AT&T wants to choose which online video services count against data caps
Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica :
Context & Ripple Effects
The cap-exemption fight has flipped sides this spring: after years of negotiating with carriers, Netflix announced in April it would stop asking ISPs to exempt its streams from data caps, leaving paid exemption schemes like AT&T's as the only path to unmetered video. AT&T arrives at this position already at war with the regulator — in February it previewed a lawsuit against the FCC over the net neutrality rules it says the agency exceeded its authority to impose.
What AT&T is proposing now goes beyond neutrality litigation: it wants unilateral power to decide which online video services count against customer data caps, making the ISP the pricing gatekeeper for every streaming competitor. The related coverage shows where this leads — by late 2016 the FCC would conclude that AT&T's zero-rating of its own DirecTV service may violate net neutrality.
First-order effects
- Streaming video providers face a new toll: exempt their traffic from AT&T's caps on AT&T's terms, or have customers burn through metered data watching them — with AT&T-affiliated video positioned to be exempt by default.
Second-order effects
- Netflix's exit from exemption negotiations hands AT&T the discretion Netflix used to share, so smaller video services without AT&T's leverage bear the cap burden while well-capitalized ones buy relief — and rival ISPs gain a template for matching sponsored-data tiers of their own.
Third-order effects
- If carriers become the arbiters of which services count against caps, data caps function less as network management than as a paid-prioritization market — and the FCC's later finding that DirecTV zero-rating may violate neutrality signals regulators treating exactly that structure as a rule-breaking pattern.
The trend: Broadband carriers are converting usage-based data caps into gatekeeping platforms that charge video services for reach, forcing regulators to decide whether zero-rating is innovation or discrimination.