T-Mobile’s Unlimited Data Plan for Music Streaming Prompts Net Neutrality Debate
T-Mobile is providing customers with unlimited data plans for music streaming on Rhapsody’s new unRadio service, said company news releases (http://t-mo.co/1lEXlY6) (http://bit.ly/1oLLPh6) Wednesday. The partnership is an example of why the FCC should take a case-by-case approach on net neutrality, said Doug Brake, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation telecom policy analyst, in an interview. Brake thinks the deal is a win for consumers. If data caps are “arbitrary,” what’s the point of having them, asked Matt Wood, Free Press policy director, in an interview.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Current Rhapsody customers can access unRadio on the company website for free, said a Rhapsody blog post (http://bit.ly/1oLLPh6). New customers can access unRadio on “iOS, Android” and the Internet for $4.99 per month, it said. The service will be available for T-Mobile customers using the Simple Choice plan (http://t-mo.co/J8xQhA) with the most recent 4G LTE data service at no additional cost starting Monday, it said. Other T-Mobile customers will be charged $4 per month for unRadio, it said. Consumers can choose from Pandora, iHeartRadio, iTunes, Rhapsody, Spotify, Slacker and Milk Music without using the data plan, said a T-Mobile news release (http://t-mo.co/1lEXlY6).
The T-Mobile deal highlights that the FCC needs a “firm grasp on the industry,” with the “ability to take a look at these kinds of arrangements” and “not just to have the carriers propose them,” said Wood. Free Press is “calling on the FCC to use Title II” and to “take a very light touch towards Internet access,” he said. If the FCC goes with the Communications Act Section 706 approach, “they'll have to allow for a lot of individual deals and discrimination,” said Wood. “This is just such an individual deal that would be hard to challenge under the precedent” set by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in January (CD Jan 15 p1), he said. The court found that the FCC didn’t have the authority to impose net neutrality rules on broadband ISPs, as a 2010 FCC order did. That the deal “doesn’t count against” the consumer’s data cap “really calls into question the need for and level in which the data cap is set in the first place,” said Wood. It’s not that the FCC “would necessarily find” the partnership to be “unreasonable” but they should be in a “position to assess it,” he said.
This is “exactly the sort of arrangement that demonstrates a need for a case-by-case approach to net neutrality,” said ITIF’s Brake. ITIF supports such an approach to net neutrality, he said: The arrangement is “good for consumers and shouldn’t be a real net neutrality concern.” Consumers are also allowed to “vote for new streaming services,” he said. “In wireless, these sorts of arrangements make an awful lot more sense,” because of “significant capacity constraints” due to “limited availability of spectrum,” said Brake. The deal would be “more questionable if T-Mobile were only offering one streaming service,” he said.
That T-Mobile isn’t “counting this usage against a subscriber’s data bucket represents a unique approach,” said Wells Fargo analysts in an email Thursday to investors. “While attractive, it is hard for us to see this as a major ’switching factor’ to drive a customer’s decision in choice of which operator to use,” said the analysts: But it “clearly offers further evidence” of T-Mobile’s “value offering.”