This quotes netflix as having 37% of traffic in N.A. http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/20/netflix-boasts-37-...
It's like you build an autobahn for everyone, and then one monster haulage company moves in and dominates the road, and the road isn't really as useful as envisaged.
Ps. They had the same arguments for YouTube and torrent. What's next
Bingo!
But customers don't want to pay more and ISPs prefer to look for revenue from content providers since they're more motivated to pay.
They occupy 37% (trusting the source) because that's how much people want to use their service, not because they force themselves on "the internet".
If the sold speed is only achievable when nobody else in the neighborhood is using the service then it’s a lie, and it’s no one else’s fault but the ISP’s if they get caught
Without video many people could just stick with their cellphone bandwidth and drop their cable plan entirely.
Congratulations, you have just made anti Net Neutrality argument.
"Pissing off customers has failure points" is the core of the anti-NN arguments. There's no need to regulate what ISPs can do with the traffic - if they slow down access to some websites, or stop providing access to some of them or increase prices on the access of the "entire internet", then the customers would go to competitors who do not impose such restrictions.
The "there's no need to do last mile infrastructure multiple times" is bunk. It is easy, it is doable and no, you won't have 100 companies running lines. You would have 4-5 and that will be enough to push Comcasts and Verizon to get their prices down.
The issue is that the population of localities does not want competition. That's why the population does not want cell phone towers ( eyesore ), the population does not want more wires on poles (wires, eww!) etc etc etc. And the population wants to protect the busy bodies that attempt to block things ( because busy bodies are typically nice old people who should really be helped to remain in their homes and they really really really like stuff to be the same as it was fifty years ago ).
An ISP can leach off of internet traffic by shaping it so say Netflix is limited to low quality. But, that doesn't not mean they can simply block it without getting into issues. The problem is as demonstrated by China simply degrading websites bandwidth is is massive leverage.
Bandwidth is what we pay for. Net neutrality does not mean we get bandwidth for free. People who use more bandwidth have to buy more bandwidth already.
So the ISP were overselling bandwidth?
> Why shouldn’t Netflix have to contribute to the increased investment that they are benefitting from?
They do. Netflix give CDN boxes to ISPs for free. They contribute by saving the ISPs all that external bandwidth (which is what they oversell).
Its irrelevant who creates this traffic. Wether it is The Pirate Bay or Netflix or Spotify or Google or DDoSers. The traffic is there. Only in the latter case do you want measures from the ISP(s).
ISPs could install CDNs.
Apparently the ISPs can handle the bandwidth, else they'd take measures. If ISPs can't handle the bandwidth they need to charge their customers more, decrease the overal max bandwidth the customers have, or decrease the monthly bandwidth caps. It is that simple.
> It's like you build an autobahn for everyone, and then one monster haulage company moves in and dominates the road, and the road isn't really as useful as envisaged.
You make it seem autobahn usage is unfair (that's a debate in Germany as the German government argues or argued tourists use the autobahn without paying so they're considering requiring a vignette).
What you do to deal with this is you increase the tax owners of cars pay, introduce a "vignette" as they have in Austria and Switzerland, or introduce toll roads as e.g. France notoriously has. Trucks pay more, but there's no other differentiation AFAIK. And each vehicle pays.
This takes pressure off their outgoing interconnects (where the actual contention should arise, if they've designed their network correctly).
This was never about Netflix hurting their internet business, it was always about Netflix hurting their cable business, which is where more money lies for them.
Or you could just complain and ask for more money, whilst not improving anything.
Everyone pays for their connection to the notional Internet. Individual households tend to pay for all-you-can-eat of a nominal speed, which is fractionally provisioned upstream at whatever rate the ISP thinks that they won't get too many complaints about - typically 10:1. Medium and large companies either buy all-you-can-eat at less underprovisioned services, or pay for 95th percentile billing that is calculated monthly.
Really large corporations pay for interconnections to peering locations, and do a mix of paying for transit and swapping traffic with willing peers. Finally, backbone network companies buy or lease fiber, peering points and data centers and try to pay for as little transit as is economically feasible while shipping data around their networks at lower costs.
Everybody pays for what they use. The larger the scale, the lower the price per bit.
"Fast lanes" and "Zero-rate" traffic are purely subsidies and extortion. Rent-seeking.
The only reason they are making a big stink about it is because when there's just one it's so much easier to put the blame on that company or ask it for money, than it would be to ask 100 or 1,000 video sites the same.
It's the same reason why those who want censorship start rearing their heads when you have only a couple of app stores, instead of apps/programs being offered from all over the web, or why law enforcement prefers to go to large companies to ask them for user data, and so on.
When things are centralized, they are much easier to target.
