
Net Neutrality already attacked in Portugal - LeRieur
https://www.meo.pt/internet/internet-movel/telemovel/pacotes-com-telemovel
======
thisisit
As Ben Thompson of Stratecherry said here:

[https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-
ii/](https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/)

 _There are the Euros and Portuguese you would expect, but in this case
perhaps it was the language difference that introduced its own issues:
Congressman Khanna seems to have missed the text at the top (under ‘+ Smart
Net’) that clearly stated that the packages were for an additional 10GB /month
of data; in addition to what, you may ask? Simply scroll down the page:

So to recount: one Portugal story is made up, and the other declared that a
10GB family plan with an extra 10GB for a collection of apps of your choosing
for €25/month ($30/month) is a future to be feared; given that AT&T charges
$65 for a single “Unlimited” plan that downscales video, bans tethering, and
slows speeds after 22GB, one wonders if most Americans share that fear._

~~~
tinus_hn
There is no reason whatsoever why sending 10GB of data to one IP would be more
expensive than sending it to another. So if they are offering 10GB for free if
you connect to one service they’d be able to offer it for free for connecting
to anyone.

If they refuse that means there is no competition. It also means they are
meddling in content so they are no longer common carriers and are responsible
for what happens on the line.

~~~
Pilfer
>There is no reason whatsoever why sending 10GB of data to one IP would be
more expensive than sending it to another.

This statement is false. It most certainly is more expensive to send packets
to places like Australia than to Europe (Australia has 20x higher transit
pricing). You could claim the cost is pennies either way however that doesn't
address the fact that some packets are more expensive than others.

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-
world...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/)

~~~
tinus_hn
The cost for transferring these 10 gigabytes to Australia is about $0.04,
while a closer destination would be cheaper. So while technically you are
right, realistically these costs don’t factor in the price.

------
vilmosi
We have this in the UK too.

But I don't see this as an attack on Net Neutrality, you're just charged
differently for what you use. Nobody will stop you using Facebook when you
have a Music subscription, nothing is throttled.

~~~
jimktrains2
> But I don't see this as an attack on Net Neutrality, you're just charged
> differently for what you use. Nobody will stop you using Facebook when you
> have a Music subscription, nothing is throttled.

Doesn't the OP show that you need to have the social media subscription to use
facebook, implying it'd be blocked otherwise?

EDIT: [https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/22/16691506/portugal-meo-
in...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/22/16691506/portugal-meo-internet-
packages-net-neutrality-ajit-pai-plan)

> But based on Meo’s website, this doesn’t look like buying cable channels for
> the internet. It’s an add-on to general-purpose mobile subscriptions, which
> let you access any service — including the ones above. The idea is
> apparently that if you’re into apps like Snapchat and Facebook (or...
> LinkedIn, I guess), you pay around $8 a month to specifically get more
> “Social” data, so you can use your regular allotment for everything else. It
> looks a lot like the “Vodafone Pass” service in the UK, where subscribers
> can pay for unlimited access to a similar stable of services.

This still seems awkward. I still don't understand why the endpoint being
connected to matters at all. It's all data going over your lines. Essentially
you're paying to "0-rate" a service, which just seems silly.

EDIT2:

Also, one of the main issues with not-net-neutrality is exactly this. If I
make a slightly better social network, but it's not "0-rated" it's likely that
people won't use it because it'll count against their quota. That's a problem.

~~~
Aaargh20318
> you pay around $8 a month to specifically get more “Social” data, so you can
> use your regular allotment for everything else

The problem with this is that this creates an incentive for the operator to
lower the regular allotment so they can sell more of these packages.

> I still don't understand why the endpoint being connected to matters at all.

It doesn't matter, it's just a way of extracting more money from customers.

~~~
jimktrains2
>>> you pay around $8 a month to specifically get more “Social” data, so you
can use your regular allotment for everything else

> The problem with this is that this creates an incentive for the operator to
> lower the regular allotment so they can sell more of these packages.

The quote is from the linked article explaining the situation. I think
0-rating is a terrible idea for the reasons you said, among others.

------
PeterStuer
It is quite simple realy. If I pay x€ for y GB/Month, the ISP should not
dictate what over the top services I spend that budget on, nor favor its own
services (or those of 'partners') by selective exclusion of that traffic from
limits that other are held to, or by hindering traffic from the non-partnered
services in any way.

Now for the 'complicated' part. In practice it is not difficult to create a
situation where everything is degraded. You just under-provision on a choke
point. If you then sell alternative routes, or allow edge caches beyond the
choke point, you technically didn't 'hinder' any traffic, you just provided
such a lousy service to begin with that any not otherwise enabled service
provider doesn't stand a chance of offering a decent experience on your
network.

But just pointing to a technical situation where it is hard to write a general
'rule' that in any arbitrary case can unequivocally objectively and
automatically say whether a certain criterion was fulfilled, and then saying
that because it is hard or even impossible to specify the whole regulation
should be scrapped, that is disingenuous. The spirit of the regulation can be
perfectly fine, even though case-by-case judgement may be required to
determine compliance.

