She doesn't think the actual NPRM represents the best way to acheive the objectives it seeks to serve, but agrees with the objectives. As an NPRM isn't an adopted regulations, its a proposal which sets out objectives, provides concrete proposed steps, and seeks public comment on those steps and alternatives to them, it may make sense to vote for an NPRM (especially when you believe that there is a large and active community that will provide alternatives) when you agree with the objectives but have strong disagreements on some elements of the implementation, rather than voting no and preventing any rulemaking directed at the objectives from proceeding.
She would prefer to delay and get a better (from her perspective) proposal before the public, but would rather have the process moving forward that will allow adopting rules than have the process stalled. The three that voted for the NPRM are the three commissioners that, differ as they might on the details, believe that the FCC should be pursuing net neutrality ("Open Internet") regulation, the two that voted against are the two that think that the FCC should not and that things like paid prioritization and all the other things net neutrality seeks to restrict should be permitted without restriction.
Much of the news coverage has inverted reality and portrayed the proposal as a change to permit paid prioritization, but it is a change (in relevant part) to prevent it, within the constraints imposed by the D.C. Circuit when they struck down the last FCC order intended to do that.
I don't see a problem. You can switch ISP if your current one isn't net-neutral. Why should you force businesses to operate in certain way? They're not breaking any laws.
To be less facetious, I could also choose AT&T DSL, but they don't offer competitive bandwidth. And they aren't exactly a small independent ISP. There might be ISPs that offer "business class" service, but their prices probably start at least 3x what I currently pay. I'm not even sure they would offer service in an apartment complex either.
Here's the thing about smaller, 'independent' ISPs: they're small. That means they don't have very large coverage, and the US is a very large country. So even though there are SOME smaller, independent ISPs which are likely to remain net-neutral, they can only service a very tiny portion of the population. That doesn't help everybody else.
I live in Santa Clara, in the South Bay. It's pretty close to the heart of Silicon Valley. My only option for an ISP is Comcast; my choices are literally, in the true definition of literally, use Comcast or don't get internet. And that's not really a choice, is it?
Why should you force business to operate in a certain way? Because, weirdly enough, the profit motive isn't always sufficient to make sure that business operate for the benefit of consumers, or more broadly, society.
Antitrust laws, environmental laws etc. all force businesses to "operate in a certain way". You can argue for more or less regulation, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone to argue for no regulation.
Also, the issue is many people don't have a choice between ISPs, or if they do, it's between two major ISPs. If a Time Warner / Comcast juggernaut implements a fast lane, do you think that Verizon or whoever else won't?
'They're not breaking any laws' is an empty argument when the current debate is about 'what laws should we write to curb behavior that is bad for society'.
So what happened? It seems like just yesterday that the FCC was the one creating the rules around net neutrality. A federal court over-turns this and all of a sudden the FCC decides to go the complete opposite direction?
Tom Wheeler happened. Despite his industry and lobbying connections, he raised a lot of money for Obama's campaign, so he was appointed as the new FCC chairman.
> It seems like just yesterday that the FCC was the one creating the rules around net neutrality.
It still is.
> A federal court over-turns this and all of a sudden the FCC decides to go the complete opposite direction?
No, this is an attempt to revive, within the constraints of the court decision, what was struck down. The reporting that this is about "allowing" or "considering" paid prioritization ignores the fact that, as a result of the court decision, paid prioritization is allowed now, without any restrictions. This proposal would declare some paid prioritization (where it is offered exclusively to an affiliate of the ISP) presumptively illegal, and seek to restrict paid prioritization even outside of that which is presumptively illegal. This is in the exact same direction (though not the exact same mechanism, since that was ruled outside of the FCC's authority) as prior net neutrality orders from the FCC, which is why the same 3-2 partisan alignment on the FCC exists on the issue that has existed on net neutrality as a broad concept for quite some time.
I'm confused by this headline (and a bit by the proceeding).
After watching the FCC hearing, it seemed like all of the people who were "for" open internet, and spoke of it from the consumer level (including Wheeler) voted for the proposal. The commissioners that said the FCC didn't have jurisdiction to regulate and to leave the market alone, voted against the proposal.
Isn't it the case that if they had voted against this, that we would have been in the exact same boat we are in now and therefore the agreement that Netflix signed would continue unabated?
In that case, it really didn't matter what they voted.
The people at the FCC are saying the opposite of what they mean.
Yes, we are in the same boat with Netflix having to pay for bandwidth as before. However, by the FCC officially sanctioning something that would have been technically illegal before the Federal ruling, they've basically reversed course and declared open season on content providers the ISPs don't like.
> The people at the FCC are saying the opposite of what they mean.
No, net-neutrality proponents are saying the opposite of what they mean. They couch this in terms of "protecting the open internet." Except there never was an "open internet." Before the short-lived net neutrality regulations, cable companies were allowed to do whatever they wanted with their network. And that's true now that the regulations have been struck down. The cable companies do not need any sort of action by the FCC to be able to come to these agreements.
What net-neutrality proponents want is new regulations to keep cable companies from doing something that they currently are allowed to do, and except for a small period of time, were historically always allowed to do.
If the government blocks fair competition in a market [through controlling who can provide last mile connections by right of way], they need to provide regulation to enforce fairness on the other end [those that provide last mile connections can't pick and choose whose packets they carry and at what QoS].
There used to be counterweights involved [e.g. Comcast had to play ball fairly] which effectively forced neutrality. Netflix, for instance, wasn't a 'problem' back in 2007 for the ISPs. We didn't have the ISPs pulling QoS BS like this in the 90s because people could and would switch providers. They can't now unless they want to go back to using dialup.
Yes, the choice was between no rules and weak rules, either of which will allow the telecoms to do whatever they want to service companies (despite the meaningless "commercially reasonable" clause). The Title 2 reclassification wasn't even on the table.
This should be the main issue at this year's elections. Unfortunately, this is America, where the main issues are only those the large campaign donors care about.
The term "Open Internet" is a marketing phrase promoted by Comcast for the purpose of creating confusion.
"We are gratified by the Court's decision today to vacate the previous FCC's order [to impose rules about net neutrality]. Our primary goal was always to clear our name and reputation. We have always been focused on serving our customers and delivering the quality open-Internet experience consumers want. Comcast remains committed to the FCC's existing open Internet principles, and we will continue to work constructively with this FCC as it determines how best to increase broadband adoption and preserve an open and vibrant Internet.
Comcast Statement on U.S. Court of Appeals Decision on Comcast v. FCC [6]"
> The term "Open Internet" is a marketing phrase promoted by Comcast for the purpose of creating confusion.
Its the term that the FCC adopted first for its net neutrality efforts. Comcast, the first target of an enforcement action based on those principles, attempted to subvert the term to render it meaningless.
> I'm confused by this headline (and a bit by the proceeding).
That's because the headline is an outright lie.
> After watching the FCC hearing, it seemed like all of the people who were "for" open internet, and spoke of it from the consumer level (including Wheeler) voted for the proposal.
Exactly. After the old Open Internet order was recently struck down as exceeding the FCCs authority, there are no rules limiting paid prioritization (or any of the other anti-neutrality practices the old Open Internet order addressed.) The current NPRM is both a concrete proposal and a call for public comment on alternative approaches to restore limits on anti-neutral activities by broadband providers. It is not a proposal to allow paid prioritization -- no proposal is necessary for that, as it is currently allowed without restriction. To the extent that it addresses paid prioritization, it is a proposal to restrict it.
> The commissioners that said the FCC didn't have jurisdiction to regulate and to leave the market alone, voted against the proposal.
Right.
> Isn't it the case that if they had voted against this, that we would have been in the exact same boat we are in now
No, if they voted against it, there wouldn't be an active rulemaking aimed at limiting the practice with a defined timeline, a proposal on the table, and a request for public comments on that proposal and specific alternatives. In either case, there are no actual rules in place, since this isn't actual rules, its a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking", a formal call for public comment centered around concrete proposals and specified alternatives.
This is a vote to receive comments on the proposal. IN 60 days the FCC will respond to comments and redraft a proposal. A final vote on final rules will come in about 120 days.
No, it's not. But the term "work" implies that someone really did some work and produced something out of value... but these efforts were just the work of money in the pockets of lobbyists and policy makers. What a said day.
Most important quote since the title is misleading:
"
The proposal is not a final rule, but the three-to-two vote on Thursday is a significant step forward on a controversial idea that has invited fierce opposition from consumer advocates, Silicon Valley heavyweights, and Democratic lawmakers.
"
I hope there will be companies, upon being asked by an ISP to pay more for higher priority in their network, who will tell them to get the f*k off and advocate usage of VPN and anonymisers for their users so they're not identified as US residents.
Business opportunity: Start VPN service and pay for the 'faster lane'. Advertise to users that they won't have throttled anything. ISPs become the utility that they should be.(Although at a higher cost to the end user)
I would like to see more companies go the way of shaming the ISPs. If people saw a message while a Netflix or Youtube video was buffering that said Comcast slows down this service artificially to make more money, I bet they would care more and would complain.
I think it's a reference to the DRM thing from yesterday. Honestly it was more of Mozilla capitulating to the DRM gods, it's not like they're out there pounding the pavement for DRM.
Most people just want the damn thing to work. Studios, whether the EFF and others like it or not, are not going to be changing their stance on DRM any time soon. It seems that more and more media is being consumed on a subscription basis than is being downloaded (see Spotify, Pandora, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu)... People are caring less about owning the content than having access to it.
Currently with DRM there are a variety of plugins to support it in the browser. You have to download Widevine's plugin, or PlayReady's plugin, or whatever. It's just a better user experience if we really do need DRM to have some standardized DRM that the browsers can implement to make it seamless for the user.
Note that I don't support DRM, I think it's a total waste of time because the movies aren't released to the wild by your average Joe who is downloading movies from Amazon. It just serves to hurt the average user. However I think that if we must have DRM, it should at least be something that is easier and works better for the average user.
To answer your question: the difference is that Mozilla is not going out and promoting DRM. They are being pragmatic and reasonable in the less than ideal situation.
By agreeing to incorporate DRM in the browser Mozilla is, according to that comment, agreeing to let the problem get worse.
One of the characteristics of cable TV is, precisely, that you don't get access to the content if you don't pay. DRM is one way of achieving this, and Mozilla in this case is accepting that without even a struggle.
If I understood the parent comment correctly, that is.
Mozilla fought the DRM implementation more than any other browser. They were at the point where they unfortunately had to implement it, otherwise their user base wouldn't be able to access services like netflix etc. At that point it's better to keep your user base instead of them switching to another browser and having no voice.
You raise a good point. I'm not smart enough to give a good reply to the issue on my own, so instead I'm going to quote the relevant part of the FSFs statement[1] from a different discussion[2]:
> We understand that Mozilla is afraid of losing users. Cory Doctorow points out[3] that they have produced no evidence to substantiate this fear or made any effort to study the situation. More importantly, popularity is not an end in itself. This is especially true for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit with an ethical mission.
I'd argue you are smart enough to give a good reply. You've given your reference material as well (which I should have done previously). You are reading and engaging in Hacker News topics, this means you are way above the "average" person. You are smart enough to give a good reply :)
Starting with the "land of opportunity and freedom" Insert picture of eagle...
wow,
such irony.
And then people are up in arms about moving backbone internet functionality out of US, claiming that the internet is in its most free form when situated in America. With this FCC ruling, it's more or less confirmed that this statement is a joke. American freedom seems to be restricted to the freedom to wield a firearm.
As an European I probably should be glad about this, since this combined with all the NSA spying issues and implementing backdoors into US products [1], should increasingly force innovation out of US and bring it to Europe, but somehow I'm not.
All the ISPs will slow down all the major companies services, unless they pay up. There is no "faster" Internet. It's just "paying to get normal Internet back", like they've already done with Netflix:
More likely isps in other countries will look to this and decide they can make more money there. I think some Australian ips still have low gigabyte caps per month
"And he promised a series of measures to ensure the new paid prioritization practices are done fairly and don't harm consumers."
I have a measure in mind that won't harm consumers. Don't allow ISPs to discriminate against users regarding their already paid for internet traffic based on what they request. (Gee that sounds a lot like net neutrality.)
Anything less is open for abuse.
Perhaps "Discrimination" is a good word to tar this with, because it is. It's discrimination against companies, but it's also discrimination against users based on their tastes, preferences, and possibly socioeconomic status.
This seems like a valuable approach. If we could come up with examples of services like nonprofits that would be unable to pay and have their services negatively affected I think that could make people care about this issue. Maybe if we focused on things like Khan Academy, where their content is largely video. I think in that case its clear their money would be better spent developing a larger knowledge base instead of paying extortion money to ISPs, and it might strike a chord with average users.
I think if people would get away from this nebulous message that mostly seems to benefit for-profit companies, and focus on issues like ensuring access for non-profits and educational organizations, that there would be a lot more bi-partisan traction. Right now, the optics, for those not invested in the issue, come across as being mostly about Comcast and Netflix bickering over profits.
If you focus the issue on non-profits and edu orgs, all the people trying to get this through will do is write a tiny little exclusion just for that concern (ie no slow lanes for non-profits). That's what they do every time there's a narrow concern raised against terrible legislation.
