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Can someone explain why T-Mobile is legally allowed to provide free streaming for YouTube and Netflix? Didn't net neutrality prevent that? Or am I just out of the loop?

The thing is... I like them preferentially treating YouTube and Netflix traffic by not counting it towards my bandwidth limit. The "fair" alternative sucks: I would simply not stream on my phone anymore because it would be too expensive.

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T-Mobile is allowed to do that due to zero-rating, which the FCC is still investigating. I'd expect T-Mobile to be OK (their only requirement is technical; streams need to be TCP); but some of their competitors (AT&T's advertiser-supported model, Verizon's own video service) will probably run into trouble.

The fair alternative could be to not count any streaming video service traffic towards your data usage.

And how would T-Mobile be compensated for that? AFAIK, the reason they're able to do this is because Netflix, Youtube, etc. pays them to be part of the program.

It's in T-Mobile's interest to do this for its own network management. The unlimited video is of much lower quality, using less bandwidth. The only agreement between T-Mobile and Netflix/YouTube is for T-Mobile to be allowed to control which quality is served over their network.

The video content providers do not pay to be a part of the T-Mobile Bing On program.

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