Those that will say 'but you can vote with your wallet', I can see where you
come from, but the reasoning is flawed. In practice telecoms is not an open
market, and many households have near 0 meaningful choice. Strong economic
network effects are inherent, and lasting competition has only been present
under very strict regulation.

------
BaRRaKID
Portuguese guy here to clarify.

These are just addons to your regular package, they allow you to customize
your plan according to your needs. The regular packages have different tiers
that go anywhere from 500Mb to 10Gb of data included, which is more or less
the same amount of data that the other ISPs in the country provide. There are
no unlimited mobile data packages in Portugal, in any ISP, except the special
plans for 4G personal hotspots. These addons just mean that if you pay more,
the data from the services /apps that you use more often wont count to your
regular data cap, to a limit of up to 10Gb per month.

In my case (I'm with another ISP), I pay 4€ per week and have 5Gb of "regular"
data to use per month, plus another 5Gb just for video platforms (like Youtube
and Twitch), and then there are several apps like Facebook, Whatsapp,
Instagram, Skype, Spotify, etc, that don't consume any data from the plan,
they're free to use. They also provide a premium Spotify account for free,
which is nice.

For me, as a client, this is actually good, even tough it's far from neutral.
I never go over the data cap, and I rarely use Wi-Fi even when I'm at home,
because the apps that I use more often are "free" and I still have 5Gb of data
to use on whatever else I want. If anything the problem in the original link
is that that particular ISP is charging for something that the other ISPs
provide for free.

It's also important to notice that Portugal has a communications regulatory
authority (ANACOM), similar to the FCC, but that actually works, and defends
the interests of the consumers. Just today they announced that all the ISPs
will be fined in excess of 1 million euros, and face a possible class action
law suit due to increasing prices without an explicit permission from the
costumers.

So yeah, where actually doing good here.

~~~
andrepd
>Portugal has a communications regulatory authority (ANACOM), similar to the
FCC, but that actually works

Oh, that's _very_ debatable

~~~
mping
Very, very, very debatable. Example was the monopoly that former PT Telecom,
now Meo/altice had for many years.

------
r3bl
That example shows zero rating, not "pay $5 to access certain websites", as
most people assume once it circulates through the NN debate. Still
problematic, but not as quite as those who share it make it seem. "Pay $5 to
use social media" and "pay $5 to use your data plan for anything you want and
have additional data specifically for social media" is not the same.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Nope. That's a bad argument - they're mostly the same, and in some ways zero
rating is much worse.

At my trailer, I get "Water Service". I don't get:

    
    
         "Drinking water service"
         "Dishwashing water service"
         "Washing machine service"
         "Bath/shower service"
         "Pool/jacuzzi service"
         "Toilet water service"
    

And upcharging/downcharging per "type" of water isn't done, at least on
residential. Now, there may be rates of peak times where water/volume is more
expensive for everyone. But that's not watching what devices the water goes
to.

And, Zero rating would be like saying "Pay X/month extra and Bath/Shower water
is counted as zero". Uh, no. Water's water. Like like how data's data.

Now, about why Zero Rating is worse - you start up a fledgling business that
does something novel with a Zero Rated service. Well guess what? All those
entrenched players with Zero Rating get an "In", and your new service is
pretty much screwed until you can figure out how to get on _that_ list. Zero
rating is yet another barrier preventing new players on the Internet.

~~~
bsherrill
It's not done yet. It is coming in the near future.

------
vaalnl
It’s funny that this all comes from a misunderstanding based on language
differences. A data cap on your web use is pretty common in mobile phone
providers. With these packages you can surpass the data cap (10gb) for select
services (that you can select your own)..

Say you use a lot of spotify but you don’t surf that much this is ideal.

Nothing gets blocked or censored, it’s just that you can buy additional MB’s.

~~~
skocznymroczny
Depends on how big is the data cap. Sure, if your package is 10GB, it's fine,
but what if the data cap was 250 MB and you could surpass it with a "Netflix"
package?

~~~
mcv
Assuming that package is cheaper and the people who choose it are only
interested in Netflix anyway, it's fine. What matters to me is that paying
customers are treated as customers, and that we get to choose what we want,
rather than ISPs secretly throttling stuff behind the scenes in order to
coerce extra money out of Google and Netflix.

I don't want to be ammo in their trade war.

~~~
AlexandrB
> What matters to me is that paying customers are treated as customers, and
> that we get to choose what we want...

I want more bandwidth for Mastodon. I don't see Mastodon in the "social
networks" plan. So my options are: 1) pay more for "general" bandwidth, 2) use
Twitter instead. This is the choice that customers will have to make when
evaluating new internet services and it's not good for anyone trying to
compete with Google/Facebook/Microsoft.

------
mcv
At least here it's the user deciding what to use and how much to pay for it.
It's explicit that this is not full internet but limited.

The big assault on the internet is when you pay for full internet, and your
ISP decides to throttle Netflix or Youtube because they don't also pay the ISP
for your internet connection.

------
TYPE_FASTER
"Free traffic to MEO apps already included in your tariff" \- and the music
app costs 6.99/mo per user. That is one way to drive customer adoption I
guess.

