Dutch Market Regulator Bans T-Mobile's 'Free' Streaming Music Service (reuters.com)

The Dutch Consumer and Markets regulator ordered T-Mobile to shut down its zero-rated music streaming service because it violates the country's net neutrality rules. T-Mobile launched the Music Freedom service in October, allowing customers to stream music on their mobile devices without it impacting their data plans. Reuters reports: The AFM said the practice, often called "zero rating" is a violation of Dutch net neutrality rules, because it puts rival services such as Spotify at a competitive disadvantage. Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Mobile Netherlands, which had introduced the product on Oct. 10, must stop offering it or face penalty of 50,000 euros ($52,000) per day, the AFM said. Zero rating is shaping up as one of the major battlegrounds for European telecommunications companies as they seek ways to attract customers. The Dutch net neutrality law unambiguously forbids the practice, but European Union rules are less clear.

Comments

There's only two things I hate in this world.

[turkeydance]

People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch. some movie quote

Re: There's only two things I hate in this world.

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're being intolerant let's not forget those miserable fat Belgian bastards.

Re: There's only two things I hate in this world.

[OrangeTide]

Their culture is to nibble on a herring hanging over their head.

Re: There's only two things I hate in this world.

[Dutch Gun]

I'll take stroopwafels, olliebollen, Gouda cheese, Zoute Drops, and groentesoep met balletjes, thanks.

Re: There's only two things I hate in this world.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Most people here celebrate Christmas (and call it that), christians and atheists alike. I even got christmas cards from some muslim friends. Some SJW's are trying to get Zwarte Piet banned (another Dutch December tradition)

Re: There's only two things I hate in this world.

[ShounenSuki]

No-one's celebrating "December" because Christmas is too offensive. If anyone's celebrating December, it's because there are three major holiday celebrations in December. It's why we've been saying "vrolijke feestdagen" foor ages now.

Re: There's only two things I hate in this world.

[OrangeTide]

Honestly I like a nice hearty stomppot. Lots of dutch people in my American city.

Re: There's only two things I hate in this world.

[sabri]

And on the 8th day, as a finishing touch
God took a huge crap and created The Dutch.

NN FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Net neutrality laws: Another win for the consumer!

Re:NN FTW

[xonen]

As one of those dutch consumers - not so much. While i do totally understand and subscribe the need of net neutrality, this example already shows it is not always in the consumers best interest.

Another dutch provider (KPN, market leader) wanted to do this a few years ago, and ran into the same legal issue. Their final solution(s): 1. increase all data with all plans and 2. sell a discounted spotify subscription that came with 'free' additional data, the latter apparently being a legal solution.

This (net-neutrality thingy) was well known in the Netherlands, and T-Mobile should have been aware of this. I do recall seeing their advertisements for this unlimited streaming plan 2 months ago, just before i left the country, and already wondered how they would legally do this. Now i know the answer - they don't.

But back to the consumer - i'm not sure if consumers are better of as 'heavy users' are forced to premium plans just for their streaming needs. Then again, data plans in Holland (and in Europe in general) seem to be a lot cheaper than in the USA. This may partly be due to fragmentation - most plans in Europe are national, for a Europe-wide plan you'd pay a premium and streaming when abroad is more or less out of the question since you easily pay $10 for 100MB on the other side of your national borders. - and partly because of more competition - the Netherlands has a multiple of providers compared to the USA where only 3 providers seem to control the market. (Having said that, in Netherlands only 3* providers have their own network (*4 if you count in tele2), the rest are resellers).

Concluding: you can get anything as long you pay up. The more casual users are either left in the cold or forced to pay a premium for service they don't use. The market is not free to bind users in a way they see fit, because of some arbitrary legal requirement.

Re:NN FTW

[AvitarX]

In the US we have 4 providers (Tmo, Verizon, Sprint, ATT), many resellers, and options for cheap cross bordera (through TMO at least).

Also, zero rated streaming is happening, but on a level playing field that any content provider can play on (though in a month or so I expect zero rating to become based around crushing other providers).

Re:NN FTW

[thegarbz]

No it really is in your best interest. These discounts have one purpose and one purpose only, reduce competition and user lockin. Okay maybe two, but the end result is always the same monopolies and less choice and when the goal is finally realised, ... Guess who will start charging again when there is no competition.

