You misunderstand 'the case' here. The case is that your music startup now has no chance of competing against Spotify, TuneIn, Play Music, or Soundcloud because it would go against your general internet data, not the music specific data bundle.

Many telecoms zero-rate their own phone service now, too, even though it's generally delivered over IP on modern phones and networks. Skype and FaceTime count against my data cap. No consumer I know would want a change to the status quo that phone calls are free. Why shouldn't this be generalized to other popular services? If consumers prefer the service and are willing to pay for it, especially in mobile broadband which is relatively competitive ecosystem with several vendors in each market, then why not let consumers make that choice for themselves?

General purpose internet service isn't going away - too many consumers and businesses depend on it, and, at least based on my last Comcast bill, are willing to pay through the nose for it.

Zero-rating your own services is something entirely different than zero-rating services of other companies though.

It is no different than a car manufacturer paying for their own highway lanes. If half of the highway lanes are BMW-only, would you still buy any other car? Free market resolve this by competition based on price, but if I wanted to start my own car manufacturing company, I wouldn't be able to compete because a smaller player in the car market wouldn't have enough funds to get the various levels of government to implement MyNewCarBrand Inc. Roads (TM)

It's not a matter of (absolute) pricing, but of (relative) preference. It's giving established players a significant advantage that puts independent actors in a weakened position.

So is there no network access at all other than these apps? I don't see that clarified on the page.

Personally, I wish Comcast (being the only high-speed option for much of the US) followed this model for TV, where I only want 2 channels but can't pay for less than 80 or so.

> So is there no network access at all other than these apps? I don't see that clarified on the page.

No, the 'regular' access goes out of your normal data cap, and of course they have every reason to lower that cap as much as possible so you're more or less forced to buy these packages.

This is just the first step, they are trying to get consumers used to paying for special data packages like this. The next step is to keep lowering regular data caps, etc.

scroll down the page. those are addons to the basic internet package.

That's what it seemed like to me, but wasn't sure. So basically non-established players are actually free, but established players require additional money? i.e. the opposite of what the parent comment was saying?

It's giving you additional per-app data usage. So if your kid uses 8GB a month on Snapchat, you can pay extra to increase the data cap just for those social apps. Otherwise it would count against your regular data usage.

Portugal have a minimum wage of 550 euros/month and an average wage of 850 euros/month or something like this. You can't compare absolute price.

Minimum wage is indeed about 550 euros a month (it’s 557 euros) but the average wage is more like 1130 euros monthly.

https://www.expatica.com/pt/employment/minimum-wage-in-portu...

That's gross average wage and it's inflated by Lisbon region that have crazy rents. One-bedroom flat costs 600/500 euros, more if it's in city center.

Whoever claimed that the threat to net neutrality was an economic one? The problem is that you give companies the power to decide what information people will have access to. And ISP can say: 'A review website that has many bad reviews about us? Lets throttle the global traffic to 1Kb/s. There, problem solved. A website with opinions about abortion that do not match the views of our CEO? Lets throttle those to 1Kb/s. Wait a minute, the KKK wants us to let customers access websites of members at full speed? Ok, lets do that.'

Completely besides the point. The point is about internet service discrimination.

In Europe you can get 1Gbps for 20-30 euro a month, so about half of what most Americans pay for 50 Mbps or less. But that doesn't mean all Europeans choose the 1Gbps option, because for many (in places like Portugal) that 20-30 euro is still 20 euro too expensive.