> autobahn
An ISP isn't a shared commons. It's offering a service to transit data to/from other hosts on the internet, usually metered at either a fixed rate per unit time, or by the total carriage "weight" (bandwidth). Complaining about Netflix "using 37% of traffic in N.A." is like complaining about Amazon "using 7% of UPS' N.A. volumes"[1].
The way customer's actually want to use their bandwidth might not be compatible with the ISP's wishes or a particular business plan based on oversubscription or promoting local services, but that's a risk of being in the ISP business.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/news/2016/05/25/why-u...
That's garbage. I don't need my ISP shaking down the content business to be able to put their own content up front while requiring payment from others for equal level treatment.
Taxpayers built this infrastructure and there are still regional broadband monopolies all over the place. It's entirely anti-consumer. We built the damned thing in the first place with the agreement there would be sufficient service. Fact is, our service is lousy, even in many dense urban areas!
We should stand up together and vote this anti-NN crap down, regardless of whether it takes 2 weeks or 2 years.
ARPANET became obsolete and made redundant by private backbone providers, and so was decommissioned in 1990.
This is about the 1996 Telecom Act, and how the public has allowed private companies to acquire regional monopolies while using public resources.
Taxpayers building modern ISP infrastructure is a myth. Very little public money went to last mile ISPs. In fact, they are typically taxed fairly highly by local governments. Governments see ISPs are a money raising source not a place to spend money .
There are still regional "telecom" companies like AT&T and Verizon, but they don't have monopolies over ISP service. In most areas its actually the cable company that has more customers.
The deregulatory 1996 Telecom Act included provisions for a particular level of broadband penetration and performance. Those provisions were not met. Instead, now we have an FCC trying to reclassify broadband to 10 Mbps.
Look at the distribution of throughput speeds in the green image posted here [1]. ISPs haven't fulfill their end of the deal with regards to speeds, and the country is mostly covered by regional broadband monopolies.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/5/15191048/fcc-chairman-ajit...
But now they're too greedy having seen the cable TV model where they get to charge rent on both ends for content they didn't even create.
Also, its not like youtube, fb etc. Create their own content
Regarding ISPs creating original content, they have tried that and the quality of their stuff just couldn’t stand next to Google, Facebook, etc.
I think we all know a relative who used the “install CD” that came with their 2000s-era ISP and ended up with a junk homepage & browser toolbars, and “ask Jeeves” as their default search engine.
I'm not sure you can rebut (parents) hypothetical with an appeal to free markets ... since it is free markets in telecom service that net neutrality subverts for (what is, in my opinion) the greater good.
"An ISP isn't a shared commons. It's offering a service to transit data to/from other hosts on the internet, usually metered at either a fixed rate per unit time, or by the total carriage "weight" (bandwidth)."
Are you drawing a distinction between transit ISPs (like he.net, etc.) and last-mile providers (like Comcast) ? Because I thought the entire point of net neutrality was that an ISP was indeed, to some degree, a shared commons.
This isn't about markets (free or regulated). The entire point[1] of an ISP is to (for a fee) carriage IP packets. Just like UPS/FedEx (for a fee) carriage you physical packages. I'm appealing to the simple idea that both of those businesses have an obligation to fulfill the service the customer paid for.
If ISPs costs are too high, they should e.g. raise their {monthy flat rate,per-bit bandwidth fee} or any claim that they provide access to the internet as an internet service provider is fraud.
> ISP was indeed, to some degree, a shared commons.
The internet is a shared commons. The actual carriage of packets from your house to the internet is usually some kind of leased flat rate or pay-per-use service. You are not sharing your ADSL line or contractually guaranteed portion of your local cable line's bandwidth.
[1] obviously they also handle associated technical minutia like assigning IP addresses
The ISPs are paid, by the consumers, to ship data to them. If they can't do this they need to fix their networks and charge their customers more, not try to extort third parties.
What an ISP is not free to do is whitelist or bias one content source over another. The ISP absolutely is a utility and should be in the business of operating at layer 3 in the OSI model.
This sounds correct, but can you point me toward some additional info?
Well someone is paying: the customer. Netflix isn't hogging anything. So ISPs want to double-dip and get paid at both ends but really what they want to do is protect their ailing TV businesses. It's naked protectionism, nothing more.
So to your comment: if customers can't get all this Netflix data then the ISPs have lied to them about the capacity of the connections they've sold. Or they're not charging enough (heh).
Netflix gives away free servers to cache popular content near the users so the ISP doesn’t need to pay for the bandwidth to stream multiple copies of the same thing:
https://openconnect.netflix.com/
My ISP (RCN) uses this and we’ve never had a slowdown using Netflix, no matter what time it is. Using fast.com (which uses Netflix’s network to benchmark comnection speed) always shows that the limiting factor is that I use WiFi and don’t have a device which supports enough 802.12 channels to get more than 150Mbps.
When a large ISP complains about Netflix congestion it inevitably turns out that they have refused this help because they’re trying to use performance as an extortion point.
