or connections from their site to the Internet via local carriers. When these carriers transfer traffic to other networks needed to reach customers, neither the other network owners nor the carrier connected to the subscriber are compensated. See Figure 6-1 in the section "Streaming-A Disruptive Technology" in this chapter, which illustrates Netflix and others' streaming traffic connections to telephone companies' equipment. Zero Rating Zero rating is the process whereby ISPs and cellular providers exempt consumers from data fees and data caps for certain services, including unlimited video streaming. Carriers sometimes exclude their own content from data caps limits or fees for data. This is what AT&T instituted when it eliminated data caps from its DirecTV service. In a similar vein, Comcast eliminated data caps for its Stream TV service. Another instance of zero rating is AT&T Mobility's 2012 announcement of a plan to shift some of its data network costs to developers whose customers generate the traffic. Under the plan, developers will have the option of paying fees to AT&T Mobility for cellular traffic generated by their applications. The applications for which developers pay usage fees will not count toward customers' data plans. Critics of the plan charge that it favors established developers that can afford the fees, which results in free usage for their customers. www.TechnicalPDF.com The Have's vs. the Have Nots: First Class and Everyone Else Many consumer watchdog organizations feel that creating exceptions for certain possibly lucrative applications will in effect create two different Internet classes of network services. They fear that the part of the network providing priority "first class" treatment for new applications will take increasing amounts of capacity away from ordinary applications and bog them down. This is because without network neutrality, carriers are free to charge content providers extra for not throttling the movies and TV shows carried over the Internet to subscribers. Content pr