Professor Barbara van Schewick weighs in on T-Mobile’s plan to allow large companies to stream without affecting data plans for The National Journal.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere bragged Tues­day that he’s giv­ing con­sumers “ex­actly what they want” by let­ting them watch pop­u­lar video ser­vices like Net­flix and HBO on their mo­bile devices without count­ing it against their monthly data pack­ages.

But con­sumer ad­voc­ates pounced on the new “Binge On” pro­gram, warn­ing that it could tilt the In­ter­net in fa­vor of the biggest com­pan­ies, vi­ol­at­ing the prin­ciple of net neut­ral­ity.

“As it stands, it looks like a net-neut­ral­ity vi­ol­a­tion right now,” said Bar­bara van Schewick, a pro­fess­or at Stan­ford Law School and a lead­ing net-neut­ral­ity sup­port­er. “The es­sence of net neut­ral­ity is that we don’t want In­ter­net ser­vice pro­viders to pick win­ners and losers.”

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But van Schewick warned that the tech­nic­al re­quire­ments to par­ti­cip­ate could be oner­ous for fledgling star­tups, and small com­pan­ies in oth­er coun­tries might not even know the pro­gram ex­ists. In the long run, T-Mo­bile’s pro­gram could give ma­jor me­dia com­pan­ies a big leg up, ul­ti­mately lead­ing to less in­nov­a­tion on­line, she said. “As a cus­tom­er, you ul­ti­mately lose if there are less video-stream­ing ser­vices avail­able,” she ar­gued.