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It's really quite simple.
Having strong "net neutrality" means that all bits are equal. It's like imagining that your ISP can't see where the bits go, they jus
It's really quite simple.
Having strong "net neutrality" means that all bits are equal. It's like imagining that your ISP can't see where the bits go, they just come read the meter. In fact, the analogy to your electric bill is quite apt.
Imagine if your electric company billed you more for using your toaster than it did for using your refrigerator. Imagine if you had to pay to add devices to your electric plan, or if you had to pay extra to be able to use full power on your microwave. Because the electric company just "reads the meter" and treats all "bits" of electricity as equal, you are free to use your electricity as you choose. This means a guy in his garage can run a server and start a business and break into markets (that actually requires both "electricity neutrality" and "net neutrality."
The ramifications of having no net neutrality regulations range from simply throttling certain websites, like netflix, in order to squeeze them for more money, to charging to access certain web sites or selling "packages" of web sites you can access. If that sounds terrifying to you, you're not alone.
It’s actually illegal in most locations to run commercial servers on your home electric line.
It might be against terms of service, but I very much doubt it's illegal.
Ten minutes of Googling shows nothing about running servers from my home being illegal.
How would they know you're hosting a server? I mean, practically speaking a server is just a computer you leave running 24/7.
Please could you provide some evidence of your statement, otherwise I don't think it's quite true.
For example Austin, you have different bills if you use it for residential or commercial:
https://austinenergy.com/ae/residential/rates https://austinenergy.com/ae/residential/rates
https://austinenergy.com/ae/commercial/rates https://austinenergy.com/ae/commercial/rates
Did you just really link a power utility bill rating to say it's illegal to run a computer?
Son, what?
It is not illegal anywhere to run a computer as a server. In fact a computer that serves data, is a server. If you've ever hosted a file on your computer or sent one, you're a server. Ever had a Facebook messenger call or uploaded a picture, you're a server.
Geeeez.
Well, if your home internet connection's TOS prohibits running servers then it could be a CFAA violation. It would involve exceeding the allowed access (of the ISP's routers) of a computer involved in interstate commerce (the ISP's router is almost certainly used to buy things across state lines, someone has gone to Amazon or such).
> It would involve exceeding the allowed access (of the ISP's routers)
That's quite a stretch. You, the server hosting customer who pays for internet access, aren't "exceeding the allowed access". Your website visitors are accessing your server. If there's a thundering herd, the ISP is allowed to protect it's network accessibility (IIRC Comcast did this and the FCC lost a lawsuit against them[1] afterwords).
Typically ISPs care more that you are actually abusing the expected bandwidth of your connection (thus deteriorating service quality for your neighbors and eating into your ISP's profits), not that you are running a server at all. Every time you have to open a pinhole in your home router, you are "running a server" of a sort.
I'm an advocate for the principles of Net Neutrality and to clarify the vagueness of CFAA, but I don't have a clue how to implement them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC
But the "bits are equal" argument still doesn't work. You can easily run your own VPN and then what?
You realize that there are two sides to every internet connection right? It doesn't matter if you are running your end through a VPN, they can slow / filter it from the content provider to you.
This doesn't make sense if the endpoint is another country, for example
The traffic isn't completely circumventing your last mile ISP. Just because you tunnel over that connection doesn't mean they're not serving your traffic.
Likely the outcome would be "we couldn't identify this traffic as one of our approved providers, so we used the lower of the rates we offer."
e: the second bit of that was to compare to the plan offered by a peer comment, with e.g. netflix, youtube served at higher rates and the rest at lower. So you would never see the higher rates.
Presumably they are talking about a VPN service hosted somewhere outside of your ISP's network, so your ISP could only throttle traffic between you and your VPN service but not between the VPN service and the content provider.
The VPN's ISP or the content provider's ISP or any transit provider in the middle could throttle between the VPN service and the content provider, but there is far, far more competition among ISP's suitable for server farms and transit providers than there is among residential ISP's so they are much less likely to be able to get away unreasonable throttling.
The can and will come at it from the other side. They will charge Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, etc. money to get access to "their" network. And of course, those charges will be passed on to you resulting in higher bills.
I have no problem viewing the scenario "throttle/charge-more-for Reddit specifically" as a nightmare, as an unambiguous violation of NN, and as a bad thing I'd like to prohibit.
But, per my other comment [1], NN seems to be used in a much stronger sense than that, which covers any arrangement whereby you can pay more for a dedicated pipe.
