally. I'd actually be willing to sacrifice this program if it meant a more fair internet, and I benefit from it...
  - frizzlebox 12y ago
    Adding to this, the T-Mobile FAQ claims they're willing to add legal services if you contact them: http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html Will you add more streaming providers over time? Absolutely! Any lawful and licensed streaming music service can work with us for inclusion in this offer, which is designed to benefit all of our Simple Choice customers. And we want to hear from you! Who do you think we should add next? Vote at #MusicFreedom and be heard! If you are a streaming service provider Click here, send us an email and we’ll get back to you to begin the process. Doesn't make it any less anti-competitive, I think, but it feels nice to see this kind of promise.
    - whyaduck 12y ago
      Yes, definitely anti-competitive (he says as he changes Spotify's streaming quality to "Extreme" on his T-Mobile serviced phone).
gojomo 12y ago
Perhaps next Professor Crawford will want to outlaw freemium pricing for web services. Or free web email. Or free over-the-air TV and radio. Or free urban newsweeklies.
brudgers 12y ago
Why shouldn't something like Wikipedia that is relatively easy for a carrier to cache locally be charged differently than something for which providing access requires inter-carrier agreements? It's just an extension of not paying per use of jquery mobile because there's a copy cached on my phone. It's congestion pricing.
- userbinator 12y ago
  It's not only Wikipedia; it's Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and other services. I'm pretty sure you can't cache IMs, as that defeats the whole "instant" part.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    A lot of Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. can be localized. People 'Like' button local businesses live near their friends, they mostly follow people who produce lots of content, they search for local and regional businesses. Facebook's CDN: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19568411/list-of-facebook-cdn-addresses http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19568411/list-of-facebook... Caching is a real business case for 'personalizing experiences'. I don't get a lot of Australian news in my searches. Instead, I get my probable biases confirmed. Twitter encourages me to follow my local handegg team. Facebook trickles my more geographically distant friends and family into my feed. The common denominator is part of the algorithm and its just not worth the bandwidth to serve the long tail.
notwedtm 12y ago
In the article the comparison of everyone sharing the same road infrastructure is given. Why is the analogy not carried over to public transportation? There are plenty of people who are willing to pay a much lower cost per trip by riding public transportation instead of driving (or even owning) a car. Nobody is claiming that the bus system is anti-competitive to car manufacturers. In fact, the author even states that people could be satisfied by this approach. If people are satisfied with their walled garden, why is this an issue?
- kazagistar 12y ago
  Public transportation is public. Private shared transportation does not have nearly the same incumbent advantage. Anyone can build or buy a bus, and move people around. There is not Facebook to pay lots of money to ensure that competitors are locked out of providing a similar service. Moreover, users actually get meaningful choices when it comes to which car or bus to take. ISPs are more like roads, a utility where the options (in many places) are very limited.
- tfinniga 12y ago
  > Nobody is claiming that the bus system is anti-competitive to car manufacturers. Have you heard of the GM streetcar conspiracy?( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi... ) That doesn't make sense in this context though - the analogy breaks down. The reason why regulation is useful is because unregulated companies collude, form monopolies, fix prices, and eventually kill innovation and prey on their customers. Regulation is a useful tool to provide an even playing field. Sure, customers may be satisfied with a walled garden now, but how did facebook / twitter / netflix flourish? Using unbiased network traffic. We shouldn't shut the door on new startups.
- SilasX 12y ago
  I see what you mean: Public transportation can be welfare-enhancing when there is enough regularity of travel between certain (networks of) points that throughput is increased when e.g. a lane is converted from road to light rail. The benefits of higher throughput would exceed the opportunity cost of the space being usable for fewer routes. (tl;dr: it pays to bus people if they're all going between the same points.) In that sense, if some major sites can exploit the regularity of the traffic they get to the point that they produce less load on the network per bit transmitted, that it's (not un)reasonable that the user be billed less for that site, though "free" is still questionable. We should be careful to distinguish "bribing ISP for preferential access" vs "accounting for the reality of the cheaper carriage of one site's data". (tl;dr: cheaper data rates can reflect corruption or legitimately lower access cost, and our reaction should reflect that.)
lquist 12y ago
I'm surprised this discussion didn't come up when FB acquired Whatsapp. IMHO, zero rating explains a significant chunk of Whatsapp's $19B price tag. Zero Rating is a valuable moat, and makes Whatsapp that much harder to unseat by rival apps. Also zero rating is particularly common in the countries that Whatsapp dominates.
- shkkmo 12y ago
  Facebook is also one of the principle sponsers of the push to bring zero rating to "the 2/3rds of the world that don't have internet": https://www.internet.org/press/introducing-the-internet-dot-org-app https://www.internet.org/press/introducing-the-internet-dot-... I believe some of internet.org's strategies are good. I'd be a lot less skeptical if 'facebook' weren't on that list of 'basic apps'
