February 2016

India's telecoms regulator has blocked Facebook's Free Basics internet service as part of a ruling in favour of network neutrality.

"No service provider shall offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of content," ruled the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. The body had been investigating whether any online content should be prioritised over others, or offered for free while others were not.

Vikas Pandey, digital producer for the BBC in India, said there had been an intense publicity campaign on both sides of the debate, with Facebook taking out front page advertising in national newspapers to defend the scheme. "The people who live in cities and are aggressive users of the Internet said: 'You can't dictate the terms, give free internet to villagers and then tell them how to use it'," he said.

The Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules, passed in 2015, explicitly ban Internet providers from a number of discriminatory measures like throttling and blocking, but there's evidently a huge loophole that every major wireless carrier in the US has rushed to exploit. T-Mobile's Binge On program, which throttles video content, is troublesome — but AT&T and Verizon's programs are much worse, especially the one Verizon just announced Feb 5 in the fine print of an update for its Go90 video app. Verizon's Go90 video platform — the company's effort to compete with video providers by offering its own bundle — now won't count against customers' data caps. That's a huge deal, since video eats up a lot of data on mobile devices, and especially since Verizon's data plans are expensive. Verizon and other carriers have argued that zero-rating programs, like the one snuck in Feb 5, are beneficial to consumers and do not violate the FCC's net neutrality rules — but their arguments are based on a market of artificial scarcity they have created, and now intend to exploit.

The endgame of zero-rating programs is a two-way tollbooth that Verizon controls: first Verizon receives payment from customers for access to the network, then it receives payment from content providers who want unlimited access to customers, or from whatever other revenue sources it can draw from hosting an exclusive video bundle that won't count against data caps. The upshot of creating punitive data caps, like the ones you can see in the photo above, is that you can then reap juicy tolls from people who provide services that require a lot of data. This scheme is exactly what the principles of net neutrality are designed to prevent, but Verizon and its peers are doing it anyway.

[Commentary] In the 2016 Iowa caucus, advertisement spending wasn't the key to victory. If we plot vote percentage against the percent of spending among candidates who survived to the caucuses, there's very little correlation. There are two possibilities for what happened in 2016.

Possibility No 1 is that 2016 was anomalous, driven by a reality television star who managed to capture media attention for months on end, unseated at the last minute by a stronger traditional campaign. Under this possibility, 2020 will return to the classic Iowa tradition of butter cows and hugging ethanol. Possibility No. 2 is that Iowa's results were linked to how the candidates were doing nationally in a way that they will from here on out. That the Iowa process won't mean much anymore as voters track the national conversation more closely than the guy showing up at the local Pizza Ranch. That a guy who jumps into first place based in part on the strength of his tweeting is creating a new path for success in early state voting.