T-Mobile Thumbs Nose At Net Neutrality and FCC with “Music Freedom” Plan
T-Mobile has launched Music Freedom, a no charge add-on to the mobile carrier's Simple Choice Plan, that eliminates the data cap for select music streaming services. While likely to be a popular option, the fact that T-Mobile has chosen select music partners and asked users to vote on others, is contrary to recent public and Congressional outcries demanding net neutrality and the FCC's efforts to regulate it.
Beats, Soundcloud, Google, Rdio & Others Excluded
Qualified customers can stream as much music as they want on their smartphone from select streaming services: Pandora, iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, Rhapsody, Slacker, Spotify and Samsung's Milk Music.
Others major music streaming services including Beats, Rdio, Soundcloud ,Google Access, Last.fm have to be voted onto the service by users.
The T-Mobile ballot is pictured on the right.
Click on the image to enlarge.
What criteria T-Mobile chose to create both the list of available services and those that needed to be voted on is unclear. Were payments involved? That's something the FCC may be asked to investigate.
Ironically, music streaming isn''t really a data hog, but that's not the point. As Mick Masnick wrote on Techdirt, "When the company that provides you access to the internet has the ability to pick the winners and losers for service providers, a key part of what makes the internet so powerful and useful… goes away."
Wow ! this is soo wrong !
What is Mick Masnick talking about? Streaming music is a HUGE data hog. You can burn through the standard 1-2 Gig caps in no time. T Mobile gives me 5Gig but I quickly switched my SiriusXM to wifi downloaded content quickly after seeing how much it eats. Other music apps have done this too which is why I don’t let my phone be a streaming radio on the cell network.