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This comments shows a surprising lack of knowledge of the arguments for net neutrality. The threat of Non-Net-Neutrality isn't some arbitrary increase in costs
by matt4077 9y ago
This comments shows a surprising lack of knowledge of the arguments for net neutrality.
The threat of Non-Net-Neutrality isn't some arbitrary increase in costs for starting a business that gets paid, and filed with other nuisance.
It's that by virtue of their position in the market, the providers can extract all the added value any company makes with their customers. That's because the startup isn't the one choosing their customers' internet access. What the provider charges for access to the customers that signed up with them doesn't factor into the decisions of the market, because the customer doesn't pay it, and likely will never know about it.
And "the market" will not solve this. There are maybe three or four companies large enough to cause significant backlash when they can't be reached. But besides Facebook, YT and Amazon, everyone will have to pay up.
And when faced with the decision to pay or not to pay, the rational decision will be to accept any price that leaves you with a single cent of profit. The power imbalance is staggering, and the potential for success with content startups on the internet will suffer dramatically.
On the practical side, your startups' second to tenth employee better be contract lawyers. Because you don't just have to pay Comcast and Verizon. You will have to make arrangement with every single one of tens of thousands of providers around the world if you want to reach customers connected via their network.
Of course, you probably won't bother with some of them. Or decide against, say, reaching potential customers in Montana. That will kill off several of the best features of the web. Namely the long-tail of default-accessible content that ordinarily nobody would think were interesting to someone of your age in your location.
- oconnore 9y agoNo ISP is going to stop rural Montanaians from looking up Yelp reviews or visiting obscure ferret jousting fan pages. No one is even going to throttle video streaming, unless the ISP can demonstrate that the bandwidth consumed times some small per Gigabyte fee is worth far more than the postage and accounting costs (which for a handful of >0.1%-total-traffic-volume sites like Netflix, it will be). Your prediction is like a Terry Gilliam movie (which I love!), but it's not actually going to happen that way.
- CamperBob2 9y agoYou seriously need to learn about the history of the telecoms industry, going back to the days when they did exactly what you say they're not going to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger Nothing is happening now that hasn't happened before. People forget, is all.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- marak830 9y agoActually, as to the throttling of video: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/verizon-wireless-apparently-throttles-streaming-video-to-10mbps/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/veriz...
- oconnore 9y agoYes, they throttled Netflix and Youtube, two sites that account for ~30% and ~13% of total traffic volume, respectively. This is consistent with what I said.
- marak830 9y agoYou are right, sorry not sure how I missed that part
- pdkl95 9y ago> ~30% and ~13% of total traffic volume So what? That's traffic that the ISP's customers requested. That isn't Netflix using some shared resource. Customers are paying Verison to transfer data, and if 30% of that data is NetFlix, that's fine. Throttling denies the customer the service they are paying for. Should FedEx or UPS throttle the number of Amazon packages per address they will deliver on time since Amazon represents a very large percentage of their business? (If this isn't compatible with a business model based on oversubscription, that's the ISP's problem) > No ISP is going to stop rural Montanaians from looking up Yelp reviews or visiting obscure ferret jousting fan pages Of course not, because that isn't what Network Neutrality is about. Obscure ferret jousting fan pages are not competing with Verison. However, ISPs are* often involved in various aspects of "media" production and distribution, which is a conflict of interest.
- howlgram 9y agowouldn't the result be all of these companies (or at least new ones) moving outside the US if they have the chance? Then US internet customers would be in a precarious situation compared to the rest of the world.