Hacker News Reader

Comment by subtra3t | Hacker News Reader

Iirc they also limited data speed on netflix and other ott platforms, no?

yes as I understand it netflix is or has sent some ISPs "protection" money, specifically Comcast. https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...

If you value the internet at large, never get your service from Comcast.

Tell PA to stop granting them a local monopoly in my area then. I'll gladly switch when I have an alternative that works. I have nothing here in rural western PA except comcast and they have just been jacking the cost up year after year and sucking more and more.

Interesting as this talking about performance degradation and payments from netflix to comcast in Dec 2013-Jan 2014. Nextflix happened to raise prices of their service a few months later in Apr 2014...

Exactly. When Netflix pays extortion to ISPs that money comes from your pocket, not Netflix's profits.

And when Netflix stops paying money to ISPs, the ISPs will get that money from... your pocket.

All of this is fungible and companies compete for the marginal dollar of revenue. Despite the wishcasting of central planners, there's no magic way to manifest money out of the pockets of one class of corporations without the system shifting to a new equilibrium.

The issue is that now smaller ISPs or honest ISPs have to raise their advertised prices compared to Comcast.

It's a self-contained lesson in corporation taxation, I suppose.

In the neighborhood where I live, there are exactly two choices: Comcast or AT&T. Every time I think I have a grip of which one is more evil, I am proven wrong.

(Starlink is not an option, for a huge number of reasons that I won't get in to here. T-Mobile has an attractive-looking wireless 5G package for home Internet, but hide the fact that you're getting third-world service via CGNAT, which means it is really only useful for content consumption.)

Their big argument there was around asymmetry. "Netflix sends us a huge amount of data. That's not what peering was made for - it was meant to be more equal sharing of traffic. That's why we want to charge them."

So how about "We send BackBlaze, Dropbox, Acronis, etc., huge volumes of our customer's backup data, so we should be paying them"?

Hah. Not likely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com