36 leading US scholars, in a letter addressed to the FCC, have called for the ban of paid prioritisation, including zero-rating
February 2015
This is the first letter by leading scholars that unequivocally supports a bright-line ban on all forms of paid prioritization (including zero-rating).
Key extracts:
“The Internet is what economists call a General Purpose Technology. It is a key technology, like the steam engine and the electric motor, that increases productivity economy-wide and drives an entire era of technological progress and economic growth.”
"Antitrust cannot practically prevent the other two competition problems associated with paid prioritization: excessive access charges imposed by terminating monopolists and their incentive to degrade non-priority traffic or set low monthly bandwidth caps."
“A broadband provider would have an incentive to set low monthly bandwidth caps in order to motivate edge providers to pay for exclusion from the bandwidth cap (zero-rating)”
“Antitrust enforcement is not enough. Antitrust law protects only against certain harms to competition”
“A firm’s mere exploitation of market power through monopoly pricing or its decision not to invest in upgrading non-priority service or to impose low bandwidth caps would rarely satisfy the conditions for antitrust enforcement.”
Read the letter posted by the Stanford Law School »
Click here
2015
United States
zero-rating
