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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 li

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?
    - benlorenzetti 9y ago
      Consider an ISP at node 0 receiving data from the domain naway.com through the cheapest path isp1, isp2,...isp n. But of all the members in the chain, isp0 only has a business relationship with isp1, so the price that isp1 advertises to isp0 has to be the cumulative sum of distribution costs charged by isp's 1-n. Because naway.com's server is so far away, it could cost isp0 more than average to serve this data. If there is a lot of traffic from naway.com, the ISP could compensate by raising prices on all end consumers, throttling the speed to reduce demand, or negotiating with naway.com for extra $$. Note that isp0 would only bother to do this with domains of sufficient size. If you had regional ISPs answerable democratically to the city entity that owned the roads, your ISP would be fighting for your lower prices and it would still be important to the ISP to provide access to these in demand sites. Net Neutrality seems to try to correct a symptom of a federally created, legal monopoly's concentration of power with more federal regulation. In the same way that the FCC allocates airwaves for the entire US, we need to acknowledge that the natural size for a ISP monopoly is the size of the government entity that owns the streets. Open protocols and market forces could be used for the rest of the network.

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?
  - benlorenzetti 9y ago
    Consider an ISP at node 0 receiving data from the domain naway.com through the cheapest path isp1, isp2,...isp n. But of all the members in the chain, isp0 only has a business relationship with isp1, so the price that isp1 advertises to isp0 has to be the cumulative sum of distribution costs charged by isp's 1-n. Because naway.com's server is so far away, it could cost isp0 more than average to serve this data. If there is a lot of traffic from naway.com, the ISP could compensate by raising prices on all end consumers, throttling the speed to reduce demand, or negotiating with naway.com for extra $$. Note that isp0 would only bother to do this with domains of sufficient size. If you had regional ISPs answerable democratically to the city entity that owned the roads, your ISP would be fighting for your lower prices and it would still be important to the ISP to provide access to these in demand sites. Net Neutrality seems to try to correct a symptom of a federally created, legal monopoly's concentration of power with more federal regulation. In the same way that the FCC allocates airwaves for the entire US, we need to acknowledge that the natural size for a ISP monopoly is the size of the government entity that owns the streets. Open protocols and market forces could be used for the rest of the network.