Netpolicy/equal-rating

Equal Rating

Mozilla workstreams

Our work to

Research

The core of our work on Equal Rating is our research agenda. Over 2015-2016, we will support field research and analysis to dig into deep questions around user behavior and real-world impact of various subsidization plans, all targeting questions at the intersection of access and openness. Some of the questions we hope to drive insight into include:

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Fostering innovation

In April 2016, we announced our forthcoming Innovation Prize, a public challenge to encourage creative new ideas on business models, practices, and technologies to connect the unconnected to the open Internet. We expect the event to take place in fall 2016.

Policy engagement

In two filings in India, we offered some deeper thoughts from a public policy / regulatory perspective on how to approach subsidization and the intersection of access and openness:

• June 2016: Filing: Comments by the Mozilla Corporation on the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s Consultation Paper on Free Data
• December 2015: Filing: Mozilla Comment on TRAI consultation paper on differential pricing

In a filing with the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC), we elaborated on our Equal Rating principles in more depth, as follows:

To us, “equal-rating” describes a model of subsidisation of user-facing access charges that does not introduce the risks to innovation, competition, and user rights inherent in zero-rated models in the market today. Equal-rating practices meet the following criteria:

1. They are content-agnostic. Subsidisation should not be subject to any predetermined limits on the content, application, or service sought by the user, nor type of content, application, or service. This does not mean that a service provider cannot limit the user to predetermined amounts of subsidisation – merely that the provider cannot control that decision on the basis of content, application, or service sought by the user, nor type of content, application, or service.
2. They are not subject to gatekeepers. In many systems, a human element is involved in the approval of content before it can be included in a subsidisation scheme. This element effectively establishes a gatekeeper. Even if the criteria applied are facially neutral, the process creates the possibility of subjective decision-making that introduces a risk of content-specific bias into the system. Gatekeepers create barriers to entry for existing and new players, raising transaction costs of market entry; this would undermine the essence of the “innovation without permission” principle, where anyone, anywhere, can reach an audience without permission from anyone or any entity.
3. They do not allow pay-for-play. Allowing content providers to buy their own subsidisation injects the same types of harms as paid prioritisation in the context of traditional network neutrality analyses. Smaller providers are far less able to pay than large, resulting in harm to competition, innovation, and user choice.

Although somewhat distinct from the concept of “equal-rating” itself, good commercial practices should also follow two additional principles: They should be transparent, and should support user and content provider choice. The service provider should disclose details of the practice, including coverage limits as well as any tradeoffs the user will experience (e.g. for communications throughput or latency). Ideally, users should not be automatically added to a commercial practice that affects their experience, but should be required to opt in, after being presented with an opportunity to review technical disclosures regarding the practice. Finally, if there are any technical changes made to the content, application, or service as part of the practice (as with the U.S. case study Binge On, where total bandwidth was throttled among other changes), then content provider choice is fundamental as well, as content providers should be able to avoid the technical tradeoffs, even if a user chooses them, if in the provider’s mind they impact the desired end user experience.

• July 2016: Filing: Comments by the Mozilla Corporation on the Public Consultation on the Draft BEREC Guidelines on implementation by National Regulators of European net neutrality rules