It is quite simple realy. If I pay x€ for y GB/Month, the ISP should not dictate what over the top services I spend that budget on, nor favor its own services (or those of 'partners') by selective exclusion of that traffic from limits that other are held to, or by hindering traffic from the non-partnered services in any way.<p>Now for the 'complicated' part. In practice it is not difficult to create a situation where everything is degraded. You just under-provision on a choke point. If you then sell alternative routes, or allow edge caches beyond the choke point, you technically didn't 'hinder' any traffic, you just provided such a lousy service to begin with that any not otherwise enabled service provider doesn't stand a chance of offering a decent experience on your network.<p>But just pointing to a technical situation where it is hard to write a general 'rule' that in any arbitrary case can unequivocally objectively and automatically say whether a certain criterion was fulfilled, and then saying that because it is hard or even impossible to specify the whole regulation should be scrapped, that is disingenuous. The spirit of the regulation can be perfectly fine, even though case-by-case judgement may be required to determine compliance.<p>Those that will say 'but you can vote with your wallet', I can see where you come from, but the reasoning is flawed. In practice telecoms is not an open market, and many households have near 0 meaningful choice. Strong economic network effects are inherent, and lasting competition has only been present under very strict regulation.
"But the offer alarmed Swedish media companies, which warned that the deal gave Facebook an advantage over competitors, and Telia an edge over other telecom operators."<p>ISP's have a million and one other ways to be anti-competitive. Example, in New Zealand, one of the major ISP's runs 'Lightbox' a streaming competitor. If you sign up to any of their plans, you get free Lightbox.<p>This incentives the customer to not use other streaming services. You can talk about zero-rating all day long but no amount of neutrality regulation will prevent something like the example above from happening. What happens if Comcast decides that Hulu Plus will be free with their broadband? It has the same effect as if Comcast decided to zero-rate Hulu on their network.<p>For their to be real changes in the American ISP market, you need competition.
Besides Pai and the top shareholders of some companies, how many people actually <i>want</i> this proposed repeal?<p>I'd guess most people don't know or care. Still, millions wrote to object to the proposed repeal.<p>Is it possible that only a couple hundred people are making this decision for 300 million over the objections of millions?
The article mentions that, <i>"France has four major mobile and internet operators and nine low-cost offshoots. Britain has more than 50.</i>" I'd appreciate if somebody could explain something here because that doesn't seem to make any economic sense. Let's assume that France/Britain have absolutely rigid and perfectly enforced net neutrality. That means internet service providers can compete only on price/speed as everything else is supposed to be otherwise identical. 13 different companies, let alone 50? How? Users would simply pick the company with the lowest price for their desired speed. And the cheapest service is going to tend to be the largest due to economies of scale. The end result is a natural trend towards monopolization when companies are allowed to only compete on price/speed.<p>I mean you might decide to pass on a "low-cost" alternative in most industries as there is often an implied "low-quality" qualifier attached. But with strong net neutrality, this is not supposed to be the case. They state a speed, they state a price. Everything else is identical. So what gives? I find it disappointing that the NYT did not even bother to even consider this obvious question since it seems to cut to the core of this issue!
In France, the main mobile operator Orange, offers you tethering only as an option to be additionally paid on top of your data plan. They basically monitor the connection to check if your mobile is forwarding packages and do mitm in order to display advertisement about the additional paid option.
I hadn’t considered the impacts such a ruling would have on zero ratings schemes, the two hadn’t even connected in my mind, but now that it’s been mentioned it would clearly fall afoul of any existing regulations. There used to be a similar plan from Optus in Australia to zero rate Facebook, and there’s currently one to do the same with Spotify, but today these accompany generous data plans in general, whereas originally it was offered on very low cap plans such as the 100mb/mo plan. Curious to see how this plays out internationally in countries like Aus where this already occurs unchallenged, and whether they will now go further following the ruling in the U.S.
My account (US, MN) with Virgin Mobile is already doing this with "free" streaming music. A hand full of apps (Pandora, iHeartRadio, Slacker, 8tracks and Milk Music) don't count towards the monthly data cap.
Outside the wireless space, the local loop is a rather strong classical mono/duo/-poly. While there may be several re-sellers, and more players at the national level, in practice for most individual homes the choices are extremely limited. Network effects (in an economic sense) are in play at the ISP level so entering the mature market as an 'independent' isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Consumer Internet is furthermore already packaged in with a TV/PSTN/Mobile bundle offer. Keeping an open Internet has definitely been a struggle in Europe. One that is under constant attack. A strong Net Neutrality stance has been the only defense, but also over here it is failing as we speak.
>“From a user perspective, I don’t think it’s a problem and I think most consumers don’t think it’s an issue,” said Magnus Haglunds, a Stockholm-based independent music producer who uses the Telia service. “There are those who may have to change from Apple Music to Spotify. But then they get free surfing on Spotify.”<p>What kind of a sheep customer thinks, "Well I guess I'll just totally change the service I use because that's what my provider wants!" People like that need, if you'll excuse the gendered metaphor, a swift kick in the balls.