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> They now also want to collect revenue by charging large content providers fees for access to their network Isn't what they are advocating for the exact oppos

> They now also want to collect revenue by charging large content providers fees for access to their network Isn't what they are advocating for the exact opposite of net neutrality? Everyone's connection is saturated, but they argue that because they are a large content provider they should get special treatment and not need to pay for direct access. Smaller companies are equally affected during peak hours, but they would need to pay for that same privilege? If not, what is too small? There seems to be a trend of adding "free peering" into the net neutrality debate. Unless you're carrying equal bit-miles, free shouldn't even enter into the equation. If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction. I think a lot of companies are leveraging the current hate for cable companies to get out of properly engineering their infrastructure. People have leased lines, built out additional datacenters and paid for colos around the world for years and it was never "extortion" until a popular company twisted the definition of net neutrality a bit so they wouldn't need to build their own datacenters.

asdfaoeu 11y ago
>There seems to be a trend of adding "free peering" into the net neutrality debate. Unless you're carrying equal bit-miles, free shouldn't even enter into the equation. If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction. I think the difference here with CDN provided traffic is the bit miles are basically zero so I don't think that argument really holds up.
- thomaskcr 11y ago
  I see your point - but it's their content (or content they are being paid to serve at least). Cogent carries data between ISPs regardless of origin/destination for many of their runs -- while they are being paid by their clients for access to their network, Comcast can also push a significant amount of data destined for non Cogent customers through their lines. If you're only offering routes for your customers, you're not offering the ISP anything that you don't benefit from. I would think rules enforcing net neutrality would explicitly not allow this. If I am a small time host with 20 clients, a host with 5000 clients shouldn't get a direct connection for free while I would need to pay. Both my clients and their clients are equally affected.
  - asdfaoeu 11y ago
    > Cogent carries data between ISPs regardless of origin/destination for many of their runs -- while they are being paid by their clients for access to their network, Comcast can also push a significant amount of data destined for non Cogent customers through their lines. If you're only offering routes for your customers, you're not offering the ISP anything that you don't benefit from. All ISP will only carry traffic that's either from their customers or to their customers. Heztner isn't arguing that they are large enough to be worth getting a free connection but that their providers Level 3 and NTT are worth it to get a connection to Comcast's customers (not every ISP connected to Comcast) at a reasonable expense. The issue is that Comcast / insert other residential ISPs have a monopoly on access to their own customers and the large ones can charge for that.
omgtehlion 11y ago
> If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction Ok, data flows (mostly) this way: Hetzner (or any other DC) --> ISP --> customer DSL companies want money to flow this way: Hetzner --> ISP <-- customer
- thomaskcr 11y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the difference between Hetzner and a customer. They are both utilizing the ISP for the same purpose, transporting data. We still need to pay for an Internet connection for our servers. You're not paying the ISP for access to a specific person's server, you're paying to be part of their network which happens to be connected to other networks. Everyone pays to be part of the network. The end user is not paying for access to content, so the fact that Hetzner is providing something requested is irrelevant because that's not what the internet ever was. In your diagram, Hetzner is an end user and whether it's up or down data you still need to pay. The end users are not Hetzner's customers - the people paying them for hosting are. If they want to lease a line and offer access to that leased line at a premium to their customers for better connections during heavy times they are free to do that. It's not the cable companies job to make sure Hetzner's customers are happy though. There is already a framework in place to achieve what they want.
  - Natanael_L 11y ago
    You're supposed to pay your ISP. The services you use are supposed to pay their ISP:s. The ISP:s that interconnect are supposed to agree on payment for created load via peering agreements in between them. Your ISP is not supposed to both ask you, the other ISP and also the client of the other ISP, your subscription service, for money, independent of actual load.
  - Cakez0r 11y ago
    But Hertzner aren't pushing data onto DTAG's network. The ISP's customers are requesting it.
    - thomaskcr 11y ago
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
This is not about the size of some content provider, but about not providing the service they bill their customers for. The DSL subscriber pays for an internet connection at n Mbit/s. Note: The DSL subscriber does not pay for a line to their local central office, the product telcos sell to end customers is internet access. Now, these customers who have bought internet access request some data transfer from some server at Hetzner (for example), and Hetzner essentially says "here, we have a few gigabytes of data for your customer, where should we drop them off so you can deliver them?" - and the telco's answer is "we won't, unless you pay us!" This is not about moving the data to the telco's network, but about the telco delivering the packets to their customers. Cost-neutral peering does not mean free peering, those "content providers" complaining about net neutrality violations do not complain because they have to pay for a line from their datacenter to some location where the DSL telco's network is, so that they can interconnect (they generally are more than willing to pay for that, at least if it's not some location where the respective telco is the only one who could provide the line and would bill unusually high rates for it) - what they are complaining about is that, essentially, even if they were to offer delivering their traffic directly to all the central offices of the telco using their own lines, so the telco only would have to connect them to the DSLs of their customer, those telcos would refuse unless they were paid for it. And I am not exaggerating: There have been cases where CDNs offered to place cache servers in the telco's network, to pay for the rack space and the power and their servers at normal hosting rates that other hosting customers would pay, so that the traffic originates as close to the subscriber as possible, thus reducing the network costs for wide-area transport by the telco as much as possible, and they refused. They want to be paid for access to their customers - nobody would complain if they wanted to bill for wide-area transit at normal market rates, or even if they wanted to have the traffic delivered closer to their subscribers, as long as the content provider could choose their transit provider freely, thus buying the transit at market rates. But in practice, they want to be paid unless you installed your own DSL to their customer. Also very interesting, though german only, unfortunately: http://netzneutral.init7.net/de/situation-init7.php http://netzneutral.init7.net/de/situation-init7.php - they report that they tried to get an offer from DTAG for direct peering, and what they got not only didn't match what they requested, but also had progressive pricing: The more capacity they would have wanted to buy, the more they would have had to pay per unit. That is to say: a 10 Gbit interconnect would have been more than 10 times as expensive as a 1 Gbit interconnect. That certainly is not due to costs, hardware for bigger pipes never gets more expensive the more you buy.

