Net neutrality gives “free” Internet to Netflix and Google, ISP claims
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In other words the private electric company being compared to that has a vertical monopoly on both facets production and distribution basically doesn't exist.
An odd argument by an account created right after this story was posted...
> Bad analogy, since the ISP lays a (figurative and real) pipe between Netflix and the user; this isn't correct for electricity.
Most readers can just glance out the window and see various manholes stamped with the name of a power company. These are the very real pipes you claim do not exist.
Your argument is blatantly false.
Now you came up with a new argument: that Netflix "pushes" bytes. I have news for you: Netflix is already paying for internet connectivity to "push" these bytes. Anyone renting even a single internet server does.
Are you just throwing stuff out there, hoping something sticks?
Together with the suspicious timing of your account creation, you don't seem very objective or genuine.
Now the ISPs want paid again to provide the service they're already being paid to provide at both ends of the pipe, to make sure the pipe works properly? Extortion plain and simple.
So if you view "the internet" as a singular type of utility like electricity then the analogy works. It's also how most people (correctly as it happens) think about it. IF the internet didn't behave that way it would be a very different place, where things like cloud providers, emails, and link aggregates wouldn't and couldn't exist.
The real problem is you only have one choice of ISP in most areas. If the ISP markets were competitive this likely wouldn't be a problem, because all the ISPs would be offering "the internet". But now the ISPs are trying to use their market position to extract additional money. It's called economic rent, and we've basically known it's a bad idea (economically and morally) since feudal lords were doing it (cough a certain tea party).
They are also then free to peer directly with Netflix, who have an open peering policy: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/peering-locations/
If you're pushing enough traffic, Netflix will also send you an Open Connect caching appliance for free: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances-overview/
Greed. Maximize shareholder value. So they'll use circular, trump-like arguments to justify killing net neutrality.
These ISPs conveniently forget or omit the fact that without Netflix or YouTube, most customers would be fine with 2-5Gb a month of data - i.e. they'll make much less from their customers.
As solar gets cheaper and cheap that will obviously impact times when excess power is available (actually already is).
Report of the rates for lighting and power service. National Electric Light Association., 1903:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu56609884;view=...
See for example page 9:
"Norwich, Connecticut:
17.5 cents per kWh for incandescent lighting. 10 cents per kWh for power. Discounts ranging from 5% on lighting bills of $10 to 20% on bills over $20. Discounts on power bills range from 10% on bills of $10 to 70% on bills of $400 to $600."
Note that the electrical lighting prices start higher and also have lower discounts for high-volume consumption.
Fortunately, the adoption of standardized electrical outlets made this sort of price discrimination less practical over time. Also fortunately, the providers didn't have any sort of fancy Deep Power Inspection systems to determine when a consumer buying "power" was beggaring the provider by converting power to light.
If I pay for 100kbps internets then who cares where the data comes from since I'm paying for the service and not the origin?
--edit--
Though if they oversubscribe their tubes I can see how they'd have an argument since they aren't truly fulfilling their contractual terms to all customers at all times but that's more a case of their problem than the Google or Netflix.
I don't know how this works with e.g. LTE, but I had a little experience with cheaper-grade WiFi networks that had lots of active users. Some stuff (especially early uTP traffic, when it was a high-PPI network killer) made service severely degrade.
Still, charging the source isn't going to solve the last-mile congestion issues. At most it gives them extra "free" money to upgrade their network (or give bigger CxO bonuses) so they don't have to charge their customers more and risk loosing them to the competition.
E.g. with WiFi just throwing in more APs may actually make things worse. Better hardware is a way, but up to a certain extent, then you hit the ceiling and need a new technology. Like the only working solution for a noisy environment is to just forget about the 2.4GHz band and go to the wider and less busy 5GHz. My (uneducated) guess is this is somewhat similar for stuff like LTE, too.
I don't know how high the demand is, though. It could be hitting the ceiling, or it could be nowhere near that (and issues could have a different cause).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_preemption#Field_preem...
The point the ISPs are missing is that this is the opposite of progress. A society does not prosper when everyone is paying the maximum amount they would be willing to pay. The opposite is true. Society prospers when they unlock discretionary income by spending less on something they would have paid more for...
Furthermore and to that same point; the purpose of classifying something as a utility is to ensure they leave money on the table. If everyone was allowed to charge exactly what something was worth water would be infinitely more expensive.
