3 ms·

As a thought experiment, imagine a world where household customers were provided internet for free and ISPs earned all their money from the outbound traffic on

As a thought experiment, imagine a world where household customers were provided internet for free and ISPs earned all their money from the outbound traffic on servers. Want a particular cable channel? Pay the company operating that server. Want the news? The news company earns money from advertising so they deliver it to you. Like you point out total data is the same. The premise that the ISP payment should be born by only one side of the transaction should not be codified into law. Also I do agree we should regulate protections for the ``who''. I just think these should come from the cities under whose streets the fiber is laid, not the FCC. There is even a strong case to be made for municipal ISPs.

wvenable 9y ago
ISP have peering agreements with other networks -- everybody pays for their connections on both sides. Big ISP #1 pays big ISP #2 to carry their data and vice-versa but often the traffic just cancels out. If household customers were provided internet for free and ISPs earned all their money from servers the cost would be distributed through this network. ISP #1 with the customers would charge ISP #2 with the servers for the traffic and it would somewhat balance out (as ISP #2 can make no money if it can't get to customers). Netflix is, for example, already paying your ISP indirectly to deliver content to you when it pays its ISP. I think you're confused about what net neutrality means. ISPs can still charge whatever they want how they want as long as they don't discriminate on the content of the data (who it's from and what it is). The quantity of data, the physical location of the data, and whatever else is free game. In your thought experiment, the net neutrality has no impact one way or the other.
- benlorenzetti 9y ago
  My vision for an internet renaissance would be a collection of many small interconnected ISPs, some serving end users and some backbone-y like a trans-arctic link. But should the transarctic link be able to make extra money prioritizing traffic between financial centers in NY, London, and Tokyo? I say yes. More at home, lets say the peering agreements were set up with a DNSy system allowing you to do breadth first search for the cheapest route to serve data from one domain name to another. The cost ought to vary depending on which path through the small ISPs you take, for example an ISP which had Netflix servers high in its topology could advertise cheaper rates for netflix.com requests to its neighbors. Such a market system would be required for my renaissance of the internet vision. And consequently, consumer-facing ISPs would have to be allowed to discriminate against high volumes of requests from domains which it cannot cheaply access. One way of correcting this would be charging those domains on the side, i.e. discriminating. You would also need to be able to discriminate on content type and other pricing schemes to help fund those backbone ISPs. If traders in NY, London, and Tokyo will help finance an undersea link through higher pricing for preferential service, why not let that happen? You still need regulation and democratic oversight of the local ISPs though, to prevent corruption from harming consumer access. Finally there is the concern that this would unfairly burden small content providers who have only one server. But this is silly even if it costs more to obtain data from the breadth-first search to this lone server in the middle of nowhere, its a small volume so you can ignore it and average that cost in elsewhere. Thus regulating for net neutrality directly impede the possible creation of a more distributed, more free system. In such a system all data is inherently not equal and the system could never function if we pretended it was.
  - wvenable 9y ago
    95% of this is how the system works already. Routes are chosen based on the potential delivery cost as well as performance and congestion. > If traders in NY, London, and Tokyo will help finance an undersea link through higher pricing for preferential service, why not let that happen? One can already pay more for faster service by paying for priority traffic (QoS). One could even pay for a private link. It happens all the time. In fact, my business already pays for multiple tiers of traffic for different purposes (video streaming, phones, regular Internet traffic). This not any sort of violation of net neutrality. Honestly, net neutrality is not significant impediment. I would argue that it boils down to simply treating all traffic fairly. If you can imagine a scenario where an ISP could treat your data or another service's data unfairly, it's probably a violation of net neutrality.
    - benlorenzetti 9y ago
      I think we have reached a sufficiently small statement, that all traffic should be treated fairly, that we agree. But I still don't think it is appropriate or even productively useful for the federal government to mandate this and declare what is fair. And ISPs should have the right to use their position to get payment agreements with: 1. the end consumers, 2. intermediaries, per peer networks--thank you for calling these to my attention, and 3. from the domain of origin if serving that domain from external ISPs incurs a higher than average costs for the local ISP. National scale network neutrality laws would make 3 very difficult and I absolutely do not think selectively applying 3 to only the flushest companies is wrong. Why not let cities, who already have to have plans for integrating cable into roadways be the regulatory/ownership entities?
      - wvenable 9y ago
        From your list, it's only #3 that makes no sense. The traffic is coming from their peer (which could have passed through dozens of networks) -- the ultimate source of that data is immaterial. There are no higher costs per domain for the ISP. There is just bytes and their quantity. Since ISPs already charge for quantity of data, there is no scenario where charging for the origin domain could possibly be fair. It is by definition unfair. The fact is that nearly all service providers in North America are monopolies (or duopolies). This is the reason the federal government needs to be involved. There are no market forces to correct for being unfairly treated by your ISP. You literally have no choice. If your ISP were to charge you $5 more to visit hacker news, what could you do? What if hacker news had to pay your ISP $5? What if they just didn't bother?

