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Comment by sksk | Hacker News Reader

>> Notice how not all music streaming services are covered - only the ones that T-Mobile has approved here.

"During the announcement, T-Mobile’s John Legere assured the audience that their initial picks for streaming services wasn’t any sort of competitive/business move. Rather, it was a matter of technical implementation. They’ve got to manually configure the network to whitelist each service’s myriad data sources, so they picked just eight to start. The goal, Legere says, is to include “every music streaming service” in the program; moving forward, they’ll invite customers to vote on which services get added next."

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-dat...

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That's probably true and I have no reason to believe T-Mobile is acting in bad faith, but that's not good enough.

This is a bad idea. Unless you can offer the same service to every streaming audio service (even little startups) then it ain't neutral. T-Mobile currently has a poll on their Facebook page for which streaming services to add next. How is a new startup supposed to get on that list when it's competing in a poll with Google, Microsoft, last.fm, etc.

I would prefer that my ISP not give special treatment to packets from one company over another. Just deliver the bytes I paid for, thanks.

It's never perfectly neutral & accessible to companies of any size.

How is it fair when you have to pay money to develop apps for iOS? That's not equal-opportunity!

Answer: you're right, it isn't.

I think I phrased that poorly. I'm not asking that they make it perfect, I'm saying it's just a plain bad idea. It would be impractical to implement in a fair way. So it has the (likely unintended) effect of reducing competition. It's a bad idea.

The world is not fair and this makes one tiny piece of it even less so.

But what if it makes T-Mobile more competitive, thus making the wireless carrier industry more fair? Could we see a net increase in total fairness?

So unless the solution is absolutely perfect you'd prefer no solution at all?

Streaming music is the single biggest use of bandwidth on my phone right now (T-Mobile, as it happens). This change gives me one less reason to care about my bandwidth usage. If they don't whitelist the particular service I use yet, that's not going to make me stop streaming music or force me to buy a more expensive plan, because T-Mobile doesn't cut you off when you reach your cap in the first place.

Solution to what? Data caps being too low?

I think this is a perfectly reasonable implementation of a bad idea. It's good for the T-Mobile customer today, bad for everyone in the long run.

And which is it? Either you care that your streaming app is whitelisted or you don't. Since it's the single biggest usage of data on your phone (same for me, btw) I'd guess you probably care. If I had a 1GB cap on my data service, you'd have a very hard time convincing me to switch from a favored streaming service to a non-favored one.

But if they theoretically could get every sound broadcaster now matter how small, then you would support them taking a stance that music is more valuable than other forms of data? Is that neutral?

Not really. I'd definitely prefer they treat all bits equally for all services. But it's much easier to see the potential harm from picking winners and losers among a set of direct competitors than between apps in different categories.

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