Talk of an Internet Fast Lane Is Already Hurting Some Startups

The entire FCC is entirely corrupt and in pockets of the cable companies.

It is not doing its job worse yet it is harming the system it was designed to protect.

"Electricity supply companies have found that almost 30% of the total electricity capacity in their networks is being consumed by customer's light bulbs. In order to support future demand, the electricity supply companies will begin charging light bulb manufacturers for light bulb users electricity usage."

Completely bonkers.

This is American capitalism, morality doesn't enter the picture.

More seriously, the McDonald's argument doesn't work because McD's business model is profit on turnover. If they sell more, they make more. Comcast's model is renting out wires. The money they make is the price set by the "market" in internet connections. Actually providing a service is a cost, and therefore they want to reduce it as much as possible without driving away customers.

Building more won't enable them to charge their customers more, so they're sending a rent bill to Netflix to see if they pay it.

I've been reading over and over again how the ISPs should already have this upgrade money allocated and available to spend on network infrastructure upgrades.

You've Already Paid $2,000 For A Fiber Connection You'll Never Get - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml

He can argue it because he has a lot of money (indirectly) invested in the outcome going his way. There will be winners and losers if net neutrality is abandoned and it looks like Cashman would be a winner. Most of the rest of us would be losers.

I hate when reporters find the most biased people in the debate and quote them as if they were an objective opinion. This reporter, to his credit, immediately follows the Cashman quote by saying "Some less financially invested observers have little sympathy for this argument" and then quotes Rob Faris, who may have strong opinions but at least isn't talking his book.

We don't need fast lanes or bandwidth caps on the internet. We need an ISP that isn't ran by greedy tyrants.

The premise of deregulation was that it would lead to increased infrastructure spending. And it has: the late 1990's and the 2000's saw massive investment into cable and wireless. People assumed at the time the money would go into fiber, but demand exploded in wireless so investment went there instead.

In most countries you only pay for outgoing calls (unless you are roaming).

In the US you pay for incoming calls as well (your minutes are deducted) and in addition the person calling you is also paying for that call.

So there is double dipping going on there as well. At some point I was even paying for incoming SMS.

http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/broadband/pac...

We would need some sort of regulation to force ISPs to provide a pipe that doesn't suffer random packet loss or connection problems. In addition you would need some way to make ISP upgrade to better pipes or you will be stuck with 56k for ever.

I believe all new homes in the US are now equipped with a minimum if a 200A circuit by law which would equate to your internet speed minimum being regulated.

Here are some thoughts:

Other utilities usually come with a base fee, ie. even if I were to consume no electricity I'd still pay some amount of money per month. The total cost is (base fee + usage fee). So it's not purely based on consumed resource amount.

If we were to transition to a consumption based fee model to realign incentives, it would stand to reason that the amount of revenues the telcos should get should not change significantly. I expect that the telcos would not be able to resist gouging their customers if consumption based fees were to comeback (competition might drive down prices... eventually).

Water and electricity are quite cheap (in first world terms). There's an incentive not to be grossly wasteful with either, but that's it, really. It'd be nice if internet consumption fees could work in a similar way.

That sounds like the interests will greatly favor the ISP. They can leave prices the same, institute a monthly data cap then gouge users on their overages. Yes, I can definitely see how this would be a huge win for customers...

Unlike water and electricity, the internet isn't a finite resource in the sense that the data will 'run out' if we use it too much. The people generating content are paying on their end and the users consuming content are paying on their end. We don't need to be careful not to overuse the internet, lest we leave future generations without the ability to use it.

I've heard similar about Comcast and the rest, but no one's put two and two together.

But not all bytes are equal. If I am pulling 1 Linux DVD at 3am and my neighbor is pulling down 2 per night at 3am, the costs he is placing on the system are not twice mine. The actual electricity costs between moving his bits and my bits are negligible.

Instead, the cost is in building out the pipe to handle the maximum load each evening when everyone is pulling videos down and/or Skyping to Grandma. And even then not all bytes are equal. I might really want the voice packets of my Skype session to go through right now, but be able to tolerate several second of lag on the video I'm watching from Netflix, while letting the video of my Skype call degrade as needed.

I don't think you can put ISP regulations into one simple sentence. They need a more complicated and thus expensive regulatory regime. And, yes, the more complicated, the more subject it will be to lobbying pressure from people with different views from you. It still strikes me as the least-bad solution.

EDIT: Water and electricity providers do care about peak usage somewhat. Water companies need to keep up pressure, and electric companies need to keep the electrons flowing no matter what. But the water company can tolerate a 5% dip in water pressure, and electric companies have ways of, say, disabling AC units to juggle demand during especially high periods of usage.

I think we need some way of discouraging the single biggest consumers of the shared resource (such as charging them more) during peak usage while still providing incentive for the ISP to increase capacity. Lots of people fear that the ISPs would just use this to increase revenue instead of to properly ration a shared resource. I totally understand that fear because I trust my ISPs about as far I can throw their headquarters. But other providers of shared resources with much more predictable demand patterns still have ways of dealing with demand surges, so I don't see how ISPs could hope to function in the long-term without some kind of peak-demand management.

So the 900lb gorilla might not be actually running away.

Regardless, I think we can all agree that slow payment processing is a Bad Thing.

So with inefficiencies due to a lack of competition comparable to a government agency AND a profit motive rather than the public service motive that government agencies have, you've got the worst of both worlds. Companies that barely compete to offer good service with the explicit intention of sucking as much of your dollars as they can for a service you can't really go without.

guizzy - A good point; that's what I was referring to when I mentioned 'local monopolies'.

Businesses with money could do this too. Imagine WM paying Comcast to throttle Amazon traffic or make 1 in 5 page loads fail.

That could be where we're headed, if we don't fix this problem now.

To me the only way metered would work is if all these government sanctioned monopolies in communities are lifted so that any company can offer service to any customer.

Or, I suppose, the service is a utility governed by representatives of the community.

I don't have a choice, but to pay for Comcast, and they changed my plan from Unlimited to 300GB/mo.

I could stream 10mbps video 24 hours/day for 30 days and my bill at $0.025/GB will be about $80 for bandwidth, on top of the ~$40 I pay for my existing connection, which we'll just assume we'll let the cable companies continue to gouge me on.

If I'm streaming high-quality HD video 24/7, I can live with a $120 Internet bill.

I'm not actually doing that, of course. In reality, even I (combined with 4 other family members on the same connection who aren't power users, but do watch some streaming video and otherwise make fairly active use of my connection) rarely use more than ~500GB/month. Even if I used a terabyte every month, it'd be about $25 extra. Meh.

In the end, it's not consumers that don't want this. It's the cable companies. They hate the idea, because it puts front and center the fact that they are and should be just a dumb pipe. They don't provide content, they provide a conduit. This is exactly the public perception that they fear.