14 DAY TRIAL // In a recent post on the official Skype blog, Jean-Jacques Sahel, the company’s European director of government & regulatory affairs, has shown his support for mobile Internet neutrality, as a response to the fact that more and more companies want to charge users for browsing the net when using mobile devices. Apparently, this action can be seen as a strain on their networks and the operators want to compensate their losses by introducing new fees.
The blog post can be better understood if one takes into consideration that the popular voice call service has grown steadily over the years and has also been integrated in numerous types of mobile devices, therefore charging users for accessing the web on their handsets would surely affect Skype as a company.
On the other hand, Sahel adds that "This idea of charging online companies threatens the very innovation that will drive people and businesses to start using the Internet on their mobile device."
He supports his statement by arguing that Internet access is the very thing that attracts users to sign up for various types of data plans when buying a new phone. "There has been a big increase in sales of data plans, thanks only to the appeal of all kinds of online content, services and applications like Skype, Wikipedia, Spotify, or Facebook... Without them operators would not sell a single data plan."
Furthermore, the author offers Orange in France as a negative example as they have chosen to limit VoIP access on mobile devices and offer it exclusively to users who have opted for the most costly data plans. Another method used by operators when dealing with VoIP is to charge a new fee in addition to the already-included ‘Internet’ one, in other words, consumers find themselves in the position of having to pay twice for having the possibility to enjoy web services.
The conclusion of Sahel’s article was that operators are definitely not encouraging users’ interest in mobile Internet, but they are rather discouraging the efforts of creating and sharing innovative content and applications.