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Comment by smhenderson | Hacker News Reader

Having skimmed the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article on Zero Rating[1] I immediately knew what it was about but I'd never heard it called that before. Think T-Mobile's free music[2] service if you live in the US.

Once again I think this is going to be a hard one. If you understand the devilish details under the surface and it's effects on Net Neutrality you can make an informed decision to oppose this. But it's hard to convince the general public that free is a "bad thing". I think India's Department of Telecom is going to have a tough PR battle on it's hands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating [2] http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news/t-mobile-sets-your-music-f...

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Imagine if Orkut was zero-rated, back when Facebook started. Or if Yahoo was zero-rated when Google started. Internet giants are turning their back on users, now that they have money.

It's pretty standard practice for any company that becomes suffiently large to increase barriers to entry (after previously championing low barriers to entry when it suited them). Not saying it's good for users, but the incentives for corporations are clear.

Exactly. So that is the one thing a government should care about: keeping entry levels low.

However, politicians talk (!) to the public only just before elections. After that they listen (!) to the big guys because that is good for their ego and maybe future career.

Yes, the question is would you rather put people in office who support those barriers and benefit the few, or people who represent the majority? I'm not surprised that corporations behave this way, and it's very important that it's publicized so the populace can defend it's own interests. Just because it's not surprising doesn't mean we shouldn't publicize it.

"Don't mistake my outrage for surprise." :)

Are the music streaming companies paying T-Mobile to take part in the program? If not, is the barriers to entry objection sufficiently mollified? That is, the carrier is making an entire class of content zero-rated, not picking favorites.

That's a great question and since I brought up T-Mobile in the first place I went ahead and dug around a little via Google. It looks like no, they do not charge the providers so I guess this was a bad example on my part. They started the program with a few big names (Apple, Spotify, Pandora, more...) and then opened it up to others (Google Play, Rhapsody, more...). But it looks like the entry cost to providers is low/free and in this case T-Mobile is genuinely trying to add some value to the customer to compete against the giants in their space.

So IMHO opinion it's still Zero Rating but consumer friendly because it does not favor one music streaming service over another. I'm not trying to promote T-Mobile, just stating the facts as I see them. The cynical in me thinks that T-Mobile doing it without charging providers is to avoid any any competition legislation they are worried about running up against.

More here: http://www.eweek.com/networking/t-mobile-expands-free-music-...

In my heart of hearts, I want to think that TMO understands that the networked future everyone raves about won't happen because data transfer is too costly to make it practical.

Mobile devices are wonderful, but come on, the price of mobile data is assault with intent. I don't mind paying for my data. But I do object to being abused for wanting to use the network for non-trivial activities, such as twitter, farcebook, etc.

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