Not much to fear about sponsored data

[Commentary] In its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on the Open Internet, the Federal Communications Commission has been paying undue attention to the (so far) commercially-uninteresting and technologically-unfeasible notion of paid prioritization. In the meantime, other commercially reasonable practices get deployed, both in the US and around the world. One such practice is “sponsored data.”

Sponsored data is the notion that some third party pays for the cost of the bandwidth to deliver content or applications to the end user. One concern frequently raised by sponsored data skeptics is that smaller edge providers might be made worse off because they are not able to invest as much capital as the big guys. Of course this proposition is true universally, across every aspect of business in all markets, which in no way makes it inherently unfair.

[Wadsworth is Director of Corporate Communications at Sandvine which enables sponsored data plans]