You have to be a decently large ISP to qualify. So, this is helpful to big players BUT big players can also afford a PoP in a major hub where they can likely directly peer with Netflix.
This is also a "black-box" system on your network, likely behind your edge firewalls and DMZs. So, you will have to deploy extra network infrastructure and monitoring protect the rest of your network from Netflix. If it was outside your edge routing/firewalling it may as well be on a peer network.
So, this isn't exactly a "free pass" for anyone to have superior Netflix service. And it would only serve Netflix. The ISP I worked with had a few racks devoted to this type of machinery (Google Global Caches, Akamai CDN edge nodes etc). We were not large enough to qualify to host an OpenConnect Box.
Even with one you have the additional issue that most last-mile providers don't exactly have a 40gigabit back-haul to all of their DSLAM or CMTS PoPs. So, some part of "congestion" happens down stream of the data centers. This is why companies like Comcast will put one of their On-Demand video storage boxes in that giant green box that is at the end of your street. You are literally talking with a server next door. OpenConnect style boxes cannot compete with that proximity and that deployment strategy is partially responsible for one of the "smoking guns" in this debate where people claim proof that Comcast slows Netflix in favor of their services.
(And thanks to net neutrality, they can switch to another haulage company at any time.)
1. Corporate greed (rational desire to maximize profits).
2. Individual greed (subscribers' rational desire to pay very little for their Internet connection).
You can get off the couch and find an ISP willing to give you a decent SLA and QoS guarantees but it'll cost you 10+X the price that the regular Joe's are willing to pay.
If everyone pays $x per minute for road time, why does it matter whether they navigate it via haulage company A only, or via haulage companies A, B, C, D, and E? It's still the same road time.
The dominance of Netflix is about video streaming being a disproportionately bandwidth-heavy form of internet use and about Netflix being the dominant player in the video streaming market. If it disappeared tomorrow Prime Video or someone else would rise to take its place.
So, now we have an autobahn whose "bandwidth" is 40000 cars per second.
The way haulage works is by the car with no real guarantee about a steady rate of delivery. I don't care, just get 10000 cars from point a to point b. This is no-deadline data transfer like downloading a file.
The way streaming works is that it needs exactly 10 cars per second with no mention of total cars. I don't care, I just need a steady 10 cars per second.
For reference, I can service 10,368,000 of those haulage requests in a 30 day month (ideally) but I can only have 4,000 simultaneous streaming users, ever.
The internet, before streaming, was almost all haulage. Most of the infrastructure was built on the idea of haulage being the dominant use case. People needed to get information from point A to point B as fast as possible. Even torrenting, was haulage. "Congestion" at peak times was not as important because delivery deadlines were looser. As long as you were averaging more cars delivered over a time period (24hrs) than requested the congestion would eventually clear.
Then streaming hit. Now most of the traffic on the internet is on a tight deadline. That infrastructure built for haulage was completely incapable of handling it. We have 40000 cars per second but this is now "Rush Hour" and we have 20k users wanting to get 200k cars in THIS EXACT SECOND otherwise their experience suffers. It doesn't matter if we unused bandwidth at 3am, it doesn't matter if we have unused bandwidth ever. What matters is that we can cover the peak cars per second requested on our network. If we cannot, we have oversold the autobahn and are now "guilty of fraud".
The Internet was like an autobahn but these days consumers only care about what happens during rush hour. Imagine how different an autobahn would be if you had to guarantee a lane for every driver that wanted it on-demand. It is an autobahn that is huge and mostly empty most of the time (your lane is your lane and if you are not driving its empty), it was also far far more expensive to build.
My understanding from the best sources I can find detail a disagreement within the government about how net neutrality is implemented, not that it exists. Internet providers want to repeal net neutrality. Democrats are happy with the current implementation. Republicans want to enshrine net neutrality in law through congress, stripping what they believe is overreach on the part of the FCC.
The fact that net neutrality can currently be repealed so easily suggests to me that putting it through congress is a good idea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/01...
I've heard this, but I still see no law on the books, and a very strong push for the FCC to remove the regulations that are currently in place.
I'd believe them if I saw an effort to put a replacement plan in motion before repealing.
All NN does is to disallow ISP from tiering the internet and double dipping on both sides of the network.
Imagine if you had to pay a different subscription to call only family, another also for friends, anyone on the Bell directory, anyone on other directories, businesses. You’d imagine telephones would have remained a novelty to this day
I understand the issues inherent in leasing the lines, but fundamentally companies should be able to price their offerings as they wish.
There simply needs to be fewer barriers to entry for new ISPs to come into the market.
This isn’t about protecting Netflix, it’s about protecting the consumers right to use the product they bought - internet bandwidth - for what they choose without having that choice interfered with or constrained by back room extortion rackets. If the ISP wants to set up a special fast lane for my connection to this or that service, they talk to me. Not Netflix, or anyone else.
