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Comment by theoperagoer | Hacker News Reader

ISPs should be allowed to throttle traffic for services. Otherwise, the result is going to be increased costs for all end-users.

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No they shouldn't. I don't think that logic makes any sense at all. No one is paying increased costs because their neighbor is watching netflix, youtube, or browsing reddit. Users already pay for internet service they shouldn't have to pay again because the ISP wants to be greedy and double dip from fees to avoid throttling.

If netflix traffic is straining ISPs to the point of requiring hardware upgrades etc., I think it is fair for ISPs to ask them to pay some of that cost.

Their customers already pay the cost. The ISPs offer IP services. The customers on each end pay for it.

> If netflix traffic is straining ISPs to the point of requiring hardware upgrades etc., I think it is fair for ISPs to ask them to pay some of that cost.

It is fair for ISPs to ask their customers to pay for required upgrades. Netflix's ISPs can ask Netflix. Netflix's customers' ISPs can ask Netflix's customers.

It isn't netflix traffic it is ISP customer traffic which they pay for. Hardware upgrade, bandwidth costs, and other operating costs are already paid for by the ISP customers. The ISP should not be able to double dip by charging netflix or the customer a second time.

If the ISP isn't able to provide the service they advertised and sold they should be investigated and be issuing refunds at the very least. Can't provide the service you said you could? Maybe don't advertise and defraud customers.

it's not a double-dip. if a single service is behind load problems and causing general service degradation, I think it is fair to throttle that service.

It is a double dip. The ISP customer already pays for that bandwidth and internet connection. Asking the customer to pay a second time or asking netflix to pay is clearly double dipping. Trying to call it something else is just silly!

>causing general service degradation

Customers using their internet service they pay for isn't causing service degradation. If the ISP oversold or lied about being able to provide the service they were selling that is another issue. The response to that shouldn't be charging more for a service customers already pay for.

These companies already have fine print that the advertised speed is not a guarantee. My point in this thread is this policy takes away a tool ISPs had to control traffic in their networks, which I believe will lead to higher costs.

Customer pays for say, 1Gbps bidirectional. ISP has a total capacity of 1Tbps. They find that the average usage rate from users is 100Mbps bidirectional, so they sign on 10x as many users as they could truly offer a full 1Gbps to, taking a risk. Then new services come along, and the customer average usage increases to 500Mbps.

Instead of upgrading their total capacity, reducing their user count by 5x or reducing the speeds they promise, the ISP decides that it's the service's fault that they can't provide the 1 Gbps they're selling. This is obviously double dipping. They want to both sell higher bandwidths than they can provide, and charge others for making them have to provide what they're advertising.

They should be able to throttle across the board to load balance. They sell an IP protocol service. They should honor the customer's wishes by delivering those packets fairly, not necessarily reliably.

They can, and they do. It's called QoS and it's not effected by net neutrality.

They cannot throttle a particular service under NN. That's the problem.

> No one is paying increased costs because their neighbor is watching netflix, youtube, or browsing reddit

Increased bandwidth = Increased costs

Who do you think is paying?

The ISP customers already paid for that. The ISP customer already paid for the bandwidth, hardware, and all other costs. Not sure why this is confusing for you. The ISP isn't paying more because Bob next door decides to watch netflix for a few hours a night.

>Who do you think is paying?

The customer..? Are you really confused about this?

> already paid

In some cases. In other cases, it hasn't even happened yet.

> Are you really confused about this?

I'm not at all confused.

The ISP spends $X to build and maintain infrastructure for Y Gbps internet.

Mobile carriers do the same.

Yes, and then they charge $Z dollars for a certain bandwidth allotment to each of their customers. It does not cost the ISP more money to route a MB/s to Netflix than it does to route a MB/s to Reddit.

>In some cases. In other cases, it hasn't even happened yet.

..? By the point ISP customers receive internet they have either already paid for the service, paid a deposit, or agreed to pay for it the following month like other utilities. In all of these cases by the time the user makes use of their service they have already agreed to pay for the internet service which includes data, hardware, and other infrastructure fees.

>The ISP spends $X to build and maintain infrastructure for Y Gbps internet.

EXACTLY. You are proving my point! The customer of the ISP has already paid for that. It doesn't cost the ISP any more money if I make use of my service by sending data to netflix, reddit, or whoever! If I watch netflix 12 hours a day it costs the ISP exactly $0 extra dollars. Asking me to pay more money or be throttled is ridiculous.

Hell, if you have one of the largest ISPs they pay nothing for any amount of data transfer over their networks anyway so your argument is even weaker lol.

The ISP’s customers pay for their costs. The problem started when those ISPs decided they weren’t satisfied with 15-20% profit margins and started finding other ways to generate revenue like selling their customers’ activity data to advertisers, injecting ads, or by trying to get popular services to double-pay their operating costs.

You can tell it’s not a real barrier to the business in two ways: one is that it only affects MBA-infested companies - small ISPs and municipal broadband never seems to have a problem providing better service for less money – and the other is that they’re not asking their customers to pay more. If their cost of providing service had actually gone up, they’d have been open about that and own the claim that a few Mbps costs more than it used to despite all evidence to the contrary. Keeping as a back room deal lets them try to hide all of the details behind NDAs.

I already paid for my bandwidth.

I bought a 1 gigabit connection. If the 10-20 mbps data stream from Netflix is overloading my ISP, then my ISP is not providing me with what I paid for.

ISPs should throttle for network health if necessary. This should occur in a fashion that is fair to users, some services might get hit disproportionately because they consume a lot of bandwidth, but no services should be given an exception just because they happen to be, say, provided by the ISP.

I think you need to provide a lot more explanation and clarification of what you mean; your comment as written sounds like nothing more than a hollow talking point. What kind of throttling in what situations would be prohibited by these regulations and how would that cause increased costs?

Maybe DDOS protection? IE: Things that ensure that a malicious user can't negatively impact other users on the network.

Have you ever seen even a draft of a proposed regulation that didn't already have clear exceptions for that?

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