freehunter 12y ago
I agree that data should be data and having companies pay (or otherwise sign up to be exempted) should be considered anti-competitive in such a regulated industry. But that belief won't stop me from using the exemption until the minute the FCC requires otherwise. My carrier (T-Mobile) exempts streaming music services. It doesn't charge for the exemption and any music service can sign up for it, but it's still against net neutrality principles. It's better than AT&T's method, but only by a little. However, when they started this, I was able to cut from an unlimited plan to just 1GB/mo, and never suffer overages. Do I disagree with it? On principle, yes. But I'm going to keep disagreeing with it while simultaneously using it as a way to lower my bill while getting around silly and even more innovation-stifling (IMO) data caps and high price mobile broadband.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Isn't that then more of a preference and less of a principled disagreement?
  - shkkmo 12y ago
    Wouldn't leaving your phone on silent and streaming music on HD all night be also principled disagreement?
  - freehunter 12y ago
    I disagree with their policy in principle. In practice, I use the hell out of it. I frequently drive long distances (over an hour each way) streaming music from Spotify the entire way. I would rather have no data cap the same way my home Internet connection has no data cap. I would rather they not make exemptions for music specifically, since that shows they don't need the caps in the first place. But as long as they offer it (and I used T-Mobile long before they announced it), I will use it to my advantage.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      I'm whining about your phrasing. I wish people only used "principle" to describe very strongly held beliefs. You are weighing your belief that 'data is data' against, basically, a trivial convenience (you have many options, among them: no music, downloaded music, cheap streaming violating the principle, expensive streaming respecting the principle). That action says something about how strongly you believe in 'data is data'.
driverdan 12y ago
Regulation is anti-competitive. We don't need regulation, we need competition.
- freehunter 12y ago
  In the days before regulation, there was so much competition it wasn't even funny! Oh wait, there was only one phone company: AT&T. Then they were broken up and the industry became a little more heavily regulated and suddenly there was finally some competition. Regulation doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It happens because bad things were happening before the regulations were put in place.
  - wmf 12y ago
    Based on some quick Wikipedia reading, it was a patent-based monopoly from 1876 to 1894, then "the telephone market opened to competition and 6,000 new telephone carriers started while the Bell Telephone company took a significant financial downturn" until 1907 when AT&T bought out most competitors. Then in 1913 AT&T became a government-regulated monopoly until 1984 when it was broken up by the government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System So the relationship between regulation and competition isn't all that clear.
greggyb 12y ago
A clear analog for this issue is television. I do not know, but was there ever such contention over OTA programming vs cable networks? I view these proposals as very competitive - among mobile carriers, where we see much less competition (in the US at least) than we do among app developers. It always seems curious to me that those who advocate most strongly to keep the government out of the content of the internet is also most vocal in advocating to get the government into regulation of the means of access. The two are not easily separable.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  You mean that the people most vocal against the government deciding what they can read are also the most vocal against a corporation deciding what they can read? You are right, those two are not easily separable.
  - greggyb 12y ago
    Zero-rating is not the same as censorship. A corporation cannot prevent any individual from taking an action that individual wants to. A government can, if not make impossible, make very costly that same reading. I would much rather have to pay extra for the internet, than trust any government, to benevolently regulate access to the internet. If the government regulates my access, then a corporation much larger than I can lobby quite effectively for regulatory change that I would not like. If a corporation restricts what I can access (and that is not what is happening here - they are merely charging a different rate), then I have multiple options to choose from. I can cheaply break a contract with a corporation. I cannot cheaply break a contract with my government. There is a qualitative difference to appreciate here. With corporations it is "What I want costs $50 extra a month." With a government, it can be "What I want sits behind the Great Firewall, and I may go to jail for consuming it." I am not suggesting that the US government may turn into the Chinese. I am suggesting that the US government does some pretty shady things, and that regulatory capture is real, and worse for consumers, than firms competing by trying to offer me free things.
    - Terr_ 12y ago
userbinator 12y ago
Coming from a place where this practice is banned, I wonder how they implement this. Traffic going to certain IPs or IP ranges is exempted? They mention WhatsApp and Twitter, and the first thing that comes to mind is using them as proxies to tunnel through. I don't think it would be against ToS either - you're just asking someone else on the "other side" of those services to access the 'net and get the information for you, and it shouldn't matter one bit if you're speaking English or TCP/IP. :-) (There's plenty of info on the internet about wanting to use these services while behind a proxy, but seemingly none on using them as a proxy...)