First, you have the posture wrong. If there's no "terrible legislation" then Comcast and TWC can do whatever they want. What you're asking for is "terrible legislation" to keep them from doing whatever they want.
Second, at least to me, the non-profits and .edu orgs are the ones that implicate the most substantial public interest concerns. I don't really care about Netflix's profit margin.
After thinking on this further, here are some thoughts on wording and campaign approach.
This isn't about business, although we know the big ISPs behave badly as businesses (list various examples, monopoly issues)
This isn't about who is paying and how much, although we know there are problems with this too (list examples, compare to rest of the world)
This isn't even about 'fast lane' vs 'slow lane', although we know that this will be the results (list historical examples, monopilies)
This is a direct attack on your personal freedoms. It is censorship and discrimination.
This bill makes Comcast and other ISPs your personal internet censor. They will be able to decide who has how much access to you. Although they may not choose to make it 'exactly' zero access, it may be too close to matter. Partial censorship, or not-as-fast access is still censorship. (Examples from history about drowning out voices and controlling the message).
This bill allows Comcast to discriminate against it's users.
Not only can Comcast (and other ISPs) control how fast you access the internet (which they can already do), this allows them to discriminate against you, based on what information you choose to request. Can't afford services that pay off Comcast or that Comcast doesn't like? You are less of a person, less deserving of the service you already paid for.
This also allow subtle and insidious racial or religious discrimination. Do you watch 'televangelists' live online? Comcast or other ISPs could decide a different denomination gets a nice stream, while your church gets the 'separate but not equal' choppy, laggy, broken stream. Do you decide to use services that operate in other countries to talk with family in other nations? Comcast could decide they aren't as good as their favorite service that costs more. Even more critically, that service that they like may not even be allowed by law in the country you are trying to talk to. Live video and voice chat can be hard to hear and understand under good circumstances, if Comcast never fixes problems unless companies 'pay up', then they can decide if you can really see your family using the tools available to them.
The free market cannot address this problem. Comcast and other ISPs have made this a controlled non-free market. Fair competition isn't possible in this space, because of their monopoly/duopoly control, and difficult regulations that they helped write and suit only their business models.
All netizens are equal. "Whoever can pay" isn't equal. "Whoever we choose" certainly isn't equal. Don't let Comcast make some "more equal" than others.
Overall, I think slowing down a webpage may be the wrong message. Straight up better or worse is the better message. Maybe a "congratulations, your ISP has decided you are worthy of accessing this page. Find out why your ISP thinks it has this right, and why your rights are being signed away." would be more effective. Or even a big splash with "Comcast has approved this website for viewing.", which may be REALLY effective if IP block based, to be the actual ISP.
Don't allow ISPs to discriminate against users regarding their already paid for internet traffic based on what they request.
It's (relatively) cheap for Netflix or their CDN partners to connect their content-serving systems to a few dozen "meet me" rooms where it's "easy" for Comcast to hook as many wires up as necessary to receive the requested data into their network at an acceptable rate. That's all Netflix or their CDNs need to worry about. And so it's (relatively) cheap for them to scale the amount of data they serve as their customer base, average viewing time and stream quality grow.
But Comcast has to deliver all this data to tens of millions of customers spread out around the nation. While it would be nice if their networks were sufficiently provisioned to serve, say, half their customers 20Mbit/sec continuously during primetime, that is just not the network they have today. It will always be cheaper for Netflix to turn up the spigot than for Comcast to build out its infrastructure. Should "network neutrality" force Comcast to spend billions every time Netflix doubles its streaming rate?
Basically the answer to this is yes. If Comcast spends all of this money to upgrade their network and the cost to the end user goes up for the better service, then there are really no problems here. That's basically how a market should work. That plan would actually encourage them to upgrade their networks over time and install things like fiber to meet the new demands of customers, instead of providing poor service like they do now.
The problem is that a network that can stream 20Mbit continuously to every customer (so they always can get the "advertised" bandwidth) would be absurdly expensive, and rates would have to go up accordingly. Why should someone who doesn't consume Netflix pay for this? Why should Comcast be afraid to sell you a 100MBit "bursty" connection (essentially the same kind of service they actually advertise now) because they'd be 'forced' to potentially have the capacity to serve 100MBit to every subscriber when Netflix goes to 8K-h.269 or what-have-you?
The problem is that a network that can stream 20Mbit continuously to every customer (so they always can get the "advertised" bandwidth) would be absurdly expensive, and rates would have to go up accordingly
Then maybe they should advertise a different bandwidth?
No doubt. A local company in town recommends customers sign up with some absurd number like 5mpbs per every device connected on a local network. In reality the majority of customers can use the lowest possible plan (in this case 5mpbs) and have trouble free browsing and streaming.
The reality is these ISPs make money by overselling services to customers and not having to deliver on it. And now they're tacking on fees on the backend as well? Absurd.
You're not going to have a good time trying to run multiple concurrent Netflix streams on a 5Mbps connection. That's only enough for a single HD stream, assuming you even get all the bandwidth you're promised.
I'm not sure that the real problem is advertisement consistency. If your only choice is Comcast, and they deliver poor speeds (due to a combination of favoritism and not upgrading) then it's little consolation that you get the advertised low speed.
What difference does it make what they advertise? The existing advertising doesn't guarantee streaming 20Mbit from any host on the internet 24/7. If their advertising were scrupulously accurate, but they delivered the same service, why should you be happier?
twoodin:
>The problem is that a network that can stream 20Mbit continuously to every customer (so they always can get the "advertised" bandwidth) would be absurdly expensive, and rates would have to go up accordingly.
dec0dedab0de:
>Then maybe they should advertise a different bandwidth?
twoodin:
>What difference does it make what they advertise?
If Comcast is having a hard time delivering on what they advertise, as dec0dedab0de said, they should perhaps advertise differently. Offering different plans other then trying to sell a bandwidth that they can not deliver on with it being, as you say, "absurdly expensive."
There was a reason I put "advertised" in scare quotes: Comcast has always advertised that rate as a "peak rate", not something you can get continuously to every host on the internet. Peak rate matters to a lot of people who are using it for things (for example, browsing a multi-MB rich web page) other than streaming, where a consistent rate is more important.
This is sort of like car advertisements, that always touts "350hp V8" or whatever, even though in the vast majority of real-life usage you can use that power for at most a second or two at some freeway onramp or in a passing lane.
Saying that the connection is technically capable of 20Mbit/s is different from guaranteeing 20Mbit/s in any possible usage situation. The problem with my analogy is that people generally have an idea that you can't go faster than maybe 80mph regardless of what car you have, but there is no way to know if the "up to 20Mbit/s" connection means actual usage will show 15, 5, or 1... So yeah, they should somehow be required to tell you, at least at signup, what the typical throughput on your connection will be.
But this is just a problem with awareness. With the rise of Tesla cars, there has been an increase of public awareness of low speed torque. As more people have become aware of solar, more people have become aware of base-load generation. If ISPs started advertising "guaranteed bandwidth" customers would definitely pay attention, especially with the crappy product they've been getting thus far.
So you're ok with buying a 350hp v8 that can only really ever do 50hp? Except on toll roads you have to pay for again that you may use 'up to' 350hp, but you're still not guaranteed that.
The FCC isn't talking about speed that's a red herring. It's about access. What if the FCC say "Fine consumers must have a minimum of 1gbps" you're like "Huzar" and the FCC say "And anyone who pays a huge amount of money get a minimum of 100gps." ..hold the phone
So, charge consumers for what they use. Why does this seem to rarely come up?
The problem with the networks comcast and others currently maintain is they are saturated. And I'm not getting what I pay for as a result. They need a new pricing structure that properly values their product (bandwidth) and charges me for it.
Can anyone explain why the ISPs don't go down this road?
Because they can make more money selling pretty lies than ugly truths.
Of course, that's true for a lot of products, but the US ISP market in particular is problematic because there's little or no competition. And the big ISPs like Comcast spend a lot of money buying political support, so there's little effective regulation.
You're asking why Comcast should be responsible for meeting the expectations they're creating? When your advertising solely conveys "always fast Internet" and "up to 100Mb/s speeds", what exactly do you think people will take away from it.
If Comcast doesn't want to or can't provide these speeds for general use, they shouldn't advertise these speeds for general use. Can you explain the problem with that logic?
> The problem is that a network that can stream 20Mbit continuously to every customer would be absurdly expensive
Will it really? Because every time someone talks about ISP costs, they remark that what's expensive is the last mile. That's the entire reason ISPs claim to be so much more expensive than enterprize providers, so they need higher prices.
Now they claim that the backbone is the expensive part?
> Why should Comcast be afraid to sell you a 100MBit "bursty" connection (essentially the same kind of service they actually advertise now) because they'd be 'forced' to potentially have the capacity to serve 100MBit to every subscriber when Netflix goes to 8K-h.269 or what-have-you?
Who would be "forcing" them to do this? In a sane world they'd already be selling these two types of services as two types of service--you either choose the "bursty" option or you choose the (more expensive) "streaming" option. Then they would know how to provision for each type of user, and they could price each option based on the capabilities of their infrastructure.
Of course, what would happen then, if you are correct, is that the absurdly high price of the "streaming" option would drive their customers to alternative providers wherever possible--or they would be forced to actually spend that extra money on infrastructure. So basically they are trying to obfuscate the issue because actually serving their customers' needs is way too much like work.
It's actually not so expensive relative to the profit that these companies have been making. But they have a monopoly - so there's almost no incentive for them to upgrade their networks.
Exactly, customers in the market can then make cost/value choices for products that directly relate to how that individual ISP is managing costs.
With fast lane proposals, additional cost gets pushed back to successful websites. So for example, when Netflix pays a toll to Comcast, that additional cost is distributed among all the users of Netflix even if they're not doing business with Comcast. How does this work to support a market where consumer choice rewards efficient ISPs? It basically makes the market for network connections look more like the healthcare market where a fundamental problem in it's efficiency is how endpoint costs are highly disconnected from how efficient individual players in the market are operating.
The part that makes this different from healthcare options, is that there are usually no or few options. I know where I live I have the choice of timewarner or fios. That's it. If they decide they are slowing down the sites I use, I'm SOL.
I see a future where we are given a list of "premium" supported sites before making ISP decisions. I wonder if well end up with another dimension of price tier where one dimension is speed of service and the other is what major sites support it.
Comcast's network is designed to deliver a certain amount of data per customer.
It can hit this number when the data is coming from distributed sources.
It should be able to hit this same number even if all the data was coming from 60 interlinks to netflix.
It's not about how fast the netflix access is in absolute terms, it's about whether it's throttled compared to other things.
Comcast is not obligated to speed up their entire network when their customers request more data from a provider, but they should be obligated to peer.
Your comment is indicative of why this discussion is so difficult to have and why it's even tougher for the general public to understand or even care.
The way this has always works, and is not changing based on anything 'network neutrality' related, is that generally the sending network (Netflix) pays the receiving network (Comcast) based on something like the 95th percentile of their sending rate. It maybe not be linear, but if Netflix starts sending 2x traffic, they will pay something like 1.8x-2x. That's not changing, and nobody is disputing this.
What we're talking about here is that Comcast could take a user's 20Mbps connection and decide that even though it's fully provisioned in the last mile for 20Mbps, and they have plenty of pipe to get the Netflix data to the Comcast side of the last mile, that Comcast can just decide that Netflix will only get 5Mbps of that 20Mbps, that is unless Netflix pays the ransom money to Comcast to change that arbitrary limit.
> What we're talking about here is that Comcast could take a user's 20Mbps connection and decide that even though it's fully provisioned in the last mile for 20Mbps, and they have plenty of pipe to get the Netflix data to the Comcast side of the last mile, that Comcast can just decide that Netflix will only get 5Mbps of that 20Mbps, that is unless Netflix pays the ransom money to Comcast to change that arbitrary limit.
On the other hand, that's not what happened in the recent Comcast/Netflix dispute, so spinning it that way does not make a good case for net neutrality.
It maybe not be linear, but if Netflix starts sending 2x traffic, they will pay something like 1.8x-2x. That's not changing, and nobody is disputing this.
Are you arguing that Netflix's costs to scale traffic into Comcast are commensurate with Comcast's costs to scale the delivery of that traffic to consumers? I don't think that's true. Didn't Level 3 just blog[1] that they largely operate on a settlement-free basis? Prior to their deal with Comcast, Netflix may have been paying Level 3, and Level 3 may have been paying Comcast, but neither could have been paying the order-of-billions Comcast would need to spend to support, say, doubled Netflix primetime traffic.
Well, there's no gold standard for how any of the contracts are setup, but if I had to guess, it's because you're talking about Level 3 <-> Comcast. The profile of Netflix is far different from Level 3. Generally the fee is based on the net (as in net total, not net internet) traffic.
If Level 3 sends 100Mbps to Comcast, and Comcast sends 100Mbps back to Level 3, or at least approximately even most of the time, they very well may have a settlement free agreement. This is believable because Level 3 is a transit provider, as in if you send them traffic bound to anywhere on the internet, they'll get it there, so the amount of traffic that Level 3 receives from everybody to get to Comcast could be roughly equal to the amount of traffic Comcast wants/needs to route through Level 3 to the rest of the internet.
