It’s a cliche villain scene: “Don’t force me to kill the hostages. Unless you do as I say, their blood is on your hands.” While no one would mistake policy fights for a hostage situation (usually), the same principle applies frequently when challenging industry to stop anticompetitive and anti-consumer practices. Industry will take some anti-competitive practice that provides an apparent marginal benefit to someone sympathetic and threaten that the proposed law change will make it impossible for them to do the “nice” because it stops them from doing the bad thing.
So it is no surprise that after California’s 2018 net neutrality law survived it’s first day in court, carriers are doing everything in their power to make it look like banning zero-rating (which the California law does to some degree, but not completely. See more detail below.) is bad for consumers. Almost immediate, for example, AT&T announced it would discontinue its anti-competitive practices of zero-rating it’s own video product and “sponsored data” from third parties. But carriers have now reached a new low by claiming that California’s net neutrality law forces them to discontinue zero rating a specific telehealth program available from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Needless to say, opponents of net neutrality have rushed to trumpet this claim without troubling themselves to investigate whether it is even true.
Spoiler alert: Its not true.
As net neutrality expert and law professor Barbara Van Schewick explained in a blog post immediately after the Politico story broke, California’s net neutrality law does not prevent carriers from zero rating telehealth programs for veterans. What the law does do, as it was designed to do, is prevent carriers from choosing a single program among a universe of competitors and anointing this one program as the only program that gets such special treatment. Or, as I explain below, carriers can choose to continue to zero rate the Veterans Affairs program in a number of ways, provided they don’t disadvantage other programs that do the same thing (here, veterans health). Mind you, carriers could also decide not to impose artificial bandwidth caps as a means of overcharging consumers and/or favoring their own affiliated content. But hey, where’s the fun and profit in that?
I break this out below . . . .