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Verizon Wireless Wades Right Back Into the Net Neutrality Debate With Fios Deal (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Verizon is taking a page out of AT&T's book by zero rating its Fios cable TV service for all Verizon Wireless customers. That means that if you purchase your mobile data plan from Verizon Wireless and your cable TV plan from Fios, you can now use the Fios Mobile app to stream live channels and on-demand shows and not have it count against your monthly data cap. (It should be noted that Verizon Wireless and Fios are separate subsidiaries, but both are owned by Verizon Communications.) This builds on Verizon's previous decision to zero rate its Go90 mobile app for customers of its own wireless service, which net neutrality advocates see as prioritizing its own products to the detriment of those from competitors and upstarts. One notable exception here is for customers with unlimited mobile data plans. Streaming Fios Mobile content will in fact count toward the unlimited plans' 22GB a month cap, after which Verizon will cap speeds. This caveat is not made clear in Verizon's marketing language, and instead is found only in the App Store release notes.
... and this is the problem with "zero rating". When T-Mobile makes makes a whole bunch of music and video services free without a clear and obvious bias for a particular company, people asked, "What's wrong with that?" and it was harder to point to a clear problem. For many consumers, those services being free seemed like a benefit with no real downside.
But I think it becomes much more clear when a wireless carrier starts zero-rating their own pay services. It's a private company leveraging its own control over public infrastructure to push people into using the services *they want you to use*. Make FIOS video streaming "free" so you will pay for that service, and then why would you pay for Netflix, Hulu, or whoever else? With those services, the data usage costs money when you use them on your mobile.
Though it may not be technically/legally an anti-trust violation, this move is ant-competitive at it's core. It violates the "free market forces" that would allow consumers to pay for the best service based on its merits. This is why people in favor of free markets should also favor net neutrality.
Net neutrality is just a way to keep the ISPs honest if you insist on letting them keep their local cable/phone monopolies. If you get rid of the monopolies and allow competition, then you don't need to enforce net neutrality
You will never get competition in last mile delivery because the economics of it make it impractical.
What needs to happen is that the companies providing the pipe should have an arms length relationship with any content providers. Comcast should be able to provide me a pipe to my house or to provide me content over that pipe but not both. Comcast cannot both own NBC and transmit its content over Comcast data lines. Given that it is economically impractical to have more than 1-2 data lines coming into any given dwelling it is unlikely that the local phone/cable monopolies will ever disappear. For economic reasons they are a natural monopoly because competition actually increases costs plus building and maintaining such a network is prohibitively expensive to new market entrants. So the dividing line should be pipe or content. Pick one and never cross that line. Collusion between pipe providers and content providers should be explicitly illegal and prosecutable under anti-trust laws.