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Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

And even if big services like Netflix can afford to pay to play and make it all transparent to the customer, there will be hidden costs to play. Expect that that services like Netflix will have to raise their rates more and more frequently to cover the expenses, all inaccessible to consumer-choice in a direct way.

The consumer can no longer choose an ISP on their individual performance separately from various internet services and their performance. The bundling of agreements will increasingly reduce the ability of the market to deliver efficiently.

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Hopefully services can charge differential pricing. I imagine a list like the below would be pretty effective in ISP subscriptions, at least where people actually have a choice.

- Comcast $20 - ATT $15 - Other $10

That introduces significant cost and complexity into their customer relationship, and that kind of public callout would also likely be negotiated out / disallowed in some hypothetical Netfix subscriber ISP agreement.

Edit: It also a gatekeeping hurdle that smaller businesses would have much more difficulty crossing than large established players.

>And even if big services like Netflix can afford to pay to play and make it all transparent to the customer, there will be hidden costs to play. Expect that that services like Netflix will have to raise their rates more and more frequently to cover the expenses, all inaccessible to consumer-choice in a direct way.

But right now the ISPs are paying for Netflix's bandwidth and that's being passed to customers in their ISP's bill. I'd rather only Netflix customers have to fund Netflix's service.

Netflix pays for bandwidth on their end, and I pay for it on mine.

And everyone in the middle pays for it. Again, ISPs are forced to upgrade to deal with Netflix traffic. Saying that isn't the case and the market sets the price is willfully ignorant. There's a reason there are no more small ISPs available in the urban areas where they used to be plentiful (in the late 90s to early 2000s), but even if you keep pretending it's a series of tubes, someone has to pay for that capacity who isn't sharing the revenue.

If they have to upgrade, then the bandwidth they sold to end customers wasn't there was it? Small ISPs have been pushed out often by legal manoeuvres by large mega-ISPs.

Netflix pays for Netfix's bandwith, I pay for my ISPs bandwith, and w/o Net Neutrality, the ISP charges Netflix again for transport across the ISPs network.

What are they charging the first time for that isn't "transport across the ISPs network"?

Without a rule saying you can't charge for the same thing twice, there's only law, convention, or competition to prevent it from happening. Since the ISP industry is famously uncompetitive, we're left with law and convention. Now, just convention.

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