House of Representatives Passes Net Neutrality Protections
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https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/438133-mcconnell-net-neu...
Dropping the sarcasm now, because it's obnoxious, but honestly, it's silly to pretend nobody knows what's going on here. Frankly though singling out ISPs here is silly, I'm sure most big businesses do exactly this same thing and we all let it happen so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So obviously it’s way easier to hold an extremely narrow point of view because it’s so easy to get campaign money for it.
Against net neutrality is not "an extremely narrow point of view".
ISPs on the other hand have few other issues quite as important.
Netflix, Google/YouTube, Amazon/Twitch etc. will be able to afford to pay ISPs extra for the fast lanes.
Startups and companies that could never take off because of appearing slow to their potential users cannot afford lobbyists and political donations.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000000461&ty...
This is less ideology and more corruption.
1. Don't know what net-neutrality really is
2. Are against it because their "team" is against it.
3. Or are getting paid to oppose it
Net neutrality is a push by the big corporations to avoid having to pay for the pipeline they use. Google, Netflix, and the like that use huge amounts of bandwidth. You are witnessing rent seeking 101, the corporations on one side are trying to get regulations to help themselves.
Carrying the traffic from the peering exchange to the end customer is what the end customer is paying the ISP for. Charging for that again is double dipping, using the leverage created by the last mile monopoly to charge for what has already been paid for.
I must say that my impression of the issue is totally opposite, because to me the idea of net neutrality makes no technical sense whatsoever. There's a multitude of reasons one might want to shape the traffic.
This is a bit of an oversimplification and the principles behind it are a bit more nuanced than presented here (regulatory capture is a thing and it can suck), but it's a good first approximation.
If anyone is interested in getting into the weeds, this conversation gave me a more nuanced view on the subject:
You're talking about transit providers like Cogent and Level 3, which it doesn't apply to any more than it does to Google.
It also applies to Google to the extent that they have Google Fiber last mile customers.
It's true that GCE and AWS have expensive bandwidth prices, but then buy from someone else. It's not as if they have no effective competition, unlike Comcast.
The only way a new company without a massive nationwide network could compete with Google or Amazon is if they could pay a carrier for prioritized service. If you prevent the carriers from offering prioritized service then you are reducing competition because Google and Amazon can and do offer this.
Google and Amazon are far more dangerous monopolists than the traditional telcos. They are already vertically integrated hardware/software/media/everything companies. If some innovative startup builds a killer product that requires their network to function then they will either buy it, or create their own competitive product and kill it.
AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are relatively small companies now and they are in direct competition with Google and Amazon on many fronts, including this one. The Google version of net-neutrality is nothing more than an attempt to stifle what little competition they have left.
You're confusing two different things. The reason companies build networks with many edges is the speed of light. If the server is in California and the customer is in New York, you're looking at about 100ms of round trip latency, because physics. Putting a server in the Northeast can get the RTT to that customer down to around 20ms. There is nothing the ISP can do about this; if the server is thousands of miles away, you can't change the speed of light. (Another reason to do that is then you don't need as much long-distance fiber capacity, but that's a cost savings and doesn't really affect performance one way or the other.)
Moreover, small customers with latency-sensitive applications can do the same thing as Google and Amazon -- use a CDN. There are multiple competitive CDNs with edges all over the place that will cache your content closer to your users.
By contrast, if the ISP's network isn't exceeding capacity, ISP prioritization does nothing. A well-provisioned network forwards 100% of packets immediately. There is nothing to prioritize when nothing has to be dropped.
Now suppose you want paid prioritization. The first thing you've done is encourage the ISPs to underprovision their networks sufficiently to cause significant congestion, because they can't charge to relieve congestion if there isn't any. So yay, now the ISP purposely saturates their uplink and the default type of network connection you get is one with 90ms of bufferbloat and significant packet loss, that way they can charge extra to make it the way it should have been to begin with.
Now you can pay the ISP to put it back the way it was. But that isn't any advantage over Google or Amazon because they can do the same thing, only they can negotiate a better price than you because they're bigger. (They still don't like it because they'd rather not pay monopoly rents to Comcast at all than have to pay $X even if smaller competitors have to pay $2X.)
The only thing paid prioritization gets the little guy is a bill from the ISP -- from every ISP -- and a correspondingly even more competitive disadvantage against larger competitors with more leverage. Along with more transaction costs, because good luck negotiating as a small business with every ISP everywhere.
> Google and Amazon are far more dangerous monopolists than the traditional telcos.