I don't really want this. I just want...bandwidth.

------
zerostar07
and look how cheap it is.

------
diego_moita
I am a Portuguese speaker (from Brazil) and I fail to see what the problem is
or even how it undermines Net Neutrality.

You pay 4.99 euros, get 10Gb and also get free traffic in one of those uses
that provide plenty of competition, no privileges for a specific provider.
Seems quite a good deal to me. Kudos to Portugal.

Here in Brazil, net neutrality is protected by law. If I could get one of
those Portuguese plans in here I'd jump at it. Quite better than what we have.

~~~
Goronmon
How do they determine what sites get the free traffic? If I start a social
networking site tomorrow, how does it get the free traffic that Facebook gets?

~~~
diego_moita
Fair question, the page doesn't say it.

But it is important to notice that, for networking, they also have Facebook
competitors like Twiter, Snapchat and LindedIn. This seems quite the opposite
of privilege to providers.

It is quite possible they also have other sites less famous in Portugal (e.g.:
HN, Reddit).

~~~
AlexandrB
> But it is important to notice that, for networking, they also have Facebook
> competitors like Twiter, Snapchat and LindedIn.

These are all 800lb gorillas in the social networking space. If there was a
new Facebook competitor it would not be on that list until it was relatively
huge. Notice that ello, Mastodon, and other upstart social network are missing
even though they've been around for a while now.

The problem is that now a new social network is not just fighting the network
effects of Facebook (already a huge hurdle), but also economic incentives from
ISPs to keep using Facebook, since you get cheap data for it. If this becomes
the norm, I think it's only a matter of time until services like Facebook
offer ISPs incentives to zero rate their traffic - especially on limited
mobile plans.

Arguably the most problematic category there is not "social networks", but
"video". The volume of traffic that streaming video uses on mobile dwarfs just
about everything else. If I wanted to compete with Youtube on mobile how could
I do it in an environment where Youtube gets special treatment from ISPs and I
don't?

------
yann63
Sadly, in France too.

The CEO of Orange, the main ISP in France, Stéphane Richard, is against net
neutrality:

Article in French: [http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/stephane-richard-orange-
veut-...](http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/stephane-richard-orange-veut-des-
internets-avec-des-fonctionnalites-et-puissances-differentes-39861348.htm)

------
casellasrj
Even if you bought every package possible, it's still cheaper than most
packages here. You're not really helping your case here buddy.

~~~
superice
You misunderstand 'the case' here. The case is that your music startup now has
no chance of competing against Spotify, TuneIn, Play Music, or Soundcloud
because it would go against your general internet data, not the music specific
data bundle.

~~~
AndrewGaspar
Many telecoms zero-rate their own phone service now, too, even though it's
generally delivered over IP on modern phones and networks. Skype and FaceTime
count against my data cap. No consumer I know would want a change to the
status quo that phone calls are free. Why shouldn't this be generalized to
other popular services? If consumers prefer the service and are willing to pay
for it, especially in mobile broadband which is relatively competitive
ecosystem with several vendors in each market, then why not let consumers make
that choice for themselves?

General purpose internet service isn't going away - too many consumers and
businesses depend on it, and, at least based on my last Comcast bill, are
willing to pay through the nose for it.

~~~
superice
Zero-rating your own services is something entirely different than zero-rating
services of other companies though.

It is no different than a car manufacturer paying for their own highway lanes.
If half of the highway lanes are BMW-only, would you still buy any other car?
Free market resolve this by competition based on price, but if I wanted to
start my own car manufacturing company, I wouldn't be able to compete because
a smaller player in the car market wouldn't have enough funds to get the
various levels of government to implement MyNewCarBrand Inc. Roads (TM)

------
shak77
These also exist in Spain and I love them. I hope they don't remove them.

~~~
zemnl
You love them because you are not a startup that plans to compete with other
services or a customer who wants to use apps outside of the selected ones for
which you can use dedicated data. What if one day you'd like to use a new
emerging service that is better than WhatsApp|Viber|Any-other-app-that-you-
currently-use but that is not in a bundle for which your provider has plans
that give extra dedicated data? Will you make the switch and consume your
regular data or will you stick with your current one that makes you use
dedicated data for which you paid those extra €5?

~~~
shak77
I wouldn't purchase a bundle if I'm not going to use the services that are
included. That would be really stupid.

------
bdz
When did HN turn into sensationalist clickbait stuff? Basically Reddit

Especially when it's posted by new accs

~~~
diego_moita
I totally agree with you. This whole thread sounds like an hysterical witch
hunt, people condemning without understanding.

Ending Net Neutrality might be bad. But the deal offered by this Portuguese
operator has none of the evils associated with it.

~~~
AlexandrB
This is a site with a major focus on startups. If I wanted to do a video
startup, plans that give cheap additional bandwidth to specific incumbent
video services (YouTube) are yet another major hurdle to overcome if I want to
be successful.

So yes, this kind of deal absolutely is "evil", as it will hurt innovation on
the web in the long run.

