India Tells Facebook To Shut Down Controversial Zero Rating Program 'Free Basics'

from the for-the-love-of-the-poor dept

The Indian government has spent much of the last year trying to craft net neutrality rules, and had recently been fielding public comment on whether or not Facebook's zero rating effort, Free Basics, violates net neutrality. As we've covered at length, Facebook's been trying to corner the developing nation ad market with a zero rated program that offers free access to curated, Facebook approved content. Critics and Free Basic content partners alike haven't been comfortable with giving Facebook that much control.

Neither has the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which, in an initial set of net neutrality guidelines, argued that what Facebook has been up to is effectively collusion. And Facebook's recent attempt to stuff the comment box apparently didn't work very well. Now TRAI has taken things one step further and demanded that Facebook's partner, mobile phone operator Reliance Communications, shut down Free Basics immediately:

"We have asked them (Reliance Communications) to stop it and they have given us a compliance report that it has been stopped," a senior government official told TOI... "The question has arisen whether a telecom operator should be allowed to have differential pricing for different kinds of content. Unless that question is answered, it will not be appropriate for us to continue to make that happen," the source said, in reference to the Facebook-Reliance 'Free Basics' platform.

Critics have long argued that not only does Free Basics give Facebook too much power, it potentially harms free speech, undermines the open nature of the Internet, and provides a new, centralized repository of user data for hackers, governments and intelligence agencies. Others, like Mozilla, have suggested that if Facebook really wants to help the world's poor, it can start by funding access to the actual Internet. Facebook, annoyed by those who don't believe it's being purely altruistic, has responded by calling such critics "extremists" who are hurting the poor.

Granted it's important to note that TRAI has yet to finalize any rules yet, meaning that Facebook's lobbying team (run by former FCC boss and no friend to net neutrality Kevin Martin) still has plenty of time to convince Indian regulators that it's an altruistic angel with only the the welfare of the poor in mind. It's also entirely possible that while the final rules ban Facebook's power grab, telecom lobbyists still manage to water them down to the point of uselessness. In fact there already have been reports that Airtel has had lots of input into the proceedings, and as a result TRAI likely won't ban zero rating.

Avoiding the issue of usage caps and zero rating is the path taken by the FCC after pressure from AT&T, Verizon and friends -- and the result has been a bit of an ambiguous mess here in the States thus far, with broadband operators doing their best tap dance routines to wiggle over, under and around ambiguous consumer protections. So while keeping Facebook from becoming an entrenched gatekeeper in any market is a good idea, it won't mean all that much if traditional telecoms ensure the broader rules remain useless.

Filed Under: free basics, india, internet.org, net neutrality, trai, zero rating
Companies: facebook, reliance communications

What Net Neutrality? T-Mobile Abusing Its 'Binge-On' Effort To Throttle Non-Partner Video

from the the-war-on-net-neutrality dept

For quite some time now, we've pointed out that the whole zero rating issue was a way for broadband providers to conduct a stealth war on net neutrality -- first putting in place "restrictions" that they could then "lift" for partners, pretending it was a consumer friendly move. Last month, T-Mobile introduced Binge-on, it's second such attempt at zero rating. Its first, Music Freedom, exempted some streaming music services from its data caps. Binge-On focused on video, but had a few oddities. Like Music Freedom, Binge On would make "select" video streaming platforms exempt from the data cap -- but in order to do that, it would downgrade the quality of those streams to 480p, a lower resolution than most are used to these days. It was notable that neither YouTube nor Amazon Prime were included "partners" in the launch.

But... some people started noticing some problems: specifically, even those services that have not partnered with T-Mobile started seeing their own videos downgraded. The complaints started to flow on Reddit: someone noticed that Amazon-owned Twitch.tv's videos were suddenly being throttled. Others noticed YouTube videos being throttled. In both cases, those users were able to "fix" the problem by going into their account and turning off Binge On, but it still seemed troubling that T-Mobile had decided to automatically turn on Binge On for users, downgrading streaming video, even for video providers who had not agreed to such provisions.

Given all this, some started noting that this appeared to be a clear net neutrality violation by T-Mobile, which has a brightline rule against throttling:

Degrading video quality this way violates the FCC’s no-throttling part of the net neutrality rule, which forbids reducing the quality of an application or an entire class of applications. Even though T-Mobile and its brilliant CEO, John Legere, have done much to shake up the mobile industry in positive ways (they even won me over as a subscriber), this is one practice that the company should, and probably must, abandon.

As a purely legal matter, T-Mobile cannot easily defend its actions by arguing that this discrimination is good for its users. The FCC has already rejected that argument in advance by adopting a “bright-line” rule for all technical forms of discrimination absent some special technical justification. After hearing from millions of Americans throughout 2014, the FCC decided earlier this year that “the record overwhelmingly supports adopting rules and demonstrates that three specific practices invariably harm the open Internet,” and named one of them throttling.

And now YouTube itself has come out and accused T-Mobile of violating net neutrality (paywalled WSJ article):

YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., said T-Mobile is effectively throttling, or degrading, its traffic. “Reducing data charges can be good for users, but it doesn’t justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent,” a YouTube spokesman said.

T-Mobile -- which has never been a fan of the new net neutrality rules, seems to think that because the service is "optional" that makes it okay. But that ignores two key things: (1) the FCC's rules say no throttling and (2) even if it is optional, T-Mobile turned it on for everyone, without telling users, and has not made it at all clear to users what's happening. That is, in every complaint you see online, you'll notice that people have no idea that this service has been turned on.

That makes it hard to square with the idea that this is for the benefit of T-Mobile subscribers. T-Mobile's only statement on this issue so far is also totally disingenuous:

In a statement, the No. 3 U.S. carrier by subscribers said its customers “love having free streaming video that never hits their data bucket” and like “both the quality of their video experience and the complete control they have.”

Again, this is T-Mobile exempting certain services from the data caps it set up itself. If customers love having streaming video that doesn't hit their data caps, then there are all sorts of ways to do that, which don't involve messing up the user experience overall, and without surreptitiously turning this system on in a way that messes up the plans of users.

Over the last few months, we've seen basically all of the major telcos look for ways to test the boundaries of the new net neutrality rules. At some point the FCC is going to have to smack them down or the tests are going to get more anti-consumer and more blatant. And, again, don't be fooled into thinking this is a "pro" consumer move in that it exempts data from the cap. That's like someone tackling you and then demanding to be called a nice guy for giving you a hand to get back up. The data caps are set by T-Mobile itself. The argument pretending that an exemption is somehow consumer friendly should immediately be spun around to point out that the caps themselves are then clearly anti-consumer.

Either way, one hopes that the FCC is actually paying attention, otherwise the telcos are going to keep moving to walk all over the new rules, with plans like this one, figuring out where and how they can throttle or prioritize traffic based on the providers' own needs, rather than based on what the internet allows.

Filed Under: bingeon, broadband, john legare, net neutrality, throttling, video, youtube
Companies: amazon, t-mobile, youtube