Survey of all differential pricing offers in the EEA

Net Neutrality

Study Objectives

The objective of this mappingis to create a complete data set about offers of zero-rating (ZR) and application specific data volume (ASDV) in the European Economic Area (EEA). This geographical area is the scope of the net neutrality protections of the European Union. Additionally, Switzerland is also included in the data set.

  • Zero-rating is defined as the practice of an unlimited data volume for specific applications or classes of applications.

  • Application specific data volume is the practice of providing data volume which is only usable for a specific application or category of applications.

Both these forms of commercial practices rely on the existence of volume restrictions in the underlying internet access offer. Because most fixed line internet access offers in the EEA are flat rates this mapping only analyzed mobile internet offerings of both Mobile Network Operators (MNO) and Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO).

These commercial practices are rarely unilateral actions of an ISPs. Instead they often depend on commercial agreements between the ISP and the application-content and service providers (CAPs). Such agreements often incorporate marketing deals, technical obligations to keep data volume associated with the application of the commercial offering identifiable by the billing equipment of the ISP, and liability provisions. The data set and the subsequent study evaluate participating applications, their CAPs and – as far as possible – the underlying commercial agreements.

The data collection methodology is described in Annex 3 of our report of the net neutrality situation in the EU from 29. Jannuary 2019.

This data set is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.