T-Mobile Gives Free Unlimited Data for Pokemon Go - Raising Net Neutrality Concerns

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T-Mobile Gives Free Unlimited Data for Pokemon Go - Raising Net Neutrality Concerns

By CircleID Reporter
July 14, 2016, 9:25 pm PDT Views: 7,151 Add Comment

T-Mobile announced today that as a part of its “T-Mobile Tuesdays” promotion it will give its customers unlimited data to play Pokemon Go until August 2017—T-Mobile Press Release / 14 Jul 2016: “New and existing T-Mobile customers can get free and unlimited high-speed data for all your Pokémon Go gaming in the U.S.—all the way through end of August 2017. ... Since Pokémon Go launched July 6th, the mobile game has raced past the likes of Facebook and Twitter on the app charts, already attracting a record-setting 21 million daily users in the U.S. alone.”

— Move called Net Neutrality violation / unfair advantage - Karl Bode reporting in DSLReports: “Zero rating has been called a net neutrality violation by critics who say it gives select content (including games) an unfair advantage against smaller competitors, whose data still counts against usage restrictions. It’s probably an understatement to say that these concerns aren’t going to be heard whatsoever under the din of T-Mobile users rushing to “catch ‘em all.”

— T.C. Sottek, The Verge: “To be clear: making Pokémon Go exempt from data caps is bad for net neutrality, for the same reasons making certain video and music apps exempt is a bad idea.”

— As predicted: “Verge senior reporter Adi Robertson predicted this would happen just two days ago, and now here we are.” Adi Robertson tweet / 12 Jul 2016: “Countdown to the first mobile carrier offering a horrifying, net neutrality-killing, wildly popular sponsored data deal for Pokemon Go.”

By CircleID Reporter

CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.

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