To extend your electric company example:
Let's say that the mains actually had two pipes (type A and B) bundled together and you could branch off of one or the other to set up a power outlet. Further, in times of brownouts/undercapacity, type A would keep the same voltage, whatever, while type B would die out.
What if the electric company charged more for every type A connection you wanted? That doesn't seem like it's obviously a bad thing, since there are legit usages where you might want the steadier power and be willing to pay for it. It's certainly not on the level of charging by what is plugged into the outlet.
Edit: Also, type A is equivalent (in some sense) to running your own generator that just services your demand. Surely that can't be evil?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910272
> What if the electric company charged more for every type A connection you wanted?
This actually happens (in some sense). If you want tons and tons of electrical juice, you pay more for it in 1-phase, 2-phase, 3-phase options.
(I am not a power engineer, but I live in a warehouse with 2-phase power which we "need" & use for welding, running expensive equipment, etc...)
> Having strong "net neutrality" means that all bits are equal. t's like imagining that your ISP can't see where the bits go, they just come read the meter.
No, it does not mean that. I explained why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910389
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My electric company gives rebates if you buy qualified new energy efficient appliances, or if you connect your smart thermostat to their API so they can throttle it down a bit to prevent brownouts during peak times.
That's a rebate if you provide proof of purchase though, and a rebate for general use. Neither of those discounts are something that relies on the electric company knowing what is plugged into your house at any given moment, because _they cant_ tell what's hooked up at any given moment.
If net neutrality goes away ISPs not only will be able to tell what you are doing, but they will charge you more for it too. You can always try to use a VPN but nothing is stopping ISPs from charging x100 times the normal rate for VPN traffic or telling your von provider that they need to cough up if they don't want their traffic slowed.
All of this might even be acceptable if ISPs were just in the internet business. Companies would bid up for use of the internet the same way that Google is pulling some of the best engineers by paying triple what a small business in the Midwest would pay even though they both need software engineers.
Unfortunately ISPs are also in other industries like content, and they are going to be incentivized to nuke their competitors. Since the US apparently has no concept of enforcing anti trust laws anymore, ISPs can just slowly chip their way into other internet based businesses. They can either get into industries themselves or they can blackmail industry leaders to stay faster than competitors. That will lead to both increased prices for consumers as companies pass on their costs, as well as a lack of any competition because there's now a giant wall of ISP fees to overcome for any startup to try and compete with.
From GP:
> ...or if you connect your smart thermostat to their API
In a way, this sounds like a car insurance company lowering your rates for keeping their sensor device in your car.
Comcast is getting into the home automation/security/IoT business too - ISPs haven't been profitable for decades, which explains why they (1) keep squeezing their existing customer base for more money, and (2) keep expanding into new - possibly unrelated - markets like stadium ownership. Anything to avoid lowering the dividend price.
I'm a tad skeptical of the electrons vs bits (packets) analogy.
Electrons are commoditized and generic - and they don't suffer from prioritization issues except during brown-outs/black-outs. When you receive a stream of bits you are routing very specific non-generic packets via various network interconnects from very specific content providers. The routing and interconnect/bandwidth costs will vary significantly depending on the content provider, content type, and consumer usage.
It's my understanding that the ISPs want to rescind the 2015 NN rules so they can offer premium guaranteed/prioritized QoS for specific content types from premium partner providers (e.g. real-time applications such as medical/security devices, VoIP, video conferencing, and streaming audio/video). You can't do this with electrons.
Correct. Except this has nothing to do with "specific types of content" and everything to do with "specific large incumbents paying providers to make their competitors slow". If it was just about broad traffic categories, then maybe it wouldn't be as awful of a plan.
Really, ISPs don't want to just be a utility. Imagine if instead of having to charge for service provided, they could have large companies like Netflix and Hulu bid for the exclusive privilege among video providers to not be throttled; the profits would start raining in without having to even innovate on actual product or service provided. How wonderful.
Ehhh, not really. I’m pro net neutrality as much as anyone on HN, maybe more so. But recognize that there is a real business point: content delivery cohosted at the ISP is “free” other than electrical cost of the server, which is probably paid for by the content provider, and is a profit center even without kickbacks. Bits routed to other networks cost money and are a cost center. With last mile speeds increasing but backbone data rates not dropping fast enough it can be a real problem. People who torrent or run bitcoin full nodes are probably costing ISPs large amounts of money.
