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Senators Ed Markey (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CO) have written a letter to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson criticizing the company’s decision to exempt HBO Max streaming data from counting toward AT&T mobile customers’ data caps. The practice is known as zero-rating, and it’s been a contentious issue in the telecom industry for years. The letter follows AT&T’s recent confirmation to The Verge that HBO Max data wouldn’t count toward AT&T’s mobile data caps.
AT&T is able to do this thanks to the Federal Communication Commission’s rollback of net neutrality protections that prohibited companies from, among other things, giving their own data streams preferential treatment. The loss of those protections back in 2018…