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Proposal to restrict zero-rating sets up another round of regulators versus telcos, as football fever returns to Europe.
It’s hard to be neutral.
Take Euro 2016, which kicks off on Friday, ending a nearly month-long drought of football.
With 24 countries competing, it doesn’t matter who is on the pitch, you inevitably find yourself rooting for one team over the other, especially once your own side has been knocked out on penalties.
Fans of tenuous links will be thrilled to learn that it’s also hard to be neutral when it comes to the Internet.
Not all data is equal, and different services place different demands on the network. Nonetheless, in the interests of safeguarding innovation and competition, regulators are adopting rules to ensure all types of traffic are treated the same.
This week the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) opened a consultation on guidelines for how regulators should uphold the EU’s net neutrality law.
The legislation prevents unfair blocking and connection-speed throttling, and paid prioritisation. However, telcos can offer so-called ‘specialised services’ as long as it doesn’t degrade the performance of the best-effort Internet.
For one telco lobby group, this could open up a big can of worms as operators seek to tailor network performance to specific categories of service, from low-band IoT, to 4K video and driverless cars.
"We express our concern with any overly-prescriptive approach to the implementation of Open Internet rules, which would risk to hamper growth, innovation and service quality well beyond the telecoms industry," warned ETNO on Monday.
"A restrictive interpretation of traffic management rules would hamper the telcos’ ability to meet network requirements in a 5G society. Quality, latency and reliability are essential to the delivery of new services and connected products," industry group said.
Arguably the most contentious topic covered in the consultation concerns zero-rating, where the data traffic generated by a specific service or category of services, such as video, is free and does not count towards the customer’s data allowance.
If you want a good example of how a telco has used zero-rating to gain a competitive edge, look no further than T-Mobile US’s Binge On service, which allows customers to watch as much content from select streaming providers as they like without eating into their data.
There is no denying the controversy about how the operator ‘optimises’ (read: throttles) Binge On traffic – and the PR meltdown that ensued after T-Mobile was first called out on it – but there is also no denying its success.
As of May, 80 streaming services had signed up – at no cost – to Binge On, which has now expanded its remit to include music services such as Spotify and Google Play Music.
Under BEREC’s proposals, operators won’t be allowed to continue to deliver zero-rated traffic once a customer has used up their data allowance. Regulators are also advised to review the market strength of the ISP and the service it is zero-rating, and consider whether that could harm competition and limit choice.
Would Binge On be allowed in Europe? T-Mobile reduces the quality of Binge On video to a resolution of 480p; under the rules, would that be considered transparent, reasonable traffic management or discrimination against specific content or categories of application?
Binge On is free for streaming providers and end users on eligible tariffs, but in order to qualify as a partner, content companies need to have the technical capability to reduce video quality to 480p.
Under BEREC’s guidelines, does this count as the ISP picking winners on the basis of "administrative and/or technical barriers for CAPs (content and application providers) to enter into agreements with ISPs"?
Would a European telco be put off from launching an equivalent offering to avoid the cost and complexity of unravelling the red tape?
The answer to all these questions is…well, it’s unclear at present.
"Rather than unleashing the power of markets to allow providers and consumers to decide how to value and price Internet access and services, regulators are imposing one-size-fits-all models on operators that commoditise their service, allowing only speed and volume as pricing parameters," claimed John Strand, the CEO of Strand Consult.
He also argued that it is not just about video and music, there is also public interest in governments providing zero-rated access to e-government services.
"That BEREC wants to outlaw the very dynamics that create competition and innovation show that they are not interested in the liberalisation that can bring a freer, competitive market [to] the EU," he added. "That would just give them less to regulate, and then they would be out of a job."
Still, on the bright side, they would have more time to watch the football.
Regulation is one of the big topics at Total Telecom’s second-annual Connected Britain event, which takes place in London next week.
With high-ranking speakers from government and industry taking the stage, there won’t be many neutrals in attendance.