Playing devil's advocate:
But what if big companies subsidize my packets to/from them? Will that not make internet cheaper for me?
Maybe - but it will also give ISPs an excuse to artificially slow down any website which doesn't pay. And that would hurt all the small websites out there that either don't want to or can't afford to pay off the ISPs.
Today, you can make a new facebook competitor that will run just as fast as facebook.com. You just have to rent some servers and write some software. Without net neutrality, that might no longer be the case.
Exactly. The first thing you will experience is the data plans will become cheaper and your favourite channels faster. Big companies will pay ISP to make their data free and faster. This will leave all smaller competitors and startups unable to compete with the big guys. So the second thing you will experience is the big companies abusing their power, charging more, offering less. But at this point you will not have a choice anymore - there will be no Netflix competitors to choose from, no new social media to experiment with, no fresh dating apps etc, no independent opinions. Ony the big companies will have the money to pay ISP for reasonably fast and cheap data - and they will charge YOU extra for that.
Well, "commercial" really usually encompasses a whole range of different kinds of contracts depending on the specifics of the load, and there usually are also multiple categories for residential loads, but in the most common case it's simply a matter of the time of day and day of the week that electricity is used.
Commercial use in this general sense is relatively flat throughout the day with little use during night, whereas the residential load profile has peaks in the morning and in the evening with little use late at night and during working hours--it's simply a profile of the average load of a typical household throughout the day vs. the profile of the average load of a "typical business".
Of course, this "typical business" mostly matches offices and retail, industrial users usually have different load profiles, or, for that matter, no real load profile at all, in the sense that they pay based on peak power, not based on energy used, which in effect is an incentive to keep the power profile as flat as possible. Though deviations from that are possible in the form of load shedding, for example, where the utility company can remotely switch off some machinery in the factory to reduce load during peak demand times in exchange for cheaper electricity (this is typically employed with stuff like heating or cooling where it's easy to build your system in such a way that hour long interruptions here and there simply don't matter--your cold storage will stay cool enough even if you stop actively cooling it for an hour, for example).
The overall point is: The utility company doesn't really care what you use the energy for. They don't care whether you produce luxury cars or cheap gadgets. If you are willing to have the lighting in your offices switched off remotely during peak load times, they will happily sell you such a contract for your office building. If you insist on operating your aluminum smelter 24/7, you can have that, though it's going to be expensive. What they care about is the load on their grid and generation facilities, not what you use the energy for.
That's a good question, the problem is what if your only available ISP makes you this hypothetical deal:
For $59.99 a month:
- Get Facebook, Google, Netflix at 100 Mbps max.
- Any other traffic is limited to 5 Mbps max.
Watching Hulu, or Amazon Video for instance would be limited at 5 Mbps max.
But in that case your own VPN would also fall in the second category, so even if you tried to watch Hulu via VPN, you'd still get only 5 Mbps max. (And you'd be then stupid to watch Netflix through your VPN since it would also be at 5 Mbps max instead of 100 Mbps max.)
What you describe is already being done by the likes of T-Mobile and other wireless carriers such as their BingeOn program, to little fanfare.
The average consumer unfortunately has little to care about net neutrality. But in the long term it will hurt the tech economy as they have all risen from net neutrality.
T-Mobile's BingeOn is more of zero-rating than penalizing the speed/accessibility of non-approved "partners", but IMHO it's still a violation of the principle of Net Neutrality.
> T-Mobile's BingeOn is more of zero-rating than penalizing the speed/accessibility of non-approved "partners",
Erm ... so, if users want to access non-approved "partners", that's way more expensive ... but that does not affect accessibility? If you really think that, you simply fell for their psychological trick. It's simply irrelevant whether the accessibility is limited technically or economically, as one is always convertible into the other (if they limited access technically, you could still restore access by offering them enough money).
BingeOn is kind of a problem, but it's significantly better in a couple ways.
First, the free data is slower than what you get normally. Second, the program is supposedly open for anyone to join.
If BingeOn was the worst impingement on net neutrality, we'd be in a pretty good place.
> Second, the program is supposedly open for anyone to join.
Except it (a) isn't, and (b) even if it theoretically were, the model of having to follow the rules of every ISP on the planet to fall under their respective zero-rating plan, or even just the overhead of coordinating with them doesn't scale, and thus is inherently only an option for large companies. Being accessible globally via IP is a matter of renting a small virtual server for a few bucks a month. Being zero-rated by thousands of ISPs is a major undertaking.