In the Netflix<->Comcast case, it's not a transit peering. Netflix can only send traffic over that link that is destined for Comcast customers. These peering arrangements are generally drastically cheaper per Mbps than the transit peering. The difference here though is that the only think Comcast sends to Netflix is HTTP request for the most part, and then Netflix sends a video stream back, so there's a HUGE imbalance in the traffic going each direction.
All that said, what Netflix pays to Comcast may scale with Comcast's costs, but there's no direct relationship. To simplify it a bit, Netflix is paying to get traffic to the Comcast central brain. Customers are paying Comcast to get a pipe laid connecting them to the central brain. The two costs are not very directly related.
Any argument that talks about the burden of Comcast having to upgrade their intermediate networks inevitably ignores that this is precisely what customers are paying Comcast for, which makes trapped customers rightfully upset.
The phenomenon you describe is best analyzed as the assumptions behind the oversell ratio needing to change - customers' usage is becoming more correlated in time, and they have found a type of service that will expand to use all available bandwidth until each user has >500Mbit.
The appropriate thing to do is to either lower the advertised/supplied bandwidth rates, or to institute metered billing. The first one is a market non-starter as customers shop by large numbers (hence why cable got so popular over DSL). And people are rightfully worried about the second because there's very little competition in this market, and instances of such have appeared to take a punishment-based screw-the-customer approach rather than a selling-more-product-to-customer one.
I think the only legislative solution is to create competition in the consumer ISP space by making last-mile delivery a regulated wholesale utility with many transit providers competing for service.
This is a false choice, born of deception. Comcast's allocations are not zero sum between upgrading and user fees. They're taking record profits every quarter, and customer fees are higher than they've ever been. They are choosing to shoulder the costs of network infrastructure on everyone except their investors.
> Should "network neutrality" force Comcast to spend billions every time Netflix doubles its streaming rate?
It wouldn't force an ISP take any action. Each ISP would only be forced to decide how much bandwidth to offer each consumer, and at what price point. If a particular ISP did not feel it wise to upgrade its infrastructure simply because Netflix increased its streaming rate, that ISP would be free not to make the investment.
So how do you deal with network congestion in that scenario? ISPs can continue to offer different pricing plans with different download rates. They can be transparent about the real download speeds for each plan. Perhaps they can even offer a speed estimator tool where the user picks a geographic endpoint and a time of day.
That solves part of the problem of congestion, in that consumer are (roughly) paying for the bandwidth they use. (Theoretically, the users' fees would be scaled to account for the cost of infrastructure upgrades.) But I'd still like to be able to quickly download, say, an API reference page from rubydoc.org without having my connection starved by torrents and video streaming. To that end, perhaps ISPs could grant each consumer a certain GB/month quota of "guaranteed max speed." I.e. until you exceed your quota of X GB per month, your traffic never falls below Y MB/sec, regardless of current network congestion. If you wanted to get really slick, you could even let customers opt certain traffic types out of that program. So I could say, for example, "use my max speed quota for regular HTTP, SSL, etc. usage, but never use it for video."
Ideally, each consumer would have several ISPs to choose from. In that case, the market could discover the optimal plan selections.
> But Comcast has to deliver all this data to tens of millions of customers spread out around the nation. While it would be nice if their networks were sufficiently provisioned to serve, say, half their customers 20Mbit/sec continuously during primetime, that is just not the network they have today. It will always be cheaper for Netflix to turn up the spigot than for Comcast to build out its infrastructure. Should "network neutrality" force Comcast to spend billions every time Netflix doubles its streaming rate?
That has nothing to do with intentionally throttling netflix traffic. Network neutrality has never forced Comcast to upgrade its infrastructure, so I'm not sure why that is even a question in your mind. We've had net neutrality for 20 years. Why would it all of a sudden force them to spend billions?
"Comcast has to deliver all this data to tens of millions of customers spread out around the nation."
Yes, this is a definition of an ISP. The ISP transmits requests from users to the internet, and the requested data back to the users. This is the product that Comcast already provides and charges their users for.
The users ask for internet content, the ISP (Comcast) is responsible for delivering it. If the users are clamoring for more content, taking more bandwidth, so be it. Comcast charges end users more money for more bandwidth already, through different pricing Tiers. If their infrastructure isn't big enough to keep up with customers demands then either they aren't meeting their existing contractual obligations with their customers, or they are falling behind technology wise. They have the money to keep up. They tend not to invest enough in their infrastructure, but that is a business issue. If Comcast is unhappy that users are using the service they paid for, they may need to restructure their offering to users, for example paying for bandwidth as a 'per amount transferred'. The critical point here is that it is a relationship only between the ISP (Comcast) and the end user, and the content providers aren't involved.
It is incredibly dangerous to confuse their relationship with their users with outside entities.
Net neutrality doesn't mean Comcast has to handle double the traffic from Netflix. Net neutrality means that Comcast has to handle the traffic from Netflix in the same way it handles it from other places. It could be slow, choppy, and a bad experience. They could choose to invest in a better network or not. They can charge users for more bandwidth, or other related infrastructure services.
What they cannot be allowed to do is discriminate against users and outside companies.
> Should "network neutrality" force Comcast to spend billions every time Netflix doubles its streaming rate?
This is based on a misunderstanding of what network neutrality means. The question isn't whether Comcast invests in their network but whether they can charge different rates based on the kind of traffic rather than the total volume.
If Comcast wants to skimp on network infrastructure, no problem.
If Comcast wants to charge their customers more for a high speed or uncapped plan, no problem.
If Comcast wants to charge their customers more to watch Netflix than Google Play, problem.
Why is the default QoS of residential broadband suddenly deemed sacred?
FWIW: I'd prefer guaranteed super-fast DNS and guaranteed low latency, but I don't care too much whether content from Disney happens to download 10x faster than content from Youtube.
> I have a measure in mind that won't harm consumers. Don't allow ISPs to discriminate against users regarding their already paid for internet traffic based on what they request. (Gee that sounds a lot like net neutrality.)
So you'd ban the large number of existing in-ISP CDNs and CDN/ISP partnerships, as well? (e.g. YouTube or Akamai mirroring content to servers directly on an ISP's network, to improve bandwidth and latency for that ISP's customers?)
Or, for that matter, you'd stop an ISP from offering a Debian mirror?
Well those are non sequiturs. Data sitting on a CDN is not "traffic", until it is actually traffic. CDNs function not by prioritizing traffic, but by reducing traffic.
Let's say that roads out of residential areas are owned by some company named R, and the residents pay R a fee to get access to the main arteries.
Some roads are used more by people of some cultures than others, sometimes roads get congested when lots of people in one neighborhood are all trying to get to the same place at the same time.
Would it be discriminatory for R to spend more on upgrades to the roads to some locations than at other locations? What if all the roads that were best to get to Chinatown were completely neglected?
Except none of the provisions for paid-prioritization mentions, let alone mandates, new roads. If this were about new toll roads, these already exist and are paid-peering arrangements, CDNs, etc. [1]
These new rules are explicitly about 'traffic shaping', by price, by destination, existing traffic along existing routes.
So this is less like using toll roads to cross New York State and more like selectively saying "everyone in New York State that's driving to a Starbucks needs to travel 10/mph slower -- however they're getting there -- or kick in $2/mo to drive the old speed limit."
[1] Microsoft pays Comcast gobs of money to ensure a performant network connection for XBox Live. This is quite different from Comcast being able to say "Sony isn't also paying us money for better service. Let's slow them down -- to protect the network -- until they pay up."
I'm not arguing it wouldn't/couldn't lead to discrimination. I just don't see how it's inherently classist.
The argument seemed to imply something like "charging people money for different qualities of service is classist, because poor people have less money".
CDNs increase the overall capacity of the network by caching content closer to its destination. This benefits everyone, even the traffic that is not cached by the CDN because it reduces congestion for everyone. The behavior we are worried about is zero sum (where some packets get prioritized and others lose out), or even negative sum (where some packets get held for ransom.)
That’s true, and it’s also true when Netflix buys a dedicated circuit to Comcast. Their traffic is no longer going over the other circuits.
Not saying it’s the right thing to do, but that it’s functionally the same.
It’s also functionally the same to say that any traffic not on the CDN is in a slow lane or being held ransom, in the sense that it will be congested until the publisher pays.
No, as far as I can tell the incentives in the two scenarios are very different.
The transparence on what is being payed for and why some sites are fast and some are slow is not the same for Comcast's subscribes in the two scenarios either.
> It’s also functionally the same to say that any traffic not on the CDN is in a slow lane or being held ransom
You're confusing routes with endpoints. CDNs are endpoints--multiple endpoints containing the same data so that there is a much higher probability of having an endpoint close to any given user. The owner of the data has to do all the work of getting multiple copies of the data placed at all those endpoints, making sure they're all in sync, etc. But the data traveling from endpoint to endpoint--from the nearest CDN node to the user--is not privileged over any other data.
What the net neutrality debate is about is the ISPs wanting to control routes--i.e., to be able to say that some data traveling over a given route from one endpoint to another endpoint gets to travel faster than other data traveling over the same route. CDNs don't do that.
What Netflix bought from Comcast is sort of in between. It's like a CDN in that Netflix still has to do the work of placing multiple copies of their content at different endpoints in different locations; but it's also like the ISP route control scheme in that Netflix' data gets a privileged route from their endpoints to Comcast users, a route that non-Netflix data from endpoints that are similarly situated does not get, because non-Netflix data can't travel through the special connection points that Netflix now has with Comcast. Normal CDNs don't do that either.
A CDN is a route, is my contention. Its value is being closer to the user.
CDNs are a good thing. But they are networks like any other, the difference being that the nodes are smart enough for to re-request data they already have. CDN nodes should be understood as caching routers.
Being closer to the user – the CDN’s value – rests in having a better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network. A better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network is what Netflix bought.
> A CDN is a route, is my contention. Its value is being closer to the user.
Being an endpoint that is closer to the user is not the same as being a route between that endpoint (or any other endpoint) and the user.
> CDN nodes should be understood as caching routers.
In some respects, yes. But in other important respects, no. For example, CDN nodes do not route traffic that does not have that node as either a source or a destination. The fact that the content at that node ultimately comes from another source does not change that; it simply means that some of the traffic to and from the CDN node is to and from the ultimate source of the content. It's still not at all the same as routing traffic to and from arbitrary endpoints.
> Being closer to the user – the CDN’s value – rests in having a better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network. A better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network is what Netflix bought.
You're conflating two different ways of taking a "position" in the network. A CDN takes advantage of the existing network and the existing routes to place copies of content closer to users. It can only use the existing "positions" in the network, not create new ones.
The Netflix deal created a new privileged route that didn't exist before, for Netflix content going to Comcast users only. So the "position" Netflix traffic is now in with respect to Comcast users didn't even exist before the deal.
How? Adding any new node to the Internet does create new routes to and from that node, but that doesn't give those routes any privileges over other routes.
> Netflix did buy a new route, replacing the one they were previously buying from Cogent.
And the difference between the new one and the old one is that the new one only carries Netflix traffic, and only goes to Comcast customers. That is what makes it privileged, and what CDNs in general, including the CDN Netflix was previously using to distribute its traffic to Cogent, do not do.
CDNs operate servers, not routers. The servers can be located in data centers with easy connections to ISPs and transit providers, but their traffic still doesn't get privileged over other traffic coming in to the networks of those ISPs and transit providers. There are no separate routes that CDN traffic takes to a user's computer, that other traffic from sources in the same data center, or going through routers in the same data center, can't take.
I think you're focusing too much on the technical implementation. I agree with the parent that a CDN effectively carries traffic from a content provider to the end user. Sure it does it in bigger chunks, and uses existing network connections. But the end result is still "pay more for faster access", and isn't that exactly what net neutrality is against?
> I think you're focusing too much on the technical implementation
I'm focusing on the functionality that's being implemented, which is what the poster I was responding to said was important. Having privileged routes is different functionality from having multiple hosts that all have copies of the same data.
> a CDN effectively carries traffic from a content provider to the end user.
But so does a non-CDN. So does any route on the Internet. The only difference with a CDN is that the content provider has paid for more servers to host multiple copies of the data. But the money is for those multiple copies, not for giving any specific copy a privileged route to certain users. As above, that's a functional difference.
Here's another way of seeing the functional difference. Say I use two online services, A and B. A is served using a global CDN. B is served using a privileged network with my current ISP. Now I change ISPs to one that service B isn't paying for privileged access to. I see no difference in performance with service A, but a big difference in performance with service B. So service A using a CDN doesn't lock me in to a specific ISP; but service B paying for privileged routes does.
> the end result is still "pay more for faster access"
No, it's "pay more for multiple copies of your data". It's not "pay more to have your data go over a quicker route from the same place".
> isn't that exactly what net neutrality is against?
No, net neutrality is not against "pay more for faster access", like service A above. It's against "pay more for privileged access to an ISP's users", like service B above.
> Transit networks like Level3, XO, Cogent and Tata perform two important services: (1) they carry traffic over long distances and (2) they provide access to every network on the global Internet. When Netflix connects directly to the Comcast network, Comcast is not providing either of the services typically provided by transit networks.
The bright and shining difference is that a CDN does not have a contract with the end user, and consequently doesn't connect directly to them. When we talk about a "fast lane" (or more accurately a "slow lane"), what we essentially mean is an ISP holding access to its users hostage. This is the opposite of how a CDN works, because those are paid by the provider to speed up access to its data, rather than being paid by the consumer for access to the provider's data.
