For quite some time now, we‘ve pointed out that the whole zero rating issue was a way for broadband providers to conduct a stealth war on net neutrality — first putting in place „restrictions“ that they could then „lift“ for partners, pretending it was a consumer friendly move. Last month, T-Mobile introduced Binge-on, it‘s second such attempt at zero rating. Its first, Music Freedom, exempted some streaming music services from its data caps. Binge-On focused on video, but had a few oddities. Like Music Freedom, Binge On would make „select“ video streaming platforms exempt from the data cap — but in order to do that, it would downgrade the quality of those streams to 480p, a lower resolution than most are used to these days. It was notable that neither YouTube nor Amazon Prime were included „partners“ in the launch.

But… some people started noticing some problems: specifically, even those services that have not partnered with T-Mobile started seeing their own videos downgraded.