> The average consumer unfortunately has little to care about net neutrality.
That's simply not true. BingeOn is hurting the consumer. T-Mobile could just as well simply add x GB of traffic per month to their plans that you could use with any services you want, that would result in the same costs for them, and avoid the discrimination. But instead they manipulate their customers into assuming incorrectly that BingeOn is somehow a free gift from T-Mobile, to get them to form an opinion that is against their own interest. It's nothing but deception.
Thats because you will limited unless you use specific services.
In Germany, two operators (T-Mobile and Vodafone) offer special "passes" for different services. These do not count against your monthly quota (if you use up all your data, you will be limited to about 64 kbit/s).
So, yes, you can use a VPN, but this will count against your data cap. While, if you use the services they choose for you, you basically get "free" extra data.
You just made an excellent argument for starting to enforce antitrust laws again. But not a very good argument for net neutrality. (And Title II actually exempts ISPs from FTC regulation.)
We need to fix antitrust. Of course, one of the biggest sponsors of every net neutrality-supporting website on the Internet (Google) doesn't want to fix antitrust. This is why net neutrality regulations are carefully designed not to apply to tech companies, and why things like the old ISP privacy rules that were repealed solely targeted ISPs. (When states tried to reimplement those privacy rules, but including tech companies, Google, obviously, came out strongly against them.)
Which is why Comcast slowing a competitor is a mortal sin, but Google's websites not working on Firefox (or them outright blocking Amazon devices) is no big deal, legislatively.
Let's get the FTC back to what it was built for: Breaking up companies like Ma Bell and El Goog.
The simple way to solve this is charge larger customers more. Usage caps have been 100% the norm in Australia since the end of the dial up era. Of course we have other unrelated internet issues, (NBN CVC usage cost crippling ISPs, etc) I pay $69.99 AUD for the ability to transfer 1TB of data in total, up and down, over my ADSL2 connection at “full speed” before the ISP will throttle me down to something like 128 or 256 kbps which either way is uselessly slow (insert web page bloat rant here) until the end of the calendar month when the counters reset. If I ran a torrent client uploading lots of bits, all I would do is “burn my allotment faster” thereby creating an incentive for me to not abuse their network, at the same time as me paying a rate proportional to my use of their network capacity.
> content delivery cohosted at the ISP is “free” other than electrical cost of the server
Packets delivered to the ISP at an exchange are equally free. Noone is asking for access providers to collect packets in asia and move them to their customer in the US for free. All this is about is that if I pay a transit provider to move my packets from asia to the US, then the access ISP in the US doesn't get to charge me for actually delivering the packet to their customer, or prioritize someone else's packets over mine. There is nothing wrong with ISPs engineering traffic to be delivered to them via the closest exchange possible, they just don't get to abuse their monopoly over their subscriber's line.
> Bits routed to other networks cost money and are a cost center. With last mile speeds increasing but backbone data rates not dropping fast enough it can be a real problem. People who torrent or run bitcoin full nodes are probably costing ISPs large amounts of money.
Which is solved by discriminating between services how?
If outbound traffic is expensive, you have to charge for outbound traffic, not make youtube free (or whatever).
There is nothing wrong with traffic to on-premises hosted servers being free--if everyone can host servers there under the exact same conditions. The problem is an abuse of a monopoly position, not charging based on costs.
> Packets delivered to the ISP at an exchange are equally free.
> There is nothing wrong with ISPs engineering traffic to be delivered to them via the closest exchange possible, they just don't get to abuse their monopoly over their subscriber's line.
I don't think the ISP's problem (opportunity) resides in the scenario you're describing. The problem is the top .0001% of Internet destinations congest the ISP generic network interconnects. Hence, these larger vendors (Netflix, Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc) either pay the ISP for direct network peering or server hosting to sustain acceptable performance. However, this typically leaves the cost of growing internal network backbone capacity on the ISP. I believe the scenario you are describing would allow ISPs to offset this capital cost to both the big content providers and the biggest consumers.
> Which is solved by discriminating between services how?
The point about torrents and bitcoin is that these applications are particularly burdensome on routers because of the amount of connection requests as compared to a fairly manageable HTTP or RTSP session. As I mentioned above, server co-location and direct network peering is already a thing that many larger ISPs offer on a non-discriminatory basis. However, most new businesses will piggyback on existing cloud hosting (AWS/Google/Azure) or CDN (Akamai/Google/Cloudfront) arrangements.
