Comment by freefaler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freefaler | Hacker News Reader

The idea "to ban" ISP to put servers is not a very good one. (as mentioned in the article). It makes the internet work better and the ISP have lower costs that if there are a free-ish market they usually pass on the consumer. Not every "problem" needs more and more regulation.

ISP's are not forced to host these servers, they gladly do, because it's cheaper to colocate a caching server than to clog the uplinks and pay for that traffic. It's a win-win solution.

Big CDN providers also have their caching servers in ISPs. That's why building a CDN is a high-capex business. And if Youtube didn't have the money to pay for that traffic/server/code they woudln't have been successful.

We had a competing product that we sold to a big media group around 2010. The economy of this kind of platforms is super skewed towards put humongous amount of money beforehand, try to achieve network effect and try to find a way to monetize it. Google might've been the only company that could've done it, because it's a 3 sided market:

- uploaders/creators

- advertisers

- viewers

They not only put the money, but they shared the revenue in a meaningful way and that's why their patience and huuuge costs gave them the lead they enjoy now.

I am not sure that if you add all expences from the beginning they are net positive on this investment (if we measure the free cashflow generated after all capex has been paid off).

It's also important to recognise that content providers and CDNs adding private peering or hosting within ISPs doesn't diminish public peering. It actually frees up capacity on other transit routes.

ISPs don't QoS some companies to give them better service, the only difference is that in-demand companies tend to invest in capacity in partnership with ISPs. But ultimately, in most cases those investing generally use the same capacity that everyone else can use. The only company who doesn't resell their CDN capacity is Netflix. The others, Google and Amazon, dog food their own products. If you want to use the same systems as Prime or Google Video then you absolutely can. Other streaming providers use public CDN capacity just like anyone else.

Does YouTube get a favourable rate for capacity over other users? Yes and no. If Google doesn't charge YouTube then it's losing profit on the compute to sustain YT. But YT still has to make a profit and YT carries the cost burden of a great deal of legacy crap that a new entrant wouldn't. What Google has built is a miracle of engineering, to be able to get videos from relative nobodies to the other side of the in the world within minutes, at relatively high quality. While also allowing millions of kids to watch someone play Minecraft.

I respect what they've built. Would it be good to have diversity? In some ways yes, but in other ways choice sucks. Fragmentation of places to view content is something that gets increasingly complained about in the streaming world.

Is YouTube greedy? I don't think so. Building and maintaining what they've built is hard. As everyone else whose tried it knows. Just riding on their coat tails and leaching on their servers isn't sustainable. Ad blocking and saying Google deserves it isn't sustainable. In the extreme, if we burned down Google and said we wanted that model to end, the world would be a poorer place for it IMHO.

Context: 24 years in media, a decade in streaming for big companies, no affiliation with Google.

Yes, I agree... But it's even more complicated, because peering exchanges are only available in meaningful numbers in Europe and some countries around it. Also paths can be QoSed depending on many parameters, costs and deals. We built a software that optimized routing based on cost depending on the 95th percentile usage, channel quality and some other parameters. In Asia, South America (really shitty place for internet infra) and North America the conditions are different.

But Youtube did indeed built a great CDN, coupled with control of the end user video player made the best video on demand platform by far.

It's also worth noting that in most cases on-net caches (in ISPs) aren't as common as people think. It's mostly private peering at public data centres. Google doesn't have servers in all ISPs, this was more common in the past than today.

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