mwsherman 12y ago
This article seems to equate two things – that which is true today, and that which the writer imagines for the future. The future is not fact. The fact of zero rating is that it is beneficial to consumers, and progressive – the poorer one is, the more zero-rating is likely to help. That is factual, observable, measurable. The speculation is a slippery-slope argument, and not factual. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but simply that it’s a priori. Zero-rating is free shipping. I don’t know of anyone that considers free shipping anti-competitive, though one could make the same argument.
- api 12y ago
  It depends a bit on whether companies like Facebook are paying for this, and if they're paying a reasonable rate. My guess would be that they're paying something. The real problem re: network neutrality is a lack of competition and enforced monopolies. Open the last mile (and wireless) to more competition and you eliminate the worst network neutrality case scenarios.
- shkkmo 12y ago
  I don't think it's a slippery slope arguement at all. Zero rating is anti-competitive. I don't think that can be argued. What can be argued to to what degree it is harmful to the consumer. Anti-competitive business models can be beneficial to end users in the short term (e.g. selling at a loss to drive out competition and build a monopoly) but are pretty much exclusively detrimental in the long term.
- tetrep 12y ago
  >The speculation is a slippery-slope argument, and not factual. You don't need a slippery-slope argument, the immediate effects are anti-competitive. It adds a barrier to entry where in order to offer a service to a mobile user (with a data cap), you need to pay the carrier. It's like bribing a local official so that you can use the roads to make a delivery.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > Zero-rating is free shipping. I don’t know of anyone that considers free shipping anti-competitive, though one could make the same argument. That's a bad analogy. A better analogy would be USPS[0] providing certain shippers with free shipping, and not others[1]. Imagine the disastrous effects this would have on small sellers, who would certainly not have the means to negotiate these rates with USPS, whereas a larger company would. So it's not a slippery slope, because the anti-competitive impact is direct and immediate. USPS has to charge everyone the same price for the same service, and for good reason. [0] Like broadband ISPs, USPS has an effective monopoly on shipping in parts of the country, as private carriers (UPS/FedEx) will simply "offload" certain deliveries to them, as USPS is required to ship to all locations. [1] USPS does offer, for example, "Media mail" discounts, but this is available to all shippers, and represents a different service (slower delivery, no guaranteed dates - in the olden days, it represented surface shipping, though I'm not sure that is the case anymore).
byuu 12y ago
It's funny that when Netflix has to pay for preferential treatment, it's a bad thing ("my bill might go up!"); but when it's Spotify getting unlimited data, it's a good thing ("my bill might go down!"). You can't eat your cake and have it too.
- shkkmo 12y ago
  I'm confused. Isn't the argument presented in the article that they are both anti-competitive (and hence "bad things")?
  - byuu 12y ago
    Yes, I agree with the article. I'm saying that people in general (even in this topic) seem to not mind the issue when it's personally advantageous to them. (if that weren't the case, the article would merely be stating the obvious and not be newsworthy.) And I'll admit that unlimited streaming music does sound nice. But net neutrality is important to me, and so it would be hypocritical of me to dismiss it when it benefits me.
- JadeNB 12y ago
  I think that few people believe that Netflix should receive preferential treatment for free; rather, the net neutrality issue is that Netflix could be required to pay for whatever carriage it receives, or else receive intentionally degraded service.
sogen 12y ago
Yes. Data is still way too expensive in Mexico: $1USD = 8mb ($2 MXN = 1 mb) In context: Daily wage in Mexico is $4 USD Yes, 4 dollars...
jlawer 12y ago
While I strongly agree in net-neutrality principles, there is the case that in these scenarios the data may not have the same costs to provide, and some may be cheap enough that it doesn't make sense to charge from. In Australia at least general internet transit is orders of magnitude more expensive then a local peering connection. If the content provider is making the content cheaper then the general internet traffic, then it seems quite reasonable for that saving to be passed on to the customer. While I love the abstraction that you simply pay a fixed rate per bit/byte, it doesn't accurately portray the connectivity situation at least in Australia, where international transit, and even inter-capital city transit can be a sizeable portion of any costs. I pay rough costs of $2000 per month for a 100 Mbit / 5TB per month service to my rack in a DC, but I can pay $750 per month for a 10gbit service to a peering (IX) Internet Exchange in the same DC. If I was providing an ISP service I think it would be completely reasonable to not charge for traffic over the peering link as the data is nearly 300x cheaper, its quite possible it would be cheaper to simply not track the usage. It does create a situation where competition is harder, where a content provider may need to deploy many POPs to ensure their content is available under a peering situation, however I don't see this is inherently anti-competitive.
rlvesco7 12y ago
On the similar note, the NFL app on my android, which was installed without permission and cannot be deleted, sends 10s of megabytes of data to Verizon even though I've never opened it once. What it's sending, I don't know, and it's using up my data plan for no reason.

