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Comment by jonpurdy | Hacker News Reader

From what I remember reading when Wehe came out, ISPs in Spain and Portugal (and Brazil?) were already providing data capped plans with options to uncap particular services for a small fee. So you'd get an (example) 100GB plan and pay $1-2/mo for each service you want excluded from the cap (Netflix, or whatever).

IANAL but I'm sure this was/is legal in those jurisdictions, which indicates a total disregard for net neutrality there.

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So, I can have 100Gb of data for X or 100Gb of data plus all-I-can-eat from 'PopularService' for X+Y. If I choose to pay extra, that's my choice. Seems reasonable, after all it's my own bandwidth that I'm buying with my own money.

It's dodgy if the ISP serves it at lower speed for either capped or uncapped. An ISP might throttle uncapped to force the service to use lower quality and less bandwidth, or they might throttle capped to encourage folk to pay for uncapped.

It seems neutral at first glance, but the side effect is a barrier to market for competitors not on the ISP offers.

As for legalities until it's tested in court it's hard to know if any law stands up to scrutiny especially in an area as grey as this. My gut feel is that ISPs would get away with it unless they are abusing a monopoly, but hey IANAL either.

This was proposed in Brazil, but was repelled due to backlash. Some ISPs still technically have data caps, but it's illegal to enforce them.

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