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Comment by slaymaker1907 | Hacker News Reader

slaymaker1907

Some applications want extremely low latency compared to pretty much anything else such as cloud gaming. Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently. It's kind of like how when ordering stuff online, sometimes you don't care if it takes 3 weeks to arrive but other times you want same day shipping. It would be a bad experience if USPS was forced to only offer one priority class for delivery since people ok with slower delivery would be forced to pay for faster service than they need and people wanting faster delivery wouldn't have that option.

However, I think rules could be put in place to prevent the anti-competitive practices without limiting the legitimate use cases for going against net neutrality.

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> Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently.

This is not convincing to me at all. ISPs could have supported low latency internet for everything, not just for gaming. If latency is too low then it's because the large ISPs are purposefully doing a bad job of upgrading to fiber and expanding fiber to places without internet access. Fiber would allow ISPs to provide service for cheap and still profit in the long term [1]. Subsidy fraud is as normal as breathing among large telecom companies such as AT&T [2], Comcast [3], and Verizon [4].

Internet bandwidth is not like shipping of physical goods. Sending twice the data doesn't cost the ISP twice the money, nor does it take twice the time. Data caps are artificial and unnecessary [5]. Any ISP trying to justify expensive, fast internet by bringing up metaphors of physical transfers and physical scarcity is lying to you.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/why-slow-networks-real...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too...

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con...

[4] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...

[5] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...]

You can believe whatever you like, but the fact is that it is may be expensive to get the necessary agreements on the backend for extremely low latency. I'm not talking about negotiating for 15ms, I'm talking about negotiating for 2ms latency.

> Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently.

Could you provide an example of how net neutrality might impact a companies ability to form peering relationships and/or raise the difficultly of securing reasonable/enforceable SLAs with service providers?

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