204 points by steven 12y ago

My mobile contract in the UK is $20 per month for 1000Gb on 4G with tethering permitted, 5000 voice minutes to the same carrier, 2000 voice minutes to any other carrier and 5000 text messages. It is not just the Zero Rating that is evil.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
I'm paying $50/month in the states on T-Mobile for unlimited text/voice and 2.5GB of data, no tethering permitted. EDIT: Yes, I still tether, I stated it for completeness. You can get around the tethering nag by using SSL or VPN when tethered.
- khuey 12y ago
  FWIW, T-Mobile's tethering ban is fairly easy to circumvent.
  - mrtron 12y ago
    Just change your browser agent (or at least that worked til Sept 2014)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - jaronheard 12y ago
    I have that plan and the WiFi calling on my iPhone used the minutes. Are you using some sort of VOIP app?
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Is that a grandfathered plan? They don't seem to offer that right now. Plus most current plans come with SOME tethering (even the unlimited plans have limited tethering now).
- yellowapple 12y ago
  There's a tethering nag? I'm not paying for tethering either, but I'm still able to do it without T-Mobile yelling at me (as I've had to do several times due to network issues with my ISP).
  - ac29 12y ago
    I never saw it until I used over 1GB in a day (out of my total 5 per month).
- jschwartzi 12y ago
  Tethering is included in your rate plan if you have a Simple Choice plan. I pay the same amount per month and tethering is included in my rate plan.
eterm 12y ago
I'm in the UK and get nowhere near that for a similar price, who are you with? I've just checked and the recurring charge I pay gets: £12 goodybag: will include UK 3GB, 500 minutes, unlimited texts (was 250 minutes, unlimited data) So thanks to your post I've just discovered I'm no longer getting the service I thought I was! It seems they sent a "changes to your service" email which I didn't read because I assumed it was ToS changes. edited to add: This is 3G and not even 4G!
- SixSigma 12y ago
  Three, it's the same deal on PAYG as well. £17, my $20 is slightly off
  - eterm 12y ago
    Thanks, I thought it might be them, I've just ordered a sim from them!
phillc73 12y ago
Exactly. I thought this article dealed with a very specific problem in a very specific geographic region. I’m talking about the issue of “zero rating”: the practice being followed by mobile carriers around the world to provide Web access “for free” to their users to certain chosen services. But all other OECD countries have some flavor of zero rating in place. I've never heard of a UK or European carrier implementing "zero rating" services, so I'm not sure how far around the world this occurs and the only concrete examples given are in the US. I'm with a dinky little PAYG plan in Austria at the moment, and I just pay EUR3.95 for 1GB as I need it, which I never seem to use very fast because the majority of the time I'm connected via WiFi. Even when I was moving house in the UK and tethered my phone, I think I only used about 6GB in the course of a month. Of course I was slightly careful with video streaming and other data heavy activities, but I didn't really restrict my Internet use. Anyway, my point is, "zero rating" even if it did occur would have very little relevance when data is so cheap anyway. It seems to me that the root of the problem is overpriced data, and not the "zero rating" of some services. Edit: As for voice and text. I use Telegram for all my heavy "texting" and a SIP provider for all calls. I think my total monthly mobile telephony bill is only about EUR10 with the Austrian PAYG plan and another $10 with the SIP provider. I used to have massive mobile phone bills, sometimes in excess of £100 per month (average around £70), when I lived in the UK and traveled around Europe a lot. This was all down to charges while abroad, and apart from not accept incoming calls, there wasn't a lot I could do about it if I wanted to continue operating my business.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  > I've never heard of a UK or European carrier implementing "zero rating" services, so I'm now sure how far around the world this occurs and the only concrete examples given are in the US. Historically it has happened in the UK. For example, "daily passes" of data coming with unlimited Facebook (on O2 PayG I believe) and some streaming music all over the place (Orange pre-EE, Virgin, et al). I don't see anyone doing it currently as frankly data prices have become so inexpensive that it isn't as interesting of an offering. The UK is largely about price wars right now, who can offer the cheapest service. The gimmicks have mostly fallen by the wayside. I'm talking back when 150 MB was a "lot" of data and 1 GB was over £35/month with a 12 month contract).
super_sloth 12y ago
Can I ask what network and what plan you're on? I am clearly on a vastly inferior one with t-mobile and should switch.
- SixSigma 12y ago
  three 17 quid a month on contract or payg

anindyabd 12y ago

I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia. Also, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and doesn't really make more money by having more people use the site. It's strange to claim that Wikipedia is being anti-competitive. Personally, I think Wikipedia Zero is a great program. The article also says: > The reason that the Chinese, Russian and Cuban governments fear an open Internet more than anything else is that it allows users to gather and speak to one another. But users of a walled-garden “zero-rated” Internet can’t even click links that go outside the garden. It's true that users can't go out of the sites they have free access to. But services like Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp do allow people to "gather and speak to one another". In fact, Twitter and Facebook were prominent in the lead-up to the Arab Spring.