Basically, what is proposed here is preventing an ISP (which is already a recognizable category) from starting a CDN business — a very bad one, since it only delivers content to itself — and artificially slowing down non-CDN traffic that has already been paid for on the other end in order to prop up its CDN business.
Something is going on here, such that the market isn't working. Otherwise, Comcast et al would be buying CDNs and vertically integrating to increase profits. But with our current system, it's more cost effective to lobby your way into bigger profits.
The difference to me is that CDNs increase the availability of content to everyone. If CDNs did not exist, the content would still be available.
Comcast is talking about "not decreasing" the availability of content. Some businesses can afford to pay to use already-paid-for infrastructure. Others are out of luck, and their content is not fully accessible. If Comcast did not exist, current users would not be able to request content, but the market could provide a solution in an alternate ISP. With Comcast the market cannot provide a solution, because it is actively being suppressed by Comcast.
There isn't really a difference between "increasing" and "not decreasing". Some of these debates have been about ISPs not investing in infrastructure when they otherwise might have.
The market can still provide a solution with the Comcast payments. That would be customers wanting fast everything don't use Comcast. If there's no competition for those customers then that's the real problem - a monopoly - not what tricks the monopoly uses to take advantage of people.
I don't get this whole net neautrality discussion that is going on in US (and maybe somewhere else, just haven't paid attention).
Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices.
Service providers (not ISPs, but the ones who run servers that consumers connect to) pay based on speed of their connection. If the ISP feels like service providers are not paying enough, raise the prices.
Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps?
I'm four years old. So please keep that in mind when explaing this to me. :)
> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes
Because once the middleman has established himself as a monopoly and everybody has to go through him with no alternative, he can make bank by having everybody pay more.
> and data caps?
Lets the ISP oversubscribe even more and extract even more money out of the system without providing any additional value whatsoever.
When you make an industry a public utility, and eliminate market-rate profit incentives, you get underinvestment, which is exactly what we see in water, power, etc: http://www.asce.org/failuretoact.
You can talk all you want about making internet service into "dumb pipes" but you can't make investors and shareholders pour billions of dollars a year into the "dumb pipe" business. They'll just dump their regulated business lines and shift the money to something more profitable, like Goldman is encouraging Verizon to do: http://stopthecap.com/2012/01/09/wall-street-encourages-veri....
Investors and shareholders are not in favor of pouring billions of dollars a year into infrastructure either. That's why we're seeing this rent seeking behavior, and one reason why we have slower speeds than other modern nations.
Yes, I am in favor of municipal fiber-to-the-home solutions paid for with public dollars given the critical importance of these "dumb pipes".
> That's why we're seeing this rent seeking behavior, and one reason why we have slower speeds than other modern nations.
Like? We compare quite favorably to countries like Canada and Australia, which have similar problems as we do with lack of density. According to Akamai's testing, we're in the top 10 worldwide for measured average connection speeds: http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q413.pdf?WT.mc_i... (page 19, Figure 20). Ookla's NetIndex puts us ahead of Canada and Australia, and only slightly behind the UK and Germany: http://www.netindex.com. Our Northeastern states, like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which have density comparable to continental Europe, have average connection speeds comparable to France, the EU standout.
> Yes, I am in favor of municipal fiber-to-the-home solutions paid for with public dollars given the critical importance of these "dumb pipes".
You don't, because when public dollars are involved, you get "lowest common denominator" levels of investment. Comcast's average user uses 2-5 GB/month. If telecom infrastructure was provisioned according to these people voting, do you think the resulting level of investment would be at a level that would make the folks on HN happy?
Absolute dollars isn't as interesting as a trend. According to the National Cable Telecommunications Association, expenditure on broadband infrastructure has declined over the past 5 years. http://www.vox.com/2014/5/12/5711082/big-cable-says-broadban...
> We compare quite favorably to countries like Canada and Australia.
> You don't, because when public dollars are involved, you get "lowest common denominator" levels of investment.
That must explain why Comcast and other monopoly providers fight municipalities tooth and nail against local broadband projects. I respect your opinion, but I disagree that communication infrastructure is not a public good.
And Canada ranks #37, and Australia #55. The average speed on Ookla's test for the U.S. was 24.34 megabits. Germany was at 25.38 and the UK at 27.01.
It's insane to compare a country like the U.S. to a country like Belgium that is more than ten times more dense. If you look at the northeastern states, which have densities closer to Europe (500-1000 per square mile versus 90 per square mile which is the U.S. average), average speeds range from 30-38 megabits, well ahead of the U.K. and Germany which are comparable dense, and on par with countries like Belgium, etc.
That's true; I would have loved to have found a source that provided speed by municipality rather than country which as you point out here (and earlier) is subject to density. Barring additional evidence, I concede the point.
> We compare quite favorably to countries like Canada and Australia.
According to a 2013 report by Ookla, US ranks 31st in download speeds.
You know you didn't disagree with him at all, right? Your source shows the US beating out Canada comfortably, and Australia overwhelmingly.
The US is not going to match the #1 and #2 on your list, Hong Kong and Singapore, ever, because it is trivial to wire up a single dense city with weak democratic red tape.
I can't say this with 100% (I may have missed one comparing lists from different sources), but it looks like there's no country within an order of magnitude of America's land area that has higher download speeds on Ookla's list.
EDIT Yep, confirmed. It looks like the biggest country that is faster than the US is France, which is 547,000 sqkm, while the lower US's land-only area is over 7.6 million sqkm.
> The US is not going to match the #1 and #2 on your list, Hong Kong and Singapore, ever, because it is trivial to wire up a single dense city with weak democratic red tape.
But even the most densely populated areas in the US have terrible Internet access. A small portion of New York City has FiOS, but the vast majority has Comcast or Time Warner, and those are about$60 for 20Mbps advertised[0].
I'm willing to give Singapore the fact that it's a smaller government[1], but the bottleneck in providing better Internet access in NYC is not the NYC government.
[0] I am in midtown Manhattan, probably the most densely populated area in the country, and I am getting 700 KB/s as I type this, so I'm not even getting anything close to what's advertised.
[1] And the population is about 2/3 the size of NYC
At the state level, on Ookla's data, New York performs pretty comparably to France and Belgium. It may be that there are cities in France and Belgium that have faster internet service. But they have better subways, etc, too. Most Americans cities are terribly managed. While Verizon is trying to deploy FIOS in New York, De Blasio has hired a civil rights lawyer to look into the issue of poor people not being able to afford FIOS! I would say the bottleneck is definitely NYC's government!
> At the state level, on Ookla's data, New York performs pretty comparably to France and Belgium.
Because they're including Weill Cornell Medical College and Digital Ocean in the data (those are the top ISPs in NYC, on their map).
It's not very meaningful unless we (A) can separate out consumer ISPs from business ISPs[0], (B) Know what speeds everyone is paying for and has available (currently this is all lumped together), and (C) knows how much everyone is paying for that service.
> While Verizon is trying to deploy FIOS in New York, De Blasio has hired a civil rights lawyer to look into the issue of poor people not being able to afford FIOS! I would say the bottleneck is definitely NYC's government!
As someone who actually lives in NYC and has tried to get FiOS installed in multiple buildings, there are two problems. One is that buildings have exclusive agreements to provide television service through either Time Warner or Comcast (usually because the superintendant and/or owner gets free cable as a result of this agreement), and that Verizon refuses to
provide FiOS Internet unless they can also provide television service.
Verizon is fully aware of this problem, and they've framed it in a way that allows them conveniently to point the finger at another entity.
Verizon is "trying" to deploy FiOS in New York, but they're not really interested in expanding their coverage.
> De Blasio has hired a civil rights lawyer to look into the issue of poor people not being able to afford FIOS! I would say the bottleneck is definitely NYC's government
This would only be relevant if the NYC government were the ones actively blocking people who can afford to pay for FiOS from having it installed, but as explained above, that's not the case.
I didn't mean to imply that Singapore had a smaller government. But Singapore and Hong Kong definitely have governments where, once the leaders decide to do something, it happens. If it's what you wanted to happen, great. If it inconveniences you, too bad.
How could any putative problems in broadband deployment not be because of some difference in governance? I don't mean this as a "government sucks" rant (although that could definitely be the problem, as 'rayiner mentions FiOS being used as a social justice issue, of all things). But there are lots of rich people in dense areas who would be willing to pay money for the service. NYC's government must be doing something wrong (whether it's over-regulation or under-regulation or mis-regulation).
This bears highlighting. The water company, regulated as a public utility, will fine people for using "too much" water when they decree they are running out. And water usage is a lot easier to model than broadband. Do you want that same mentality running the broadband companies?
Your question is about metered versus "unlimited, but not really" billing. With "unlimited, but not really" billing, you get throttled or cut off, but under a metered billing scheme heavy end-users pay more for the traffic generated as a result of their requests.
Are you making the argument that the existing QoS for power and water are both optimal? If so, for whom are they optimal?
Many people purchase bottled drinking water via delivery service b/c they deem the quality of tap water unacceptable for consumption.
Many people invest in UPS units, backup generators, etc. b/c they deem the reliability of power from the grid unacceptable.
Imagine if the power grid had an additional 9 of reliability -- it would save hospitals tens of millions of dollars on redundant power backup systems, significantly reducing the cost of healthcare. From this vantage-point, the poor quality of grid power is subsidized by those who need life support systems... this seems horribly unfair.
Many people purchase Google Fiber for 900Gb/s down b/c they deem the quality of Comcast's 25Gb/s down as unacceptable.
Are you making the counter argument that 25Gb/s is optimal given the reality that we're living in a time where 900Gb/s down is attainable except for the lack of shareholder will preventing its deployment?
I've built my own modems. I witnessed the stagnation around 2400 baud. I'm unimpressed by your suggestion that commercially-available bandwidth is at an "optimal" speed.
You do understand that in all of your weak counterpoints, the difference is choice. I can choose to not use Github, I can choose different restaraunts. However, broadband providers are rarely if ever competitive.
There are dozens of competitive providers in major cities, and many people subscribe to multiple (I buy broadband from Verizon (LTE) and TWC (cablemodem)).
Even small cities usually have a cable, dsl, and wireless option. The smallest rural cities I'm thinking of offer WiMax or some kind of similar service which is cheaper than cable for many customers.
ISPs would like to charge a fee from services that produce a huge amount of traffic, to carry that traffic to their consumers with a higher priority rather than mixing it in with all the other content. (Some people worry that ISPs would throttle high-bandwidth content lower than other content to force the services to pay to avoid degredation.)
Note that large ISPs have done this for years, via in-ISP CDNs: if you have enough content, it makes sense to have copies of it to serve up directly from the ISP's network.
The primary concern I've seen raised by network neutrality advocates: because many people have very few available high-speed ISP choices (one cable provider and sometimes one fiber provider, since most people can't get competitive DSL), it may not work to just say "pick another ISP if you don't like what yours does". (That assumes enough ISP customers care enough to switch ISPs over this issue.)
"After weeks of public outcry over the proposal, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the agency would not allow for unfair, or "commercially unreasonable," business practices. He wouldn't accept, for instance, practices that leave a consumer with slower downloads of some Web sites than what the consumer paid for from their Internet service provider."
From what I understand, your example would not be permissable. I know there are downsides to this, but a lot of the negative sentiment I see about this seems like an exaggeration which may not work in our favor.
Comcast has regularly ignored rules set by the FCC in favor of long court battles (that they eventually won). In the mean time, consumers have to deal with it.
Just out of curiosity, what authority does FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler cite for his ability to do this, given the history of the FCC getting railed in court?
How do we know this is not just FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's plan to give Comcast exactly what it wants?
"Oh well, we tried to block this deal, but that darn court stopped us!"
You need to think like an evil cable monopoly. It's a great thing because then they can charge consumers for their broadband service and charge content companies as well. A whole new source of revenue. And they can keep on jacking up the prices whenever they want, because they've got the customers of the content company hostage and can ransom them for nearly any level that would still let the content company turn a small profit.
> Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices.
Imagine you build a road. Who benefits? Drivers, obviously. But also store owners, because customers can now get to their stores. It's equally legitimate to charge the driver, via tolls, or the stores they drive to (via special tax districts). If you charge only the driver, you tap into only part of the net positive value created by the road.
This basic premise applies to cables and other infrastructure as much as it does to roads.
Except without the content, the ISPs wouldn't have much of a business. What's the point connecting people to the internet if there's nothing on there to see? It's supposed to be a symbiotic relationship not a robber baron one.
Netflix should be able to just block Comcast until they give in and agree to improve their peering.
I live in the UK though, where we have a competitive broadband market. The above tactic is less effective in the US because Comcast's users don't have anywhere else to go.
Because in this way they will be able to price discriminate more. Running a high bandwidth low profit margin site? Ok, carry on.
Running a low bandwidth high profit margin site? Shame if anything were to happen to your latency... All I want is 20% of your profit.
Could also be used to make backroom deals where you "slowban" political undesirables.
> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps?
Well, supporters of net neutrality say there is not a need, and that this is just ISPs being greedy.
