EU Regulator: Proposal to force websites to pay telcos puts Internet at risk | Hacker News Reader

EU Regulator: Proposal to force websites to pay telcos puts Internet at risk

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

103 pointsjacobobryant40 comments

Link to archive: https://archive.ph/2022.11.29-005636/https://cyberlaw.stanfo...

Everyone already pays for their Internet access.

In some cases, two networks will judge that their exchange is close enough to equal value that they will have a settlement-free peering in some locations at some speed.

Every few years, an MBA at a telco decides that there is rent to extract, often because they don't understand how the Internet works.

They are always wrong.

MBAs eating the world again.

The purpose of an ISP is to allow a connection between customers and websites. Why should only one side pay?

Both sides already pay? Customers pay for internet access. Websites run on servers which are using some form of internet being paid for.

If there is an ISP giving out free bandwidth somewhere, do please let me know.

Cloudflare R2 gives out essentially free bandwidth, if that's the kind of thing you meant?

R2 is object storage and only part of a functional website

Of course. But it will provide you with free egress for files, a game changer for many projects. I've seen some projects from the community be several orders of magnitude cheaper to run than on competing services.

Definitely worth exploring if you have any kind of large files to distribute, which seems like it might be the goal given the question was about bandwidth specifically.

What are you talking about? Website operators already pay for hosting, which at large scale includes paying for your bandwidth aswell.

Some platforms may use their own scale to provide some form of free hosting, such as Cloudflare pages, but at the end of the day this is just moving costs around between users, and Enterprise customers still pick up their hosting bill.

You think a website just magically connects to the Internet for free?

Top websites should have to release their tax returns so we can see whether they pay.

https://www.vultr.com/pricing/#direct-connect

- and -

At what rate is overage bandwidth billed? Overage rates for bandwidth utilization in excess of instance allocation vary due to differences in regional costs. Overage rates are applied based on instance location according to the following list:

$0.01/GB Overage Rate Amsterdam, NL Atlanta, Georgia Chicago, Illinois Dallas, Texas Frankfurt, DE Honolulu, Hawaii London, UK Los Angeles, California Madrid Miami, Florida New York (NJ) Paris, France Seattle, Washington Silicon Valley, California Stockholm, Sweden Toronto, Canada Warsaw, Poland $0.03/GB Overage Rate Singapore Tokyo, Japan $0.05/GB Overage Rate Bangalore, India Delhi NCR, India Melbourne, Australia Mexico City, Mexico Mumbai, India Seoul, South Korea Sydney, Australia São Paulo, Brazil

Content providers have to pay for transit (although they try to peer for as much as possible, which is very much mutually beneficial for all parties who agree to do it). So both sides absolutely do already pay! All these kind of proposals are just attempts at double-dipping by ISPs.

Bell Canada seems to be doing quite well at it. They reabsorbed the Bell Aliant assets in Ontario a few years ago and removed themselves from TorIX (the TORonto Internet eXchange, the largest IX in Ontario of which Bell Aliant was a member). The only place most Canadian ISPs can peer with Bell is in the US (in New York or Chicago, iirc). It's sad that local peering is not a thing in many jurisdictions. Bonus side effect: traffic crossing international borders is free to snoop on for the spooks!

Wait, why though? What are they winning by not peering locally? I would've thought it would increase costs.

They probably are peering locally, just not publicly.

In Germany the largest ISP Deutsche Telekom is not peering publicly in any meaningful manner. To get access to their customers you need to pay them a lot of money and connect to their network at some remote locations. It's the reason why YouTube was laggy for years for the majority of German customers until Google finally caved.

They do peer locally, but of course they charge for it. It's all PNI, and quite expensive. For the longest time, Cloudflare routes from Toronto went down to Chicago.

Any ISP that wants to peer with Bell either pays them to connect directly, or pays Bell for transport links to IXes in the United States. It's a win-win if you're Bell!

Rudolf van der Berg [1] delivered a good talk on the topic "Big Telco vs Big Tech, why telcos want money for traffic (again)" [2]

He has a good, dry humor and some very valid points on why this is just the same old story as it ever was.