> I don't think the ISP's problem (opportunity) resides in the scenario you're describing. The problem is the top .0001% of Internet destinations congest the ISP generic network interconnects. Hence, these larger vendors (Netflix, Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc) either pay the ISP for direct network peering or server hosting to sustain acceptable performance. However, this typically leaves the cost of growing internal network backbone capacity on the ISP. I believe the scenario you are describing would allow ISPs to offset this capital cost to both the big content providers and the biggest consumers.
I really don't understand what your point is ... how does avoding load on the internal backbone leave which costs of growing the backbone to the ISP?!
> The point about torrents and bitcoin is that these applications are particularly burdensome on routers because of the amount of connection requests as compared to a fairly manageable HTTP or RTSP session.
Uh? How is the number of connection requests relevant to a router?!
> As I mentioned above, server co-location and direct network peering is already a thing that many larger ISPs offer on a non-discriminatory basis.
Non-discriminatory is no enough, it has to be free or at cost. They are a monopoly, and as such non-discriminatory is still a monopolistic price.
> However, most new businesses will piggyback on existing cloud hosting (AWS/Google/Azure) or CDN (Akamai/Google/Cloudfront) arrangements.
Which isn't necessarily that bad, as long as there is competition among CDNs. A CDN ultimately is just a different kind of transit provider.
> how does avoding load on the internal backbone leave which costs of growing the backbone to the ISP?
I didn't say anything about avoiding load. They don't want to raise capital to build their own backbone - so they want to pass off the cost to the largest traffic sources (Netflix etc) and largest traffic destinations (most oactive consumers).
> How is the number of connection requests relevant to a router?!
More connection requests means more CPU usage on a router. More open connections means more RAM usage.
> Non-discriminatory is no enough, it has to be free or at cost. They are a monopoly, and as such non-discriminatory is still a monopolistic price.
Non-discriminatory means they offer all content providers the same prices. Now if you're saying that they can overcharge because there's no competition, then I agree. This is a problem in the short term. But if I understand Pai's logic, this gap in the market will spur competition (and solutions) to emerge through innovation. I'm skeptical about this logic but cautiously optimistic.
I grant you that this is not a satisfying answer when you only have one shitty ISP option like Comcast and there's no hope fore a competitor in the short term. But given the growth of fixed residential wireless and new spectrum like White Spaces it's possible that a Comcast/Verizon would be doing more damage to their own brand (and content offerings) in the long term by mistreating their customers.
No. ISPs want to rescind the 2015 NN rules so they can vertically integrate their content and delivery products, mostly because their content offerings are utter crap and can't compete in a free market. The intent here is patently obvious; the industry analysts working for major ISPs don't even pretend anymore.
Also, medical devices?! Hospitals can/do buy dedicated lines with QoS guarantees and then monitor their own networks' use of those lines; all of that is 100% allowed under NN... so unless your argument is that it would be a net good to add medical devices to the Internet of Crap ecosystem, this is a fantastic argument in favor in net neturality ;-)
> You can't do this with electrons.
Huh?! yes, you absolutely can.
We happen to mostly use photons these days, but I'm having a really hard time seeing why this distinction between "you can only use the electron for x,y,z" and "you can only use the photon for x,y,z" is anything but completely arbitrary.
If I happen to use a tranmission medium that uses electrons instead of photons, does that suddenly mean my ISP should be bound by NN regulations? Thats... rather confusing.
Or, more succinctly, "you can't microwave Netflix(R)-brand Popcorn with bits"
I think he mean electrons as in power, not as in the joyous copper phone line that gives me barely usable internet at times. Hi from Australia.
> ISPs want to rescind the 2015 NN rules so they can vertically integrate their content and delivery products, mostly because their content offerings are utter crap and can't compete in a free market.
This is certainly true as well. But we've seen with T-Mobile's zero-rating that it's faster and cheaper to acquire/retain new customers through partnering and network management. To your point, and to compete with Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast, I believe T-Mobile announced a TV-related acquisition today.
> Also, medical devices?! Hospitals can/do buy dedicated lines with QoS guarantees and then monitor their own networks' use of those lines; all of that is 100% allowed under NN... so unless your argument is that it would be a net good to add medical devices to the Internet of Crap ecosystem, this is a fantastic argument in favor in net neturality ;-)
Hospitals are already being addressed, as you say, with dedicated lines and VPNs. I'm referring to the millions of device endpoints sitting on consumer-grade (NN limited) wired/wireless networks. Rescinding NN will allow the ISPs to sell premium prioritized QoS to medical and security services companies who can bundle access to their customers. I'm not sure how this will play out in practice though.
