Study comparing 30 European nations on net neutrality enforcement finds that zero rating business practices by wireless carriers increases cost of wireless data
When an ISP decides to exempt certain applications or services from cutting into a user's data cap, that's zero rating. Tweets: @psawers Tweets: Paul Sawers / @psawers : Except the EU only has 28 (soon to be 27...) countries. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This EFF study lands mid-arc in Europe's long fight over zero rating. The EU telco regulator had already closed the loophole on paper with its final implementation guidelines in 2016, but carriers kept testing the boundary — most visibly Deutsche Telekom, whose StreamOn streaming plan a German court struck down under the EU's net neutrality rules in 2019.
What the study adds is economic evidence for what regulators had argued legally: exempting favored apps from data caps doesn't just tilt competition, it raises what users pay for ordinary data. That finding fed directly into the enforcement wave that followed, including the EU top court's confirmation that net neutrality rules ban zero rating outright and later rulings against Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom's unlimited-streaming tariffs.
First-order effects
- Carriers running zero-rated bundles — Deutsche Telekom's StreamOn being the named example — now face both a legal track record against them and study data showing their pricing raises consumer costs, weakening their defense before national regulators.
Second-order effects
- With the EU's top court confirming the ban, carriers lose the bundled-streaming upsell as a differentiation tool and are pushed back toward competing on raw data price and network quality instead.
Third-order effects
- If enforcement holds, Europe consolidates around a stricter net neutrality model than markets where sponsored-data deals persist, making app-level exemptions a regulatory fault line rather than a standard carrier product.
The trend: European telecom regulation is converging from loophole-prone rules toward hard judicial bans on zero rating, with economic studies supplying the evidence base courts and regulators now cite.