netneutralish

But if the carrier chooses to throttle an "unlimited" data plan and thus degrades the delivery speed outside of "network management" contexts (such as congested network conditions) then they are now subject to additional punitive fines arising from net neutrality regulations that they are now subject to, on top of any (successful) fines related to misrepresentative advertising.

This falls under the category of willfully "impairing, or degrading" an existing service motivated by business interests related to the specific subscriber, instead of driven by purely technical network management justifications which would apply to a wider geographic area (i.e. not subscriber-specific), and this is one of the bright-line examples given by the FCC when they issued their press release.

As a side note, I believe the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Bureau of Consumer Protection handles deceptive advertising enforcement, while the FCC handles net neutrality enforcement.

a) eat up more data as the client's parental control component needs to continually update its URL database;

b) require more CPU and RAM (i.e. more expensive phone) if you want a better "content inspection" engine (since URLs are notoriously easy to bypass);

c) you are willfully acting as a MITM and creating a backdoor by forcing all content to be decrypted in some way for the solution to work effectively and only controlled by you (the parent), which may (or may not) compromise your stance on the issue of e2e encryption, privacy and security;

d) (your point above and following from c) having to personally safeguard and secure your child's device;

e) on Android, is it even possible to not root the device? Where's there's a will, there's a way: most kids with smartphones coupled with an incentive to bypass controls (Minecraft was a good example given above) could easily root their device, or eventually social engineer their parents into choosing future devices that are rootable.

It's one of the examples given during the FCC's bright-line guidance ( https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-332260A1.p...):

However, the network practice must be primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management and not business purpose. For example, a provider can’t cite reasonable network management to justify reneging on its promise to supply a customer with “unlimited” data.

Hopefully enough people care about this to influence the FCC before T-Mobile meets them on January 15th to discuss their Binge On program as per: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/t-mobiles-video-thro...

I'm still on the fence about de-privatizing spectrum for a variety of reasons. But the biggest elephant in the room whenever discussing spectrum de-privatization is that the FCC earned US$45 billion from wireless carriers last year, and US$19 billion in 2008's auction (http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-rakes-in-45-billion-from-wirele...). In the grand scheme of the entire US federal budget, I think that's just a drop in the bucket. But it's still money that the federal government looks forward to.

So on the one hand, the FCC wants to play fair for consumers and tax-payers. On the other hand, the FCC can't really restructure an existing industry without biting the hand that literally feeds their existence to the tune of US$2-3 billion per year if you imagine their auction revenue as ratable over the years an auction doesn't take place.

A counter example that I bet T-Mobile is waiting to deploy is parental control. As strange as it sounds, there are actually families that pay to have their wireless carrier restrict adult content while on-net.

EDIT: "As strange as it sounds" refers to the fact that most parental control solutions are network-based, when in fact a proper parental control solution should be client-based because as soon as your child goes to WiFi at MacDonalds/Starbucks they probably have access to all the adult content they want to see by bypassing the wireless carrier parental control network controls.

1) they are allowing customers to opt-out (maybe they will concede this could be improved, but it doesn't change their fundamental desire to circumvent net neutrality); 2) content discrimination has positive benefits for consumers (i.e. allows higher consumption of content)

T-Mobile may be willing to bet that the FCC and consumer groups will be hard-pressed to claim that sending HDTV vs. EDTV falls under a discriminatory context given the consumer benefits and (seeming) fulfillment of video service.

I wonder if he's on an internal hunt to find out who confirmed to the EFF that videos were being "throttled".

For example, they were the first as far as I can tell to launch extensive WiFi calling and WiFi SMS, even extending to some American airlines (at least for WiFi SMS - calling is possible but socially unaccepted on planes).

Wireless carriers as a general rule are all looking at WiFi offload capabilities especially as 802.11ad and up provide higher transmission rates (peak and average theoreticals).

There is a race to perfect and bring to market seamless WiFi-base station handoffs (both ways) in real-world conditions. I suspect that will require a combination of channel (i.e. mobile devices) + wireless network upgrades, so in the meantime carriers need to bridge the gap. This is arguably a pretty good strategy assuming T-Mobile is expecting WiFi to handle even more of their traffic overtime.

Here's an announcement: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/fcc-approves-net-neutral...

Or is the worry that only indefinitely free offerings can set the stage for trouble later? To me both viewpoints set the stage for trouble, except the indefinite free offering is a darker shade of gray.

"degrade services that are not paying them" and "allow higher bitrates for services that pay them" would even more blatantly violate FCC net neutrality in the US.

T-Mobile here is circumventing this by only zero-rating with an opt-out mechanism. If they tried to pull a stunt like Deutsche Telekom in Germany, they'd be fined in no time by the FCC in a clear and shut case. They are doing something far more subtle here in the US.

EDIT: For clarity, Deutsche Telekom is a majority shareholder of T-Mobile USA.

So other carriers sure could implement the same thing, but nobody is crazy enough to do that until they figure out how T-Mobile subscribers and the FCC respond.

It's even cheaper if you don't opt out of BingeOn and can tolerate DVD (480p24) quality video streaming on your wireless device.