My pet theory on why they've have been able to argue their case effectively: internet traffic (or at least some notion of "website popularity") follows a distribution with a long tail, meaning a small number of sites will always be responsible for a large % of traffic; this makes it easy and attractive for ISPs to target a few players for "protection", because it's easy for them to make the fallacious claim "hey, look Netflix is taking up X% of our bandwidth; that's not fair!" when this doesn't have much to do with Netflix per se, and when that scenario is actually much cheaper (because of caching, etc) to handle than a hypothetical one in which the same traffic is distributed more evenly.
Its not a plan to allow paid priority on the Internet -- that's already allowed without any restriction since the old Open Internet order was struck down by the D.C. Circuit. Its a plan to, within the limits placed by the court order striking down the old plan, limit practices that violate the neutrality principles the FCC has articulated as part of its Open Internet efforts, including paid prioritization.
People having the freedom to look at whatever they choose on a level playing field may not be in the interests of all concerned.
The consolidation of media companies possibly served interests other than profits. Look at what Putin is allegedly doing with the internet. Maybe in a way the eventual intent of this is the same. And for the same purposes. I don't think we should let it get started just in case.
same reason there's party lines inherent in the verdict-deciders of the highest court in the land (blind justice). or in counties/cities where sheriffs are publicly-voted for (to serve and protect). political collusion -- sorry, persuasion -- is the dna of gov't office.
I think the question was not why there are members of different parties in the FCC, but why do they differ in this vote based on partisan membership? I.e. why would one party find these rules good while the other not? It's as if one likes net neutrality, while the other doesn't.
> It's as if one likes net neutrality, while the other doesn't.
"As if"? For the whole length of the net neutrality policy debate, the support has concentrated in the Democratic Party and the opposition has centered in the Republican Party -- not just on the FCC, but in Congress and everywhere else. The reason the Democratic majority of the FCC keeps trying to find a way to advance Open Internet principles within the framework of existing law that at best addresses the issue indirectly is because neither mostly-Democratic supporters of express FCC authority (or mandate) for net neutrality nor mostly-Republican supporters of expressly prohibiting the FCC from regulating for net neutrality have sufficient support in Congress to pass legislation incorporating those goals and get it signed into law or override a Presidential veto.
Let's rephrase it then. Net neutrality is a very reasonable idea (same way as antitrust regulations are). Why do Republicans oppose it? They like monopolistic abuses on the Internet?
It's quite simple; net neutrality represents regulations on business. Republicans are anti-(business)-regulation, believing that a completely free market will deliver the best result to consumers. Of course, in this case that disregards the reality of 80 years of telecom monopolies (and derivative companies thereof,) i.e. mammoth established players with a history of playing dirty to stomp all others out of the marketplace; it is possible that in a blank slate scenario that regulation-less competition would lead to a good result for consumers, but even that is not a foregone outcome. In short, market idealism.
Great! the FCC has officially sanctioned ISP's to be Trolls, demanding some gold to cross their bridge. This guarantees that there will always be multiple levels of peering speed even if the connections are upgraded and are able to easily handle the load. They won't want to give up their troll gold. That's just peachy, thanks for letting us get screwed over even more, Go USA! </Sarcasm>
> the FCC has officially sanctioned ISP's to be Trolls, demanding some gold to cross their bridge.
No, the DC Circuit did that when it struck down the FCC's old Open Internet order. The FCC has proposed a draft plan to limit harassment by the trolls, and asked the public for comments on how to make it better before "official sanction" is given to any rule.
Metered service is, ultimately, what they want. They are envious of the kinds of margin wireless carriers are getting for data transfer over their networks.
Can anyone make a serious argument on behalf of the carriers? Given the court decisions, the only way to protect the American people and the economy is to reclassify ISP's under Title II.
For the skeptics, it appears to come down to the question: which route offers better prospects for upgrading our internet infrastructure? Choice one is relying on a for-profit corporation with an effective monopoly that is beholden to shareholders; Choice two is relying on elected politicians beholden to the voters.
If you think there is a different argument that can be made on behalf of the carriers or if you can make the above one better, I would be very interested in hearing it.
> Can anyone make a serious argument on behalf of the carriers? Given the court decisions, the only way to protect the American people and the economy is to reclassify ISP's under Title II.
If you ignore the various arguments about ISPs trying to get paid twice for the same content, consider the possibility of an ISP and a major high-bandwidth content provider (YouTube, Netflix, Akamai, etc) trying to build a deal that's better for both of them and for the consumer. For instance, consider a CDN on the ISP's network. Consumers get content faster with lower latency; the content provider reduces their bandwidth costs by sending only one copy of $POPULAR_CONTENT rather than one per customer; the ISP has lower costs and makes its customers happier.
Network neutrality would ban that, too. So this isn't the kind of thing that can be settled with simple blanket statements like "carriers should not make deals with content providers" or "all content should be treated identically".
> For the skeptics, it appears to come down to the question: which route offers better prospects for upgrading our internet infrastructure? Choice one is relying on a for-profit corporation with an effective monopoly that is beholden to shareholders; Choice two is relying on elected politicians beholden to the voters.
I'm always impressed when people can say with a straight face that politicians listen to voters. Voters don't care about issues like these, unless you can divide the issue across party lines and successfully make it one of the very small number of visible issues in a political campaign.
I'd be more interested in seeing proposed solutions to the "effective monopoly" problem than to network neutrality. Solve the monopoly and issues like network neutrality will disappear along with it.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Care to explain your CDN/ISP hypothetical further? Wouldn't the content providers who are capable of paying have an advantage over those who aren't?
I'm not clear on how money changes hands in your case, but undoubtedly this arrangement would favor the ISP. As far as peering goes, it's a bit more complicated... server locations are more mobile than consumer locations, so there is less concern about an effective geographic monopoly for backbone providers. Without fully thinking through the economics of peering, my initial thought is that there should probably be a regulated amount that ISP's can charge to peer with backbone providers. Maybe cost plus a maintenance fee based on traffic volume.
Regarding voting, I just feel it's the better of two imperfect solutions.
> Thanks for the thoughtful response. Care to explain your CDN/ISP hypothetical further? Wouldn't the content providers who are capable of paying have an advantage over those who aren't?
Of course, just as Amazon has an advantage over smaller retailers, and Netflix has an advantage over new steaming services. Incumbents always have certain advantages, and business deals always favor those involved in them over those not involved in them. Money makes things easier. But "an advantage" isn't "an insurmountable advantage", and HN is full of startups coming up with innovative ways to circumvent incumbent advantages.
> I'm not clear on how money changes hands in your case, but undoubtedly this arrangement would favor the ISP.
Not necessarily. This doesn't need to be a win/lose zero-sum scenario; it's entirely possible, in the scenario I described, for all three of the customer, the ISP, and the content provider to come out ahead.
> As far as peering goes, it's a bit more complicated... server locations are more mobile than consumer locations, so there is less concern about an effective geographic monopoly for backbone providers.
That's certainly true. And in general, I think it's much more critical to find a solution to the ISP monopoly problem than to the network neutrality problem, because ISP monopolies lead to quite a few other issues as well.
> Without fully thinking through the economics of peering, my initial thought is that there should probably be a regulated amount that ISP's can charge to peer with backbone providers. Maybe cost plus a maintenance fee based on traffic volume.
I can understand where that idea would come from, but ick; there are so many things wrong with that idea.
Perhaps it would make sense to legally separate the "last-mile" provider from the large-scale bandwidth provider, with the former providing only connectivity to a local meet-me room. I don't particularly like that idea, but it seems far less awful than alternatives.
Tom Wheeler, the FCC Chairman, was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the majority Democratic U.S. Senate in 2013 (lead by Harry Reid who also claims to be pro net neutrality) is going to kill Net Neutrality.
Please take some time to remind democratic politicians & supporters why practicing this sort of politics will come with a price.
> Tom Wheeler, the FCC Chairman, was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the majority Democratic U.S. Senate in 2013 (lead by Harry Reid who also claims to be pro net neutrality) is going to kill Net Neutrality.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit already killed net neutrality. Wheeler is trying to resurrect it within the limits set by the Court (if you want more than that Court will allow under current statutory authority, you need to get more net neutrality friendly people in Congress so that they can change the statute to give the FCC more authority with regard to net neutrality.)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] thread"I believe the process that got us to rulemaking today was flawed," she said. "I would have preferred a delay.""
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But... she voted yes anyway. WTF?
I may disagree with the decision, but I understand her position.
Yet she did not consider the future one bit.
She doesn't think the actual NPRM represents the best way to acheive the objectives it seeks to serve, but agrees with the objectives. As an NPRM isn't an adopted regulations, its a proposal which sets out objectives, provides concrete proposed steps, and seeks public comment on those steps and alternatives to them, it may make sense to vote for an NPRM (especially when you believe that there is a large and active community that will provide alternatives) when you agree with the objectives but have strong disagreements on some elements of the implementation, rather than voting no and preventing any rulemaking directed at the objectives from proceeding.
She would prefer to delay and get a better (from her perspective) proposal before the public, but would rather have the process moving forward that will allow adopting rules than have the process stalled. The three that voted for the NPRM are the three commissioners that, differ as they might on the details, believe that the FCC should be pursuing net neutrality ("Open Internet") regulation, the two that voted against are the two that think that the FCC should not and that things like paid prioritization and all the other things net neutrality seeks to restrict should be permitted without restriction.
Much of the news coverage has inverted reality and portrayed the proposal as a change to permit paid prioritization, but it is a change (in relevant part) to prevent it, within the constraints imposed by the D.C. Circuit when they struck down the last FCC order intended to do that.
I'm really starting to think mesh networks are going to be the only solution.
To be less facetious, I could also choose AT&T DSL, but they don't offer competitive bandwidth. And they aren't exactly a small independent ISP. There might be ISPs that offer "business class" service, but their prices probably start at least 3x what I currently pay. I'm not even sure they would offer service in an apartment complex either.
I live in Santa Clara, in the South Bay. It's pretty close to the heart of Silicon Valley. My only option for an ISP is Comcast; my choices are literally, in the true definition of literally, use Comcast or don't get internet. And that's not really a choice, is it?
Especially in apartment complexes, you'll have a single carrier lock down entire areas in a no-compete way.
Antitrust laws, environmental laws etc. all force businesses to "operate in a certain way". You can argue for more or less regulation, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone to argue for no regulation.
Also, the issue is many people don't have a choice between ISPs, or if they do, it's between two major ISPs. If a Time Warner / Comcast juggernaut implements a fast lane, do you think that Verizon or whoever else won't?
Media misrepresentation happened.
> It seems like just yesterday that the FCC was the one creating the rules around net neutrality.
It still is.
> A federal court over-turns this and all of a sudden the FCC decides to go the complete opposite direction?
No, this is an attempt to revive, within the constraints of the court decision, what was struck down. The reporting that this is about "allowing" or "considering" paid prioritization ignores the fact that, as a result of the court decision, paid prioritization is allowed now, without any restrictions. This proposal would declare some paid prioritization (where it is offered exclusively to an affiliate of the ISP) presumptively illegal, and seek to restrict paid prioritization even outside of that which is presumptively illegal. This is in the exact same direction (though not the exact same mechanism, since that was ruled outside of the FCC's authority) as prior net neutrality orders from the FCC, which is why the same 3-2 partisan alignment on the FCC exists on the issue that has existed on net neutrality as a broad concept for quite some time.
After watching the FCC hearing, it seemed like all of the people who were "for" open internet, and spoke of it from the consumer level (including Wheeler) voted for the proposal. The commissioners that said the FCC didn't have jurisdiction to regulate and to leave the market alone, voted against the proposal.
Isn't it the case that if they had voted against this, that we would have been in the exact same boat we are in now and therefore the agreement that Netflix signed would continue unabated?
In that case, it really didn't matter what they voted.
Yes, we are in the same boat with Netflix having to pay for bandwidth as before. However, by the FCC officially sanctioning something that would have been technically illegal before the Federal ruling, they've basically reversed course and declared open season on content providers the ISPs don't like.
No, net-neutrality proponents are saying the opposite of what they mean. They couch this in terms of "protecting the open internet." Except there never was an "open internet." Before the short-lived net neutrality regulations, cable companies were allowed to do whatever they wanted with their network. And that's true now that the regulations have been struck down. The cable companies do not need any sort of action by the FCC to be able to come to these agreements.
What net-neutrality proponents want is new regulations to keep cable companies from doing something that they currently are allowed to do, and except for a small period of time, were historically always allowed to do.
There used to be counterweights involved [e.g. Comcast had to play ball fairly] which effectively forced neutrality. Netflix, for instance, wasn't a 'problem' back in 2007 for the ISPs. We didn't have the ISPs pulling QoS BS like this in the 90s because people could and would switch providers. They can't now unless they want to go back to using dialup.
This should be the main issue at this year's elections. Unfortunately, this is America, where the main issues are only those the large campaign donors care about.
"We are gratified by the Court's decision today to vacate the previous FCC's order [to impose rules about net neutrality]. Our primary goal was always to clear our name and reputation. We have always been focused on serving our customers and delivering the quality open-Internet experience consumers want. Comcast remains committed to the FCC's existing open Internet principles, and we will continue to work constructively with this FCC as it determines how best to increase broadband adoption and preserve an open and vibrant Internet.
