EU court rules that “zero tariff” offers from Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom that offer unlimited streaming violate EU roaming and net neutrality rules
The EU court ruled on Thursday (2 September) that unlimited streaming offers from Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom violate EU roaming and net neutrality rules.
Context & Ripple Effects
This verdict is the endpoint of a five-year enforcement arc. Deutsche Telekom already lost at national level when a German court struck down StreamOn in 2019, and T-Mobile faced the same logic earlier from the Dutch regulator over zero-rated music streaming. In September 2020 the EU's top court confirmed that net neutrality rules ban exempting bundled services from data caps — today's ruling applies that precedent directly to Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom's zero-tariff offers, adding roaming rules on top.
First-order effects
- Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom must withdraw or restructure their unlimited-streaming tariffs across the EU immediately, folding streaming data back into general caps or repricing those plans.
- Deutsche Telekom's StreamOn, already barred in its original form by the German court, has no compliant variant left to fall back on under the EU-level ruling.
Second-order effects
- Every other EU operator running similar bundled-streaming promotions now faces the same legal exposure, removing zero-rating as a competitive differentiator in mobile plans.
- With differentiation via sponsored or exempted content closed off, competition shifts back to headline data allowances and price — squeezing margins on mid-tier plans that relied on streaming bundles to justify upsells.
Third-order effects
- If enforcement holds, the EU market structurally separates connectivity from content: carriers can no longer act as gatekeepers deciding which apps escape the cap, entrenching application-layer neutrality as the regulatory norm for European telecoms.
The trend: European regulators are systematically dismantling zero-rating, forcing telecom operators to compete on neutral data pricing rather than content-bundled exemptions.