If they want "premium" routes for their MASSIVE traffic, they will have to pay to the ISPs. I think that's reasonable. Giving them premium routes for free would not be neutral, would it? ;)
ISPs should provide connection to the internet for their customers in exchange for a monthly bill. How they do that isn't the customer's concern and it shouldn't be Netflix's concern. The only ISP Netflix should be paying is their own link to the internet (AWS last I heard)
Side note, Netflix isn't using any traffic. They're not sending me a UHD video stream unsolicited. I'm using the traffic.
Milk companies put their lorries in the highway to deliver their products. You're the one buying milk. Are you the one who's using the highways?
If Netflix wants a premium highway let them pay for it. Otherwise they will have to use the normal highway, the one that's worked fine until Netflix decided to fill it with lorries.
Those highways between the farm and the neighborhood, though… Anyway, either the analogy breaks or it’s onto something!
Sidebar: I do wish HN had a rule against these kinds of analogies as they do other reddit-esque puns and the likes. The internet is not like a milk truck, it's not like a series of tubes, it's like 1s and 0s being communicated across a worldwide mesh of cables of varying material under the control of varying entities
We're all at least vaguely techy enough that we're on HN, we can understand at least the basics. Lets talk about what it is, not what it's like.
BOB pays ALICE for a connection at fixed uplink/downlink parameters to the public collective of interconnected autonomous networks commonly referred to as INTERNET.
BOB uses the service as advertised to connect to CAROL’s autonomous network.
ALICE fails to adequately peer with CAROL’s autonomous network and calls it a feature.
BOB can’t switch ISPs because ALICE has monopoly on the service where he lives.
ALICE tries to muddy the waters with nonsensical milk lorry analogies that have nothing to do with fiber optic cables to maintain its monopoly and further leverage it to run protection racket on CAROL.
Sounds about right?
When BOB is paying ALICE for the service, he is implicitly paying for whatever “highway” connects his house and CAROL’s milk depots. Everything between the two points is ALICE’s responsibility. If ALICE doesn’t like that BOB mostly orders his milk from CAROL’s then she shouldn’t offer the service as supporting fixed amount of lorries per hour.
It also works the other way around: CAROL does not want to pay ALICE to have premium access.
Also, laughable that you call me a shill. Seems like the most used argument when you don't agree with someone. I'm not even American. So your "BOB can't switch ISPs" does not even apply here.
How does this logically follow? CAROL advertises fixed downlink/uplink connection to any autonomous network. How is it “premium access” to deliver on what you are actually advertising?
It’s like selling SSD drives and then saying oh yeah but if you store video files in this particular video codec they will play at only 15 fps unless the codec vendor pays us extra for a firmware update.
> So your "BOB can't switch ISPs" does not even apply here.
It applies to the particular Netflix/neutrality debate.
As others have mentioned there is no extra "premium" access needed.
Netflix pays for their whole upstream, probably a bit extra for redundant uplinks etc.
Customers pay for the entire downstream.
Everyone in between just have to accept the bits and forward them within reasonable time (Netflix has some caching in the client so it shouldn't be to hard unless someone has oversold their capacity.)
> Also, laughable that you call me a shill.
I looked at your recent comment history and I agree.
That said you really seem to defend an undefendable practice to the point where I understand where people get that idea from.
So I'd rather guess you enjoy annoying people on the internet to see them get mad.
BOB could just switch to using DAVE’s ISP service, who would be happy to connect him with CAROL’s AN without any throttling.
They get paid by customer to deliver bits.
The only extra burdens I see is the "burden" of 1) not double dipping and 2) not overselling their offerings.
All the work to make sure it comply with net neutrality.
not taking extra steps to throttle Netflix,
i.e.
the burden of not double dipping.
I think few people are arguing that Netflix should get special treatment, only that:
* ISPs should treat all bits the same (unless I as the receiver has asked for something else).
* ISPs should have enough capacity to serve their customers.
- basic honesty (not pretending they don't get paid)
- and not extorting money from other companies by keeping said customers hostage
shouldn't be considered a disadvantage?
From oil companies, to fishing companies, to waste disposal to whatever, most companies from a purely technical viewpoint would be more than happy to get rid of regulations that control what and how they can do business. Yet, we have those regulations in place for a reason.
In this case we simply ask that ISPs deliver the bits we paid for. I don't want Comcast treating my bits differently anymore than I want my mail carrier to hold my packages ransom because they seem important and I'd probably pay more for them.
My mail carrier doesn't read my mail. Comcast shouldn't either.
Ie, in a purely technical sense corporations shouldn't want any laws/regulations. But that's not really a relevant fact to anything, is it?
Yes, I think that is the right way to think about things here.
As to the rest of your comments - Imagine if Amazon could pay the USDOT for special lane on the highway.
The Netflix route is using too much bandwidth? Then upgrade it, that's what your customer pay you for. For sure there will be route that will be unequal, some too big, some too small, but that's part of ISP job to make sure its impact is minimal.
The only problem is if the ISP can't actually deliver the bandwidth that they promised in exchange for taking the consumers money. That's called a scam.
That is fair.
They shouldn't pay for our downlinks, that we've already paid for.
That would be double dipping or something by our isps.
What I don't get is, both Netflix and I pay for bandwidth. As far as consumer bandwidth (mine) is concerned, why should Comcast care if it's 1TB/month coming from a thousand sites or just one. I paid for the data, I paid for the bandwidth, give me my bandwidth.
Likewise, Netflix paid for their own too, with whoever is their ISP.
Conceptually the bandwidth has to be paid for, and I could see your argument if I only paid a portion of what it costs to transfer the data.. but that is a broken model if that's the way it is. I want to pay for data, and I shouldn't have to get Movies.com to pay Comcast to serve me movies. I paid Comcast for data, it doesn't matter who it's from. My data is my data.
Is this wrong somehow to you? Honestly it's a strange argument from you, I have a hard time understanding. Like, if you run a website and I visit your website, do you think you should have to pay my ISP for data I'm downloading from your site? That's a bizarre system in my mind.
If Netflix wants to pay extra to deal with saturation they are more than welcome too but if ISPs are denying their subscribers access to a service, even when spare bandwidth was available and sitting unutilized then its time for pitchforks to come out
https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/building-fast-com-4857fe...
Shaking down the destination, because the ISP controls the customer is wrong on many levels.