Who should pay for your data usage?

Nowadays, people are almost addicted to smartphones, and there are many smartphone applications that have been developed to provide more entertainment and improve productivities. During our ordinary day, what makes us consume data usage? I think most of data usage is created during using applications on our smartphones. Then it raises a question that if application developers pay for our data usage. My answer is they could but they do not have to.

There have been more and more application developers that cooperate with carriers to provide their users with free charged data when using their applications. In China, this has become more and more common; in Britain, some carriers also start to work with application developers, but usually those traditional developers, such as Netflix. However, there is a common character of the application developers that seek cooperation with carriers. The majority of these applications are those who require large amount of data usage, such as YouKu, Netflix, and other similar online video applications. This is understandable as these developers want people to use their applications for longer hours, which is a very important factor to measure their popularities (this will relate to their abilities of receiving financing and values of their companies). This is because the demand of their users is not only constrained by their time, but constrained by the costs of using data usage. If they can reduce the costs of using data for their users, this is very likely to encourage their users to spend more time on their applications.

However, to applications which do not consume much of their users’ data usage, such competition strategy seems unnecessary and could be costly especially when they are still small developers. Therefore, developers could use consuming data for their users as a marketing strategy, but this strategy is optional, not necessary.