4 ms·

Next up, net neutrality gone? ugh I hope not. It will be a tragedy.

adrr 10y ago
Removing net neutrality will open the ISPs to being charged to access services like facebook and google. The big services hold all cards. This what happens on the cable tv side. Content is king.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Except most people are conditioned to pay for content on cable. Not so the internet. It will be interesting to see how many people would pay extra to their ISP to access Facebook.
  - 464192002d7fe1c 10y ago
    You assume they will be charged extra by the ISP, or more correctly that they will know about it. It'll probably end up like most people's cable bill: a large block of charges that are mostly not understood by most people. Also keep in mind that most services don't actually want to charge the ISPs for access to their content, they just want access. Facebook doesn't want to charge your ISP to reach you reliably, nor does Netflix, they just want to be able to do it.
    - djrogers 10y ago
      > You assume they will be charged extra by the ISP Given that ISPs aren't charities, yes - the cost will be passed on. And the first time a major ISP agents in a dispute about the charges and access is blocked, everyone will know - look at the various ESPN/cable/directv disputes over the years.
- wmf 10y ago
  Netflix and Riot Games are paying ISPs, not vice versa. I guess they aren't the king after all.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  ATT/Verizon/Comcast: Nice startup ya got there... be a shame if anything happened to your packets wink. That is the future without net neutrality. The large ISPs will charge content providers. It will start slowly and only affect the largest services (like Netflix) but when they need to juice the quarterly numbers they'll start working their way down the list. Because we don't have competition in this country they will just start severely degrading traffic from anyone they want to make pay. Pai has made no proposal for actual broadband competition. In fact he thinks we already have "robust" competition among ISPs: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/washington/fccs-pai-broadband-competition-underplayed/140624 http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/washington/fccs-pai-br...
  - equalunique 10y ago
    Have you ever rented a VPS, Colo space, or served up content from a cloud service? Practically every service already charges for outbound data. The idea that somehow net neutrality will lead to an increase in those charges seems unlikely to me.
    - trome 10y ago
      If you have an ASN in North America you can get settlement free peering with most networks. That means all you pay for is the hardware/power cost to transport your content. Usually this is fairly unbalanced, and providers will compensate eachother (reach a settlement) if data is too skewed in one direction, almost always in the datacenter's favor (as ISPs are really upstream light). Comcast, Verizon and others have recently tried to turn this on its head by witholding peering upgrades to Netflix, who wasn't even charging them a dime for all this data that their customers requested! This is not net neutrality, and performance degradations like this made Comcast uncompetitive in my neck of the woods since I have Fiber available by rare happenstance. That being said, my fiber provider (Centurylink) has even worse peering with Comcast, such that loading xfinity.net is a chore on gigabit fiber, let alone the Xfinity Go app. These performance issues caused me to cancel my TV service with them and get a different provider that worked better on my kids tablets, and so long as providers play games to throttle eachother, stories like this will be common.
  - 10y ago
stuartd 10y ago
If you don't get any internet at all because you can't afford it, net neutrality is irrelevant.
- yewhdriof 10y ago
  Net neutrality is relevant, and so is affordable Internet.
doctorshady 10y ago
Pai is getting to that - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/fcc-rescinds-claim-that-att-and-verizon-violated-net-neutrality/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/fcc-rescinds-cla...

adrr 10y ago

Removing net neutrality will open the ISPs to being charged to access services like facebook and google. The big services hold all cards. This what happens on the cable tv side. Content is king.

ams6110 10y ago
Except most people are conditioned to pay for content on cable. Not so the internet. It will be interesting to see how many people would pay extra to their ISP to access Facebook.
- 464192002d7fe1c 10y ago
  You assume they will be charged extra by the ISP, or more correctly that they will know about it. It'll probably end up like most people's cable bill: a large block of charges that are mostly not understood by most people. Also keep in mind that most services don't actually want to charge the ISPs for access to their content, they just want access. Facebook doesn't want to charge your ISP to reach you reliably, nor does Netflix, they just want to be able to do it.
  - djrogers 10y ago
    > You assume they will be charged extra by the ISP Given that ISPs aren't charities, yes - the cost will be passed on. And the first time a major ISP agents in a dispute about the charges and access is blocked, everyone will know - look at the various ESPN/cable/directv disputes over the years.
wmf 10y ago
Netflix and Riot Games are paying ISPs, not vice versa. I guess they aren't the king after all.
xenadu02 10y ago
ATT/Verizon/Comcast: Nice startup ya got there... be a shame if anything happened to your packets wink. That is the future without net neutrality. The large ISPs will charge content providers. It will start slowly and only affect the largest services (like Netflix) but when they need to juice the quarterly numbers they'll start working their way down the list. Because we don't have competition in this country they will just start severely degrading traffic from anyone they want to make pay. Pai has made no proposal for actual broadband competition. In fact he thinks we already have "robust" competition among ISPs: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/washington/fccs-pai-broadband-competition-underplayed/140624 http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/washington/fccs-pai-br...
- equalunique 10y ago
  Have you ever rented a VPS, Colo space, or served up content from a cloud service? Practically every service already charges for outbound data. The idea that somehow net neutrality will lead to an increase in those charges seems unlikely to me.
  - trome 10y ago
    If you have an ASN in North America you can get settlement free peering with most networks. That means all you pay for is the hardware/power cost to transport your content. Usually this is fairly unbalanced, and providers will compensate eachother (reach a settlement) if data is too skewed in one direction, almost always in the datacenter's favor (as ISPs are really upstream light). Comcast, Verizon and others have recently tried to turn this on its head by witholding peering upgrades to Netflix, who wasn't even charging them a dime for all this data that their customers requested! This is not net neutrality, and performance degradations like this made Comcast uncompetitive in my neck of the woods since I have Fiber available by rare happenstance. That being said, my fiber provider (Centurylink) has even worse peering with Comcast, such that loading xfinity.net is a chore on gigabit fiber, let alone the Xfinity Go app. These performance issues caused me to cancel my TV service with them and get a different provider that worked better on my kids tablets, and so long as providers play games to throttle eachother, stories like this will be common.
- 10y ago

stuartd 10y ago

If you don't get any internet at all because you can't afford it, net neutrality is irrelevant.

yewhdriof 10y ago
Net neutrality is relevant, and so is affordable Internet.

doctorshady 10y ago

Pai is getting to that - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/fcc-rescinds-claim-that-att-and-verizon-violated-net-neutrality/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/fcc-rescinds-cla...