Too Little Too Late: FCC Finally Realizes AT&T's Zero Rating Is Anti-Competitive | Hacker News Reader

Too Little Too Late: FCC Finally Realizes AT&T's Zero Rating Is Anti-Competitive

techdirt.com

48 pointsdoener7 comments

>FCC's decision not to ban zero rating (or the practice of exempting some content from usage caps) when crafting net neutrality rules ... As a result, despite having net neutrality rules, we now have companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all exempting their own streaming content from the caps ...

the network is equally neutral to all content, to some content it is just more neutral.

By definition, that is not neutral.

He was making a reference to Animal Farm, I believe. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6466-all-animals-are-equal-b...

Doesn't "zero rating" make an obvious lie out of data caps?

That is, I could stream "zero rated" bits all day, and not touch my "cap". If I stream regular bits all day, suddenly, I've hit my "cap".

Why do "zero rated" bits not cause congestion, etc etc, like the regular bits?

I'm going to play devil's advocate here, but there might be legitimate technical reasons - streaming from your ISP's network may actually be easier on the network (it doesn't require inter-network hops, or maybe, since they control the content, they can cache it closer to the edge, etc.).

There may also be financial reasons - if people are paying them for a separate streaming service, then it's easier to justify investments in infrastructure to reduce the congestion from that service.

That assumes that the congestion isn't at the edge/CO/etc. If it is, then I don't know how to justify it, except as a way to get people using their service, which is obviously part of it, either way.

All good points, thank you. It's just hard to believe that the ISP/entertainment conglomerate's own bits have zero size in terms of congestion - somewhat smaller size, yes, but zero size? No.

Yes, although it was a bit of an obvious lie to begin with.

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