wvenable 9y ago

ISP have peering agreements with other networks -- everybody pays for their connections on both sides. Big ISP #1 pays big ISP #2 to carry their data and vice-versa but often the traffic just cancels out. If household customers were provided internet for free and ISPs earned all their money from servers the cost would be distributed through this network. ISP #1 with the customers would charge ISP #2 with the servers for the traffic and it would somewhat balance out (as ISP #2 can make no money if it can't get to customers). Netflix is, for example, already paying your ISP indirectly to deliver content to you when it pays its ISP. I think you're confused about what net neutrality means. ISPs can still charge whatever they want how they want as long as they don't discriminate on the content of the data (who it's from and what it is). The quantity of data, the physical location of the data, and whatever else is free game. In your thought experiment, the net neutrality has no impact one way or the other.

benlorenzetti 9y ago
My vision for an internet renaissance would be a collection of many small interconnected ISPs, some serving end users and some backbone-y like a trans-arctic link. But should the transarctic link be able to make extra money prioritizing traffic between financial centers in NY, London, and Tokyo? I say yes. More at home, lets say the peering agreements were set up with a DNSy system allowing you to do breadth first search for the cheapest route to serve data from one domain name to another. The cost ought to vary depending on which path through the small ISPs you take, for example an ISP which had Netflix servers high in its topology could advertise cheaper rates for netflix.com requests to its neighbors. Such a market system would be required for my renaissance of the internet vision. And consequently, consumer-facing ISPs would have to be allowed to discriminate against high volumes of requests from domains which it cannot cheaply access. One way of correcting this would be charging those domains on the side, i.e. discriminating. You would also need to be able to discriminate on content type and other pricing schemes to help fund those backbone ISPs. If traders in NY, London, and Tokyo will help finance an undersea link through higher pricing for preferential service, why not let that happen? You still need regulation and democratic oversight of the local ISPs though, to prevent corruption from harming consumer access. Finally there is the concern that this would unfairly burden small content providers who have only one server. But this is silly even if it costs more to obtain data from the breadth-first search to this lone server in the middle of nowhere, its a small volume so you can ignore it and average that cost in elsewhere. Thus regulating for net neutrality directly impede the possible creation of a more distributed, more free system. In such a system all data is inherently not equal and the system could never function if we pretended it was.
- wvenable 9y ago
  95% of this is how the system works already. Routes are chosen based on the potential delivery cost as well as performance and congestion. > If traders in NY, London, and Tokyo will help finance an undersea link through higher pricing for preferential service, why not let that happen? One can already pay more for faster service by paying for priority traffic (QoS). One could even pay for a private link. It happens all the time. In fact, my business already pays for multiple tiers of traffic for different purposes (video streaming, phones, regular Internet traffic). This not any sort of violation of net neutrality. Honestly, net neutrality is not significant impediment. I would argue that it boils down to simply treating all traffic fairly. If you can imagine a scenario where an ISP could treat your data or another service's data unfairly, it's probably a violation of net neutrality.
  - benlorenzetti 9y ago
    I think we have reached a sufficiently small statement, that all traffic should be treated fairly, that we agree. But I still don't think it is appropriate or even productively useful for the federal government to mandate this and declare what is fair. And ISPs should have the right to use their position to get payment agreements with: 1. the end consumers, 2. intermediaries, per peer networks--thank you for calling these to my attention, and 3. from the domain of origin if serving that domain from external ISPs incurs a higher than average costs for the local ISP. National scale network neutrality laws would make 3 very difficult and I absolutely do not think selectively applying 3 to only the flushest companies is wrong. Why not let cities, who already have to have plans for integrating cable into roadways be the regulatory/ownership entities?
    - wvenable 9y ago
      From your list, it's only #3 that makes no sense. The traffic is coming from their peer (which could have passed through dozens of networks) -- the ultimate source of that data is immaterial. There are no higher costs per domain for the ISP. There is just bytes and their quantity. Since ISPs already charge for quantity of data, there is no scenario where charging for the origin domain could possibly be fair. It is by definition unfair. The fact is that nearly all service providers in North America are monopolies (or duopolies). This is the reason the federal government needs to be involved. There are no market forces to correct for being unfairly treated by your ISP. You literally have no choice. If your ISP were to charge you $5 more to visit hacker news, what could you do? What if hacker news had to pay your ISP $5? What if they just didn't bother?