The article makes the correct point that even if the upside is access to more services for now, zero-rating effectively favours big companies and big services, (who have the money and time to negotiate these deals with carriers and ISPs) and removes the "level playing field" which most people believe is at the core of the Internet and fuels innovation and allows startup services to thrive and grow.
There's no level playing field in business as it is. Incumbents have the advantage of having more resources than start-ups, that's what makes disruption hard. Saying zero rating shouldn't be allowed is worse for me as a consumer, I'd definitely like it if music streaming apps I use made deals with my wireless carrier so I could stream as much as I wanted.
You (and startups) are basically asking for a subsidy that doesn't exist for anyone else. No one is giving Jolla a hand in taking on Samsung or Apple in the phone business.
If they do (by incentivizing people to conserve bandwidth on, say, mobile connections) then they need to be consistently enforced, with no exceptions.
If they don't serve a purpose for consumers then they should be abolished anyway.
If Spotify and WIMP use equal amounts of data then they should cost you, the consumer, the same in transfer costs. Anything else just ends up with all consumers subsidizing the incumbents no matter what vendors they choose (like the often criticized "Microsoft tax"), unless they only go with startups that do not have these agreements in place (yet).
> You (and startups) are basically asking for a subsidy that doesn't exist for anyone else. No one is giving Jolla a hand in taking on Samsung or Apple in the phone business.
Oh yeah, let's never try to improve things in new markets that work differently.
You should just say that you don't buy the argument of net neutrality. The intent is that network access is non-discriminatory. ISPs will not be allowed to offer special deals that benefit one service provider over another. It's not a subsidy, it's treating bandwidth as a regulated utility.
You can choose to imagine cellphone hardware as a utility but clearly it is not.
So, an ISP that makes a deal with a content provider to host a server caching the content provider's data on their network, specifically to improve bandwidth and reduce transit costs, should not be allowed to pass on that savings to the customer, and should instead be forced to pocket it all themselves?
They shouldn't pass on the savings to just some of the customers; there's no reason they can't pass on the savings to all of their customers. After all, everyone benefits: those using the service with the CDN node get a faster path to that content, and everyone else gets a less congested path to the rest of the internet.
> They shouldn't pass on the savings to just some of the customers; there's no reason they can't pass on the savings to all of their customers.
So they shouldn't be allowed to pass the savings on to the customers who actually use the service in question and thus benefit from the colocated server? And this is supposed to be more "fair"? And somehow the ISP's rate model for their customers is yours to dictate?
Consider if ISPs actually charged customers by data transfer, the way many large datacenters do. What actually costs the ISP money is data transferred outside the ISP's network, going over peering connections. Many datacenters don't charge for bandwidth within their own network; for instance, bandwidth between AWS nodes in the same area is free. So why can't an ISP use the same model, and only charge for bandwidth going over their peering connections but not for bandwidth that stays inside their own network (such as to the YouTube or Wikipedia mirror they're hosting)?
For the record, I do believe in network neutrality in the sense that ISPs should not be artificially limiting bandwidth to particular Internet services (though I'd prefer to see that solved more naturally through ISP competition, but there's a severe lack of local ISP competition available). I don't, however, see anything wrong with setting up additional peering/colocation/etc arrangements that are designed to be mutually beneficial to the ISP, their customers, and the services whose data they're carrying.
The cost savings from CDN colocation and peering to the ISP as so miniscule that, even if they were passed on in full, would barely register on your bill. We are talking about fractions of a cent per customer.
Zero rating is not about passing on cost savings, it's about market power and discrimination.
Also, datacenters do not usually charge by data transfer. Just because Amazon does it (and overcharges by two orders of magnitude) does not mean others do it.