This is because there is a healthy amount of competition with supermarkets, something the ISP market lacks.
Again, it comes down to lowering barriers of entry for new ISPs, rather than falsely labeling all network traffic the same, and pretending that solves a problem.
If you don’t like the price at a Supermarket you can usually drive 5 minutes to the next store, but changing ISPs can take weeks and you’re locked into long contracts.
Maybe if we can lower the barriers to entry and give people a genuine choice of ISPs first. That would be the equivalent of talking to the customer about special deals for certain content and giving the customer the power to choose. Do that, then we can talk. Wiping out net neutrality without a genuine choice for consumers is a blatant stitch up.
1. Very, very high costs to get started
2. Exclusive agreements that buildings have with a particular ISP already
3. Many regulations that would prohibit laying new broadband connections to every house, e.g. because there are already houses and streets in the way
4. Economies of scale that prevent small ISPs from being profitable
5. Competition from megacorps that can treat broadband as a loss leader (or low margin side business) to get customers for their other services such as cable TV, landline telephone, or video streaming
6. Difficulty competing with much larger competitors since they would generally be offering a nearly identical commodity service without the advertising budget or brand recognition
7. Larger competitors actively lobbying against new rules that would devalue their investments
You might be able to find a way around some of them (like #7) but most of those issues are basically intractable given the current technology.
Imagine if a new company wanted to run cables to your building in a crowded city each month. You’d have to keep tearing up the roads and other infrastructure to make improvements and you’d have tons of essentially duplicated cables. You’d basically want to push for laws that required shared access to the cables to eliminate redundancy which leads quickly to either the government owning the cables and leasing them out (quite a good option in my view) or a major ISP like Comcast owning the cables and leasing them out.
Don’t get me wrong, governments should incentivize way more competition among ISPs. But we aren’t even close to it being an industry with low barriers of entry. Until we have better wireless technologies, we are probably stuck burying fiber which Google has shown is enormously expensive.
what you describe can't exist in the free market. else you would either need to allow that anybody can dig holes to build a network or you need to oust the network from the ISPs and sell them to anybody who wants to resell it for common rates. no country that I'm aware of supports any of the above.
btw. I live in germany and a long time ago the government in germany owned the lines, however they outsourced it in favor of "innovation".
What market? I recently had fiber optic service installed in my building, raising my broadband choice to a whopping two companies. That is not remotely enough to talk about a market.
"There simply needs to be fewer barriers to entry for new ISPs to come into the market."
If you want a market-based approach, you need to have line sharing rules. We used to have that in America with DSL, but the Bush administration ended that and left us with the current situation of local monopolies. I would be all for Pai's proposal if it included a reinstatement of line sharing requirements for ISPs, but as it stands Pai has proposed almost nothing to foster the competition needed for a market to exist, and has instead lied about the broadband choices available to Americans.
Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers must treat all data on the Internet the same, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
The government is not controlling the price, they are mandating that ISPs treat all network traffic the same.
For all intents and purposes, data traffic is exactly the same: with the majority being TCP and a smither of UDP.
That's about it as far as your ISP should be concerned.
You personally might want to divide it up further between bt, streaming, messengers, http, etc.
But the result of such a division for an ISP means that they get to decide which networking applications you get to run on your computer. That is likely what they want: their own walled garden.
Whether all these applications use the same port and protocol is an irrelevant distinction here. Arguing against net neutrality is arguing in favour of an external agent determining which networking applications you can run on your own hardware to connect to the world.
There is no "both sides of the argument" or "Devil's advocate's arguments " here to be explored for the more critical minds, and there is no "Internet Freedom" to be gained by any definition of those words.
Net Neutrality is a fundamental tenet of the Internet. A network without it is simply not the Internet, technically, morally, and historically.
No competent network technician would mark VOIP the same as Torrent traffic.
Now, all Internet traffic may not be handled in such a manner but that's another matter.
Should I be charged differently for using that bandwidth to view facebook instead of your personal blog?
Useful when you want to get a sneak peak at the propaganda campaigns, and internet brigade tactics and talking points that are about to be rolled out against the public (or A/B test some of your own), but not so much for serious debate.
Like 99% of the stuff you see on there is going to be deceptively worded or presented, or just factually incorrect. If you're letting 4chan influence your opinion, you're using it wrong.
The REAL net neutrality that needs to happen is in the search market. There are about 20 billion search terms now that will ONLY lead me to Etsy.com as the top search result. They didn't pay anyone for that, just people promoting Etsy. Same for Facebook, Amazon, Wikipedia, and a few others. What we have is a set of large websites that have taken over all result sets. It's actually impossible to start a new business that has a shopping cart outside of Etsy.com, Amazon.com, etc... How are we all allowing that to continue.