[1] https://twitter.com/internetthought

[2] https://youtu.be/WNk4QzPL4jU

Clickbait title really is the title on the article but it is bollocks (spoiler: Internet not at risk):

"Europe’s top telecom regulator dealt a strong blow to Europe’s biggest telecoms in a report released in October, finding “no evidence” to justify the proposal from large broadband companies ... to force websites and apps to pay them."

It's like the old meme of Congress wanting to charge postage on email. It just won't die, then some ID10T type hears it as a TIL but thinks it's a good idea. lather, rinse, repeat

I think they quickly forget that without all those websites the telcos wouldn't have an internet business in the first place. Perhaps the telcos should pay the internet sites, after all - they are benefiting from all the content those web sites create.

oh, yes! you are right, this is a good one :)

Add to this we experimented for years how greedy the telco s can be!

So the customers are paying for access to the internet to access services and these isp want the services to pay to provide that same service?

Nevermind that the providers are potentially paying for the same internet access.

Even better. The customers are paying for access to the internet. The services are paying for access to the internet. By some convoluted logic the users ISP wants the services ISP to pay them too.

It's like paying to send text messages plus paying to receive text messages plus paying for other people to receive text messages.

Think we need more gen z politicians. This whole doesn’t understand how the internet works thing is getting old

It doesn't seem you've bothered to read the piece, or really even the title properly. The regulatory body in question is shutting down grubby ISPs.

The "politicians" being referenced are the ones on the European Commission that worked on and announced this law. It took a mass public outcry to get the EC to delay the law long enough for the regulatory body (BEREC) to issue this report. The report doesn't "shut down" efforts to pass this law, but hopefully will make it harder for the EC to push through.

Complaints about the politicians who put this forward in the first place seem entirely warranted.

Since when does gen z understand how internet works? You'd have better luck with millenials.

I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck. - Bill.

The myth that young people know more about the internet just because they grew up with it needs to die. It's just not true.

The average teen doesn't know more about technology than the average boomer does. Even a 2 y/o knows how to handle a smartphone and use apps, it's nothing special anymore.

Gen z will probably suck at this. Millennials will be best.

Gen z did grow with a walled internet (insta/snap/tiktok) and apps (uber/grab/…) that they might not appreciate why the Internet should be free.

Flip this around on the ISPs, no one is going to want to pay you for internet service if there arent interesting websites to visit...so the ISPs should pay each website that their users visit. Seems only fair since the product ISPs are offering is a conduit to the product customers actually want but dont currently have to pay for. It would make the Internet a lot less reliant on advertising.

I always encourage people to compare internet with water, electricity, sewage, gas and roads. These other networks are by comparison 1) incredibly expensive to build and 2) expensive to maintain and 3) incredibly cheap to use.

What is an ISP but a bunch of tiny switch boxes?

We can see it costs nothing to set up or maintain in how prices scale with purchase power:

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

At some point law makers should move in? I think the above proposal should make a good excuse for merciless price regulation.

Commercial lobby groups in politicial setting should be banned. Lobbyism is a form of slow corrruption. Democracy is here to serve the voice of the people not promote corporate interest first.

this has some Italian origin and links to a typical behavior you see there: doing business is hard, it is much easier to look at who is making money and pretend somehow a share,

Instead of properly investing in R&D you just look at who is making money: I've heard them saying: they make billions thanks to "our" cables, they have to give us some! Lobbies have been working on this for years: now that they saw that even gas can be declared green, or that you can turn the EU in a guns buyer in few months (so that, somehow, anything goes) they are kicking harder.

A good term to be used to denigrate this attitude is to use the Italian slang 'pizzo', so I would call it: the 'pizzo EU proposal'

Website wouldn't load for me... cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2rSRyD...

ironic.

did you pay the bill?

mikysco paid mikysco's ISP, but unfortunately cyberlaw.stanford.edu didn't pay mikysco's ISP, so mikysco's ISP blocked it.

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