5 ms·

Then use a VPN? Or is the idea they will charge high rates for all traffic (already legal by the way) thus preventing access to the majority of the internet?

throwanem 9y ago
The idea is that, in the majority of markets where a single ISP has an effective monopoly, that ISP can do what it damn well please within the limit of enforceable law and regulation, and there's not a whole lot that can be done to prevent it. The idea is further that, not only does it make pragmatic sense for so favorably positioned an ISP to act aggressively in defense of that position, but such ISPs have been observed to do so, as for example with AT&T's successful defeat of the recent municipal broadband expansion bill in Tennessee. AT&T's position is that taxpayer money should not be used to fund competition with private industry, which all sounds very fine and upstanding, except that the private industry has already stifled any possibility of competition by means of the sort of monopolistic activity which US governments spent much of the early 20th century working to restrict, in order to prevent the unsavory outcomes that such activity has been observed to produce in direct proportion to the degree in which it's successfully pursued. So, sure, they can charge high rates for traffic if they want, in addition to charging more or less whatever rates they please simply to provision backhaul in the first place. They can impose a $20/month, or higher, charge for reliable access to video streamed from services other than those they themselves run. They can do whatever they're able to get away with - and in an environment of permissive and favorable legislation and no effective private competition, they get away with a hell of a lot. In case it matters, I'm really not progressive, and I understand business reasonably well - I've been in private industry my entire career, with no one doing me any favors, and if I didn't have at least a generally accurate idea of how things work, I wouldn't be able to support myself. In particular, I find the current attitude held by the federal, and many state, governments, toward small business enterprises, absurd and execrable - and I've seen the onerous burden such an attitude inflicts on people who go into business for themselves. But the current attitude toward large business is a whole 'nother matter entirely, and I see nothing of value to our polity as a whole in the results of such gross permissiveness. Expanding such permissiveness still further strikes me as very much the wrong thing to do.
- cmdrfred 9y ago
  The thing is everyone has mobile phones for the most part. If a local ISP makes cost of doing business for Netflix so high that Netflix no longer offers that service at a reasonable price. Many consumers will either scale back their connection or cancel it entirely. "What's the point of paying $100 a month for Facebook and Instagram? I get that on my phone anyway! I don't want Verizon's $100 a month TV plan, I want house of cards." As the ISP mostly has sunk costs and slim margins if even 5% of its user base leaves in a certain market that will render them insolvent or force them to raise prices, causing more departures, and higher prices still... The point is while they don't always have direct competition they do have a decent amount of elasticity of demand.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Everyone has mobile phones, but not that many people have unlimited data and a high enough data rate to handle household streaming demands - usually you only get one or the other, and even "unlimited" usually hits a cap after a while. I don't think the elastic is as stretchy as you seem to be suggesting it is.
    - cmdrfred 9y ago
      I understand they don't have unlimited data, but if they can't stream Netflix (insert your preferred service here) anyway what's the point of keeping the wireline internet service? Five gigs a month is a lot of Facebook/Snapchat and Instagram. Either way they won't have access to the content they want. Why not save a few dollars or move those dollars towards mobile data? Sure they can go to the ISP's media service but those are priced at the cable model for the most part and not really competitive, I don't know anyone under 40 that has cable service anymore. If you used to pay $15 for 4K high quality original content and now you are offered $60 a month for often low quality content with commercials would you take that deal? I'd pass. A big cost for ISP's is customer acquisition, even if they change back their policies it will be years, maybe decades to recover. I think if an ISP did this on any large scale it would be suicide.
      - 9y ago
ascagnel_ 9y ago
VPNs hide the destination of your traffic, they effectively cannot hide from your ISP that you're connecting to said VPN. ISPs would likely throttle most VPN in this instance, because what would stop them?
- cmdrfred 9y ago
  Something like obfsproxy[0] or a straight up http proxy wrapped in SSL and a VPN service that acquires and rotates new IP addresses regularly would prevent this. It would be an expensive game of wack a mole for the ISPs at least, personally I'd just set up a digital ocean droplet for my traffic. Less technical users can employ Streisand[1]. [0]https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/TrafficObfuscation https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/TrafficObfuscatio... [1]https://github.com/jlund/streisand https://github.com/jlund/streisand
  - outsidetheparty 9y ago
    For that reason, the algorithm wouldn't be "throttle specific services", it'd be "throttle everything except for the specific services that we own or that have paid us the toll."
    - cmdrfred 9y ago
      So essentially throttle 99% of the internet? Comcast already doesn't throttle it's cable or phone service and doesn't include it in your bandwidth. Why would anyone buy a larger bandwidth package than the throttle rate? So they can pay their bill faster?
    - ascagnel_ 9y ago
      Not necessarily. They could whack-a-mole the services to such a degree that they become non-viable commercially.

