German Incumbent to throttle zero-rated music streaming
The first fallout of the TSM-Regulation in Europe containing new net neutrality rules seems to be coming to us curtesy of T-Mobile Germany. On Thursday they announced via Blog (German) that the optionally bundled and zero-rated music streaming service Spotify will no longer be exempt from the usual throttling users suffer from when passing their monthly data allowance. The usage of the service itself, however, will still not count against that allowance (more on heise.de, German).
It presents an interesting combination of treating all data equally (at any point for the user either all services are throttled or none is) while still honouring the exclusive deal with Spotify by not counting the data used by it against the users limited monthly data volume. An interesting move that shows how hard mobile operators are working to create packages differing from simply providing internet access. It falls into the awkward timeframe between the new rules taking effect on April 30th and BEREC’s guidelines on how to understand them expected in August.
T-Mobile’s practice, from the commission’s point of view, should be acceptable under the new TSM-Regulation (see last October’s press release on the issue; also reported in the Guardian), though it remains to be seen if the net neutrality guidelines by BEREC will approach zero-rating in an equally liberal way. For others, zero-rating still is "the real threat to the open Internet” (Web Foundation) and they will press hard in the coming months to get tighter rules in.
Update 04.04.2016: Further illustrating my point about the awkward period between the enactment of EU’s net neutrality-rules and the corresponding guidelines, Golem.de reports (in German) a consumer watchdog now accuses Telekom of just pretending to bow to new rules and treating their customers as “dumb” (Telekom naturally immediately refuted that claim). I suspect we will see a lot more of this in the coming months.
