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Zero-Rating Harms Poor People, Public Interest Groups Tell FCC (vice.com)
An anonymous reader links to an article on Motherboard: The nation's largest internet service providers are undermining US open internet rules, threatening free speech, and disproportionately harming poor people by using a controversial industry practice called "zero-rating," a coalition of public interest groups wrote in a letter to federal regulators on Monday. Companies like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T use zero-rating, which refers to a variety of practices that exempt certain services from monthly data caps, to undercut "the spirit and the text" of federal rules designed to protect net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible, the groups wrote. Zero-rated plans "distort competition, thwart innovation, threaten free speech, and restrict consumer choice -- all harms the rules were meant to prevent," the groups wrote. "These harms tend to fall disproportionately on low-income communities and communities of color, who tend to rely on mobile networks as their primary or exclusive means of access to the internet."
On what the fck is 0rating
So by NOT charging people for what can be a sizable amount of data usage, we're harming poor people?
Further, why in this sissy state the Loony Left is breeding, must someone always be harmed or be a victim? Honestly, you can't do anything good anymore, or some Libtard will cry foul because they didn't get "their fair share."
Is it possible that the wireless companies are playing a complex psychological game here, trying to turn public sentiment away from net neutrality, by first offering to not (in essence) charge for certain services, secretly expecting someone to raise complaints against the practice because it violates net neutrality, so they can then throw up their hands and say "Sorry, the FCC won't allow us to give this to you for free, so now we're forced to count it against your data cap"?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The 'stateside fixed line broadband situation must be really bad, seeing how mobile data is still positioned as a "premium product"*.
* A service is not a product, but that's a pet peeve for another time.
I want FREE but work for a living. How does one get a WIC card, subsidized housing, free phone, few internet, and free healthcare? Please sign me up.
They had to throw in the bit about people of color because we all know nothing's worth doing unless it involves righting white people's oppression of people of color.
basically on one side we have,
limited content, mostly preselected by others, offered at zero cost.
on other side,
unlimited content, which must be selected by consumer expending time and effort(esp brain), offered at a price.
economics of mass acceptance of 1st could eventually lead to limitation of all content even for those making 2nd choice, or at least ever higher prices in 2nd choice
but should government(fcc) decide to ban the 1st prevent that? or let the consumer decide (even if most will choose them 1st)? that is the question. harder to answer than it appears.
Either failure of the market, where the government breaks it beyond repair, or failure of the market, where the players abandon the market and move to profitable business models.
Trying to make pricing fair fails so long as there is no genuine competition. Whether this requires multiple providers or not is interesting, as there are in fact multiple providers for most of the U.S. - fixed v mobile services to start, with mobile having several that probably now function as an oligarchy, and fixed having probably two at most, with the problems of geographical coverage making that an oligarchy in practice.
Google is trying to upset that, though I cannot yet figure out why. Municipalities continue to abet the incumbent abuses by preventing them from entering markets where the incumbents can get protection.
And going to government at any level for service would probably (from experience) result in below average service, poor customer service, increasing prices, and a genuine risk of introducing regulations worse than what we have now. Has no one considered whether a municipal Internet provider could be forced to filter objectionable content? Some would be pretty obvious, but some not so much. Porn in Utah? Gun blogs in Malibu?
A free Internet is a real challenge - the world actually may prefer liberty, but very few governments do. Ours even, founded on liberty, is being twisted and subverted in favor of oppression. Freedom is not free. It must be defended. Constantly.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
the fact that providers can zero rate a group of high bandwidth video providers means that prices are too high for plans. If you can group the highest bandwidth consumption and say its not even countable then why is all the email and voip and music countable? Prices are way too high and the lowest priced plans from cable are always the highest per mbit of speed. 5mbit costs 10 times what 100mbit costs per mbit and who is using more of the pipe a 5mbit user or a 100mbit user?
Many believe retaliations are in order against the members of the FCC and against officers and board members of those companies. Hopefully it will be peaceful, but you know how people are.