Comcast Statement on U.S. Court of Appeals Decision on Comcast v. FCC [6]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC#The_FCC.27...
Its the term that the FCC adopted first for its net neutrality efforts. Comcast, the first target of an enforcement action based on those principles, attempted to subvert the term to render it meaningless.
That's because the headline is an outright lie.
> After watching the FCC hearing, it seemed like all of the people who were "for" open internet, and spoke of it from the consumer level (including Wheeler) voted for the proposal.
Exactly. After the old Open Internet order was recently struck down as exceeding the FCCs authority, there are no rules limiting paid prioritization (or any of the other anti-neutrality practices the old Open Internet order addressed.) The current NPRM is both a concrete proposal and a call for public comment on alternative approaches to restore limits on anti-neutral activities by broadband providers. It is not a proposal to allow paid prioritization -- no proposal is necessary for that, as it is currently allowed without restriction. To the extent that it addresses paid prioritization, it is a proposal to restrict it.
> The commissioners that said the FCC didn't have jurisdiction to regulate and to leave the market alone, voted against the proposal.
Right.
> Isn't it the case that if they had voted against this, that we would have been in the exact same boat we are in now
No, if they voted against it, there wouldn't be an active rulemaking aimed at limiting the practice with a defined timeline, a proposal on the table, and a request for public comments on that proposal and specific alternatives. In either case, there are no actual rules in place, since this isn't actual rules, its a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking", a formal call for public comment centered around concrete proposals and specified alternatives.
So we had a good time, haven't we...
" The proposal is not a final rule, but the three-to-two vote on Thursday is a significant step forward on a controversial idea that has invited fierce opposition from consumer advocates, Silicon Valley heavyweights, and Democratic lawmakers. "
What's the difference?
Currently with DRM there are a variety of plugins to support it in the browser. You have to download Widevine's plugin, or PlayReady's plugin, or whatever. It's just a better user experience if we really do need DRM to have some standardized DRM that the browsers can implement to make it seamless for the user.
Note that I don't support DRM, I think it's a total waste of time because the movies aren't released to the wild by your average Joe who is downloading movies from Amazon. It just serves to hurt the average user. However I think that if we must have DRM, it should at least be something that is easier and works better for the average user.
To answer your question: the difference is that Mozilla is not going out and promoting DRM. They are being pragmatic and reasonable in the less than ideal situation.
One of the characteristics of cable TV is, precisely, that you don't get access to the content if you don't pay. DRM is one way of achieving this, and Mozilla in this case is accepting that without even a struggle.
If I understood the parent comment correctly, that is.
Mozilla fought the DRM implementation more than any other browser. They were at the point where they unfortunately had to implement it, otherwise their user base wouldn't be able to access services like netflix etc. At that point it's better to keep your user base instead of them switching to another browser and having no voice.
> We understand that Mozilla is afraid of losing users. Cory Doctorow points out[3] that they have produced no evidence to substantiate this fear or made any effort to study the situation. More importantly, popularity is not an end in itself. This is especially true for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit with an ethical mission.
[1] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-condemns-partnership-between-mo...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7749108
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/firefox-cl...
wow,
such irony.
And then people are up in arms about moving backbone internet functionality out of US, claiming that the internet is in its most free form when situated in America. With this FCC ruling, it's more or less confirmed that this statement is a joke. American freedom seems to be restricted to the freedom to wield a firearm.
https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=6
All the ISPs will slow down all the major companies services, unless they pay up. There is no "faster" Internet. It's just "paying to get normal Internet back", like they've already done with Netflix:
http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious...
[1] - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-...
We should never look over the water and be thankful it's not happened to us, because all we're seeing is how our (near) future is likely to be.
I have a measure in mind that won't harm consumers. Don't allow ISPs to discriminate against users regarding their already paid for internet traffic based on what they request. (Gee that sounds a lot like net neutrality.)
Anything less is open for abuse.
Perhaps "Discrimination" is a good word to tar this with, because it is. It's discrimination against companies, but it's also discrimination against users based on their tastes, preferences, and possibly socioeconomic status.
To say nothing of de-facto censorship issues.
It'll backfire big time, and waste valuable time.
Second, at least to me, the non-profits and .edu orgs are the ones that implicate the most substantial public interest concerns. I don't really care about Netflix's profit margin.
This isn't about business, although we know the big ISPs behave badly as businesses (list various examples, monopoly issues) This isn't about who is paying and how much, although we know there are problems with this too (list examples, compare to rest of the world) This isn't even about 'fast lane' vs 'slow lane', although we know that this will be the results (list historical examples, monopilies) This is a direct attack on your personal freedoms. It is censorship and discrimination.
This bill makes Comcast and other ISPs your personal internet censor. They will be able to decide who has how much access to you. Although they may not choose to make it 'exactly' zero access, it may be too close to matter. Partial censorship, or not-as-fast access is still censorship. (Examples from history about drowning out voices and controlling the message).
This bill allows Comcast to discriminate against it's users.
Not only can Comcast (and other ISPs) control how fast you access the internet (which they can already do), this allows them to discriminate against you, based on what information you choose to request. Can't afford services that pay off Comcast or that Comcast doesn't like? You are less of a person, less deserving of the service you already paid for.
This also allow subtle and insidious racial or religious discrimination. Do you watch 'televangelists' live online? Comcast or other ISPs could decide a different denomination gets a nice stream, while your church gets the 'separate but not equal' choppy, laggy, broken stream. Do you decide to use services that operate in other countries to talk with family in other nations? Comcast could decide they aren't as good as their favorite service that costs more. Even more critically, that service that they like may not even be allowed by law in the country you are trying to talk to. Live video and voice chat can be hard to hear and understand under good circumstances, if Comcast never fixes problems unless companies 'pay up', then they can decide if you can really see your family using the tools available to them.
The free market cannot address this problem. Comcast and other ISPs have made this a controlled non-free market. Fair competition isn't possible in this space, because of their monopoly/duopoly control, and difficult regulations that they helped write and suit only their business models.
All netizens are equal. "Whoever can pay" isn't equal. "Whoever we choose" certainly isn't equal. Don't let Comcast make some "more equal" than others.
Overall, I think slowing down a webpage may be the wrong message. Straight up better or worse is the better message. Maybe a "congratulations, your ISP has decided you are worthy of accessing this page. Find out why your ISP thinks it has this right, and why your rights are being signed away." would be more effective. Or even a big splash with "Comcast has approved this website for viewing.", which may be REALLY effective if IP block based, to be the actual ISP.
It's (relatively) cheap for Netflix or their CDN partners to connect their content-serving systems to a few dozen "meet me" rooms where it's "easy" for Comcast to hook as many wires up as necessary to receive the requested data into their network at an acceptable rate. That's all Netflix or their CDNs need to worry about. And so it's (relatively) cheap for them to scale the amount of data they serve as their customer base, average viewing time and stream quality grow.
But Comcast has to deliver all this data to tens of millions of customers spread out around the nation. While it would be nice if their networks were sufficiently provisioned to serve, say, half their customers 20Mbit/sec continuously during primetime, that is just not the network they have today. It will always be cheaper for Netflix to turn up the spigot than for Comcast to build out its infrastructure. Should "network neutrality" force Comcast to spend billions every time Netflix doubles its streaming rate?
Then maybe they should advertise a different bandwidth?
The reality is these ISPs make money by overselling services to customers and not having to deliver on it. And now they're tacking on fees on the backend as well? Absurd.
dec0dedab0de: >Then maybe they should advertise a different bandwidth?
twoodin: >What difference does it make what they advertise?
If Comcast is having a hard time delivering on what they advertise, as dec0dedab0de said, they should perhaps advertise differently. Offering different plans other then trying to sell a bandwidth that they can not deliver on with it being, as you say, "absurdly expensive."
Saying that the connection is technically capable of 20Mbit/s is different from guaranteeing 20Mbit/s in any possible usage situation. The problem with my analogy is that people generally have an idea that you can't go faster than maybe 80mph regardless of what car you have, but there is no way to know if the "up to 20Mbit/s" connection means actual usage will show 15, 5, or 1... So yeah, they should somehow be required to tell you, at least at signup, what the typical throughput on your connection will be.
The FCC isn't talking about speed that's a red herring. It's about access. What if the FCC say "Fine consumers must have a minimum of 1gbps" you're like "Huzar" and the FCC say "And anyone who pays a huge amount of money get a minimum of 100gps." ..hold the phone
The problem with the networks comcast and others currently maintain is they are saturated. And I'm not getting what I pay for as a result. They need a new pricing structure that properly values their product (bandwidth) and charges me for it.
Can anyone explain why the ISPs don't go down this road?
Of course, that's true for a lot of products, but the US ISP market in particular is problematic because there's little or no competition. And the big ISPs like Comcast spend a lot of money buying political support, so there's little effective regulation.
If Comcast doesn't want to or can't provide these speeds for general use, they shouldn't advertise these speeds for general use. Can you explain the problem with that logic?
Will it really? Because every time someone talks about ISP costs, they remark that what's expensive is the last mile. That's the entire reason ISPs claim to be so much more expensive than enterprize providers, so they need higher prices.
Now they claim that the backbone is the expensive part?
Who would be "forcing" them to do this? In a sane world they'd already be selling these two types of services as two types of service--you either choose the "bursty" option or you choose the (more expensive) "streaming" option. Then they would know how to provision for each type of user, and they could price each option based on the capabilities of their infrastructure.
Of course, what would happen then, if you are correct, is that the absurdly high price of the "streaming" option would drive their customers to alternative providers wherever possible--or they would be forced to actually spend that extra money on infrastructure. So basically they are trying to obfuscate the issue because actually serving their customers' needs is way too much like work.
With fast lane proposals, additional cost gets pushed back to successful websites. So for example, when Netflix pays a toll to Comcast, that additional cost is distributed among all the users of Netflix even if they're not doing business with Comcast. How does this work to support a market where consumer choice rewards efficient ISPs? It basically makes the market for network connections look more like the healthcare market where a fundamental problem in it's efficiency is how endpoint costs are highly disconnected from how efficient individual players in the market are operating.
I see a future where we are given a list of "premium" supported sites before making ISP decisions. I wonder if well end up with another dimension of price tier where one dimension is speed of service and the other is what major sites support it.
It can hit this number when the data is coming from distributed sources.
It should be able to hit this same number even if all the data was coming from 60 interlinks to netflix.
It's not about how fast the netflix access is in absolute terms, it's about whether it's throttled compared to other things.
Comcast is not obligated to speed up their entire network when their customers request more data from a provider, but they should be obligated to peer.
The way this has always works, and is not changing based on anything 'network neutrality' related, is that generally the sending network (Netflix) pays the receiving network (Comcast) based on something like the 95th percentile of their sending rate. It maybe not be linear, but if Netflix starts sending 2x traffic, they will pay something like 1.8x-2x. That's not changing, and nobody is disputing this.
What we're talking about here is that Comcast could take a user's 20Mbps connection and decide that even though it's fully provisioned in the last mile for 20Mbps, and they have plenty of pipe to get the Netflix data to the Comcast side of the last mile, that Comcast can just decide that Netflix will only get 5Mbps of that 20Mbps, that is unless Netflix pays the ransom money to Comcast to change that arbitrary limit.
On the other hand, that's not what happened in the recent Comcast/Netflix dispute, so spinning it that way does not make a good case for net neutrality.
Are you arguing that Netflix's costs to scale traffic into Comcast are commensurate with Comcast's costs to scale the delivery of that traffic to consumers? I don't think that's true. Didn't Level 3 just blog[1] that they largely operate on a settlement-free basis? Prior to their deal with Comcast, Netflix may have been paying Level 3, and Level 3 may have been paying Comcast, but neither could have been paying the order-of-billions Comcast would need to spend to support, say, doubled Netflix primetime traffic.
[1] http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-inte...
If Level 3 sends 100Mbps to Comcast, and Comcast sends 100Mbps back to Level 3, or at least approximately even most of the time, they very well may have a settlement free agreement. This is believable because Level 3 is a transit provider, as in if you send them traffic bound to anywhere on the internet, they'll get it there, so the amount of traffic that Level 3 receives from everybody to get to Comcast could be roughly equal to the amount of traffic Comcast wants/needs to route through Level 3 to the rest of the internet.
In the Netflix<->Comcast case, it's not a transit peering. Netflix can only send traffic over that link that is destined for Comcast customers. These peering arrangements are generally drastically cheaper per Mbps than the transit peering. The difference here though is that the only think Comcast sends to Netflix is HTTP request for the most part, and then Netflix sends a video stream back, so there's a HUGE imbalance in the traffic going each direction.
All that said, what Netflix pays to Comcast may scale with Comcast's costs, but there's no direct relationship. To simplify it a bit, Netflix is paying to get traffic to the Comcast central brain. Customers are paying Comcast to get a pipe laid connecting them to the central brain. The two costs are not very directly related.
The phenomenon you describe is best analyzed as the assumptions behind the oversell ratio needing to change - customers' usage is becoming more correlated in time, and they have found a type of service that will expand to use all available bandwidth until each user has >500Mbit.
The appropriate thing to do is to either lower the advertised/supplied bandwidth rates, or to institute metered billing. The first one is a market non-starter as customers shop by large numbers (hence why cable got so popular over DSL). And people are rightfully worried about the second because there's very little competition in this market, and instances of such have appeared to take a punishment-based screw-the-customer approach rather than a selling-more-product-to-customer one.
