Music and video streaming services take a lot of bandwidth, and now that most people have cellular plans that charge by the amount of data they use, streaming becomes a lot less attractive. Even at home, a sizable percentage of U.S. broadband customers have data caps that work against streaming media displacing standard TV and radio.
Thus, the carriers and Internet service providers have come up with a new notion called zero rating, best known in the form of T-Mobile's BingeOn and Music Freedom programs.
At first, it sounds great: Streaming services don't count against your bandwidth usage, so you can use them freely. But there's real potential that zero rating could be misused to put invisible toll lanes in the Internet, becoming an end run around the Net neutrality rules the FCC imposed last year to assure open Internet access.
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