kassemi 12y ago
I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia. Any other encyclopedia and any wiki-formatted knowledge store could be considered close competition. Wikipedia's in the business of providing high-level (and often low) level information, and there are tons of players in that space - just perhaps not as generalized and overreaching. Wikipedia is a non-profit. They don't really make more money by having more people use the site Which doesn't mean that it can't compete with other entities, just that it does so under a special set of rules. It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic.
- anindyabd 12y ago
  > It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic. That interest is clearly not "making more money". Can you explicitly explain what those interests are? I may be naive in believing that Wikipedia's goal is "making all the world's information freely available to everyone". But if they have some other ulterior motive for expansion, I would like to know what that is.
  - crazypyro 12y ago
    At the very least, each of their employees' has a selfish reason to keep Wikipedia the de-facto encyclopedia. For instance, they have over $20 million in salary they need to pay every year and without traffic, they lose donations (over $45 million a year) and therefore could lose their jobs. Seems a monopoly would be in their interest. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit_Report_-_FY_13-14_-_Final_v2.pdf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit_...

nkangoh 12y ago

Though I agree that in many situations it is anti-competitive, I think it would be difficult to tell someone who has a small data to work with that you're going to take away their currently free access to Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
So don't. Facebook and Wikipedia don't require a huge amount of bandwidth, that's how they can be free. Just stop discriminating. Give people a mode they can switch on where they don't get charged for data but get capped at 0.5Mbps.
- mmebane 12y ago
  This is my preference. I think the only reason T-Mobile offers unlimited music streaming is that it typically consumes <= 256 kbps. I would much rather they offered an "economy mode" switch where I could throttle my entire device and browse whatever I wanted.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    T-Mobile offers unlimited music streaming because it is marketable. They are a third-wheel carrier, so they are hustling hard in search of a way to differentiate themselves, and "Unlimited Music" is going to be a much more successful ad campaign than "Unlimited 256kbps Browsing" FWIW I am a T-Mobile customer.
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      So market it as "Unlimited Music" and implement it as "Unlimited 256kbps browsing".

sliverstorm 12y ago

Since when has sweetening your offerings been viewed as anti-competitive? That's all "data sponsoring" is; making your product more compelling through the use of cash. Is using money to make your product attractive now anti-trust? I flipped through Wiki for a refresher, just to make sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices

seattlegal 12y ago
It's anti-competitive to app devs, not other wireless providers. Classic "pull the ladder up behind me" behavior.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I'm expressly talking about the app devs. It might be truly anti-competitive "ladder-up-behind-you" if all app devs were forced to sponsor client-side traffic. Think of taxi tokens- a fixed barrier to entry. But even then, to be an anti-competitive barrier to entry it must also be high. The cost of a postage stamp on your government paperwork is a barrier to entry, but it is not anti-competitive.
  - IshKebab 12y ago
    Yes on of the nice things about the internet is that there are no barriers to entry. Or at least there weren't...
  - ksk 12y ago
    To me, its similar to a supermarket only allowing already-popular brands to be on their shelves. From their POV I guess it makes sense, but if you're out there selling a new brand of peanut butter, you can either start your own supermarket, or target the mom-pop stores and hope for the best. I think this kind of stuff is highly regressive. The Internet was this place where you succeeded on your own merit and not because you pay-to-win. A place where a tiny company like Google was able to sell their service because it was on the same playing field as lycos/yahoo/altavista. If accessing Google cost you money while lycos/yahoo/altavista were free, nobody would have ever tried Google. And without enough people searching and clicking on links there will never be enough seed data for a good ranking algorithm to work.

spost 12y ago

The article calls out AT&T and Sprint for their programs, thought I'd mention that T-Mobile has something similar going on with their Music Freedom program: http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html