throwanem 9y ago

The idea is that, in the majority of markets where a single ISP has an effective monopoly, that ISP can do what it damn well please within the limit of enforceable law and regulation, and there's not a whole lot that can be done to prevent it. The idea is further that, not only does it make pragmatic sense for so favorably positioned an ISP to act aggressively in defense of that position, but such ISPs have been observed to do so, as for example with AT&T's successful defeat of the recent municipal broadband expansion bill in Tennessee. AT&T's position is that taxpayer money should not be used to fund competition with private industry, which all sounds very fine and upstanding, except that the private industry has already stifled any possibility of competition by means of the sort of monopolistic activity which US governments spent much of the early 20th century working to restrict, in order to prevent the unsavory outcomes that such activity has been observed to produce in direct proportion to the degree in which it's successfully pursued. So, sure, they can charge high rates for traffic if they want, in addition to charging more or less whatever rates they please simply to provision backhaul in the first place. They can impose a $20/month, or higher, charge for reliable access to video streamed from services other than those they themselves run. They can do whatever they're able to get away with - and in an environment of permissive and favorable legislation and no effective private competition, they get away with a hell of a lot. In case it matters, I'm really not progressive, and I understand business reasonably well - I've been in private industry my entire career, with no one doing me any favors, and if I didn't have at least a generally accurate idea of how things work, I wouldn't be able to support myself. In particular, I find the current attitude held by the federal, and many state, governments, toward small business enterprises, absurd and execrable - and I've seen the onerous burden such an attitude inflicts on people who go into business for themselves. But the current attitude toward large business is a whole 'nother matter entirely, and I see nothing of value to our polity as a whole in the results of such gross permissiveness. Expanding such permissiveness still further strikes me as very much the wrong thing to do.

cmdrfred 9y ago
The thing is everyone has mobile phones for the most part. If a local ISP makes cost of doing business for Netflix so high that Netflix no longer offers that service at a reasonable price. Many consumers will either scale back their connection or cancel it entirely. "What's the point of paying $100 a month for Facebook and Instagram? I get that on my phone anyway! I don't want Verizon's $100 a month TV plan, I want house of cards." As the ISP mostly has sunk costs and slim margins if even 5% of its user base leaves in a certain market that will render them insolvent or force them to raise prices, causing more departures, and higher prices still... The point is while they don't always have direct competition they do have a decent amount of elasticity of demand.
- throwanem 9y ago
  Everyone has mobile phones, but not that many people have unlimited data and a high enough data rate to handle household streaming demands - usually you only get one or the other, and even "unlimited" usually hits a cap after a while. I don't think the elastic is as stretchy as you seem to be suggesting it is.
  - cmdrfred 9y ago
    I understand they don't have unlimited data, but if they can't stream Netflix (insert your preferred service here) anyway what's the point of keeping the wireline internet service? Five gigs a month is a lot of Facebook/Snapchat and Instagram. Either way they won't have access to the content they want. Why not save a few dollars or move those dollars towards mobile data? Sure they can go to the ISP's media service but those are priced at the cable model for the most part and not really competitive, I don't know anyone under 40 that has cable service anymore. If you used to pay $15 for 4K high quality original content and now you are offered $60 a month for often low quality content with commercials would you take that deal? I'd pass. A big cost for ISP's is customer acquisition, even if they change back their policies it will be years, maybe decades to recover. I think if an ISP did this on any large scale it would be suicide.
    - 9y ago

ascagnel_ 9y ago

VPNs hide the destination of your traffic, they effectively cannot hide from your ISP that you're connecting to said VPN. ISPs would likely throttle most VPN in this instance, because what would stop them?

cmdrfred 9y ago
Something like obfsproxy[0] or a straight up http proxy wrapped in SSL and a VPN service that acquires and rotates new IP addresses regularly would prevent this. It would be an expensive game of wack a mole for the ISPs at least, personally I'd just set up a digital ocean droplet for my traffic. Less technical users can employ Streisand[1]. [0]https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/TrafficObfuscation https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/TrafficObfuscatio... [1]https://github.com/jlund/streisand https://github.com/jlund/streisand
- outsidetheparty 9y ago
  For that reason, the algorithm wouldn't be "throttle specific services", it'd be "throttle everything except for the specific services that we own or that have paid us the toll."
  - cmdrfred 9y ago
    So essentially throttle 99% of the internet? Comcast already doesn't throttle it's cable or phone service and doesn't include it in your bandwidth. Why would anyone buy a larger bandwidth package than the throttle rate? So they can pay their bill faster?
  - ascagnel_ 9y ago
    Not necessarily. They could whack-a-mole the services to such a degree that they become non-viable commercially.