I've been following net neutrality issues pretty closely and this is the first I've heard the term "zero rating". I didn't have a clear understanding of the term after reading the article, since I wasn't sure if zero rating was the exemption or if ISPs were exempting services from the zero rating. The wikipedia[0] entry helped, also referring to it as "toll-free data" which cleared up the confusion for me.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating</a>
A few centuries ago England used number of water channels for transportation. There was a law that owner of channel could not be associated with user in any way.
I've lived in Canada and the US. Canada's providers made me like Comcast. The service is very bad, with caps on cable (80G when I left), high cost, collusion among the two service providers, a regulator in their pocket, and publicity campaigns to stoke nationalism to block foreign (i.e. US) providers from coming in.<p>Just like the US, but so much worse.
Personally, I think zero rating is a good thing, especially as it operates in the Australian environment (or, at least, how it has operated previously). It has largely been consumer positive, allowing premium tier ISPs to differentiate themselves by making the effort to peer with service providers, and consumers benefit from the free quota. There are some distasteful uses though - where there are exclusive peering agreements, particularly around sporting events.<p>All in all, I think the CRTC has taken a pretty good approach. Perhaps the third-party only rule should be extended to refusing exclusivity arrangements, but a complete ban is over the top in my opinion - it discourages passing on savings made by peering with companies to consumers.
If used in the right context, I don't see a problem with 'zero rating.' T-mobile[0] has been doing this for a little bit now and, to me, it seems to be beneficial. The issues only arise when you are zero rating individual services belonging to one genre or vertical. Saying that Netflix won't count against your usage but Hulu does would be a problem.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html</a>