Consumers with LTE phones + data caps benefit the most from BingeOn. Possibly, they are a significant % of T-Mo consumers and are happy with the trade-off.

If a customer is paying for a service, they owe it to the customer to deliver those bytes equitably and with ideally the same level of service. This was not happening in Netflix's case, and the spirit of net neutrality absolutely applied there.

* Couldn't you make exactly the same argument about fast lanes? Why is it bad to give consumers some of their data faster?*

I'm suggesting that we can't make the same argument about fast lanes because that specific concept involves applying different service levels (faster/slower) to specific content types. It's bad to give consumers specific types of data faster if carriers are intentionally crippling popular over-the-top (OTT) players and then forcing customers to pay for the "actual" speeds that they paid for in their [50Mbps|100Mbps|Gigabit] package.

However, in this particular case, T-Mobile (supposedly) isn't changing anything related to your existing service level. All of your existing bytes counting towards your data cap are presumably still being delivered equitably, barring network congestion conditions. The only thing that has presumably changed is the way that those bytes are being billed (in this case, free) for certain content providers.

A distinction needs to be made between delivery of bytes + resultant abhorrent actions (e.g. deliberately crippling a popular endpoint or content type and giving customers no choice but to pay for a service level they've already paid for = evil), and maintaining the same service delivery level while charging for them differently.

* Let's look at it another way: Making connections to providers on this list effectively cheaper (but not touching the data cap) is equivalent to making providers NOT on the list cost more.*

I agree with you in principle, but that once strong argument centered around input costs and promotional offerings, which ultimately ends up in the "subsidies" bucket. Originally, the premise was that access to providers was selectively made more expensive and one often didn't have a say in the matter. You're correct that zero-rating (similar, but not quite the same, as the Internet.org debacle) influences consumer behaviour. However, T-Mobile is giving principled consumers a way out - by continuing to offer the same level of service today as they will tomorrow (or whenever it comes into effect) with zero-rating enabled, they're letting consumers speak with their wallets in both literal senses of the word (opt-out, or switch to another carrier).

I can't speak to the indie stations issue like Shoutcast, but if it can be shown that T-Mobile's sign up process isn't as easy as they make it out to be then this may be the Achilles heel that the FCC can leverage.

If the bar to establish the business relationship was onerous, I'd completely agree. T-Mobile is undermining the argument by stating (whether true or not remains to be seen) that a qualifying website need only sign up to participate.

Not a fastlane, but still counter to the spirit of net neutrality.

The purpose of the net neutrality regulations were to provide equitable treatment in favour of end users. I'm struggling to see how giving end consumers more of what they want for the same price (zero-rating with an option to opt-out) is counter to the initial spirit of the net neutrality regulation.

I think that current net neutrality regulations settled into a position that network operators shouldn't unduly (or at all) influence or favour certain endpoints over others. However, by providing this type of optional zero-rating, T-Mobile is firing the first salvo to force pro-net neutrality groups to more sharply understand and define the true incentives driving their respective agendas. If pro-nn groups don't respond to this the right way, then similar to the way that zero-rated streaming audio was used as a precedent to bring in these optional zero-rated streaming video, precedent upon precedent will build upon each other.

I'm not sure if this is simply a loss-leading tactic by T-Mobile to gain market share, or if this is part of a longer-term play to form a beachhead from which to dismantle the entire net neutrality Title II regulations.

This is a valid concern when the carrier asks for money in exchange for "enhanced" fast lane service. However, in this case T-Mobile is undermining that argument completely by offering "any website or mobile app that offers streaming video [to] opt into its program with no charge. And T-Mobile users can turn off Binge On at any time." (Emphasis mine.)

In a nation where most people are served by what is effectively a non-competeing cartel of companies, allowing strong anti-user incentives to exist is a very bad idea, because they wont just be out-competed by a less exploitative company.

I generally agree with you about non-competing cartels of any stripe, but this particular case seems like it was designed to be consumer-friendly to T-Mobile's short-term financial detriment. Perhaps additional two data points will help:

1) Carriers (both fixed and wireless) that are not #1 in market share will sometimes engage in loss-promotions or tactics to gain subscriber share. The question often turns into "how long can X sustain this strategy, and how many subscribers will they lose when they're forced to downgrade offerings?"

2) American carriers are at war with each other, to the benefit of end subscribers.

Data caps still apply to all T-Mobile wireless subscribers also, although I can see that the spirit of your argument is that carriers shouldn't try to exert influence over data endpoints (typically referred to as "content"). But, using your same POTS analogy, does this mean that 1-800 toll-free numbers should have been banned or regulated out of existence? The interesting point is that in this case, T-Mobile is working around the FCC Net Neutrality laws by making it clear that this is a free program for specific content partners to participate in; it's like "free toll-free" for content that might appeal the most to consumers (streaming audio and video).

Most issues with gatekeepers are what they don't allow people to consume; in this case, they're not placing a restriction.

If people wish to stand their ground on principle, this particular carrier is giving them the option to do so by opting completely out of the program (at least according to the article).