> You can't do this with electrons.
The point is that for an ISP, Internet packets are routed via dozens of network interconnects and millions of content sources on a variable QoS consumer demand basis. On the contrary, electricity is generic and is (ideally) sourced on a lowest cost basis and QoS is strictly determined on a supply/demand dimension.
> If I happen to use a tranmission medium that uses electrons instead of photons, does that suddenly mean my ISP should be bound by NN regulations?
I'm not advocating against NN. I'm just pointing out that the electricity analogy is inaccurate. I'm also pointing out that the ISPs want to offer premium Qos and, yes, their own content offerings.
> I'm not sure how this will play out in practice though.
I'm very skeptical. This doesn't sound necessary, or in some cases even very smart. An extremely niche use case.
If you want to see what death of NN will mean in practice, look at what companies were willing to do in order to test NN regulations in the past. Hint: it's not prioritizing medical traffic.
> The point is that for an ISP, Internet packets are routed via dozens of network interconnects and millions of content sources on a variable QoS consumer demand basis.
The 2015 order may or may not be the best implementation of net neutrality. But I think it's entirely reasonable to have a regulation that says "you can't change what you charge / how you behave based on who is on the other end of the line, but you can -- in a pricing-agnostic way -- prioritize/shape traffic".
> I'm just pointing out that the electricity analogy is inaccurate.
I'm still not convinced.
You can equally make the argument that in a brown-out, electricity companies should be able to prioritize consumer-grade medical devices and so on.
The only difference is that it's easier to implement this prioritization.
"because we can" is a really poor justification for doing something.
Banning data caps is very different from not allowing higher charges for higher usage.
Most data caps are of the type where you pay a flat fee for a fixed amount of data and then pay an outrageously high punitive fee for overages that is vastly out of proportion with the amount you are paying for the data below the cap. In other instances your speeds get dramatically throttled after reaching the cap or are completely cut off if you go over the cap too often. I think that should be outlawed.
Those aren't good faith attempts to charge people for what they are using; they are attempts to shut down heavy users, often because the ISPs are also in the cable TV business which competes with streaming video that is responsible for heavy data usage.
A good faith attempt to charge heavy data users fairly for their use would probably look something like the billing models used for electricity.
> if you had, for example, 4N bandwith, 3 users using an average of N, with the ability to buffer, and one user using an average of N but fluctuating by +- .5N, and without the ability to buffer.
Are you referring to buffering in the endpoint, as for video streaming? The buffers I was referring to are the queues in the network itself. Properly managed queues can absorb bursts of traffic but will otherwise maintain a steady state of minimal buffer occupancy, so packets spend minimal time waiting in the buffer even when the line is running at full capacity. Even when a user is experiencing packet drops as a congestion signal, the packets that make it through the bottleneck will do so without undue delay.
If I understand your hypothetical correctly, user number 4 has higher latency sensitivity than users 1-3, but they're all trying to use at least their full fair share of the bandwidth. Furthermore, users 1-3 are transferring at a fairly steady rate, indicating that their traffic is being managed by a relatively intelligent endpoint that is using something like TCP BBR.
Depending on the timescale of user 4's traffic volume fluctuations, his experience may differ. Short bursts of traffic will get buffered, and so the tail end of the burst may experience a few milliseconds of delay (and also induce a few milliseconds of delay on the neighbors' traffic), but if the burst is large enough that it would monopolize the line for tens of milliseconds, packets will start getting dropped as a congestion signal, and user 4 will experience most of those drops. On a long time scale of seconds, if user 4 is still trying to use more than his fair share of bandwidth in spite of having had enough time for congestion signals to make a round trip, then user 4's packets are going to get dropped as much as necessary to keep them under control, because user 4's traffic is behaving badly.
In the real world, Netflix-style video streaming tends to be fairly well-behaved, dropping to lower resolutions in response to congestion. It is also fairly latency-tolerant because of client-side buffering. Interactive videoconferencing is more latency sensitive but has similar congestion response and is almost as loss-tolerant. Video games, DNS lookups, and early-stage connection handshakes are all relatively unresponsive to congestion signals and very latency-sensitive. But because those are almost never the traffic flows that are using the most bandwidth, they're never first in line to be dropped in the event of congestion and they usually are the first packets to be forwarded by a fq_codel style traffic manager.