Spotify is zero-rated (at least in USA)

[orion205]

because it puts rival services such as Spotify at a competitive disadvantage

That article sucks. It makes it sound like Music Freedom is a music streaming service, but it's not. At least in the USA, there are many services which fall under the Music Freedom feature and are all zero-rated. Current list is 44 services. Spotify is one of them. I agree that letting T-Mobile decide that music is free but other data costs you isn't in the spirit of net neutrality. I'll be interested if they appeal.

weird

[superwiz]

It doesn't seem like it's free. It's only free to subscribers (paid subscribers) of a data plan. Bundling free stuff with paid-for stuff is generally seen as adding features rather than giving stuff away. If they shot out Spotify, then it maybe that would make sense. Yes, I do get the point that they are "charging extra" for using Spotify because that data counts towards using the data plan, but it's actually using more upstream data. A service offered by a company can be reverse proxied and carry much lower delivery costs than the delivery of content from further upstream. The closest analogy I can think of is using local apps vs web apps. One wouldn't charge data fees for local apps which don't use data from a distant server.

Re:weird

[Anonymous Coward]

It has to do with being an internet provider, internet is not a product you control, net neutrality means you can't bundle anything with internet (even dutch tv cable boxes are an option you pay extra for, but still all way cheaper than the US and at higher speeds)

Re:weird

[superwiz]

US providers give away cable boxes for free in some markets and charge full price in others. I think they can be rented instead of bought, too. Cable and VOIP *services* are also deeply discounted if they are bundled with an internet connection. Net neutrality generally means that you can't differentiate one type of upstream traffic from another (so you can't slow down 3rd party services and demand that they pay a fee to be as fast the ones which are already paying fees). But if something is much closer to the actual consumer box (network-topology wise), then it's not discriminatory pricing. Just as a hypothetical, what if there is an Internet-based TV recording service (it only allows recording a signal which actually reaches customer equipment first). Such a service would eat significantly more ISP's bandwidth than a local DVR which would come inside a cable box. Wouldn't an ISP be justified in charging nothing for the DVR and charging for the bandwidth used by an Internet-based DVR service? A local DVR would not use any bandwidth at all. I am saying that the situation with the music service is similar because it puts the music service much closer, in the network topology, to the customer equipment. So to deliver 1 MB of music from this cached service, a provider has to use much less of its own upstream bandwidth than it would have to use to provide 1 MB of Spotify music. It's just basic caching. Why can't the provider charge less for the service which it costs less to provide?

Re:Sorry for being ignorant...

[Pentium100]

The problem here is not that the streaming service is free, but that using it does not count toward your data cap, while using a competing streaming service (like Spotify) does.

So yes, you do pay double for using other streaming services.

the problem with zero rating

[OrangeTide]

It's only zero rated until all the competition is pushed out of business, then the prices go back up.

T-mobile appealing, continuing practice

[hankwang]

Spotify, mentioned in the summary, is a bad example, since it is one of the many streaming services that is whitelisted. T-mobile allows any streaming provider such as spotify to sign up, without restriction or charges. According to T-mobile, this is allowed by the European law, which takes precedence over Dutch law. So, they are appealing in court and continuing their service for the time being.

References (Dutch, you'll have to pass it through Google Translate): https://www.t-mobile.nl/datavr... http://newsroom.t-mobile.nl/t-...

Re:T-mobile appealing, continuing practice

[thegarbz]

The fact that services need to be "whitelisted" at all is a problem. Who controls the whitelist? Spotify is whitelisted? Fantastic. So you created an oligopoly locking out new players in the music streaming business.

Unless the whitelist is independently controlled and reviewed and free to use for any player then it's a violation of net neutrality by my view.

Re:T-mobile appealing, continuing practice

[El_Muerte_TDS]

this is allowed by the European law, which takes precedence over Dutch law

Which is not true. "European Law" is not a law, it's a regulation specification a member state you implement into local law.
Netherlands already had a net neutrality law, which is more strict than the EU regulation. There is nothing in the EU regulation which does not allow these stricter rules.

Re:T-mobile appealing, continuing practice

[hankwang]

Clearly, IANAL, and the difference between "law" and "regulation" is fuzzy for me. But I think it happens every now and then that a local law/regulation is overturned because it conflicts with an EU regulation. Couldn't that be the case here?

Re:T-mobile appealing, continuing practice

[hankwang]

Until a music-streaming provider complains about being discriminated against, I don't think the review of the whitelist is the problem. The legal issue seems to be about the question whether discrimination by type of content (music, in this case), regardless of the company that provides the content, is allowed or not.

My feeling is that T-mobile is in a weak position here. Because if T-mobile is right, they would also be allowed to discriminate against other types of content; for example by making VoIP traffic more expensive. In fact, this is already happening: the cost of any data traffic is increased to subsidize the bandwidth for music data.

