We haven't had net "neutrality" in the history of the internet and call me crazy, but it seems to have done just fine.
"Net Neutrality is just left wing populism run amok" http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/07/eff-lies-about-netneutrali...
"Net Neutrality is just left wing populism run amok" http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/07/eff-lies-about-netneutrali...
I really can't believe you are so deluded to think that there is not a problem brewing here that has the potential to ruin the Internet as we know it (both as a consumer and a business owner).
Netflix is particularly unsympathetic in my eyes, because its just a middle man. Almost all the real value (the content, and the wires that deliver the content to consumers) is created by other people.
ISP's have tended to charge for a specific speed, not amount of data. By throttling the Netflix connection they're basically saying "We don't really care that you paid us to be able to access anything on the internet at this speed".
And it's worth noting that this is a case where the ISP is in complete control of the speed you get Netflix. There are many cases where the ISP doesn't have a hand in this, the server you're connecting to simply can't pump stuff out fast enough to go as fast as your ISP will let you. But in this case Netflix has more then enough server power (Which they paid for), but the ISP's are specifically slowing down the end connection to you're house to a lower speed then you paid for unless Netflix is willing to fork over more money.
It is almost exactly the same thing as if you were to purchase a 'subscription' to the post office where they guarantee your packages would be delivered in at least 10 days (when possible). But, packages from Netflix are purposely slowed down by the post office and get to you in 14 days instead, and the post office turns around and tell Netflix they need to pay more if they want the package to get to you in 10 days, even though you already paid for that speed.
I think you're reading an "anything on the internet" into your service agreement that isn't there, but even then you have at best a case for false advertising. If ISP's were up front about these practices, would it be OK?
I don't know that regulations regarding advertised vs actual speeds are going to do anything to solve the problem, but I do believe that there is a problem when I can't use even 6% of the theoretical bandwidth that I've theoretically paid for.
I understand not getting 100% downloads all day every day from every website on the internet. Not all have fast enough servers or fast enough primary links or whatever. I understand not getting even say 50% downloads all day every day because I know how TCP backoff works; it's exponential and a lot of downloads are short.
I might even understand not being able to use all 25% of my connection 24/7 again because there are things like peak usage where everyone gets home from work and starts doing stuff online at home and the local loops that the cable company has provisioned might be too big to provide everyone with 100% throughput. I'm not necessarily complaining about that as there are realities to life that aren't necessarily pretty but still real.
But what I can't understand is that my ISP which advertises a specific download capability would throttle it at the SOURCE (or the input to their network) when there is enough bandwidth at the last mile to support the connection.
For the vast majority of internet history (admittedly only 25 years or so) the limiting factor was almost always the LAST MILE. We're now finding out that it's not the last mile anymore but still something within the ISP's control and they're not doing much to alleviate the problem.
This to many folks feels like a betrayal because according to a certain "the last mile is always the slowest" mindset, it is! People aren't wrong to think that because that's how it's always been. ISPs are creating a paradigm shift that they're not telling anyone about and are in fact doing a good job to obfuscate.
You might disagree that it is a betrayal but it feels like that to many folks. You can try to tell them they're wrong but I suspect that because of the many years of assumptions people have had about the way the world works you won't have a lot of luck.
But the point still stands, why the heck am I paying for 2 MB/s download speed if my ISP isn't even going to give me that much if I pay for it? IMO, it's simply bull. If they were actually upfront about these practices (instead of just making it look like Netflix's or whoever-else's fault) I can guarantee you their would be a ton more outrage. If my ISP isn't going to actually give me 2 MB/s download when they are completely capable of doing it, and I paid for it, that's just absurd. In any other industry that type of practice would easily be grounds for a lawsuit. It's not even that it's out of their control, they're purposely going against attempting to fulfill what you're paying for.
It certainly doesn't help that the SOP for ISPs in the US is to deflect blame for network issues, even when the blame falls squarely on them (throttling Netflix, their DNS server is down, etc). It's always the user's fault or the remote site's fault. Never the ISP's fault.
You can even see this in the rhetoric that they espouse about Netflix. The ISPs are choosing to throttle Netflix. It's a business decision. Yet, they want people to think that it's Netflix's fault for not "paying up." Regardless of whether or not you think that the ISPs have a right to ask Netflix for this money, it's disingenuous to say it's Netflix's "fault" for deciding not to pay.
What if it were Comcast charging Sony extra money to deliver their streaming service for Sony produced content? What if Time Warner wants to charge Hulu extra money to deliver content since it is owned by Comcast? You can dismiss Netflix for not creating content to a small degree (house of cards, arrested development, orange is the new black all produced by Netflix themselves, I would argue they are a content creator as well but thats beside the point) but if you substitute Netflix for someone else, its obvious that this is anticompetitive.
