But the "bits are equal" argument still doesn't work. You can easily run your own VPN and then what?
For $59.99 a month:
- Get Facebook, Google, Netflix at 100 Mbps max.
- Any other traffic is limited to 5 Mbps max.
Watching Hulu, or Amazon Video for instance would be limited at 5 Mbps max.
But in that case your own VPN would also fall in the second category, so even if you tried to watch Hulu via VPN, you'd still get only 5 Mbps max. (And you'd be then stupid to watch Netflix through your VPN since it would also be at 5 Mbps max instead of 100 Mbps max.)
The average consumer unfortunately has little to care about net neutrality. But in the long term it will hurt the tech economy as they have all risen from net neutrality.
Erm ... so, if users want to access non-approved "partners", that's way more expensive ... but that does not affect accessibility? If you really think that, you simply fell for their psychological trick. It's simply irrelevant whether the accessibility is limited technically or economically, as one is always convertible into the other (if they limited access technically, you could still restore access by offering them enough money).
That's simply not true. BingeOn is hurting the consumer. T-Mobile could just as well simply add x GB of traffic per month to their plans that you could use with any services you want, that would result in the same costs for them, and avoid the discrimination. But instead they manipulate their customers into assuming incorrectly that BingeOn is somehow a free gift from T-Mobile, to get them to form an opinion that is against their own interest. It's nothing but deception.
First, the free data is slower than what you get normally. Second, the program is supposedly open for anyone to join.
If BingeOn was the worst impingement on net neutrality, we'd be in a pretty good place.
Except it (a) isn't, and (b) even if it theoretically were, the model of having to follow the rules of every ISP on the planet to fall under their respective zero-rating plan, or even just the overhead of coordinating with them doesn't scale, and thus is inherently only an option for large companies. Being accessible globally via IP is a matter of renting a small virtual server for a few bucks a month. Being zero-rated by thousands of ISPs is a major undertaking.
And also, obviously, that ideal is completely unrealistic: Either the ISP gets to look into the video stream to verify that it is indeed video, which would be awful, or what you in effect end up with is a flat rate for "medium bit rate connections", which would be fine, but absolutely not what any of those ISPs want.
Nothing stops them from throttling VPN connections, or even all encrypted traffic. Read up on The great firewall of China and how it really does stop VPN connections. Further, it's much easier for ISP's to block stuff because the first hop for every connection you make is through them.
In Wireshark, normally you'll see flurries of variable-sized traffic across 53 then either 80 or 443. But for a VPN, you just see a constant flow of boring packets over 500.
Why doesn't China's national firewall block port 500? Possibly because it would also block the personal VPNs of the leadership of the Chinese government.
(Edits for clarity)
Never will this happen.
Even beyond the FCC backing this sort of business now, what other part of the government would care to stop that? The only other parts in charge of anything touching on communication technologies are all law enforcement and they are already explicitly stated that they want access to all encrypted communications
These new startup's customers' packets can be deprioritized by the customers' ISPs unless the new startup pays a bribe.
The bribe that existing big players (Facebook, Netflix) need to pay will be significantly less (or even zero) because of the leverage of their large customer base and brand recognition. The ISP may face blowback from its users for degrading service to those existing players. The fledgling startup doesn't have this leverage, so the ISP can extort it.
The VPN's ISP or the content provider's ISP or any transit provider in the middle could throttle between the VPN service and the content provider, but there is far, far more competition among ISP's suitable for server farms and transit providers than there is among residential ISP's so they are much less likely to be able to get away unreasonable throttling.
Likely the outcome would be "we couldn't identify this traffic as one of our approved providers, so we used the lower of the rates we offer."
e: the second bit of that was to compare to the plan offered by a peer comment, with e.g. netflix, youtube served at higher rates and the rest at lower. So you would never see the higher rates.
Yes, you can beat this, but it is inaccurate to characterize it as being completely unstoppable.
I believe it is a game ISPs acting in bad faith will ultimately lose.
In Germany, two operators (T-Mobile and Vodafone) offer special "passes" for different services. These do not count against your monthly quota (if you use up all your data, you will be limited to about 64 kbit/s).
So, yes, you can use a VPN, but this will count against your data cap. While, if you use the services they choose for you, you basically get "free" extra data.