Verizon updates go90 video app to exempt it from data caps for customers not on prepaid plan
Verizon just blatantly betrayed net neutrality by excluding its video app from data caps — The FCC's net neutrality rules, passed last year, explicitly ban internet providers from a number …
Context & Ripple Effects
Verizon spent January building a business out of data cap exemptions, announcing the FreeBee Data 360 beta to sell sponsored data to third-party content providers starting January 25. Weeks later it has turned the same mechanism on itself: the go90 video app no longer counts against data caps for postpaid customers, while the FCC's year-old net neutrality rules explicitly bar exactly this kind of preferential treatment.
The move puts Verizon ahead of its closest parallel case — AT&T's zero-rating of DirecTV, which the FCC had already flagged as a potential violation by late 2016. Whether go90 gets the same scrutiny becomes the test of whether the rules bind carrier-owned video at all.
First-order effects
- Postpaid Verizon customers can stream go90 without touching their monthly data allowance, tilting everyday viewing toward Verizon's own app over Netflix, Hulu, and other services that still burn through capped data.
- Prepaid customers are carved out of the exemption entirely, splitting Verizon's own base into two tiers of video economics.
Second-order effects
- Rival carriers face pressure to match the play with their own properties — AT&T already did with DirecTV, drawing an FCC preliminary conclusion that its DirecTV zero-rating violates net neutrality, which hands Verizon a live precedent for how enforcement might land.
- Third-party content providers now choose between paying Verizon for equivalent treatment through FreeBee Data 360 or accepting a slower, metered experience next to a free carrier-owned alternative.
Third-order effects
- Enforcement turns out to hinge on who chairs the FCC rather than the rules' text: after leadership changed, the agency dropped its probe and Verizon extended exemptions to the FiOS Mobile App in the 2017 expansion, suggesting zero-rating becomes standard carrier practice whenever oversight recedes.
- If the pattern holds, data caps harden from capacity management into a two-sided market — carriers charging content companies for reach while favoring their own video assets, structurally disadvantaging independent streaming services.
The trend: Wireless carriers are converting data caps into a paid-prioritization marketplace for video, with the FCC's willingness to enforce net neutrality — not the rules themselves — setting the boundary.