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Comment by Cody-99 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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