I think the gist of this complaint, /. headline aside, is that zero-rating harms open competition and violates the FCC's policies towards net neutrality. The impact on poor people isn't the focus of it. An example might be how T-Mobile doesn't count Pandora traffic against the cap. While I might prefer to use another music service, I use Pandora since it doesn't count against the cap. Thus putting competitors at a disadvantage. Of course, large established players always have all sorts of advantages.
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So, let me get this straight. T-Mobile decides to exempt a whole swath of data-intensive services from the data cap and that is harming these people who otherwise could never be a real user of Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, etc. Wait, I'm having problems following your SJW "logic" here. They can't afford mobile and wired broadband. Wireless, for obvious reasons, has more restrictions ordinarily than wired on data consumption. A company decides to give people unlimited data use on preferred, highly popular services. Services that those same communities really, really want.
I'm struggling to find the argument for network neturality here, and I am generally a proponent of it. If anything, these SJWs have just created an argument that everyone in Congress from the Black Caucus, to the Tea Party, to the moderates in the establishment could agree is a good reason to abolish network neturality.
Arguably they shouldn't own any content, since their job is to transport your requests and the replies. This is the core value of the internet: Cooperation, as in you carry my data, I carry yours. Seen that way, "owning content" to serve your customers devolves into some variation of the "internet.org" teh zuck vehicle, which is pretty much a play to "own" not merely content, but the eyeballs the ISP can charge marketeers for. IOW, instead of a paying customer, it turns you into a paying product paid for again by the real customer, the marketeers. Charging the product extra to access what they really wanted to see in the first place is just icing on the cake. The end result is a walled garden that, no matter the name, is quite different from the open internet.
Or do the companies charge different amounts because there might actually be real differences in cost associated with providing that service?
And if it really is the latter, why should an ISP be prohibited from charging less, or even not at all, for providing access to facilities that might happen to cost *THEM* less money to have provided to their customers in the first place? Why should an ISP be prohibited from charging a customer more for services that actually cost *THEM* more, because the content isn't already on their their own network?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Charging by the GB is also stupid, let me know how much per Mbit sustained and bill me at the 95%
It's fascinating that the most egregious net neutrality violation arrives first, and people even defend it. They don't even bother with charging a little more for services which don't pay them off: They barge right in and make everything else infinitely more expensive. Division by zero. Is that why it works? People see "free" and wonder how that's going to hurt anyone? No, folks, it's not the "free" that is the problem. The problem is how much more everything else costs, unless they also pay off the ISPs. People will literally be unable or unwilling to afford email and web browsing.
It's not really 'Free' as in zero cost because long term, the provider is still collecting benefit in some other way.
The term from robber baron days is 'Predatory Pricing'.
It's when a monopoly uses it's position in the market to sell at below cost to attempt to drive a competitor out.
I'm not sure if the competitor has to be in the same market, or could be in a different market.
It's not clear if that is what is happening here, but it seems like a case could be made that offering free Internet service (the monopoly part) is intended to help the video service (non-monopoly) gain an unfair advantage.
...you whiny liberal bitches. This is the free market at work. If the telecoms don't want to waste their time on squeezing money from low-lifes and bottom-feeders like "the poor", they don't have to. They should be free to run their businesses in whatever way they find most profitable. Right? So just STFU about net neutrality, and monopolies, all the rest of your socialist ideas.
outlaw metered service. problem solved.
We are looking at the wrong problem. The only thing that makes zero-rating work is metered service. Get rid of metered service and zero-rating goes away. What actually CHANGED to cause the need for metered service? Nothing. the only NEED for metered service is the telco/cablecco bottom line increase.
This is a prime example of Marxist wealth distribution scemes. Welcome to Obama's America.
I think other telecoms are pissed at T-Mobile, so they're just trying to get precedent set that will disallow T-Mobile from continuing to offer the only type of zero-rating that actually may be a great idea.
