Hotstar will soon be violating Net Neutrality in Singapore. The streaming service is set to launched in Singapore on November 1, Disney announced on Monday. This is second Asian market where Hotstar will be violating neutrality, after recently doing so in Indonesia. The streaming service will only be called Hotstar, not Disney+ Hotstar, as is the case in India and Indonesia. This is likely because Disney plans on launching Disney+ as a separate service in the island nation, according to job listings spotted by Geek Culture. Hotstar's Singapore catalogue will include matches from the ongoing Indian Premier League and some Hindi and Tamil TV shows and films. The company has tied up with the telecom operator StarHub to offer its content without billing eligible users for the data that the app will use. This practice, called zero rating, is a violation of Net Neutrality, the principle that all data needs to be treated equally on the internet. Zero rating programs, such as StarHub TV Go, allow streaming services to exempt their traffic from internet customers' data allowances, essentially tilting the market in their favour; customers on restrictive mobile plans may prefer to stream video from services for which they are not charged. This is an especially significant edge to have in Singapore, where 1GB of mobile data costs US$2.57, compared to India's 9 cents, according to data sourced from Cable.co.uk. It has been illegal since 2016 for telecom operators to strike such deals in India. Hotstar entered into a similar zero…
