HOT TO MAKE ZERO-RATING
BETTER FOR USERS
Yiannis Yiakoumis, Sachin Katti, Nick McKeown
Stanford University
Zero-rating
2
Zero-rating
3
What if we let users decide?
Neutral
Network
ISP-defined
Fast Lanes
User-Driven
4
Do users want zero-rating?
1000 smartphone owners, US, 18-65 year old, SurveyMonkey Audience, 08/15
37.0%
Don't care
Don't know
63.0%
Interested
5
What music do users want to zero rate?
Long-tail of user preferences
What music do users want to zero rate?
66% of user preferences not in Music Freedom (November 2015)
wwf
action news
edmodo
mapmyrun
trivia crack
candy crush
flipboard
viber
soma.fm
swig
indie103.1
lynda.com
schwab
8tracks
hulu
nyt
wikipedia
tunein radio
beats
nine
whatsapp
reddit is fun
amazon music
~50
google music
google maps
20
facebook
netflix
instagram
# of users
What do users really want to zero-rate?
Which application would you choose for ZeroCharge?
~
15
10
5
1
8
Boost (deployed at 160 homes)
9
What do users want to Boost?
Very Popular (Alexa ranking)
Less Popular
Long-tail of user preferences
10
• Respect user preferences!
1. Clear and transparent process to get zero-rated
2. Enable users to decide
How can users express their preferences?
High-level Requirements
• Simple & expressive
• Deployable
• Respect Trust (accountability, authentication, privacy, revocation)
Deep Packet Inspection, DiffServ, Out of band
do not meet these requirements… 
12
Step 1: Think of network services as “lanes”
Zero-rated Lane
13
Network Cookies: a mapping abstraction
Network Cookie : A small piece of data users append to their traffic
1. Get cookie for each service
2. User appends cookies to the desired traffic
3. Network matches against them and enforces service
Free Lane
14
• Respect user preferences!
– Clear and transparent process to get zero-rated
– Enable users to decide
• Network Cookies
– a mechanism to express user preferences to the network
– Simple and expressive, can be practically deployed, respect
trust
– More inclusive, better auditable, user-driven network
services
thanks!
[email protected]