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What about the devil's advocate? As the internet kept growing for the last 20 years, "global bandwidth" have increased by a lot because of services like youtub

by jokoon 9y ago

What about the devil's advocate? As the internet kept growing for the last 20 years, "global bandwidth" have increased by a lot because of services like youtube, netflix. The democratization of smartphones multiplied this effect: people listens to music using streaming, and you could say it doubled the amount of connected devices (not to mention smartphones update apps quite often). I'm not against net neutrality, but the internet is still a very centralized platform, and it's not surprising that very popular services can become problematic for ISPs. If you look at bandwidth, the largest actors are using a disproportionately larger share of it compared to smaller actors. I just want to ask, is there some accounting of how those big actors contribute to the internet infrastructure, or how much they pay for its access considering the bandwidth usage? I know that monopolies are bad, but I'm really curious about the business of internet infrastructure and how things works.

Treblemaker 9y ago
This question touches on something I've wondered about for a while. Why are large actors' usage questioned as if they alone were responsible for their internet traffic? Bits go in and bits come back out somewhere. There are always two endpoints in a connection. Netflix, for example, pays for Netflix's internet connection according to their usage at their endpoint[1]. The consumers cumulatively pay for the same amount of usage; it's just spread across a large number of endpoints. Netflix's ISP and the consumers' ISPs pay for the infrastucture to connect the two together, and set their end user rates accordingly. Nobody in this chain of connections is getting a free ride. Is this deliberate misdirection from the ISPs? Do I have some fundamental misunderstanding? Is it more nuanced than this? [1] ignoring CDNs etc. for the sake of simplyfing the argument

by jokoon 9y ago

Treblemaker 9y ago

This question touches on something I've wondered about for a while. Why are large actors' usage questioned as if they alone were responsible for their internet traffic? Bits go in and bits come back out somewhere. There are always two endpoints in a connection. Netflix, for example, pays for Netflix's internet connection according to their usage at their endpoint[1]. The consumers cumulatively pay for the same amount of usage; it's just spread across a large number of endpoints. Netflix's ISP and the consumers' ISPs pay for the infrastucture to connect the two together, and set their end user rates accordingly. Nobody in this chain of connections is getting a free ride. Is this deliberate misdirection from the ISPs? Do I have some fundamental misunderstanding? Is it more nuanced than this? [1] ignoring CDNs etc. for the sake of simplyfing the argument