Someone1234 12y ago
I was going to point out the same. I really like T-Mobile's program since a lot of my data usage was disappearing into streaming music (namely Google Music/Play Music). However I will fully admit it is anti-competitive since if you're a new music streaming service just trying to make it, you won't get onto T-Mobile's free list (and even Google Music/Play Music wasn't until extremely recently, like even two months ago it wasn't). However as much as I like and benefit from this program, I think the world would be a better place if all data was treated equally. I'd actually be willing to sacrifice this program if it meant a more fair internet, and I benefit from it...
- frizzlebox 12y ago
  Adding to this, the T-Mobile FAQ claims they're willing to add legal services if you contact them: http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html Will you add more streaming providers over time? Absolutely! Any lawful and licensed streaming music service can work with us for inclusion in this offer, which is designed to benefit all of our Simple Choice customers. And we want to hear from you! Who do you think we should add next? Vote at #MusicFreedom and be heard! If you are a streaming service provider Click here, send us an email and we’ll get back to you to begin the process. Doesn't make it any less anti-competitive, I think, but it feels nice to see this kind of promise.
  - whyaduck 12y ago
    Yes, definitely anti-competitive (he says as he changes Spotify's streaming quality to "Extreme" on his T-Mobile serviced phone).

gojomo 12y ago

Perhaps next Professor Crawford will want to outlaw freemium pricing for web services. Or free web email. Or free over-the-air TV and radio. Or free urban newsweeklies.

brudgers 12y ago

Why shouldn't something like Wikipedia that is relatively easy for a carrier to cache locally be charged differently than something for which providing access requires inter-carrier agreements? It's just an extension of not paying per use of jquery mobile because there's a copy cached on my phone. It's congestion pricing.

userbinator 12y ago
It's not only Wikipedia; it's Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and other services. I'm pretty sure you can't cache IMs, as that defeats the whole "instant" part.
- brudgers 12y ago
  A lot of Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. can be localized. People 'Like' button local businesses live near their friends, they mostly follow people who produce lots of content, they search for local and regional businesses. Facebook's CDN: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19568411/list-of-facebook-cdn-addresses http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19568411/list-of-facebook... Caching is a real business case for 'personalizing experiences'. I don't get a lot of Australian news in my searches. Instead, I get my probable biases confirmed. Twitter encourages me to follow my local handegg team. Facebook trickles my more geographically distant friends and family into my feed. The common denominator is part of the algorithm and its just not worth the bandwidth to serve the long tail.

notwedtm 12y ago

In the article the comparison of everyone sharing the same road infrastructure is given. Why is the analogy not carried over to public transportation? There are plenty of people who are willing to pay a much lower cost per trip by riding public transportation instead of driving (or even owning) a car. Nobody is claiming that the bus system is anti-competitive to car manufacturers. In fact, the author even states that people could be satisfied by this approach. If people are satisfied with their walled garden, why is this an issue?

kazagistar 12y ago
Public transportation is public. Private shared transportation does not have nearly the same incumbent advantage. Anyone can build or buy a bus, and move people around. There is not Facebook to pay lots of money to ensure that competitors are locked out of providing a similar service. Moreover, users actually get meaningful choices when it comes to which car or bus to take. ISPs are more like roads, a utility where the options (in many places) are very limited.
tfinniga 12y ago
> Nobody is claiming that the bus system is anti-competitive to car manufacturers. Have you heard of the GM streetcar conspiracy?( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi... ) That doesn't make sense in this context though - the analogy breaks down. The reason why regulation is useful is because unregulated companies collude, form monopolies, fix prices, and eventually kill innovation and prey on their customers. Regulation is a useful tool to provide an even playing field. Sure, customers may be satisfied with a walled garden now, but how did facebook / twitter / netflix flourish? Using unbiased network traffic. We shouldn't shut the door on new startups.
SilasX 12y ago
I see what you mean: Public transportation can be welfare-enhancing when there is enough regularity of travel between certain (networks of) points that throughput is increased when e.g. a lane is converted from road to light rail. The benefits of higher throughput would exceed the opportunity cost of the space being usable for fewer routes. (tl;dr: it pays to bus people if they're all going between the same points.) In that sense, if some major sites can exploit the regularity of the traffic they get to the point that they produce less load on the network per bit transmitted, that it's (not un)reasonable that the user be billed less for that site, though "free" is still questionable. We should be careful to distinguish "bribing ISP for preferential access" vs "accounting for the reality of the cheaper carriage of one site's data". (tl;dr: cheaper data rates can reflect corruption or legitimately lower access cost, and our reaction should reflect that.)

lquist 12y ago

I'm surprised this discussion didn't come up when FB acquired Whatsapp. IMHO, zero rating explains a significant chunk of Whatsapp's $19B price tag. Zero Rating is a valuable moat, and makes Whatsapp that much harder to unseat by rival apps. Also zero rating is particularly common in the countries that Whatsapp dominates.

