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Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless Broadband Than Countries Without It
A comprehensive multi-year study by the non-profit Epicenter.works, comparing the 30 member countries of the European Union (EU) on net neutrality enforcement, has found that zero rating business practices by wireless carriers have increased the cost of wireless data compared to countries without zero rating. From a report: This directly contradicts all of the assertions by major wireless carriers that their zero rating practices are "free data" for consumers. Based on the evidence, zero rating not only serves as a means to enhance ISPs' power over the Internet, but it's also how they charge consumers more money for wireless service. Zero rating was originally going to be banned by the FCC under the General Conduct Rule, but when the FCC changed leadership the agency promptly green lighted and encouraged the industry to engage in zero rating practices before it began its repeal of net neutrality.
Oh Creimette, would it be rude to kiss you and brush your teeth at the same time? I have one of those vibrating brushes
This is my shocked face. :|
It's a fairly simple rule .. if a telco claims to do something which benefits their consumers, it's a fucking lie.
By the time you are in management at one of those, you are an undeniable sociopath who only cares about doing whatever it takes to maximize profits, and your own bonus.
Nobody in management at such a company isn't a complete and utter sack of monkey crap.
Zero rating was originally going to be banned by the FCC under the General Conduct Rule, but when the FCC changed leadership the agency promptly green lighted and encouraged the industry to engage in zero rating practices before it began its repeal of net neutrality.
Elections have consequences. If you want a different outcome in 2020, work on getting the people who didn't vote off their asses and to the polls.
I'm also thoroughly convinced it's an exercise in futility attempting to convince Trump supporters to stop voting against their own best interests. Seems like as long as they get their cup full of "liberal tears", the world could burn down around them and they'd still be satisfied because their side was victorious. You'd have better luck teaching a pig to sing.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Epicenter.works is an advocacy organization, not a research organization. So this "study" may be a bit biased. They have an agenda to push.
The lawyers would be all over these guys with class action lawsuits, if they weren't all paid off.
Didn't even know that kind of shit existed. What a load of crap zero rating is.
Costs going down in countries with zero rating bans also are the same countries that regulate wireless prices as nationalized values.
This makes sense; carriers have an incentive to raise the costs of exploring alternatives in order to make their preferred, zero-rated choice of content more attractive.
However, once that incentive is removed, the wireless carrier no longer has a reason to raise the cost of alternatives because nothing is given special treatment. In short, zero rating practices cost you more money.
In short, data rates are approved by gov't agencies (at least in US), and this study appears to hold every other development, both political and technological, entirely equal across all EU countries examined. Is that really true? Is everyone of the 30 countries considered exactly equal except for the few that choose to zero-rate some services for whatever reason?
Anyone else notice this gem in the "report":
The practice also has a disproportionate impact on low-income users. These users tend to only be able to afford wireless broadband services for their entire Internet experience, resulting in them receiving an inferior Internet compared to users who can afford both a wireline and wireless service.
Apparently wireless broadband is inferior to wired broadband, and since poor people can only afford mobile wireless, they suffer... The implication is that if zero-rating services didn't inflate the cost of broadband service the poor could afford both wired and wireless internet access? That's just stupid - is the claim that zero-rating doubles the cost of the data service? What is the impact o zero-rating services, as discovered by this report? It doesn't say.
And then there's this counter-logical argument, from the people that know what's best for low-income residents in California:
When the issue of zero rating came before California during its debate on net neutrality, California organizations that represent low-income Californians (such as the Western Center on Law and Poverty) as well as organizations that promote the digital civil rights of communities of color (such as the Center for Media Justice and Color of Change) all came out in strong support for California banning on zero rating.
So, all the "California organizations that represent low-income Californians (such as the Western Center on Law and Poverty) as well as organizations that promote the digital civil rights of communities of color (such as the Center for Media Justice and Color of Change)" all argued that it is in the consumers best interest to not be offered any free music or video streaming services that don't count against their data plan, it is better if they are forced to pay for the data the streaming services use. In other words, low-income, people of color, consumers are better off being forced to upgrade their data plans to more expensive tiers to accommodate their streaming needs, rather than subscribe to a lower priced tier that includes free (zero-rated) music and video streaming?