I think the only legislative solution is to create competition in the consumer ISP space by making last-mile delivery a regulated wholesale utility with many transit providers competing for service.
It wouldn't force an ISP take any action. Each ISP would only be forced to decide how much bandwidth to offer each consumer, and at what price point. If a particular ISP did not feel it wise to upgrade its infrastructure simply because Netflix increased its streaming rate, that ISP would be free not to make the investment.
So how do you deal with network congestion in that scenario? ISPs can continue to offer different pricing plans with different download rates. They can be transparent about the real download speeds for each plan. Perhaps they can even offer a speed estimator tool where the user picks a geographic endpoint and a time of day.
That solves part of the problem of congestion, in that consumer are (roughly) paying for the bandwidth they use. (Theoretically, the users' fees would be scaled to account for the cost of infrastructure upgrades.) But I'd still like to be able to quickly download, say, an API reference page from rubydoc.org without having my connection starved by torrents and video streaming. To that end, perhaps ISPs could grant each consumer a certain GB/month quota of "guaranteed max speed." I.e. until you exceed your quota of X GB per month, your traffic never falls below Y MB/sec, regardless of current network congestion. If you wanted to get really slick, you could even let customers opt certain traffic types out of that program. So I could say, for example, "use my max speed quota for regular HTTP, SSL, etc. usage, but never use it for video."
Ideally, each consumer would have several ISPs to choose from. In that case, the market could discover the optimal plan selections.
That has nothing to do with intentionally throttling netflix traffic. Network neutrality has never forced Comcast to upgrade its infrastructure, so I'm not sure why that is even a question in your mind. We've had net neutrality for 20 years. Why would it all of a sudden force them to spend billions?
Then they can build out their infrastructure with the new revenue.
Yes, this is a definition of an ISP. The ISP transmits requests from users to the internet, and the requested data back to the users. This is the product that Comcast already provides and charges their users for.
The users ask for internet content, the ISP (Comcast) is responsible for delivering it. If the users are clamoring for more content, taking more bandwidth, so be it. Comcast charges end users more money for more bandwidth already, through different pricing Tiers. If their infrastructure isn't big enough to keep up with customers demands then either they aren't meeting their existing contractual obligations with their customers, or they are falling behind technology wise. They have the money to keep up. They tend not to invest enough in their infrastructure, but that is a business issue. If Comcast is unhappy that users are using the service they paid for, they may need to restructure their offering to users, for example paying for bandwidth as a 'per amount transferred'. The critical point here is that it is a relationship only between the ISP (Comcast) and the end user, and the content providers aren't involved.
It is incredibly dangerous to confuse their relationship with their users with outside entities.
Net neutrality doesn't mean Comcast has to handle double the traffic from Netflix. Net neutrality means that Comcast has to handle the traffic from Netflix in the same way it handles it from other places. It could be slow, choppy, and a bad experience. They could choose to invest in a better network or not. They can charge users for more bandwidth, or other related infrastructure services.
What they cannot be allowed to do is discriminate against users and outside companies.
Isn't comcast also a content provider? They provide cable TV services and own a TV network and a film studio.
This is based on a misunderstanding of what network neutrality means. The question isn't whether Comcast invests in their network but whether they can charge different rates based on the kind of traffic rather than the total volume.
If Comcast wants to skimp on network infrastructure, no problem.
If Comcast wants to charge their customers more for a high speed or uncapped plan, no problem.
If Comcast wants to charge their customers more to watch Netflix than Google Play, problem.
FWIW: I'd prefer guaranteed super-fast DNS and guaranteed low latency, but I don't care too much whether content from Disney happens to download 10x faster than content from Youtube.
So you'd ban the large number of existing in-ISP CDNs and CDN/ISP partnerships, as well? (e.g. YouTube or Akamai mirroring content to servers directly on an ISP's network, to improve bandwidth and latency for that ISP's customers?)
Or, for that matter, you'd stop an ISP from offering a Debian mirror?
That's a pretty shakey one. Are people who can't afford Porsches being discriminated against based on their socioeconomic status?
And it's pretty easy to see where that could lead to discrimination.
So, if you were starting in New York City, it would cost a lot more to travel to Buffalo than it would to White Plains.
Some roads are used more by people of some cultures than others, sometimes roads get congested when lots of people in one neighborhood are all trying to get to the same place at the same time.
Would it be discriminatory for R to spend more on upgrades to the roads to some locations than at other locations? What if all the roads that were best to get to Chinatown were completely neglected?
These new rules are explicitly about 'traffic shaping', by price, by destination, existing traffic along existing routes.
So this is less like using toll roads to cross New York State and more like selectively saying "everyone in New York State that's driving to a Starbucks needs to travel 10/mph slower -- however they're getting there -- or kick in $2/mo to drive the old speed limit."
[1] Microsoft pays Comcast gobs of money to ensure a performant network connection for XBox Live. This is quite different from Comcast being able to say "Sony isn't also paying us money for better service. Let's slow them down -- to protect the network -- until they pay up."
The argument seemed to imply something like "charging people money for different qualities of service is classist, because poor people have less money".
To my mind, I can’t imagine a rule that describes a fast lane that doesn’t also describe a CDN.
Not saying it’s the right thing to do, but that it’s functionally the same.
It’s also functionally the same to say that any traffic not on the CDN is in a slow lane or being held ransom, in the sense that it will be congested until the publisher pays.
The transparence on what is being payed for and why some sites are fast and some are slow is not the same for Comcast's subscribes in the two scenarios either.
You're confusing routes with endpoints. CDNs are endpoints--multiple endpoints containing the same data so that there is a much higher probability of having an endpoint close to any given user. The owner of the data has to do all the work of getting multiple copies of the data placed at all those endpoints, making sure they're all in sync, etc. But the data traveling from endpoint to endpoint--from the nearest CDN node to the user--is not privileged over any other data.
What the net neutrality debate is about is the ISPs wanting to control routes--i.e., to be able to say that some data traveling over a given route from one endpoint to another endpoint gets to travel faster than other data traveling over the same route. CDNs don't do that.
What Netflix bought from Comcast is sort of in between. It's like a CDN in that Netflix still has to do the work of placing multiple copies of their content at different endpoints in different locations; but it's also like the ISP route control scheme in that Netflix' data gets a privileged route from their endpoints to Comcast users, a route that non-Netflix data from endpoints that are similarly situated does not get, because non-Netflix data can't travel through the special connection points that Netflix now has with Comcast. Normal CDNs don't do that either.
CDNs are a good thing. But they are networks like any other, the difference being that the nodes are smart enough for to re-request data they already have. CDN nodes should be understood as caching routers.
Being closer to the user – the CDN’s value – rests in having a better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network. A better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network is what Netflix bought.
Being an endpoint that is closer to the user is not the same as being a route between that endpoint (or any other endpoint) and the user.
> CDN nodes should be understood as caching routers.
In some respects, yes. But in other important respects, no. For example, CDN nodes do not route traffic that does not have that node as either a source or a destination. The fact that the content at that node ultimately comes from another source does not change that; it simply means that some of the traffic to and from the CDN node is to and from the ultimate source of the content. It's still not at all the same as routing traffic to and from arbitrary endpoints.
> Being closer to the user – the CDN’s value – rests in having a better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network. A better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network is what Netflix bought.
You're conflating two different ways of taking a "position" in the network. A CDN takes advantage of the existing network and the existing routes to place copies of content closer to users. It can only use the existing "positions" in the network, not create new ones.
The Netflix deal created a new privileged route that didn't exist before, for Netflix content going to Comcast users only. So the "position" Netflix traffic is now in with respect to Comcast users didn't even exist before the deal.
> CDN nodes do not route traffic that does not have that node as either a source or a destination.
Correct. That is true of any router.
Netflix did buy a new route, replacing the one they were previously buying from Cogent.
How? Adding any new node to the Internet does create new routes to and from that node, but that doesn't give those routes any privileges over other routes.
> Netflix did buy a new route, replacing the one they were previously buying from Cogent.
And the difference between the new one and the old one is that the new one only carries Netflix traffic, and only goes to Comcast customers. That is what makes it privileged, and what CDNs in general, including the CDN Netflix was previously using to distribute its traffic to Cogent, do not do.
If the CDN is on Comcast’s premises, or primarily feeds a single last-mile network (which would de facto be true on a local level), then same.
A CDN doesn't carry traffic at all; it hosts content (multiple copies of it in different locations) for others to carry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
CDNs operate servers, not routers. The servers can be located in data centers with easy connections to ISPs and transit providers, but their traffic still doesn't get privileged over other traffic coming in to the networks of those ISPs and transit providers. There are no separate routes that CDN traffic takes to a user's computer, that other traffic from sources in the same data center, or going through routers in the same data center, can't take.
I'm focusing on the functionality that's being implemented, which is what the poster I was responding to said was important. Having privileged routes is different functionality from having multiple hosts that all have copies of the same data.
> a CDN effectively carries traffic from a content provider to the end user.
But so does a non-CDN. So does any route on the Internet. The only difference with a CDN is that the content provider has paid for more servers to host multiple copies of the data. But the money is for those multiple copies, not for giving any specific copy a privileged route to certain users. As above, that's a functional difference.
Here's another way of seeing the functional difference. Say I use two online services, A and B. A is served using a global CDN. B is served using a privileged network with my current ISP. Now I change ISPs to one that service B isn't paying for privileged access to. I see no difference in performance with service A, but a big difference in performance with service B. So service A using a CDN doesn't lock me in to a specific ISP; but service B paying for privileged routes does.
> the end result is still "pay more for faster access"
No, it's "pay more for multiple copies of your data". It's not "pay more to have your data go over a quicker route from the same place".
> isn't that exactly what net neutrality is against?
No, net neutrality is not against "pay more for faster access", like service A above. It's against "pay more for privileged access to an ISP's users", like service B above.
> Transit networks like Level3, XO, Cogent and Tata perform two important services: (1) they carry traffic over long distances and (2) they provide access to every network on the global Internet. When Netflix connects directly to the Comcast network, Comcast is not providing either of the services typically provided by transit networks.
Basically, what is proposed here is preventing an ISP (which is already a recognizable category) from starting a CDN business — a very bad one, since it only delivers content to itself — and artificially slowing down non-CDN traffic that has already been paid for on the other end in order to prop up its CDN business.
Comcast is talking about "not decreasing" the availability of content. Some businesses can afford to pay to use already-paid-for infrastructure. Others are out of luck, and their content is not fully accessible. If Comcast did not exist, current users would not be able to request content, but the market could provide a solution in an alternate ISP. With Comcast the market cannot provide a solution, because it is actively being suppressed by Comcast.
The market can still provide a solution with the Comcast payments. That would be customers wanting fast everything don't use Comcast. If there's no competition for those customers then that's the real problem - a monopoly - not what tricks the monopoly uses to take advantage of people.
This is the line I repeat when discussing the issue with folks who are just learning about the issue.
[edit format]
Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices.
Service providers (not ISPs, but the ones who run servers that consumers connect to) pay based on speed of their connection. If the ISP feels like service providers are not paying enough, raise the prices.
Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps?
I'm four years old. So please keep that in mind when explaing this to me. :)
I feel like this isn't quite right.
Because once the middleman has established himself as a monopoly and everybody has to go through him with no alternative, he can make bank by having everybody pay more.
> and data caps?
Lets the ISP oversubscribe even more and extract even more money out of the system without providing any additional value whatsoever.
It's just an alternate way of pricing the service. You could ask similar questions about a lot of industries:
- Why does Github charge the way it does and not just price the service per megabyte of data stored or per commit, etc?
- Why do fast food restaurants offer free soft drink refills for $0.99 but not offer a single fill for $0.50?
- Why do residential bandwidth providers not offer a service with guaranteed gamer-quality low latency?
- Why do restaurants not offer a discount for customers who decline the free bread and water?
- Why does the electricity supplied to my office come in normal power and brown power versions?
Oh, wait.
Cable Internet for Residential / Cable Internet for Business...
Because SLA.
When you make an industry a public utility, and eliminate market-rate profit incentives, you get underinvestment, which is exactly what we see in water, power, etc: http://www.asce.org/failuretoact.
You can talk all you want about making internet service into "dumb pipes" but you can't make investors and shareholders pour billions of dollars a year into the "dumb pipe" business. They'll just dump their regulated business lines and shift the money to something more profitable, like Goldman is encouraging Verizon to do: http://stopthecap.com/2012/01/09/wall-street-encourages-veri....
Yes, I am in favor of municipal fiber-to-the-home solutions paid for with public dollars given the critical importance of these "dumb pipes".
Comcast spent $5.4 billion on capital expenditures in 2013: http://www.cmcsa.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=821438. TWC spent $3.2 billion: http://ir.timewarnercable.com/investor-relations/investor-ne....
Verizon and AT&T regularly top the list of companies with the highest U.S. capital expenditures, and Comcast and TWC are usually in the top 25: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-companies-investing-mo....
> That's why we're seeing this rent seeking behavior, and one reason why we have slower speeds than other modern nations.