shkkmo 12y ago
Facebook is also one of the principle sponsers of the push to bring zero rating to "the 2/3rds of the world that don't have internet": https://www.internet.org/press/introducing-the-internet-dot-org-app https://www.internet.org/press/introducing-the-internet-dot-... I believe some of internet.org's strategies are good. I'd be a lot less skeptical if 'facebook' weren't on that list of 'basic apps'

freehunter 12y ago

I agree that data should be data and having companies pay (or otherwise sign up to be exempted) should be considered anti-competitive in such a regulated industry. But that belief won't stop me from using the exemption until the minute the FCC requires otherwise. My carrier (T-Mobile) exempts streaming music services. It doesn't charge for the exemption and any music service can sign up for it, but it's still against net neutrality principles. It's better than AT&T's method, but only by a little. However, when they started this, I was able to cut from an unlimited plan to just 1GB/mo, and never suffer overages. Do I disagree with it? On principle, yes. But I'm going to keep disagreeing with it while simultaneously using it as a way to lower my bill while getting around silly and even more innovation-stifling (IMO) data caps and high price mobile broadband.

maxerickson 12y ago
Isn't that then more of a preference and less of a principled disagreement?
- shkkmo 12y ago
  Wouldn't leaving your phone on silent and streaming music on HD all night be also principled disagreement?
- freehunter 12y ago
  I disagree with their policy in principle. In practice, I use the hell out of it. I frequently drive long distances (over an hour each way) streaming music from Spotify the entire way. I would rather have no data cap the same way my home Internet connection has no data cap. I would rather they not make exemptions for music specifically, since that shows they don't need the caps in the first place. But as long as they offer it (and I used T-Mobile long before they announced it), I will use it to my advantage.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    I'm whining about your phrasing. I wish people only used "principle" to describe very strongly held beliefs. You are weighing your belief that 'data is data' against, basically, a trivial convenience (you have many options, among them: no music, downloaded music, cheap streaming violating the principle, expensive streaming respecting the principle). That action says something about how strongly you believe in 'data is data'.

driverdan 12y ago

Regulation is anti-competitive. We don't need regulation, we need competition.

freehunter 12y ago
In the days before regulation, there was so much competition it wasn't even funny! Oh wait, there was only one phone company: AT&T. Then they were broken up and the industry became a little more heavily regulated and suddenly there was finally some competition. Regulation doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It happens because bad things were happening before the regulations were put in place.
- wmf 12y ago
  Based on some quick Wikipedia reading, it was a patent-based monopoly from 1876 to 1894, then "the telephone market opened to competition and 6,000 new telephone carriers started while the Bell Telephone company took a significant financial downturn" until 1907 when AT&T bought out most competitors. Then in 1913 AT&T became a government-regulated monopoly until 1984 when it was broken up by the government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System So the relationship between regulation and competition isn't all that clear.

greggyb 12y ago

A clear analog for this issue is television. I do not know, but was there ever such contention over OTA programming vs cable networks? I view these proposals as very competitive - among mobile carriers, where we see much less competition (in the US at least) than we do among app developers. It always seems curious to me that those who advocate most strongly to keep the government out of the content of the internet is also most vocal in advocating to get the government into regulation of the means of access. The two are not easily separable.

marcosdumay 12y ago
You mean that the people most vocal against the government deciding what they can read are also the most vocal against a corporation deciding what they can read? You are right, those two are not easily separable.
- greggyb 12y ago
  Zero-rating is not the same as censorship. A corporation cannot prevent any individual from taking an action that individual wants to. A government can, if not make impossible, make very costly that same reading. I would much rather have to pay extra for the internet, than trust any government, to benevolently regulate access to the internet. If the government regulates my access, then a corporation much larger than I can lobby quite effectively for regulatory change that I would not like. If a corporation restricts what I can access (and that is not what is happening here - they are merely charging a different rate), then I have multiple options to choose from. I can cheaply break a contract with a corporation. I cannot cheaply break a contract with my government. There is a qualitative difference to appreciate here. With corporations it is "What I want costs $50 extra a month." With a government, it can be "What I want sits behind the Great Firewall, and I may go to jail for consuming it." I am not suggesting that the US government may turn into the Chinese. I am suggesting that the US government does some pretty shady things, and that regulatory capture is real, and worse for consumers, than firms competing by trying to offer me free things.
  - Terr_ 12y ago

userbinator 12y ago

Coming from a place where this practice is banned, I wonder how they implement this. Traffic going to certain IPs or IP ranges is exempted? They mention WhatsApp and Twitter, and the first thing that comes to mind is using them as proxies to tunnel through. I don't think it would be against ToS either - you're just asking someone else on the "other side" of those services to access the 'net and get the information for you, and it shouldn't matter one bit if you're speaking English or TCP/IP. :-) (There's plenty of info on the internet about wanting to use these services while behind a proxy, but seemingly none on using them as a proxy...)