Actually if someone is paying the maximum amount they are willing to pay it maximizes incentive for an innovator to create efficiencies that bring the cost down for someone. That doesn't of course guarantee progress, because structural barriers and rent-seeking might kneecap that progress.
If people are paying the lowest possible cost for something, then there is not progress, though there might be prosperity. (Generally speaking though social prosperity is destroyed by other things, like subsidies for the wealthy).
Internet companies ban service to those ISPs.
What use is an ISP if the internet companies refuse to serve it?
It would make any ISP deeply reluctant to be caught throttling.
Frontier is a textbook example of why we need net neutrality.
Companies providing services pay as well; they also have to buy internet service for a given bandwidth, and their contracts are more explicit about total data usage.
My understanding is that the difficult bit is that the consumer's ISP and the service provider's ISP are often not the same company. So, Netflix is paying their ISP a ton of money for all the data they're sending, but my ISP doesn't have any contract with Netflix even though they're carrying the data to bring it to me. My ISP finds that unfair. But here's the thing: I'm already paying for MY service, which I'm using to get that data. As long as I'm within my contractual limits, everything I'm doing is paid for, and my ISP has no basis for crying about not getting a share of what Netflix pays their ISP.
This is all just a cover story to hide the fact that my ISP wants legal cover to offer their own service that competes with Netflix, to make it cheaper and crappier than Netflix, and to compete by charging their customers more for Netflix's "premium" bandwidth, while offering their own service for a "discount" bandwidth.
Whether or not this is "bogus" is political economics.
ISPs who were zero rating partner content now have to either zero rate the entire category (therefore putting spotify and itunes and play music in the same bucket), or not zero rate. This appears to be the "subsidization" argument, and it's nonsense, since the ISP could just zero rate nothing.
Frontier has made a claim that this will:
>threatens to disrupt the incredibly successful Internet system that fuels business, innovation and economic growth in California.
Yet, there is no evidence provided for this claim and nothing to substantiate it.
It goes on to say that the bill will:
> it will harm consumers, impose complex layers of costly regulation and delay broadband deployment in California, especially in rural areas.
Once again without any actual explanation as to how this will happen, especially when Net Neutrality formerly was the standard.
The entire statement from Frontier begins with:
> Frontier Communications supports an open Internet where providers do not block, throttle, or interfere with customers' ability to access and navigate the Internet.
Which is basically what the bill reinforces -- so the question from a simple person like myself is, "If you believe in not blocking or throttling or interfering with someone's ability to access/navigate the Internet, then how exactly will a law meant to prevent such things affect your business?"
To get specifically to the question of "Free Internet for Netflix, et. al.", again, where is the argument? This is a statement made by Frontier without anything to substantiate it.
Frontier is welcome to make an argument, and it would be interesting to hear -- maybe there is a case to be made (I have no love for Netflix, can't even use them in the country I currently live in), but hearing such statements makes me suspicious, regardless of who issues them. And living in a country where ISPs charge far less and offer far more than most US ISPs, these kind of statements from an ISP make me really suspicious.
Frontier may indeed have a point, but they have not made it.
[1] - https://frontiercommunications.nationbuilder.com
[2] - https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
edit: formatting and added last sentence to the second-to-last paragraph.
They're saying they support something that everyone wants (basicaly, net neutrality) while not really wanting it to pass, but are arguing that the only way to implement it is to do things that completely undermine it. It's a common tactic I've seen other companies use in other fields too. Basically a "we want to redefine what <blank> is in such a way that it suits us and undermines what everyone else thinks <blank> should be."
If Frontier decided to make a youtube alternative, they could decide that now consumers have to pay for the cost of youtube data while their own service cost is covered by them with no cost to the consumer. And now we've come full circle to a non-neutral net.
I'm just trying to say that "net neutrality" already has a political definition that isn't the only way to interpret those words, so its probably fair for the opposition party to try and redefine it. However I also agree that trying to quibble about definitions is usually not a good way make an argument convincing.
I'm not completely naive here -- I get that likely it's just ISPs wanting to ensure that all revenue streams remain open regardless of whether the current landscape allows them to utilize them or not, but it's so incredibly frustrating to read a statement like what Frontier put out and to walk away with absolutely nothing from it.
