Historically, bandwidth in and out of Australia was super expensive, because there weren't that many undersea cables connecting it to the world; that's why Australian providers would run mirrors with uncapped access, but everything else had high usage fees; I would guess one of the conditions of getting a service zero-rated is connecting to the carrier in Australia, so the carrier isn't footing the international data bill. Likely many of these providers have local caching and serving, and may update their storage when undersea cables are off peak to reduce their own data costs. (OTOH, the undersea capacity has increased a lot, so it may not be as expensive as it once was)

I used to joke that the reason that Australian data-caps were so low is that they have to get all of the data over by boat.

The way I see things is that having an Internet service that is in high demand is simply incentive for ISPs to peer with you.

Netflix reportedly said (link below) that it regretted offering 'unmetered data' to Australian ISPs, because they feared it would have a chilling effect on the availability of other streaming services.

Their fears were unfounded: Stan & Presto are both available unmetered on certain ISPs. (Quickflix went out of business, but not because of ISP deals, but because they couldn't compete in library size and other major ways -- I suspect there's simply not room for three Australia-based streaming services to license enough content to keep themselves afloat.)

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/netflix...

Just a head's up: Presto was owned by FoxTel, and was shut down this month.

Stan seems to be a good competitor, but that's only comparing it to the Australian Netflix library. I'm of the opinion that all competition has done is split the market, as they fight over the same set of exclusives.

I'll often browse US Netflix rather than switch between Aus Netflix and Stan to find a movie I've seen previously. US Netflix seems to have 90% of the missing content Stan offers over Aus Netflix.

Are any "value-add services" Australian-borne?

Yes. Australian Football is free to stream on certain LTE carriers, along with Netflix on Optus I get access to the ABC (national government-owned broadcaster) and Stan (an Australian streaming service much like Netflix, owned by Fairfax).

Home-broadband wise, here's a link to Telstra (Australia's largest telecomms company by a large margin) and their policies around free content on their residential "BigPond" ISP: https://www.telstra.com.au/support/category/broadband/manage...

And a link to services available for 'free' on Internode (now owned by TPG, which is I think at this point Australia's second largest ISP) http://www.internode.on.net/residential/entertainment/unmete...

TPG themselves do free Netflix, although I'm not sure what else is unmetered.

Admittedly, I've only taken a cursory glance and so I may have missed something, but it seems to me that most of what's offered is either large corporations (Netflix, Xbox), or the Telecom network's own media arm.

That's nightmarish to me. 6 corporations owning 90%+ of media outlets in the US is already bordering corporatist dystopia.

Optus isn't unmetering Netflix because there's a shady backroom deal with Netflix to try to drive their viewership by sales of cellphones, Optus is unmetering Netflix because it's a tractable problem, they can QoS the traffic, and they can deliver a service that will hopefully attract more users.

If you don't happen to watch much Netflix, but another carrier offers a deal on something you do use? Switch! Or maybe you don't need the value-add services and just want an overall cheaper plan? You can do that, too! Porting to a different ISP or cellular carrier is a legally enforced right here. 99% of the population of Australia is able to switch at will to a number of different providers, and there's nothing like the regional monopolies that companies like TWC or Comcast have in the US.

There's huge, fundamental gaps in the way different continents provide Internet access. Maybe if there were no competition of ISPs at a local level in Australia, net neutrality would be a huge problem here. It isn't a problem here, though. I don't think it's something that the average Australian in the street has thought much about, and if you explained it to them they probably wouldn't understand what the big deal is. Despite the fact that we don't have net neutrality, the sky isn't falling, and Australian access to the Internet is basically as free-as-in-freedom as it is in the US.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and the idea that ISPs must only ever be dumb pipes is one way to solve the problem of competition in the Internet provider space, but it's certainly not the only one.

And this is exactly why net neutrality is an enormous issue in the United States: Typically we only have one local broadband carrier. Two if you are exceptionally lucky. And the local ISP monopoly is often run by fucking Comcast or Time Warner Cable ("now called Spectrum"), two of the worst companies on this planet. Net neutrality is an enormous issue for Americans.

Hahahahaha, 6 media corporations? Six? I wish!

Name just one (in Australia) that isn't owned by Murdoch or Fairfax :P