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Comment by burnte | Hacker News Reader

ISPs are desperate to be part of the monetary exchange of services over their infrastructure, they've been trying to become more than "dumb pipes" for decades and virtually no one wants that. Imagine if the water company could charge you more for a glass of water than a toilet flush.

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Well they sort of do already — typically you pay less for water for irrigation (usually because sewerage is metered by water usage and obv if it goes on the lawn it’s not going down the drain).

In places like Florida however irrigation water is reclaimed and not treated the same was as drinking water and has totally separate plumbing and metering (and pricing).

I'd push back on "typically." In my municipality, they have no way of measuring water used for gardening / lawncare independently from drinking water. So it all gets billed to the same drinking water and sewage rate.

> Well they sort of do already — typically you pay less for water for irrigation (usually because sewerage is metered by water usage and obv if it goes on the lawn it’s not going down the drain).

Aren't you paying more for your lawn water then?

If your sewer bill is based on your water bill[1]: a gallon of water for drinking results in a bill for a gallon of sewage treatment, which you'll use. A gallon of water for irrigation results in a bill for a gallon of sewage treatment which you won't use. Caveats: maybe you pee on the lawn, probably you perspire, sewer pipes are leaky: some of your sewage escapes out, some of your irrigation water escapes in.

[1] this is common, but I don't think anywhere close to universal; even ignoring lack of universal municipal water and lack of universal municipal sewage. Flatrate by connection size is also common. Approximately zero households have individual sewer meters, but some commercial/industrial customers may have them so they can be billed on actual usage.

There's a second meter that tracks the irrigation usage and that's how they subtract the sewer charges for irrigation. Of course you have to pay extra for the meter to be installed and there's often an additional "standing charge" for that extra meter in every bill, but it's usually since the sewer rates are quite high, it's worth doing.

My municipality uses 75% of the water usage (minus the reading from the meter used for irrigation) as the basis for the sewer charge.

The number of places in Florida that do that is tiny.

I suppose it depends, but it's pretty common to see signs saying "Non-Potable Reclaimed Water used for Irrigation" in and around housing developments, hotels, shopping and commercial areas as well as resorts and golf courses.

According to this, Florida uses 820M gals of reclaimed water per day although this isn't all necessarily used for irrigation.

https://floridadep.gov/water/domestic-wastewater/content/flo...

So you’re not using the sewer then? Isn’t that completely logical not to pay for it?

Exactly, but they have no easy way of direct metering domestic sewerage usage, so they do it indirectly via your household water usage (usually something like 75% goes down the drains). There needs to be a second meter to "subtract" the irrigation usage from the household usage so you don't get billed for that (and if it's a separate reclaimed water supply, then there's no subtraction, it's just a separate line item).

If you don't have the 2nd meter and your irrigation is running from your domestic water supply, then yes you're absolutely paying for sewerage you're not using.

Bad example, because drinking vs flushing water can have real differences in properties affecting their price, availability and quality. Just like QoS can be meaningful to differentiate low-latency vs high bandwidth. The problem starts when service level is is based on the service-provider, not the type content, when Spotify music is cheaper than Apple music, even though both are just music.

A more accurate analogy would be if the cost was based on the brand of the faucet, or if electricity was charged differently for using your stove vs running your AC. Or if roads had a fast-lane to drive to Costco, while the rest share a jammed single lane.

I find it interesting how nobody blinks an eyelid at the massive profits raked in by companies like Google, Facebook etc. but as soon as the ISPs that create the infrastructure that makes all this happen (and innovate massively in the process) want some piece of the cake everyone cries foul.

Now I actually strongly support net neutrality and maybe ISPs don't really need a piece of the cake, but it is still interesting how the online companies have captured most of the profits, but are also considered the good guys in his scenario.

> are also considered the good guys in his scenario.

You can have multiple bad guys. Just because one of them is the worse guy doesn't mean the other one is good.

There’s a reason for that. Neither Google nor Facebook are infrastructure providers. Infrastructure is a different business, and, since it frequently has natural monopolies, we regulate it so to provide the greatest good for the public and maximize stability and functionality. Infrastructure is an enabling foundation for competitive enterprise.

how is gcp not infrastructure?

Public infrastructure, like water, sewage, and electricity. I.e., utilities. Telecommunications is another. GCP is B2B; compute infrastructure isn’t generally consumed by the public as a whole.

Most people view ISPs as a utility provider, so it should be expected that people would be annoyed at the idea that they get to double dip in the profit.

I pay my electric company (the ones that create the infrastructure to make an ISP possible and have massively innovated in the process) the same for kWh if it’s for a lightbulb or my work laptop

Reminds me of how maintaining essential system like the banking systems are seen as cost centers and run on a tight budget, but if some young men make a webpage that barely works venture capitalists are tripping over themselves trying to shove millions into their hands.

What innovations to ISPs make? I thought they largely just installed equipment from the same group of vendors.

I’m genuinely curious if anyone knows of any.

You're staring right at it:

5G --> 3GPP --> ATIS[1] --> includes every major ISP in the US

Equipment manufacturers are just one piece of a much, much bigger puzzle. Standards development towards at-scale adoption, global interoperability, etc. is just as important; consumers just see the end game of all that backend work, and to be quite frank, it's grossly underappreciated.

[1] https://www.atis.org/overview/membership/members/

> but as soon as the ISPs that create the infrastructure that makes all this happen (and innovate massively in the process) want some piece of the cake everyone cries foul

I pay my ISP well over $100 a month for their service. Far more than I pay outright to Google or Meta or Apple. Why should they try to skim even more off the top?

It would probably be easier to root for the ISPs if they weren't a bunch of monopolistic assholes. I know that's the reason I personally root against them.

Infrastructure like that is a natural monopoly - I certainly would have an easier time switching from Google than I would Comcast, the latter would require me to move or put up with 90's era internet over copper lines.

> I find it interesting how nobody blinks an eyelid at the massive profits raked in by companies like Google, Facebook etc. but as soon as the ISPs that create the infrastructure that makes all this happen (and innovate massively in the process) want some piece of the cake everyone cries foul.

The ISP did nothing to earn any of the cake beyond provide me a pipe, and I already paid for that. I'm not defending Google's profits or calling them the good guys, I'm saying my prices shouldn't change because Comcast is jealous of Facebook. If ISPs get to tax Google and Netflix, they'll just charge me more, and I don't want that. If you sell shovels, you don't get part of the gold nugget profit.

I don't think they're seen as the good guys in this scenario, but ultimately those services are what we are paying the ISP access for. Also, I don't think nobody blinks an eyelid at the profits of those companies like Facebook and Google.

Facebook, Google and the like do much much more than provide internet.

The problem with fast lanes is that it makes the internet an uneven playing ground for the distribution of services. It is completely changing the fabric of how they operate at the expense of the consumer.

Have they? You’d think after 30+ years of commercial ISPs they’d have actually done something by now if they were “trying”.

I expected electricity grids to do that. Different prices for EV charging, for home use etc.

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