If your phone or tablet gets its wireless service AT&T and a DirecTV subscriber, here's some good news: you can now watch DirecTV on your mobile device without this counting against your data plan.
There could still be some gotchas. Ars Technica notes that the DirecTV app for iOS still has a disclaimer saying "Exclusions apply & may incur data usage." But the implication is clear: streaming DirecTV will cost you less than other services.
The rub: What's good news in the short term for AT&T customers may be bad news for net neutrality. And that could come back to bite us all. The thing is, AT&T owns DirecTV. And exempting it from data limits could give its own service an unfair advantage over competitors such as Dish Network's Sling TV or on-demand services like Hulu and Netflix—unless those companies shell out to pay AT&T to have their apps exempted as well. That's a particularly bad problem for newer companies that don't have the name recognition of Netflix, or the money or sway to work out a so-called "zero rating" deal with major Internet service providers.
Despite concerns, the number of zero rated services is growing. The best known is probably T-Mobile's Binge On program, which allows customers to stream unlimited data from a wide variety of video providers but slows speeds for all video connections. Verizon, meanwhile, exempts its Go90 service and, like AT&T, allows companies to pay to zero rate their apps.
The wireless Internet business is slowly moving back towards unlimited data plans, but this new wave of services is full of caveats that could keep zero rating relevant. And the phenomena isn't limited to mobile Internet services. AT&T's home broadband service limits your monthly data to 300GB unless you either pay extra or subscribe to DirecTV. And Comcast's StreamTV, which the company considers a traditional pay TV service, doesn't always count towards its data limits.
Charging more money to access services that haven't worked out a special deal with an Internet provider might seem like a blatant violation of net neutrality, but the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality regulations don't explicitly ban zero rating. The agency did reserve the right to review zero rating on a case-by-case basis and met with service providers earlier this year, but hasn't announced any action against zero rating yet.
Correction at 1:15am ET on 9/8/2016: An earlier version of this story said AT&T's home broadband connections have a limit of 250MB. It's actually 300GB.
Correction at 4:23pm ET on 9/7/2016: An earlier version of this story said that Ars Technica was the first to break this news, but The Verge reported the news about an hour earlier.
