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

Broadband

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