I'm still amazed how mostly everyone is praising T-Mobile for violating net neutrality with free music and video streaming. Instead of looking at the long-term effects (prices for other types of data will stay higher), everyone just looked at the short-term effects ("we get free video streaming _and_ they made data cheaper at the same time too").
Because not everyone agrees about what "net neutrality" means.
On the more universally reviled end of the spectrum, you have companies attempting to charge servers to pass traffic to their (also paying) customers.
On the nearly universally acceptable end of the spectrum, you have the widespread use of CDNs, or the Netflix and YouTube caching servers that they give ISPs for free.
Somewhere in the middle you have wireless ISPs offering free bandwidth to their users for use with popular services. Hard to get customers to see that as a bad thing, especially if they already use those services.
> Somewhere in the middle you have wireless ISPs offering free bandwidth to their users for use with popular services. Hard to get customers to see that as a bad thing, especially if they already use those services.
I was quite glad that the CRTC ruled against this practice in Canada. If telecoms want to run successful mobile television streaming businesses, they can start selling reasonable amounts of data with their plans.
People want bigger data plans more than they want Bell TV on their phones, so I think it got reasonable public support. Consumers groups widely applauded the ruling, at least.
> First-party services fall in a different category; quite aside from net neutrality, that raises potential antitrust concerns.
Anti-trust law in the US is only relevant if the company has a monopoly.
That's exactly why net neutrality is important, and anti-trust law does not suffice. Because two competing ISP's both charging netflix to get the data you are already paying for to you, are not a monopoly.
(Notwithstanding that where I live Comcast is basically the only broadband option -- I still don't believe they have ever been legally determined to be a monopoly (yet?))
T-Mobile is not violating NN with video streaming - they have a program where they'll essentially host your stuff (i.e., the Netflix suggestion to Comcast during their spat)... it's not discriminatory, in fact on the press meeting, someone asked if porn sites would be included and the answer was favorable.
I'm not sure about their zero-rating of audio streaming.
Except Verizon can't upsell everyone, and if you're suggesting that they can lead a push to replace wifi as we know it today, I would definitely put money on that NOT happening.
If you gradually deploy your non-solution while upselling them the cool new product, they won't even notice until it's too late.