mwsherman 12y ago

This article seems to equate two things – that which is true today, and that which the writer imagines for the future. The future is not fact. The fact of zero rating is that it is beneficial to consumers, and progressive – the poorer one is, the more zero-rating is likely to help. That is factual, observable, measurable. The speculation is a slippery-slope argument, and not factual. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but simply that it’s a priori. Zero-rating is free shipping. I don’t know of anyone that considers free shipping anti-competitive, though one could make the same argument.

api 12y ago
It depends a bit on whether companies like Facebook are paying for this, and if they're paying a reasonable rate. My guess would be that they're paying something. The real problem re: network neutrality is a lack of competition and enforced monopolies. Open the last mile (and wireless) to more competition and you eliminate the worst network neutrality case scenarios.
shkkmo 12y ago
I don't think it's a slippery slope arguement at all. Zero rating is anti-competitive. I don't think that can be argued. What can be argued to to what degree it is harmful to the consumer. Anti-competitive business models can be beneficial to end users in the short term (e.g. selling at a loss to drive out competition and build a monopoly) but are pretty much exclusively detrimental in the long term.
tetrep 12y ago
>The speculation is a slippery-slope argument, and not factual. You don't need a slippery-slope argument, the immediate effects are anti-competitive. It adds a barrier to entry where in order to offer a service to a mobile user (with a data cap), you need to pay the carrier. It's like bribing a local official so that you can use the roads to make a delivery.
chimeracoder 12y ago
> Zero-rating is free shipping. I don’t know of anyone that considers free shipping anti-competitive, though one could make the same argument. That's a bad analogy. A better analogy would be USPS[0] providing certain shippers with free shipping, and not others[1]. Imagine the disastrous effects this would have on small sellers, who would certainly not have the means to negotiate these rates with USPS, whereas a larger company would. So it's not a slippery slope, because the anti-competitive impact is direct and immediate. USPS has to charge everyone the same price for the same service, and for good reason. [0] Like broadband ISPs, USPS has an effective monopoly on shipping in parts of the country, as private carriers (UPS/FedEx) will simply "offload" certain deliveries to them, as USPS is required to ship to all locations. [1] USPS does offer, for example, "Media mail" discounts, but this is available to all shippers, and represents a different service (slower delivery, no guaranteed dates - in the olden days, it represented surface shipping, though I'm not sure that is the case anymore).

byuu 12y ago

It's funny that when Netflix has to pay for preferential treatment, it's a bad thing ("my bill might go up!"); but when it's Spotify getting unlimited data, it's a good thing ("my bill might go down!"). You can't eat your cake and have it too.

shkkmo 12y ago
I'm confused. Isn't the argument presented in the article that they are both anti-competitive (and hence "bad things")?
- byuu 12y ago
  Yes, I agree with the article. I'm saying that people in general (even in this topic) seem to not mind the issue when it's personally advantageous to them. (if that weren't the case, the article would merely be stating the obvious and not be newsworthy.) And I'll admit that unlimited streaming music does sound nice. But net neutrality is important to me, and so it would be hypocritical of me to dismiss it when it benefits me.
JadeNB 12y ago
I think that few people believe that Netflix should receive preferential treatment for free; rather, the net neutrality issue is that Netflix could be required to pay for whatever carriage it receives, or else receive intentionally degraded service.

sogen 12y ago

Yes. Data is still way too expensive in Mexico: $1USD = 8mb ($2 MXN = 1 mb) In context: Daily wage in Mexico is $4 USD Yes, 4 dollars...

jlawer 12y ago

While I strongly agree in net-neutrality principles, there is the case that in these scenarios the data may not have the same costs to provide, and some may be cheap enough that it doesn't make sense to charge from. In Australia at least general internet transit is orders of magnitude more expensive then a local peering connection. If the content provider is making the content cheaper then the general internet traffic, then it seems quite reasonable for that saving to be passed on to the customer. While I love the abstraction that you simply pay a fixed rate per bit/byte, it doesn't accurately portray the connectivity situation at least in Australia, where international transit, and even inter-capital city transit can be a sizeable portion of any costs. I pay rough costs of $2000 per month for a 100 Mbit / 5TB per month service to my rack in a DC, but I can pay $750 per month for a 10gbit service to a peering (IX) Internet Exchange in the same DC. If I was providing an ISP service I think it would be completely reasonable to not charge for traffic over the peering link as the data is nearly 300x cheaper, its quite possible it would be cheaper to simply not track the usage. It does create a situation where competition is harder, where a content provider may need to deploy many POPs to ensure their content is available under a peering situation, however I don't see this is inherently anti-competitive.

rlvesco7 12y ago

On the similar note, the NFL app on my android, which was installed without permission and cannot be deleted, sends 10s of megabytes of data to Verizon even though I've never opened it once. What it's sending, I don't know, and it's using up my data plan for no reason.