| There seems to be an assumption in the original argument that not every company will be able to get access to sponsored data, e.g. > Well since Spotify, Beats, and Apple have paid all > the telcos so that their services are free on the mobile > networks, we are concerned that new music services like > yours will have a hard time getting new users to use them > because the data plan is so expensive If a new music service could make a deal with telcos so that their service is free too, wouldn't this problem go away? In other words, if sponsored data was open to all, does this address the concern described? The real concern seems to be that the cost base of a new service will go up because it will be forced to pay for sponsored data in order to compete, and VCs aren't happy about having to cover increased costs of their portfolio companies. A similar argument could have been made about CDNs. Because the big services use CDNs to provide a better service, startups have to pay to use CDNs also in order to compete, and hence their costs are higher. |