The EU Prepares To Vote For Awful, Loophole-Filled Net Neutrality Rules

"As Stanford Professor Barbara van Schewick notes, the rules fail terribly on four major fronts. One, they fail to prevent or even police the zero rating of apps, something we've repeatedly noted lets companies with deeper pockets pay to have their traffic exempted from usage caps -- immediately putting smaller companies and non-profits at a disadvantage. This has been something American consumers have had a hard time understanding, since such systems are usually framed as "1-800 numbers for data" or the data equivalent of free shipping. But van Schewick does a good job explaining the bad precedent set:

"Research shows that zero-rated applications are far more attractive to users than those that are not. In a study commissioned by the CTIA, 74% of users said that they would be more likely to watch videos offered by a new provider if the content did not count against their monthly bandwidth caps. When the online magazine Slate experimented with zero-rating, it told some users that the podcast did not count against their cap. People who were offered the zero-rated podcast were 61% more likely to click on the link. Thus, zero-rating has the same impact as technical discrimination: it gives ISPs power to make certain applications more attractive than others and pick winners and losers on the Internet.""