The BEREChas asked the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications Mobile Operators to review all commercial offers from Zero rating Translated? All those offers that exclude some selected applications from the consumption of the data included in the subscriptions. Operators such as Vodafone sometimes give their users free access to services such as Netflix, WhatsApp and Facebook, without using GB.
The new guidelines are part of the policy in favor of net neutrality, that’s all those approved policies to make sure there’s no distinction between the various activities on the Internet. Whichever site you visit, providers are obliged to provide you with universal Internet access and to treat all data packages equally – in terms of speed and cost.
An outgrowth of this philosophy, which is part of theEuropean Union, should be the zero rating policy as well. We just said it: to be neutral, providers should not discriminate. The internet should cost the same no matter how it is used. It is also valid when the operator decides – for commercial agreements – to grant free access to certain services.
Consumers may disagree, as they can access services they love — such as Netflix and Spotify — without scaling traffic from their data threshold, but these commercial practices are widely believed to create significant market imbalances, in favor of the largest giants at the expense of smaller emerging services. Round and round, it is always about guaranteeing the freedom of competition, which is one of the prerogatives of theEuropean Union
Net neutrality activists have been calling for a ban on zero ratings for several years, but in fact the previous guidelines have never prevented this practice. It was enough to peruse the catalog of several operators, including Italians, to realize that excluding some services from data consumption was a common practice.
It is impossible not to point out that the applications included in the zero-rating offers were almost always from US companies. And when the consumer is asked to choose whether to subscribe to Spotify or use a more niche alternative, perhaps from a European startup, it is clear that this too will carry significant weight.
Will the new BEREC guidelines harm consumers? Probably not, and there is already an earlier illustration that proves it to us. While European guidelines don’t explicitly prohibit it, some member states’ laws have already included the ban on zero ratings in their measures to support internet neutrality. A year ago, the German government sanctioned Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone, both guilty of offering free access to some applications. Moral? In order not to lose customers, Deutsche Telekom responded to the sanction by reducing the GB included in its plan from 24 to 40 at the same price. Vodafone did the same and increased the amount of data traffic in its packages by 25%.
Source: Lega Nerd
