I flipped through Wiki for a refresher, just to make sure.
It might be truly anti-competitive "ladder-up-behind-you" if all app devs were forced to sponsor client-side traffic. Think of taxi tokens- a fixed barrier to entry.
But even then, to be an anti-competitive barrier to entry it must also be high. The cost of a postage stamp on your government paperwork is a barrier to entry, but it is not anti-competitive.
I think this kind of stuff is highly regressive. The Internet was this place where you succeeded on your own merit and not because you pay-to-win. A place where a tiny company like Google was able to sell their service because it was on the same playing field as lycos/yahoo/altavista. If accessing Google cost you money while lycos/yahoo/altavista were free, nobody would have ever tried Google. And without enough people searching and clicking on links there will never be enough seed data for a good ranking algorithm to work.
If accessing Google cost you money while lycos/yahoo/altavista were free, nobody would have ever tried Google.
We can't know for sure, but IMO this is totally not true. The cost for one search worth of traffic is tiny, and their results were superior.
So, we already have a better system (internet), and you want to go back to a worse system? Honestly, I don't know if you're trolling me at this point.
If a company sponsored data on search so they could fill the results with ads for their products maybe?
Or if a streaming service sponsored data so they could get people to buy from their music store or something?
If the data is sponsored using funds from the profits of the sponsoring service, I can't imagine how that could be construed as anti-competitive. Presumably the competition could do the same thing unless there's some sort of exclusivity deal.
There is a competitive advantage to being a bigger company with more money to throw around, but does that make it anti-competitive?
On top of that, I would be surprised if some carriers are not just doing it as a marketing service. In Guatemala, I see huge billboards saying you don't need to pay anything to use Facebook, Whatsapp and some others. If you have an active line (meaning you've spent a dollar in a month or two or something low), you're set to use them.
Even promotion like that is somewhat anticompetitive if there's no way for other parties to let users know.