asdfaoeu 11y ago

>There seems to be a trend of adding "free peering" into the net neutrality debate. Unless you're carrying equal bit-miles, free shouldn't even enter into the equation. If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction. I think the difference here with CDN provided traffic is the bit miles are basically zero so I don't think that argument really holds up.

thomaskcr 11y ago
I see your point - but it's their content (or content they are being paid to serve at least). Cogent carries data between ISPs regardless of origin/destination for many of their runs -- while they are being paid by their clients for access to their network, Comcast can also push a significant amount of data destined for non Cogent customers through their lines. If you're only offering routes for your customers, you're not offering the ISP anything that you don't benefit from. I would think rules enforcing net neutrality would explicitly not allow this. If I am a small time host with 20 clients, a host with 5000 clients shouldn't get a direct connection for free while I would need to pay. Both my clients and their clients are equally affected.
- asdfaoeu 11y ago
  > Cogent carries data between ISPs regardless of origin/destination for many of their runs -- while they are being paid by their clients for access to their network, Comcast can also push a significant amount of data destined for non Cogent customers through their lines. If you're only offering routes for your customers, you're not offering the ISP anything that you don't benefit from. All ISP will only carry traffic that's either from their customers or to their customers. Heztner isn't arguing that they are large enough to be worth getting a free connection but that their providers Level 3 and NTT are worth it to get a connection to Comcast's customers (not every ISP connected to Comcast) at a reasonable expense. The issue is that Comcast / insert other residential ISPs have a monopoly on access to their own customers and the large ones can charge for that.

omgtehlion 11y ago

> If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction Ok, data flows (mostly) this way: Hetzner (or any other DC) --> ISP --> customer DSL companies want money to flow this way: Hetzner --> ISP <-- customer

thomaskcr 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand the difference between Hetzner and a customer. They are both utilizing the ISP for the same purpose, transporting data. We still need to pay for an Internet connection for our servers. You're not paying the ISP for access to a specific person's server, you're paying to be part of their network which happens to be connected to other networks. Everyone pays to be part of the network. The end user is not paying for access to content, so the fact that Hetzner is providing something requested is irrelevant because that's not what the internet ever was. In your diagram, Hetzner is an end user and whether it's up or down data you still need to pay. The end users are not Hetzner's customers - the people paying them for hosting are. If they want to lease a line and offer access to that leased line at a premium to their customers for better connections during heavy times they are free to do that. It's not the cable companies job to make sure Hetzner's customers are happy though. There is already a framework in place to achieve what they want.
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  You're supposed to pay your ISP. The services you use are supposed to pay their ISP:s. The ISP:s that interconnect are supposed to agree on payment for created load via peering agreements in between them. Your ISP is not supposed to both ask you, the other ISP and also the client of the other ISP, your subscription service, for money, independent of actual load.
- Cakez0r 11y ago
  But Hertzner aren't pushing data onto DTAG's network. The ISP's customers are requesting it.
  - thomaskcr 11y ago

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago

This is not about the size of some content provider, but about not providing the service they bill their customers for. The DSL subscriber pays for an internet connection at n Mbit/s. Note: The DSL subscriber does not pay for a line to their local central office, the product telcos sell to end customers is internet access. Now, these customers who have bought internet access request some data transfer from some server at Hetzner (for example), and Hetzner essentially says "here, we have a few gigabytes of data for your customer, where should we drop them off so you can deliver them?" - and the telco's answer is "we won't, unless you pay us!" This is not about moving the data to the telco's network, but about the telco delivering the packets to their customers. Cost-neutral peering does not mean free peering, those "content providers" complaining about net neutrality violations do not complain because they have to pay for a line from their datacenter to some location where the DSL telco's network is, so that they can interconnect (they generally are more than willing to pay for that, at least if it's not some location where the respective telco is the only one who could provide the line and would bill unusually high rates for it) - what they are complaining about is that, essentially, even if they were to offer delivering their traffic directly to all the central offices of the telco using their own lines, so the telco only would have to connect them to the DSLs of their customer, those telcos would refuse unless they were paid for it. And I am not exaggerating: There have been cases where CDNs offered to place cache servers in the telco's network, to pay for the rack space and the power and their servers at normal hosting rates that other hosting customers would pay, so that the traffic originates as close to the subscriber as possible, thus reducing the network costs for wide-area transport by the telco as much as possible, and they refused. They want to be paid for access to their customers - nobody would complain if they wanted to bill for wide-area transit at normal market rates, or even if they wanted to have the traffic delivered closer to their subscribers, as long as the content provider could choose their transit provider freely, thus buying the transit at market rates. But in practice, they want to be paid unless you installed your own DSL to their customer. Also very interesting, though german only, unfortunately: http://netzneutral.init7.net/de/situation-init7.php http://netzneutral.init7.net/de/situation-init7.php - they report that they tried to get an offer from DTAG for direct peering, and what they got not only didn't match what they requested, but also had progressive pricing: The more capacity they would have wanted to buy, the more they would have had to pay per unit. That is to say: a 10 Gbit interconnect would have been more than 10 times as expensive as a 1 Gbit interconnect. That certainly is not due to costs, hardware for bigger pipes never gets more expensive the more you buy.