Frontier put forward 180 words with absolutely no content to them -- there is no statement or idea presented except "we don't want this bill", and then a bunch of empty claims that read like virtually every political speech. ("We love freedom, small business, and apple pie")
There is a business decision behind this and it would be very refreshing to just know what that decision is. It is impossible to agree with Frontier or any ISP's resistance to Net Neutrality when all you get are headline blurbs and there is no understanding of their position. I understand the polemic of this, but it's still frustrating nonetheless as there can't even be a discussion on Frontier's position except for the fact that they don't want Net Neutrality. It reminds me of a child's tantrum, except with children, at least they have the excuse that they lack the ability and skill to articulate why they want or don't want something.
The ISP has likely already been paid by Netflix to position hardware to make access have less latency, and less downtime.
Now they would also like the user to pay them to access that equipment, despite being paid by the user to supply access to everyone.
Imagine if your electric company charged different rates because of the brand of electric car you charged. Sure, they can charge more per kWh based on time of day, total household usage, or total network availability of power at the moment, but charging more (or less) per kWh going into a Tesla than a Leaf would give that electric company monopoly too much power to pick winners and losers.
I like to think of ISP deep packet inspection using the same analogy; I for one would not like my power company to know the make and model of everything I have plugged in in my house, beyond total usage it’s really none of their business.
I recognize these aren’t perfect analogies but hope that they help get the point across.
There are almost no free markets anywhere in the world.
I don't like 'internet access' being conflated with 'high speed internet access'. Yes where I live comcast has a monopoly on the latter but I have 4-6 other cellular options ( in addition to comcast) for the former.
That is our collective check against over exploitation, abuse of position, hazards, snake oul, and other easily identified, harmful market antics.
maybe what can be sold successfully. I see lot of crap that never sells in the markets.
The rules permit that crap, risk / reward being left up to the merchant.
Then there are illegal markets. Still risk / reward, but operating more on norms and some contracts, of a sort.
I'd expect the primary audience for a hardcover conversion would be libraries-- many of the books in my local library have been rebound, probably because the original paperback covers weren't suitable for that level of usage.
>Requiring consideration, monetary or otherwise, from an edge provider, including, but not limited to, in exchange for any of the following:
>(A) Delivering Internet traffic to, and carrying Internet traffic from, the Internet service provider’s end users.
It's not clear to me if that prohibits charging an interconnection fee (often charged at a per port rate), or just prohibits charging based on bandwidth used. It doesn't appear to require offering interconnection to edge providers either. It may be unlawful to discontinue existing edge provider interconnects, but it doesn't seem unlawful to simply never upgrade anything.
Generally speaking, ISPs tend to have congestion in two places -- at or near the last mile, and where they connect to other networks (transit, peering, etc). Interconnections with edge providers helps with congestion to other networks, but depending on the size of the ISPs and the traffic flows, ISPs may have been charging someone for that flow, or using that flow to justify settlement free peering with a larger network. Historic norms are that when data flows are unbalanced by a significant amount, the sending network pays for the bandwidth; but also historically, most ISPs were using some amount of paid transit to receive some of this traffic. Early content networks were able to negotiate settlement free peering by reducing the amount of paid transit the ISPs used. As residential ISPs consolidated, they have become vendors of paid transit themselves, so it's gotten pretty weird.
Anyway, not being able to charge edge providers for bandwidth, is certainly a negative for ISPs; and to the extent that they were raising revenue through that activity, I'm sure they'll pass along those revenue drops to customers in the form of higher bills or reduced capacity through limiting network upgrades, including interconnections to other networks. I don't think this is necessarily non-Netflix users subsidizing bandwidth, more it's that currently any revenue generated from Netflix bandwidth fees are subsidizing the rest of the network. Unfortunately, network neutrality does nothing to increase competition; and without competition, there's not much incentive to upgrade networks. The only positive in my book is increased transparency -- one can hope that because there are a few markets where ISPs compete, the transparency requirements will encourage them to operate in all of their markets with the same levels of service they provide to competitive markets.
Others have spoken about paying, but let me touch on one of the issues not talked about really so far:
Peering.
Netflix/Google/et al have peering points where they connect to networks like Frontier.
(Non-large customers peer with their own ISP and the ISP has peering points with other ISPs, etc).
