Forget Dogs, the Net-Neutrality Debate Is Full of Ostriches

Letters to the Editor: Forget Dogs, the Net-Neutrality Debate Is Full of Ostriches - WSJ.com: "One way or another, all three operators [in Hungary] prohibit or block applications such as Skype or WhatsApp. At the same time—and this is the really alarming part—telecom firms have started advertising their own so-called "zero-rated" media services. "Zero-rated" in telecom jargon means the services are not consuming the users' open-Internet volume allowance at all.

 The situation is similar in the EU's largest market, Germany (where users pay €6, €6, €5 and €3 per incremental gigabyte to Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Telefonica and KPN, respectively). Open mobile-Internet quotas are very low in Germany, and telecoms have started luring consumers away from the free Internet to their own walled-garden Internet. A good example is the "joyn" app, a kind of WhatsApp replacement, which was jointly developed by members of the industry's GSM Association. For some operators in Germany, the key selling point of "joyn" is that its heavy file and media-transfer traffic is not counted against open-Internet consumption quotas. Is this a level playing field?" 'via Blog this'