Like? We compare quite favorably to countries like Canada and Australia, which have similar problems as we do with lack of density. According to Akamai's testing, we're in the top 10 worldwide for measured average connection speeds: http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q413.pdf?WT.mc_i... (page 19, Figure 20). Ookla's NetIndex puts us ahead of Canada and Australia, and only slightly behind the UK and Germany: http://www.netindex.com. Our Northeastern states, like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which have density comparable to continental Europe, have average connection speeds comparable to France, the EU standout.
> Yes, I am in favor of municipal fiber-to-the-home solutions paid for with public dollars given the critical importance of these "dumb pipes".
You don't, because when public dollars are involved, you get "lowest common denominator" levels of investment. Comcast's average user uses 2-5 GB/month. If telecom infrastructure was provisioned according to these people voting, do you think the resulting level of investment would be at a level that would make the folks on HN happy?
Absolute dollars isn't as interesting as a trend. According to the National Cable Telecommunications Association, expenditure on broadband infrastructure has declined over the past 5 years. http://www.vox.com/2014/5/12/5711082/big-cable-says-broadban...
> We compare quite favorably to countries like Canada and Australia.
According to a 2013 report by Ookla, US ranks 31st in download speeds. http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/26/america-falls-a-dismal-31s...
> You don't, because when public dollars are involved, you get "lowest common denominator" levels of investment.
That must explain why Comcast and other monopoly providers fight municipalities tooth and nail against local broadband projects. I respect your opinion, but I disagree that communication infrastructure is not a public good.
It's insane to compare a country like the U.S. to a country like Belgium that is more than ten times more dense. If you look at the northeastern states, which have densities closer to Europe (500-1000 per square mile versus 90 per square mile which is the U.S. average), average speeds range from 30-38 megabits, well ahead of the U.K. and Germany which are comparable dense, and on par with countries like Belgium, etc.
According to a 2013 report by Ookla, US ranks 31st in download speeds.
You know you didn't disagree with him at all, right? Your source shows the US beating out Canada comfortably, and Australia overwhelmingly.
The US is not going to match the #1 and #2 on your list, Hong Kong and Singapore, ever, because it is trivial to wire up a single dense city with weak democratic red tape.
I can't say this with 100% (I may have missed one comparing lists from different sources), but it looks like there's no country within an order of magnitude of America's land area that has higher download speeds on Ookla's list.
EDIT Yep, confirmed. It looks like the biggest country that is faster than the US is France, which is 547,000 sqkm, while the lower US's land-only area is over 7.6 million sqkm.
But even the most densely populated areas in the US have terrible Internet access. A small portion of New York City has FiOS, but the vast majority has Comcast or Time Warner, and those are about$60 for 20Mbps advertised[0].
I'm willing to give Singapore the fact that it's a smaller government[1], but the bottleneck in providing better Internet access in NYC is not the NYC government.
[0] I am in midtown Manhattan, probably the most densely populated area in the country, and I am getting 700 KB/s as I type this, so I'm not even getting anything close to what's advertised.
[1] And the population is about 2/3 the size of NYC
Because they're including Weill Cornell Medical College and Digital Ocean in the data (those are the top ISPs in NYC, on their map).
It's not very meaningful unless we (A) can separate out consumer ISPs from business ISPs[0], (B) Know what speeds everyone is paying for and has available (currently this is all lumped together), and (C) knows how much everyone is paying for that service.
> While Verizon is trying to deploy FIOS in New York, De Blasio has hired a civil rights lawyer to look into the issue of poor people not being able to afford FIOS! I would say the bottleneck is definitely NYC's government!
As someone who actually lives in NYC and has tried to get FiOS installed in multiple buildings, there are two problems. One is that buildings have exclusive agreements to provide television service through either Time Warner or Comcast (usually because the superintendant and/or owner gets free cable as a result of this agreement), and that Verizon refuses to provide FiOS Internet unless they can also provide television service.
Verizon is fully aware of this problem, and they've framed it in a way that allows them conveniently to point the finger at another entity.
Verizon is "trying" to deploy FiOS in New York, but they're not really interested in expanding their coverage.
> De Blasio has hired a civil rights lawyer to look into the issue of poor people not being able to afford FIOS! I would say the bottleneck is definitely NYC's government
This would only be relevant if the NYC government were the ones actively blocking people who can afford to pay for FiOS from having it installed, but as explained above, that's not the case.
How could any putative problems in broadband deployment not be because of some difference in governance? I don't mean this as a "government sucks" rant (although that could definitely be the problem, as 'rayiner mentions FiOS being used as a social justice issue, of all things). But there are lots of rich people in dense areas who would be willing to pay money for the service. NYC's government must be doing something wrong (whether it's over-regulation or under-regulation or mis-regulation).
This bears highlighting. The water company, regulated as a public utility, will fine people for using "too much" water when they decree they are running out. And water usage is a lot easier to model than broadband. Do you want that same mentality running the broadband companies?
Many people purchase bottled drinking water via delivery service b/c they deem the quality of tap water unacceptable for consumption.
Many people invest in UPS units, backup generators, etc. b/c they deem the reliability of power from the grid unacceptable.
Imagine if the power grid had an additional 9 of reliability -- it would save hospitals tens of millions of dollars on redundant power backup systems, significantly reducing the cost of healthcare. From this vantage-point, the poor quality of grid power is subsidized by those who need life support systems... this seems horribly unfair.
Are you making the counter argument that 25Gb/s is optimal given the reality that we're living in a time where 900Gb/s down is attainable except for the lack of shareholder will preventing its deployment?
I've built my own modems. I witnessed the stagnation around 2400 baud. I'm unimpressed by your suggestion that commercially-available bandwidth is at an "optimal" speed.
Even small cities usually have a cable, dsl, and wireless option. The smallest rural cities I'm thinking of offer WiMax or some kind of similar service which is cheaper than cable for many customers.
Note that large ISPs have done this for years, via in-ISP CDNs: if you have enough content, it makes sense to have copies of it to serve up directly from the ISP's network.
The primary concern I've seen raised by network neutrality advocates: because many people have very few available high-speed ISP choices (one cable provider and sometimes one fiber provider, since most people can't get competitive DSL), it may not work to just say "pick another ISP if you don't like what yours does". (That assumes enough ISP customers care enough to switch ISPs over this issue.)
Amazon: OK, we'll sign a 4 year contract for 30x the base cost.
Comcast: Great
Year 5 comes around, Amazon wants a discount. Comcast refuses. Comcast then blocks all Amazon IP Address traffic until they reach a deal.
Comcast: Customers, you cannot access Amazon video on our service, but here's a $5 coupon to our own video on demand service
From what I understand, your example would not be permissable. I know there are downsides to this, but a lot of the negative sentiment I see about this seems like an exaggeration which may not work in our favor.
This entire scenario simply couldn't happen if internet were a Title 2 service.
How do we know this is not just FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's plan to give Comcast exactly what it wants?
"Oh well, we tried to block this deal, but that darn court stopped us!"
Imagine you build a road. Who benefits? Drivers, obviously. But also store owners, because customers can now get to their stores. It's equally legitimate to charge the driver, via tolls, or the stores they drive to (via special tax districts). If you charge only the driver, you tap into only part of the net positive value created by the road.
This basic premise applies to cables and other infrastructure as much as it does to roads.
Netflix should be able to just block Comcast until they give in and agree to improve their peering.
I live in the UK though, where we have a competitive broadband market. The above tactic is less effective in the US because Comcast's users don't have anywhere else to go.
Could also be used to make backroom deals where you "slowban" political undesirables.
Well, supporters of net neutrality say there is not a need, and that this is just ISPs being greedy.
My pet theory on why they've have been able to argue their case effectively: internet traffic (or at least some notion of "website popularity") follows a distribution with a long tail, meaning a small number of sites will always be responsible for a large % of traffic; this makes it easy and attractive for ISPs to target a few players for "protection", because it's easy for them to make the fallacious claim "hey, look Netflix is taking up X% of our bandwidth; that's not fair!" when this doesn't have much to do with Netflix per se, and when that scenario is actually much cheaper (because of caching, etc) to handle than a hypothetical one in which the same traffic is distributed more evenly.
The consolidation of media companies possibly served interests other than profits. Look at what Putin is allegedly doing with the internet. Maybe in a way the eventual intent of this is the same. And for the same purposes. I don't think we should let it get started just in case.
Why the fuck are there party lines in the FCC? Or any other regulatory body for that matter?
The commissioners themselves have theories that fit into party politics as well.
Because regulators aren't angels that descend from heaven, but people peforming a political function, appointed and confirmed by elected politicians.
Or, more succinctly, because representative democracy.
"As if"? For the whole length of the net neutrality policy debate, the support has concentrated in the Democratic Party and the opposition has centered in the Republican Party -- not just on the FCC, but in Congress and everywhere else. The reason the Democratic majority of the FCC keeps trying to find a way to advance Open Internet principles within the framework of existing law that at best addresses the issue indirectly is because neither mostly-Democratic supporters of express FCC authority (or mandate) for net neutrality nor mostly-Republican supporters of expressly prohibiting the FCC from regulating for net neutrality have sufficient support in Congress to pass legislation incorporating those goals and get it signed into law or override a Presidential veto.
No, the DC Circuit did that when it struck down the FCC's old Open Internet order. The FCC has proposed a draft plan to limit harassment by the trolls, and asked the public for comments on how to make it better before "official sanction" is given to any rule.
For the skeptics, it appears to come down to the question: which route offers better prospects for upgrading our internet infrastructure? Choice one is relying on a for-profit corporation with an effective monopoly that is beholden to shareholders; Choice two is relying on elected politicians beholden to the voters.
If you think there is a different argument that can be made on behalf of the carriers or if you can make the above one better, I would be very interested in hearing it.
If you ignore the various arguments about ISPs trying to get paid twice for the same content, consider the possibility of an ISP and a major high-bandwidth content provider (YouTube, Netflix, Akamai, etc) trying to build a deal that's better for both of them and for the consumer. For instance, consider a CDN on the ISP's network. Consumers get content faster with lower latency; the content provider reduces their bandwidth costs by sending only one copy of $POPULAR_CONTENT rather than one per customer; the ISP has lower costs and makes its customers happier.
Network neutrality would ban that, too. So this isn't the kind of thing that can be settled with simple blanket statements like "carriers should not make deals with content providers" or "all content should be treated identically".
> For the skeptics, it appears to come down to the question: which route offers better prospects for upgrading our internet infrastructure? Choice one is relying on a for-profit corporation with an effective monopoly that is beholden to shareholders; Choice two is relying on elected politicians beholden to the voters.
I'm always impressed when people can say with a straight face that politicians listen to voters. Voters don't care about issues like these, unless you can divide the issue across party lines and successfully make it one of the very small number of visible issues in a political campaign.
I'd be more interested in seeing proposed solutions to the "effective monopoly" problem than to network neutrality. Solve the monopoly and issues like network neutrality will disappear along with it.
I'm not clear on how money changes hands in your case, but undoubtedly this arrangement would favor the ISP. As far as peering goes, it's a bit more complicated... server locations are more mobile than consumer locations, so there is less concern about an effective geographic monopoly for backbone providers. Without fully thinking through the economics of peering, my initial thought is that there should probably be a regulated amount that ISP's can charge to peer with backbone providers. Maybe cost plus a maintenance fee based on traffic volume.
Regarding voting, I just feel it's the better of two imperfect solutions.
Of course, just as Amazon has an advantage over smaller retailers, and Netflix has an advantage over new steaming services. Incumbents always have certain advantages, and business deals always favor those involved in them over those not involved in them. Money makes things easier. But "an advantage" isn't "an insurmountable advantage", and HN is full of startups coming up with innovative ways to circumvent incumbent advantages.
> I'm not clear on how money changes hands in your case, but undoubtedly this arrangement would favor the ISP.
Not necessarily. This doesn't need to be a win/lose zero-sum scenario; it's entirely possible, in the scenario I described, for all three of the customer, the ISP, and the content provider to come out ahead.
> As far as peering goes, it's a bit more complicated... server locations are more mobile than consumer locations, so there is less concern about an effective geographic monopoly for backbone providers.
That's certainly true. And in general, I think it's much more critical to find a solution to the ISP monopoly problem than to the network neutrality problem, because ISP monopolies lead to quite a few other issues as well.
> Without fully thinking through the economics of peering, my initial thought is that there should probably be a regulated amount that ISP's can charge to peer with backbone providers. Maybe cost plus a maintenance fee based on traffic volume.
I can understand where that idea would come from, but ick; there are so many things wrong with that idea.
Perhaps it would make sense to legally separate the "last-mile" provider from the large-scale bandwidth provider, with the former providing only connectivity to a local meet-me room. I don't particularly like that idea, but it seems far less awful than alternatives.
Tom Wheeler, the FCC Chairman, was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the majority Democratic U.S. Senate in 2013 (lead by Harry Reid who also claims to be pro net neutrality) is going to kill Net Neutrality.
Please take some time to remind democratic politicians & supporters why practicing this sort of politics will come with a price.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit already killed net neutrality. Wheeler is trying to resurrect it within the limits set by the Court (if you want more than that Court will allow under current statutory authority, you need to get more net neutrality friendly people in Congress so that they can change the statute to give the FCC more authority with regard to net neutrality.)
http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2010/12/peak-internet.h...