These peering arrangements are either paid or settlement-free. That is, the two networks either pay each other for the traffic for money (details vary), or do it "settlement-free". It's called settlement free because there is no process needed to settle out the charges between the two peers.
One thing to realize is that large ISP's (AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon) have always had paid peering for larger customers. They are oligopolists, so they have no reason not to.
To be fair, some also have settlement free agreements, but they generally would not apply to most customers: https://www.xfinity.com/peering
To give a sense of scale: comcast has 40+ settlement free agreements in place, and 8000+ commercial agreements in place.
Additionally, netflix/google/etc often do provide benefits for settlement free peering.
For example, for netflix, if you allow them to peer settlement free, netflix will place caching appliances with significant portions of their content library, inside your datacenters.
https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
The alternative is generally "not peering with netflix".That alternative means the ISP is probably paying for the bandwidth transit (to someone) for their customers to view that netflix content.
Since netflix represents 30%+ of traffic at peak times, I would bet frontier/et al save more not paying for the netflix traffic.
Instead what you see is that they want, essentially, netflix to be forced to peer and pay. (like they are with oligopolists).
That way they pay essentially three times for the traffic - customer a, interconnect, customer b.
In practice, this game is mostly a waste of time. In truth, silicon valley could end this game end time it wanted by getting together.
The top 10-20 websites account for most of the time spent daily on the internet.
If 10 of them (Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc) got together and said "okay, great, there is no net neutrality, we are no longer serving comcast customers because it's too expensive", i'm pretty sure i know who would win that and how long it would take. (At worst, you end up with a net neutrality bill being approved!)
It's the lack of togetherness that enables the "divide and conquer" strategy.
(It would also be hilarious to watch comcast complain about unfair competition).
In Poland I would have unlimited voice and text, plus 10GB of LTE internet per month for about $10 fee. Here, similar plan costs $60, plus connection quality is bad, especially in the evenings, when the traffic is high, and there are areas where there's no signal at all.
Of course delivering traffic to the end customer is expensive. That's why customers are paying for that.
ISPs just want to get paid on both sides, and extract a new rent out of their (government created and paid for) monopolies.
The honest thing for the ISPs to do is either:
1. Build out the capacity to service the unlimited connections they advertise.
Or
2. Stop advertising unlimited connections.
I paying my ISP for a connection to a peering point, why should they be able to charge Amazon or Netflix different rates than Steam or Dropbox for the same total number of bytes transfered? I’ve already paid my ISP for both up and down transit to the peering point.
The service provider (Netflix, Amazon, Steam, etc) also pay someone for a connection to a peering point (or undergo that expense directly), so again, why should they have to pay my ISP for traffic that is already paid for by me and them?
I distinctly see the lack of a free ride anywhere in the system as it currently stands.
I pay my ISP for a 1 gbit connection to a peering point, I buy a 100mbit 8k HD video stream from a streaming service who is paying someone for transit from their datacenter to the peering point. Both sides pay the peering point mainenance fees. Where in this is someone getting a free ride?
Even if getting the fiber to near me cost $10k/mo and ~$1k/mo to attach my cables to all of the telephone poles in the neighborhood, it leaves me ~$5k in 'profit' (would come out as a wash after all of the other business expenses, drawing a salary and paying back initial capitial). I would make more money if I offered 100mbit plans for $60/mo and/or increased the contention ratio.
For the second case, the streaming service buys transit from a Tier 1 backbone provider[0]. In order to be Tier 1 you have to have connectivity to all of the major peering points on the internet. If I wanted really nice internet (eg: for gaming), I would buy transit from one or more Tier 1 providers.
More or less! If the ISP is already in the data center, they should freely peer with just about anyone that's providing data their users request. Even if they're not in that datacenter, datacenter bandwidth is cheap, and should be cheap, because it's very easy to get from a datacenter to the internet core in bulk.
> Basically you create 8K streaming service and DEMAND ISP to give you interconnect and they MUST deliver that content to the end users and recover cost on the end customer side.
If you get your data to the peering point, yes, that should be viable. That's explicitly what the end user pays for, everything between their modem and the internet.
A streaming company doing that is basically being their own ISP. And there's no reason for one ISP to pay another in this situation.
So it doesn't really make sense to argue that they should pay because of the ratio.
It's the end users that are responsible for the Netflix traffic, they're requesting every byte.