Google and Amazon are not monopolists in this context at all. Google has a dominant position in search and Amazon has a dominant position in online retail, but that has very little to do with networks or data centers. They have no monopolies there -- they compete with each other, along with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, the ISPs themselves and a zillion different smaller providers.
both things are true. having edge nodes cuts latency between the client and edge, but it also allows priority for longer distances if you have a private network connecting your edges.
> There is nothing to prioritize when nothing has to be dropped.
Prioritization is absolutely required for any safety critical application (remote control in a bunch of different fields). No matter how over-provisioned a network is it can always be flooded, and for a safety critical applications that is unacceptable.
For the high value applications of the future guaranteed low latency delivery is an absolute requirement. You cannot get that with "net neutrality" rules.
The only reason to impose rules that make next gen applications impossible on public networks is to decrease competition for private networks.
Paying for data would disrupt Google, i.e. it would kill youtube (owned by google) overnight or at least far reaching changes in it. Facebook also, spending 3-4 hours a day on it, and paying ? Noow, wouldn't it be better to spend 20 minutes there and then browse for other locations? Just to spend your expensive online time more wisely. With free cost of bytes send developers, and I'm sorry to say it, I'm a developer too though, can be lazy. No optimization what-so-ever. Building websites to make sure they are small, load fast, put important content up-front, don't waste users time... now how this could be bad?
Net Neutrality is the step in the future. Future of Googles, Twitters and Facebooks, Amazons, 3-4 oligopolies taking all traffic, killing all the innovation and competition in the process. This isn't the future I hoped for. I hoped for neevr ending 1990s internet. With dozens of websites I visited regularly. And these dozens changing every year too. Future of the internet looks so regulated now. The last step will be the Government taking over, or rather regulating, FANG. This is death of the innovation for this Industry.
And make no mistake: if Republicans won't pass Net Neutrality then Democrats will surely do it. But still they seem to recognize the same problem, Ms. Elizabeth Warren wants to break-down Google, Twitter, Facebook into smaller competing companies -- employing anti-trust laws against them via Department of Justice action. So I think we see the problem on both sides of the aisle. The thing is that solving the problem of big corporations governing the Internet like their own turf might be better done via making time on the internet or data sent paid again. Just seems more natural than taking Judical action against the offenders.
We accept metering for electricity and water because human intuitions still apply; this isn't the case for data. Two Web pages that appear similar could have vastly different transfer sizes. I'm reminded of the criticism of Xanadu that said "imagine an odometer that's taking money out of your pocket; now imagine it turning really fast".
My definition is roughly "price you pay only depends on how much data you want and how fast you want it, not what that data is or who it comes from."
So metering the internet is totally in line with net neutrality, as long as you don't discriminate and meter some websites at a higher price than others. In fact, this definition pretty much fits everything you say is good and avoids everything you say is bad. But you seem to say net neutrality does the opposite. Now I don't know the details of this exact bill but can you explain what you think it's doing and how that relates to your post.
The vast majority of an ISP's costs are independent of usage. The actual incremental bandwidth cost is below $1/TB of transfer and is constantly declining. And if that's what they were charging, probably nobody would care. But if that's what they were charging then they would probably make less doing the charging than it costs to do the accounting. Also, customers hate metering in general and will happily pay $5/month extra to not have to worry about it even when their actual metered bill would only have averaged $1/month extra, which across all customers more than pays for that one guy who pays the extra $5/month and then uses $100 worth.
But that isn't why metering is imposed, and those aren't the prices charged. Because the point of metering is to exempt things from it, as a way to favor those things. If you have to pay $10/GB of transfer for Netflix but not for cable TV, advantage cable TV. If it wasn't for that, metering wouldn't be used on wired connections.
But they will and do. Bandwidth caps and overage charges are a key way corporations like Comcast put fear uncertainty and doubt on watching things like Netflix. What if you go over? You can't with their Cable TV offering, but you can with Netflix, a competitor to Comcast.
What you will see is the corporations, and their proxies, will scream about the inability to "innovate". What they mean is the inability to find new ways to discriminate and double-dip.
They explicitly do NOT want a water bill system, when they can charge you much much more for water that comes out of the bathroom faucet than the garden hose.
What you describe from the early internet days is simply the transition from data plans that charged by units of time instead of a flat fee.
Yes, Google and Facebook being so large is concerning, but it has nothing to do with this subject.
If anything, the entrenched players are helped by a lack of Net Neutrality. Say Facebook makes a payment to ISPs and suddenly all it's competitor websites are unreliable and slow to load.