Re:T-mobile appealing, continuing practice

[El_Muerte_TDS]

If the EU regulation would explicitly say something is allowed, then local law cannot prohibit it (and the other way around).
But as far as I know this is not the case with respect to zero-rating or "fast lanes".

Without a doubt, the most interesting bit of the Dutch implementation is the explicit banning of zero rating, the practice where telecom operators do not charge end customers for data used by specific applications or internet services. In addition to that, the Minister of Economic Affairs must establish binding rules regarding traffic management in the case of impending network congestion and specialised services. He may also establish other rules explaining how the net neutrality regulation should be interpreted.

https://www.bof.nl/2016/05/25/...

ps, I'm a bit off on the usage of "regulation". An "EU directive" needs to be translated into local law (and thus though through the law construction procedure) and an "EU regulation" only needs to have some i's dotted and t's croess and activated (so still being activated as local law, but doesn't have to go through the classical law construction procedure).

It is not T-Mobiel deciding

[SuperKendall]

I agree that letting T-Mobile decide

The key reason to me why this is acceptable is that T-Mobile is NOT deciding. Any company can sign up to be part of the plan from the provider side. So it is completely open - that is why they have so many services signed on already, basically anyone that can handle streaming anything over the internet at any kind of scale would be able to sign up to provide this with T-Mobile.

Re:It is not T-Mobiel deciding

[lxs]

Any company can sign up

So only companies get to play, and it has to be a company that is aware of the local loophole.
Also why should customers who aren't interested in streaming music on their phones subsidise those who do?

Which incidentally means you're indirectly subsidising the music industry.

You're still using 2G data at 40 Kbps?

[raymorris]

> Wrong, the government can make sure the work gets done that the private sector has refused for decades to do.

Decades? Two decades ago we had 2G data. Are you still using 2G? Hundreds of billions of dollars of investment by the carriers brought us 3G and now 4G nationwide networks. I dislike Sprint as much as the next guy, but I'm not stupid and I'm not a liar, so when they spend billions making their data network 100 times faster I don't pretend that doesn't happen.

The government can make sure things get done? I present to you healthcare.gov, the F-35, or practically any significant government program.

Re:You're still using 2G data at 40 Kbps?

[dryeo]

All it ends up meaning is that you can blow through your monthly quota 100 times faster. Now if that 4G network actually was cheap enough to use...

Ps: More government = more Trump

[raymorris]

Ps, remember any time you suggest more government involvement, in the US you're suggesting you want more involvement from the Trump administration. You want the FCC to be more active and have more power? You want DONALD TRUMP'S FCC to have more power? You sure about that?

It sucks. Remember $2.50/MB, 115 cent text message

[raymorris]

I absolutely understand your frustration. Watching HD video on a phone without wifi gets expensive pretty quick.

Also, I got tired of the big carriers and left Sprint for Boost Mobile ten years ago, because Sprint was charging $2.50 per MB, and 15 cents per text message. Ten years later, they sell 24GB for $100; four cents per GB. That's a price reduction of over 98%, so pretending nothing has changed is just stupid. For $35 with Boost, I use my phone all day without any extra charges - but I am limited in the amount of video I watch when there's no Wi-Fi.

A drop in the bucket, an a annoying drop, but a dr

[raymorris]

Have you ever had a faucet dripping slowly and the sound annoyed you when you were trying to sleep? That's the tax money spent on the wireless phone networks. It's really annoying, and it's a drop in the bucket. The (damn) phone companies spend something like $50 billion / year on network upgrades, it's pretty crazy. As I mentioned in my other post, when I left Sprint ten years ago they were charging $2.50 /MB for 128Kbit (really 64Kb) service and 15 cents per text message. It took a minute or so to load my favorite web page, and cost a dollar per page view. In the last yen years they've built a network 100 times faster and 98% cheaper. A couple million bucks from the government isn't significant in that at all.

Re:It sucks. Remember $2.50/MB, 115 cent text mess

[dryeo]

I'm in Canada, so no cheap mobile like in the US. Here it seems to be $30 a GB unless you signup for an expensive contract and then not much cheaper and mostly cheap minutes that I don't use. I pay 15 cents a text message as well. At that it seems every couple of months something goes up in price.
Pages have grown too, especially if you don't block scripts, ads and such, which is a lot harder to do on my phone compared to my desktop. With scripts enabled, even this tab that I'm replying to you in, 6 messages, no pictures, was about 400kbs of data.

So sad you think that way

[SuperKendall]

So only companies get to play

Nope read, the other responses to my post, it's not just companies.

What's sad is you think it matters when ANYONE can forma company for around $10 in most states...

Also how is this a "local loophole", that's not what this is at all. You have no idea what the hell is actually happening with this service.