> AT&T does have a plan where any provider can sign up to pay for their customers' data use, which is different from waiving costs for certain large, established sites.
It’s like a customer-acquisition cost shouldered by the company, and presumably an option available to all companies.
Zero-metering or other things being discussed privilege a fixed, arbitrary list of companies/websites, which is why they’re bad. Also, the extra cost is shouldered by either the ISP or the customer, which is like the company/website in question benefiting from a negative externality.
It's not great, but it's open to everyone who "just" has money, reducing it to the previously not-quite-solved problem of giving capital to potential upstarts. As a Spotify competitor, you can't just sign up for Binge On, unless perhaps you have connections with people who work at T-Mobile.
> As a Spotify competitor, you can't just sign up for Binge On, unless perhaps you have connections with people who work at T-Mobile.
Binge On is video. The zero-rating program for music is Music Freedom.
If you are a Spotify competitor and want to get included in Music Freedom, you contact T-Mobile at the email address documented in the Music Freedom. You don't need any inside connections. T-Mobile's stated policy is to get as many music streaming services as possible covered.
For video providers who want to be included in Binge On, there is a different T-Mobile address to mail to, also documented on the T-Mobile site.
For Binge On, the video service can actually choose one of four ways to participate:
1. Do nothing. Their content will not be zero-rated. If a T-Mobile customer has enabled Binge On T-Mobile will try to optimize the bandwidth usage if it can detect the video.
2. Be zero-rated. T-Mobile detects and optimized bandwidth usage.
3. Be zero-rated. The video service detects when the customer is on T-Mobile and handle optimizing bandwidth.
4. Disallow Binge On. Their content will not be zero-rated, and T-Mobile will not try to optimize its bandwidth use for customers who have Binge On enabled.
I’ve tried joining Stream On (the term for T-Mobile#s Binge On and Music Freedom outside the US), but the requirements are insane.
4 weeks before I make any changes to any service I run via Stream On, I need to inform T-Mobile, and they have to approve the changes, or can end Stream On immediately.
All Stream On content needs to run via separate hostnames, and has to transmit the hostname in cleartext.
I have to be using forms of adaptive streaming, the bandwidth will be limited during this so that the user at most will be able to watch 480p videos.
50'000 EUR fine for each violation from my side, no fines if T-Mobile just kicks me out.
And so on and so on. It’s ridiculous.
Give me a single form where I enter a URL, and it’ll be zero-rated – or don’t zero-rate anything.
> T-Mobile's stated policy is to get as many music streaming services as possible covered.
While that may be a stated policy, it is also obviously a lie.
Obviously, they only want specific kinds of services covered, or else they would just drop this crap in the first place, as that is the only and totally straightforward way to make sure that all services are covered.
If I run a bittorrent-based streaming service, they do not want to cover that. It's pure propaganda that they want to cover as many services as possible.
So?! Yes, it probably would be ... but how is it my responsibility that they chose to identify services in a manner that inherently discriminates against certain services? If it was true that they intended to cover as many services as possible, they would not have chosen an identification method that obviously doesn't work for some services ... or for that matter, not introduced any distinction at all, and instead just increased the data cap, which would automatically work for all services.
Let S/D mean a service that offers a speed S mbit/sec with a data cap of D GB per month.
Let P(S,D) be the resources required to support that service. In general, for positive x, both of the following are true: (1) P(S+x,D) > P(S,D), and P(S,D+x) > P(S,D).
Let's say a particular ISP has everyone on a 40/10 plan, so they need P(40,10) resources.
Now suppose they decide to offer something like Music Freedom. A person streaming a 256 kbit/s stream 24/7 would use about 90 GB/month.
The resources required to support their customers are now approximately P(40,10) + P(1/4,90).
If instead they just raise the cap of everyone by 90, the resources required are P(40,100), which is about the same as P(40,10) + P(40,90) [1].
The general cap increase will use around P(40,90) - P(1/4,90) more resources than the Music Freedom approach.
In general, for a given total amount of data transferred per month, the more smoothly that data is spread throughout the month, the less resources are needed to handle it.
Music streaming is both smooth and does not require much speed, so doesn't require much additional resources. Streaming of video requires more, because it needs more speed, but it is still less than is required to support the same total amount of data as arbitrary files downloads, because arbitrary file downloads don't have a built in rate limit.
[1] Not quite. I don't think it is quite true that P(S,D1) + P(S,D2) = P(S,D1+D2). I think the combined will be little less than the sum of the parts. That's because the resources needed are a function of the average data used, the variation in that, and how often you can have slowdowns due to congestion without getting in trouble with regulators. So I think it is like adding distributions...the variation in the combined will be less than the sum of the variations in the individual distributions (I think...)
Zero-metering or other things being discussed privilege a fixed, arbitrary list of companies/websites, which is why they’re bad. Also, the extra cost is shouldered by either the ISP or the customer, which is like the company/website in question benefiting from a negative externality.