This is hacker news - Can you imagine trying to start a web based company and being forced to pay monthly fees to every single ISP just to get decent speeds to end users? What if Comcast decides it wants to start delivering goods so they jack up prices on instacart's monthly fees Or they want to expand into Taxi services so they throttle uber down to 52 kbps for all their customers
This is absolutely false. Almost all the existing cable infrastructure was built with private money.
> Can you imagine trying to start a web based company and being forced to pay monthly fees to every single ISP just to get decent speeds to end users?
So? It's precarious to build a business that depends wholly on someone else's expensive infrastructure. I don't see why web businesses should be different than app businesses in this regard, which have the same problem. If Apple decides to vertically integrate into your market, as an iOS app developer you don't have much recourse.
>I don't see why web businesses should be different than app businesses in this regard
So you see the World Wide Web as an equivalent to the Android Play Store? I find it hard to believe you do not see the gaping difference here. 1. the web was invented by a government agency 2. You pay for access to the web, this includes upload and download bandwidth, there are no restrictions that limit what you are allowed to do with this bandwidth, there is no agreement that you will only use specified port numbers, and not upload more than x amount of data, etc 3. would you say the automobile industry is wholly dependant on someone else's infrastructure? (roads, highways, street lights, electricity, etc) 4. again you pay for access to the web, not the web itself - the internet is not a product that is controlled by anyone, only its access is controlled. This is fundamentally different from an app store that a company wholly owns, and controls all content within
Comcast does not own or control any part of the internet itself, everything on the internet exists on the internet independently of Comcast. The only thing that Comcast provides subscribers is a pipe to and from the internet with an agreed upon speed to the internet
The only projects on that list that have distributed significant money are funded by the Universal Service Fund. That money doesn't come from general taxation, it comes from a specific tax on the telecom industry. Imagine if the government levied a 15% tax on smartphone sales and spent that money to subsidize telephones for the poor. Could you then turn around and say "Apple and Samsung are getting massive government subsidies?" That's basically what you're doing when you point to USF and say public money went into the telecom networks.
Moreover, this debate is mostly about cable, which has historically been a different sphere from "telecom" (i.e. the phone system). The networks we're talking about, Comcast's, TWC's, etc, are cable networks built with private money after deregulation in the 1990's.
> So you see the World Wide Web as an equivalent to the Android Play Store?
The World Wide Web is just a set of protocols that runs mostly on private networks. It's a platform owned by the companies that own those private networks.
Not only can you say that, you should say that. The tax money is ending up in Apple's and Samsung's pockets, routed through poor people (who presumably benefit from the subsidy, of course, and thus putatively benefiting society as a whole as well).
Just because the product or service is a derivative of something else doesn't mean it doesn't have real value. Fantasy football, for example. Should we look at fantasy football sites because they just repackage NFL stats?
In this situation, we should just let AT&T/Bell dictate all things internet, since they laid the foundation with their lines. I think the point has some weight, but there's a lot more at stake than a simple service fee.
... at a time when the government guaranteed their profits. I think that's an important point to remember when a business built off of years of government-granted monopoly starts complaining about government regulation.
Moreover, how relevant is the pre-1980's POTS infrastructure to this whole debate? How many Netflix customers are on DSL that hasn't been rebuilt since the breakup?
Very
> How many Netflix customers are on DSL that hasn't been rebuilt since the breakup?
Even if its been rebuilt since the property rights were acquired, the fact that the property rights were acquired when the provider had a monopoly and government backing (and the same thing applies to the cable cos that are ISPs as to the telcos) is a substantial advantage over any new entrant.
Everywhere I've lived, cable companies don't own the rights of way, but instead pay municipalities or power companies to run wire along public easements or power lines.
Do you remember life before Netflix? Incredible you would say they don't bring much value.
Its not really about getting money from Netflix, its about getting rid of Netflix.
Indeed, it's a fairly basic principle of the economics of building infrastructure. A free market underinvests in things like train lines because the builders can only capture one aspect of the positive value created by the infrastructure (the value to the user). However, that leaves a large amount of value to the businesses that users use the infrastructure to get to. If builders can't capture that aspect of value, they'll under invest in such infrastructure. There is a whole body of work on this subject.
And in fact, that's how it has traditionally worked on the internet. Netflix would pay it's ISP, and the consumer would pay their ISP, and the ISP's would pay each other to account for any asymmetry in the data transfer between them (peering). These payments would ultimately be reflected in the charges billed to both endpoints, so the ultimate effect was that each intermediate ISP effective billed each endpoint of the connection.