No, the reality is that these low-income "advocates" are throwing their low-income "clients" under the bus to make sure that upper and middle-class consumers pay slightly less for their broadband service.
Ken
Then you can scale the network according to actual demand, not resorting to artificial scarcity.
Not all of us are communication nerds. Please define terms. Who is rating what at zero using what units?
what is zero rating?
everything has a rating of 0. so just garbage thing are rate?
If you're a Spark customer, you get zero rated Facebook access. Some other social media platforms too, I think.
With less than 5 million people and over 5000 cell towers though, considering the infrastructure per capita, I think we pay reasonable mobile data rates.
I pay $20 a month for 2.5GB of "rollover" data, unlimited txt messages and 300 minutes outbound calling (inbound is always free for everyone on every carrier. We live in a caller-pays country, which has made spam calls to cellphones almost non-existent.)
* That's $20NZ, which is like $13US
* There's 5133 towers listed on https://gis.geek.nz/celltowers , there may be more. They say 5,582 LTE licenses. Our population is a little under 4.8 million.
* Apparently the average tower cost is $200k, so about $1B infrastructure spread across a total of 4.8M people
I notice the study ignores how much bandwidth is used, just how much people are paying on average.
It would be interesting to see the cost per average GB used is across those countries.
Here in Brazil most data plans offer zero-rated Facebook and Whatsapp access. So, you can send/receive fake news all day long for free, but to check if they are true in some fact-checking site, you have to pay.
You know, it could be that high cell prices make zero-rating valuable, instead of zero-rating driving the price up. In fact, I'll bet that's the case. Further, if they compared cell service price to, say median income instead of comparing euros to euros, that the correlation would be even stronger.
I continue to be amazed that people be so educated but so fucking stupid
There is no free lunch. If it's free for you, someone is paying twice.
That internet becomes more expensive for generic use is a safe bet, but there will be people satisfied with the big business subsidised subset of the internet. In the words of EFF, you get an "inferior Internet" ... but you can get it cheaper.
By making the superior internet the only one you can buy, poor people lose something too. There are good arguments to make that decision on behalf of society, but lets not pretend there aren't any poor people becoming losers in this scenario.
It seems like common sense -- carriers are selling bandwidth at wholesale rates to large companies that provide "free" service, so they jack up the retail rates paid by consumers to compensate.
"Free" college drives up taxes, and "Free" healthcare not only drives up taxes, but also results in increased prices for non-free whodathunk?
Those on the left need to be very careful about choosing arguments...
Unless your ISP operates as a charity instead of a business, there is no such thing as "zero rating." Business is the process of offering a value in return for something the business considers more valuable.
Ask yourself how the business benefits, and you'll discover how you are paying. Hint: it won't be zero, or it won't be in business much longer.
The title implies a correlation between zero rating and high mobile costs. That could mean that higher costs encourage zero rating, or no causation exists. However, the title is a crappy summary that omits the key takeawy of the study. What the study shows is that making zero rating legal leads to higher prices than they otherwise would be. The actual study measures the change in cost when zero rating is made legal vs. the change in cost of neighboring EU countries where zero rating is not. While there are other differences between counties, that's as good an experiment as you are likely to get in the real world. What they found is that countries that legalized zero rating had rates that went up. Countries that did not legalize zero rating actually had rates that went down.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The timing of NN was to buy some votes when they started worrying about the secuity of Hilary's coronation. The point of NN was to inject CALEA into the internet. Think about this. Ajit Pai was the one who stopped warrantless wiretapping of the internet by every city, county and state. Obama's administration authorized it by declaring the internet to be a Voice Service instead of a Data Service.
UE with 30 member countries? Last time I heard about it it was 28. Did EU include Ukraine and Turkey in the meantime?