You can yell all you want. Charging a flat fee for access to company X while not doing it for company Y is not net neutrality and it is very bad. And that’s the bottom line.
No matter what happens in your ‘base package’ or whatever they may choose to call it.
Maybe Cory didn’t word it exactly right, but that doesn’t make it any less nefarious.
That isn’t what they are doing, did you check their offerings or read the thread?
But that is what they are doing. They are letting their customers pay (discounted) for access to a specific company instead of just for general internet access.
Granting more access to one service is the same as granting less access to another.
They are charging less for certain services, whis is equivalent.
Which is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
And failing to do so. As soon as you have a list of services which are billed in a different way there will always be firms not on that list.
T-Mobile tries to get away with the same here in holland (and it looks like they are succeeding 
) and its a sham. In theory any music streaming service can apply to get categorized as ‘music service’. In practice T-mobile is the gatekeeper and decides on a whim which services to allow and which to deny. Also, imagine you want to start a music streaming firm and you have to negotiate inclusion in the ‘music streaming’ packages of every ISP on the planet? The work alone would unfairly favor the big companies over the smaller (but maybe more innovative) firms.
Yes, and who gets to decide? Some unbiased third party? Suuuure.
Bwahahahaha, I have a bridge to sell you. Surely they don’t give the discounts from the kindness of their hearts…
Even if they don’t get payed now just wait until the customers get accustomed to these sort of tiered-internet accounts.
That is NOT what they are doing. Did you check? Doesn’t seem like it.
Through peering arrangements, not corporate agreements/arrangements, again it is almost like you didn’t bother to check any of your assumptions first. These are easy things to check.
Also if you actually want to have an informed discussion on these subjects.
What you are attempting to describe is called “price discrimination” by the industry and currently happens on the neutral net all the time, it has been part of the neutral net since its inception. Provider charges are the very smallest piece of “price discrimination” and have the least impact. While that is an interesting discussion to have, it isn’t Net Neutrality. Do you understand that there is a HUGE difference between what Net Neutrality is and the issue of Price Discrimination? Where they intersect and how “price discrimination” works and exists today on the neutral net without breaking the neutral net? Many people here are mistakenly conflating one for the other as if they didn’t really understand either or the difference between the two.
Not counting traffic to certain services providers against a bandwidth cap is called zero-rating in the industry, and again is already done by most ISPs on the neutral net. it does have the potential to be problematic depending on how it is specifically implemented, which is why this company went to such efforts to specifically handle it a certain way, to avoid many of the issues.
I’d be happy to discuss the real issues in price discrimination if you want, but that is a very different conversation. I’d be happy to discuss zero-ratings as well. Or if you want to familiarize yourself with what this company is doing, i’d be happy to discuss the specifics of their offerings. I am getting tired of pointing out to people that they can’t just spout assumptions without checking them. It only takes a few minutes to familiarize oneself with their offerings and see if an assumption is true or not. very easy. smdh.
This. A million times this. @redesigned, you’re making the conversation around net neutrality activism extremely tedious. You like to imagine all the people turned off by inaccuracies in the reporting. Please, imagine those (like myself) who support net neutrality in principle, but can’t be bothered to make it a priority if the discussion is going to be dominated by people who don’t listen and never change their opinion on anything.
I give up. Lets agree to disagree. I guess it’s a matter of perception. I did read into what they were offering. Zero rating is a form of price discrimination. Zero rating is a bad thing ™ ® (pat pending) .
The industry tries to cast ‘zero rating’ in a positive light, as if it somehow is something completely different. It isn’t. It will kill the innovation and skew the playing field in favour of existing services.
So letting the ISPs control the market by having different tiers of businesses based on ability to pay is free market now?
The Too Big To Fail companies get to continue their domination while less well off “competitors” get poorer service, which leads to fewer people using them in favour of the unrestricted ones. The rich get richer while the less well off get poorer, and competitive markets become monopolies as people choose the unrestricted companies over those who cannot pay to be part of the elite.
The free market is a paradox.
The one has nothing to do with the other. You’re new here, so you may not be aware that the sysadmin and publisher of Boing Boing both come from the telecommunications sectors, but paid prioritization (non-neutral service offerings) are basically the equivalent of you power company working out deals so that some plugged-in electric dryers cost you less than others, based on deals they make. It has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of provisioning services, or delivery, and everything to do with the company trying to pretend the data you purchased (or the power you pay for) being theirs to control after purchase.
Let me ask you this, how free is the market if your power company offers free power to Whirlpool dryers instead of everyone else? Do you think this might adversely affect the dryer industry by changing consumer habits? What about certain brands of electric cars? Air conditioners? Smartphone charging?
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