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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

How's this different from priority shipping for example?

The USPS doesn't also own the roads, rivers and skies they transport your package through, and can't blockade people from moving the package themselves, or with another service.

My guess is monopoly (approximately). ISP choice for the vast majority of US people is practically nil - you either have a cable provider (Comcast, Cox, Spectrum, etc.) or a phone provider (Verizon, AT&T). With priority shipping, if you don't like Amazon's non-subtle nudges to you to pay for Prime, you just move on to Walmart.com, Rakuten, or an eBay vendor. Treating ISP as a utility company was the right model and the current FCC is not doing consumers a service by killing this model.

It'd be like if Amazon owned the only road to your house and said Amazon couriers get to use the left lane at 65mph and everyone else delivering packages from Walmart or Target use the right lane at 30mph, unless both you and Walmart pay extra to use the fast lane.

If Amazon owned the road, I would be fine with that. If a company owns a mall, I'm fine with them letting companies that pay them more have a bigger shop, and those paying them less have a smaller shop.

I'm also fine with them giving their own products preferential treatment. (This actually happens here - all mall companies have their own products, very visibly exposed.)

In priority shipping, only one side pays the fee. If the post office or UPS said "oh you want it there faster, pay X" to both sender and receiver, and both were required to pay for it to be faster, then it would be the same.

So the burden of the cost is on the sending party?

In reality the cost is really distributed. The sender hands over the money to the shipping company, but that money comes from the receiver.

And the infrastructure is supported by the community at large.

So when I pay for gigabit internet, and netflix pays their "streaming priority" charge, I get netflix content at gigabit speed.

But when I pay for gigabit internet, and some random startup doesn't pay the ISPs "streaming priority" charge, I get them at some rate limited amount less than what I pay for (gigabit).

That is the problem. The consumer gets screwed, startups get screwed, and the ISPs profit from both consumer and businesses.

How do you debug your slow internet connection? What tools let you know you're getting what you're paying for?

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