This whole debacle arose because Netflix's ISP (Cogent) wasn't willing to adhere to the traditional peering arrangements. So in the end, Netflix ended up paying to connect directly to Comcast's network.
That is a very strange way to look at things. The rate you're going, I can call anything pretty much anything. What is an ISP but a middle man -- they only facilitate content going from one end to another? Why is content the real value -- to me, it's totally formulaic, dull, uninspiring trash these days. See? You must explain more rigorously the criteria with which you're judging things here.
I also think your reduction of Netflix technology is peculiar - creating Netflix is no trivial feat. Reliable and user-friendly streaming technology for the masses, if it were so easy, would have been done earlier by other big companies. Netflix is doing a lot of things right, including making their own content of all varieties (children shows, adult shows, etc.) that seems to be received well by folks.
I'm guessing that you value the fact that ISPs have poured a fair bit of money into setting up the infrastructure. It's a good point, but I think ultimately moot. Lots of companies give it their all and still die. The people's will rules at the end of the day, whether to do business with them, whether to shape law to grant them their livelihood. This time, I'm personally okay with how people are judging ISPs.
You're right that Netflix and Amazon are creating value through their original content businesses. That's kind of orthogonal to this debate. That original content gives them a natural leverage over the ISP's that their role as content middlemen does not.
Guess who pays for that ISP? The consumer, and the consumer pays by having to be on a shitty network where the operator blackmails the places that are popular, because they are popular. Also, the consumer pays through the nose for this service. And if all this money is going into infrastructure, why don't I see it reflected in my speeds?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Net...
Just in case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine
CDNs are about making more copies of content and locating them closer to users, in order to make the average route to users shorter. There's nothing in that that is inconsistent with net neutrality: traffic from a CDN server to a given user doesn't get to the user any faster than any other traffic over the same route.
"Fast lanes" are about privileging some traffic over other traffic over the same route. That is what is inconsistent with net neutrality.
Also, the post makes an invalid assumption about how upgrades to networks get paid for:
> Forcing Comcast to upgrade their network to support Netflix means forcing the majority of low-bandwidth customers to subsidize the high-bandwidth customers.
No, it doesn't. Comcast can simply charge users more for more bandwidth usage. Again, there's nothing in that that is inconsistent with net neutrality, as long as Comcast (or any other ISP) charges just for bandwidth. Then Comcast uses the extra money it gets paid for more bandwidth, to upgrade its network so it can carry more bandwidth. People who don't use the extra bandwidth (like me) pay a lower rate for our service, so the upgrade is really being paid for by precisely the right people, the ones who need the higher bandwidth.
But what Comcast wants to do is charge more for Netflix bandwidth than for other kinds of bandwidth. (It's actually charging Netflix instead of Netflix's users, but that doesn't change the essential point.) That is what is inconsistent with net neutrality.
The post does make one good point:
> government regulators...won't allow another company [besides Comcast] to come in and lay a fiber optic network unless that company agrees to lay fiber everywhere -- even the poor areas of town
This is a good point, but it's completely separate from the Comcast-Netflix question. I agree that governments should not expect for-profit corporations to provide a service that isn't profitable. If governments want to make sure that everybody has Internet access, then governments should provide it themselves.
And local governments have indeed tried to do exactly that--to build municipal fiber networks that cover entire communities. The problem is that every time a local government tries to do that, Comcast and the other major ISPs have kittens and say that they will be driven out of business and file lawsuits.
This tells me that the corporations actually prefer the current regulatory regime, because it allows them to buy protection from competition. If we had a sane court system, that wouldn't matter too much since the lawsuits would just be thrown out; but that doesn't happen.
... but when the government starts rolling out Internet service, major ISPs lobby for laws to prevent it. The major ISPs can't say "Woe is us, we have to roll out service to unprofitable areas," then turn around and say, "Government, don't you dare service those people for us!"
It comes across like those years where the RIAA would argue to government that their business was falling apart and making music copying a criminal offense was the only way that the music industry wouldn't fall apart in a year. Then they would turn to investors and talk about how swimmingly their business was going, and how there was nothing to worry about.
Yes, this is true, and I should have mentioned it in addition to mentioning the lawsuits they file. I think something like 20 states now have laws prohibiting local municipalities from installing their own networks, passed due to ISP lobbying.
Edit: to downvoters, menace means one who causes peril. How is my usage incorrect? The parent is spreading incorrect facts and encouraging internet fast lanes. That is perilous.
Menace isn't an insult.
// *proverbial