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You should not have needed the Snowden documents to learn about the existence of peering agreements. The issue is ISPs requiring compensation for the peering ag

You should not have needed the Snowden documents to learn about the existence of peering agreements. The issue is ISPs requiring compensation for the peering agreement.

revelation 9y ago
This is where we get into the difficulty of what is net neutrality. Taking compensation for a peering agreement is perfectly fine if it's imbalanced. What net neutrality should prevent is, ceteris paribus, asking for $X from YouTube and $Y >> $X from Netflix because you figure your dying cable business will benefit from less competition. Ideally, net neutrality would be FRAND for peering agreements: you can't deny anyone if they are happy to pay market rate, and market rate is what you charge everyone else, plus minus.
- sologoub 9y ago
  It’s absolutely not fine if your customers are already paying you specifically to connect to Netflix, which is an extremely common use and why we have the bottleneck in the first place. The imbalance of the traffic has little to do with what we have here, since the telco is specifically paid to deliver that traffic by consumers. Charging on both ends is very profitable, but is definitely double-dipping. Your phone provider doesn’t charge you more to receive calls from large customer care call centers when you have a problem and request a call back. The call center may get charged more by their provider if their call pattern is problematic, but your provider doesn’t stop the call from going through. It is really not any different with internet networks and why common carrier rules make a lot of sense. These same rules also provide a lot of liability protection for the carriers, which I’m guessing they have negotiated to keep somehow.
  - kakarot 9y ago
    If I operate a large network, I would want authority over how much bandwidth I provide to each neighboring network. That seems like a reasonable demand. I would want the authority to choose to peer with who I want, but if someone doesn't want to peer with me at market rate, then they won't experience "degraded" service coming through other networks that I peer with indiscriminately. If you think this isn't fair, I would like to hear why.

You should not have needed the Snowden documents to learn about the existence of peering agreements. The issue is ISPs requiring compensation for the peering agreement.

revelation 9y ago

This is where we get into the difficulty of what is net neutrality. Taking compensation for a peering agreement is perfectly fine if it's imbalanced. What net neutrality should prevent is, ceteris paribus, asking for $X from YouTube and $Y >> $X from Netflix because you figure your dying cable business will benefit from less competition. Ideally, net neutrality would be FRAND for peering agreements: you can't deny anyone if they are happy to pay market rate, and market rate is what you charge everyone else, plus minus.

sologoub 9y ago
It’s absolutely not fine if your customers are already paying you specifically to connect to Netflix, which is an extremely common use and why we have the bottleneck in the first place. The imbalance of the traffic has little to do with what we have here, since the telco is specifically paid to deliver that traffic by consumers. Charging on both ends is very profitable, but is definitely double-dipping. Your phone provider doesn’t charge you more to receive calls from large customer care call centers when you have a problem and request a call back. The call center may get charged more by their provider if their call pattern is problematic, but your provider doesn’t stop the call from going through. It is really not any different with internet networks and why common carrier rules make a lot of sense. These same rules also provide a lot of liability protection for the carriers, which I’m guessing they have negotiated to keep somehow.
- kakarot 9y ago
  If I operate a large network, I would want authority over how much bandwidth I provide to each neighboring network. That seems like a reasonable demand. I would want the authority to choose to peer with who I want, but if someone doesn't want to peer with me at market rate, then they won't experience "degraded" service coming through other networks that I peer with indiscriminately. If you think this isn't fair, I would like to hear why.