Welcome to the tech policy podcast, your source for policy rants and raves from Tech

Freedom, your Washington, D.C. advocate for the freedom to tinker and innovate. On today's show,

zero rating, sponsored data, and the controversial world of internet coupons.

Joining me in our studio to discuss this is Rosalind Leighton.

She is a PhD fellow at Alberg University in Copenhagen, and she's a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

You can read about her work at techpolicydaily.com. Rosalind, thank you for joining me.

It's great to be here. Thanks. So we've talked about this on our last podcast. Recently,

companies have been experimenting with something called zero rating. And the most easy to understand

example of this is probably T-Mobile's offering Binge-On where every month most

Americans have a certain amount of mobile data they can use, whether it's 2 gigabytes,

three-gibytes. And you can really eat that up pretty quickly with data-intensive activity

like streaming audio over Spotify or streaming video over Netflix. So T-Mobile with binge on, they zero out all of those

services so that you can stream as much video as you want and then use the three gigabytes for

something else. So it's a form of zero rating. But for people who don't really follow tech

policy or haven't come into contact with these offerings, zero rating might be difficult to

understand. So can you take this digital world controversy and put it in the physical world?

Sure. Well, you know, thanks so much for that question. You know, what this is about

price differentiation, this is the essence of competition. You know, if you want to have competition

in the marketplace, you can't expect all the products to be the same, if you want to have competition in the marketplace,

you can't expect all the products to be the same, all the prices to be the same. You want to have

companies to provide different products and services. And this is really part of an evolution,

it's a larger field within the mobile industry called value-added services. Within economics, within, you know,

...