It is wrong to offer people something for free. Esp. if they are poor.
Zero-rating is the new 800 number. Remember when you had to pay for long distance phone calls by the minute? Companies who wanted you to use their services would set up 800 numbers so you could call them for free. The receiver of the call paid the bill.
Zero-rated services likewise have to pay, or have to comply with certain rules, to be included in the zero-rating program.
800 numbers didn't kill the "neutrality" of phone calling, and I don't think zero-rating necessarily will kill off net neutrality. As long as every business has the same opportunity to become part of the zero-rating tier, and the costs aren't prohibitive, a form of neutrality is preserved. On the other hand, if the carrier only exempts its own services, and doesn't let other in, or makes it cost-prohibitive, then we have a problem.
"communities of color"
Can someone explain to me why this policy has a racial bias? Or is this just along the lines of "terrorists and pedophiles" and "think of the children" type arguments?
World ends, poor and minorities disproportionately affected...
Why does *everything* have to be filtered through an SJW lens?
I think ISPs should go back to separate limits for local and long distance data use. Local data will be close to unlimited. Long distance will be the 250 GB/month, which Comcast currently imposes. There will be some services, such as Netflix, which can deliver content locally via its many locally cached servers.
Anyone remember 15 years ago when Slashdot wasn't full of whiney SJW communists who want to use the government to dictate when, where, and how you take a piss? The quality of the discussion on this forum has declined dramatically over the years... to the point where most commenters no longer have a sufficient grasp of the content to provide valuable insight.
Anyone familiar with the section 508 requirements? Thanks to the hard work of the SJWs every piece of software produced by the government must be usable by blind people. It's really fun to explain to a customer that you can't deliver the functionality they want because you're too busy making sure blind people can use their application. They explain they don't give a damn because blind people can't qualify for the particular job... you explain it is in the contract... they explain they only put it in the contract because Congress and SJW made them. Noone gives a rats ass... we're wasting tens of billions of dollars every year just to make the SJW feel good. It would be less expensive and more productive to pay blind people a living stipend then to make all software 508 compliant... but then the SJW would get all butthurt because we aren't catering to their sense of self-righteousness.
Zero rating would not be a problem if ISPs were required to set technical criteria for a service being zero-rated, were required to provide all content providers with the same advance notice of changes to the zero-rating technical criteria, were prohibited from conspiring with content providers to change technical criteria to empower any particular content providers, and were prohibited from considering any non-technology/non-technical criteria for the practice of zero rating any service.
Their argument is wrong on its face unless they can prove the ISPs raised prices.
So you have situation a) where they treat everything the same and situation b) where they discount the data charge for specific sources.
By "basic knowledge" aka definition of reality situation b) is better for everyone _unless_ they raise rates for customers or lower usage limits.
In the case in India the situation is risible because it's "free". So basically it's just people being fucking stupid.
In the US cases like T-Mobile you'd have to show that T-Moble lowered their data caps or something to show any actual harm.
In general, "Internet Activists" are some of the dumbest mother fuckers around and anything they bitch about can usually be dismissed as entitled millenial bullshit.
IN art practice brown is not a color, the same black and white are not considered colors but shadow and light. I AM A PERSON OF COLOR. Being of color meaning African is no reason to judge favorably or unfavorably... meaning Africans can get f upped, they are getting too much help when they simply do not not need it. Unless you DO mean it will harm people of COLOR, as it seem is true (Africans mistrust us). I think I get the concept of neutrality and... I thought a service comprised of my email, facebook and one or two fora like this one would be an improvement over my Nintendo DSi Opera browser, totally open but without memory capacity. Would save me time sometimes going straight to the point. Adding google paragraph previews would be great also, I liver with those only for almost half a year and was better than nothing. Currently without wifi I would be having exactly NOTHING. Cell phone is simply beyond my reach in NYC and is not a matter of money or hardware but of instruments and other policy related obstructions. Do they really have to ask for a phone number to call before granting service? See what I mean?