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Can someone explain to me how it's evil for them to charge more money for a "bigger pipe"? Their networks can only service so much traffic; not sure why supply

Can someone explain to me how it's evil for them to charge more money for a "bigger pipe"? Their networks can only service so much traffic; not sure why supply and demand are seen as evil in this case.

djschnei 9y ago
Yes, yes... don't explain, just downvote.
- paulmd 9y ago
  Explanation: you have not even done a bare minimum of attention or research on a pivotal internet-freedom issue that has been slow-boiling over the past 3 months and you are still weighing in as if your opinion is informed (let alone intellectually significant) in any respect whatsoever. It's not like it's a real deep and multi-faceted issue or anything here, you just didn't bother to do even a bare minimum of research. Maybe consider doing the google before weighing in on a major issue before demanding that it be spoon-fed to you. This sort of post is actually subtly demeaning to everyone else on this forum and lowers the level of discussion here. Try to elevate it instead.
  - djschnei 9y ago
    Yup, I don't hold your opinion so I am uninformed. Asked for your POV, but I'm too dumb to even attempt to explain it to. Must revert to personal slights and putdowns. Ahhhh, politics in 2017.
    - paulmd 9y ago
      Joke's on me, you were only pretending to be an idiot! You were actually just a sealioning libertarian all along!
      - djschnei 9y ago
        Dude, I am trying to understand your POV. F&$%# me right? People paying more for something that costs more to provide seems completely logical to me. The anti-competitive nature of the regional monopolies isn't fair and turns all the normal rules on their heads, I understand that. I wish we would fix that rather than regulating the monopolies.
        wtallis 9y ago
        > I wish we would fix that rather than regulating the monopolies. See, that's the kind of bullshit that makes it hard to tell whether you're honestly misinformed, or disingenuous. The ISPs at issue are the ones providing last-mile connectivity. That's a textbook example of a natural monopoly. You can't make it not a natural monopoly. The free market will never settle on a strategy of providing competition in the form of multiple parallel and competing cables along every residential street and driveway. Regulation of the inevitable monopolies is the only solution that doesn't completely ignore reality and basic economic concepts. There's no alternative that can be expected to be at all effective.
  - oreo81 9y ago
    This is r/Iamverysmart material. Wow.
    - djschnei 9y ago
      Seriously! haha
    - paulmd 9y ago
      OP disagrees with the concept of natural monopolies because he's deep down the libertarian rabbit-hole, but instead of just coming out and saying it he phrases it as a question and expects people to explain the basics of the concept to him so he can obtusely disagree at every step. It doesn't really do us any good to have a 101-level discussion of microecon and market failures on every single topic. It just happens that this is a topic where you can't even pretend there are two sides to it, and it's one that has been discussed to death over the past couple months, so the bad faith is pretty transparent. (the next stage of sealioning: "woah how dare you ascribe bad faith to my totally legitimate attempts to grok this issue, I totally would have agreed with you if you had just responded nicely but maybe there is something to this whole internet-fast-lanes thing after all!")
- AquaMorph 9y ago
  Downvoting things I dislike is easier than explaining why I think they are wrong
- Jotra7 9y ago
  I did, fella. But I'm not sure why I wasted my time trying to explain anything to a reactionary. Might as well explain calculus to a 3 year old.
- sctb 9y ago
  The guidelines ask us not to do this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Jotra7 9y ago
Because it's not paying for a "bigger pipe." It's so they can degrade service and not upgrade infrastructure. It's so they can prioritize their services over competing ones on the pipe that you paid for. Imagine a hypothetical electric company changing their electric service to make it only function 100% of the time with appliances they sell or appliances from companies that pay kickbacks to the electrical company, while the rest of appliances you have currently will stop functioning reliably. Unless you pay for the electricity "fast lanes."
scoon1329 9y ago
The issue is more complex than just a bigger pipe. As a site owner, you pay a service provider (or cloud hosting service or whatever) to offer you a certain amount of bandwidth to host your site. The problem comes when other ISP's implement their fast lanes and traffic from your site doesn't get equal priority to traffic from another site who has paid that specific ISP to prioritise their traffic when serving their customers. So you end up having to pay multiple ISP's to prioritise your traffic on their networks. Your site could appear slow even if you've paid your own service provider for a high bandwidth.
- notyourday 9y ago
  That's also not correct. If you, as the site owner, are still talking about ISPs or cloud hosting you are someone who is riding a bicycle on a shoulder of I-95 next to semis doing 80mph in 65 zones. You are, frankly, irrelevant. Also you do want to make sure that those semis use <blah>-bypass instead of clogging your highway. The real issue is that we allow those ISPs to determine which semis are allowed to use a bypass. Public's ( even technologically advanced public's ) mixing of the two issues is why NN fight would continue to be lost.
  - djschnei 9y ago
    So, I guess, my question still stands, right? I'm assuming this bypass costs money for the ISPs to provide. Why is it evil for them to charge people to use it?
    - notyourday 9y ago
      I was responding to my parent, not your comment. To address your point, I do not see an issue for ISPs charging for PNIs as long as those charges are uniform. If I, JoesFlix, have 100Gbit/sec traffic to Comcast and Comcast says "In order to access EP-Bypass, traffic has to come from AS that has more than 90Gbit/sec traffic to us" then Comcast should not be allowed to prevent me from accessing EP-Bypass. Congestion is bad for business. Sane PNI rules are easy: 0. there's some access fee ( typically it is actually - you must show up in X places - how you get there is your cost ) 1. we get even number of PNIs. 2. i order and pay for half 3. you order and pay for half
justaskqs2017 9y ago
Youre getting downvotes for JAQing off - low value “just asking questions” post that’s been more and more prominent in the last 15 years. This specific post isn’t a clear cut JAQing off post, but you made it clear in your follow up.
Brockenstein 9y ago
As a customer you're already paying the ISP to access the Internet. The websites you're paying your ISP to access already pay for bandwidth and whatnot from their providers. But now they need to also pay your ISP to ensure you get optimal performance. So you've got 30mbps internet? Sorry, Netflix is in the 256k lane so your speed doesn't matter. And this is Netflix's fault because they haven't paid us. Also Netflix costs $19.99 a month to cover the costs of paying your ISP. And now maybe your ISP wants to also charge you a premium on to of your normal bill to view Netflix. It won't be a bigger pipe, this won't create a fast lane. It's just going to create a slow lane.
tzs 9y ago
The issue is who they are trying to charge. Supply and demand is great...when it is between the right parties. To keep things simple, imagine an ISP with only one plan: 1 TB of data/month at 100 Mb/second for $50/month. Note that at 100 Mb/second it would only take 22 hours to use all your allotted data for the month. Because of this they do not have to build their network out to where it can handle everyone doing 100 Mb/second all the time. In fact, building it out to where it could do 100 Mb/second all the time would be prohibitively expensive. So they just build their network out to where most of the time, most people get their 100 Mb/second, but during some peak times there may be congestion and things may slow down. Imagine now that it is during one of those congested times. I am trying to watch a video lecture at a free MOOC. You are trying to watch, say, Netflix. Bob is trying to download a video game he just bought. Alice is trying to do a major OS and XCode update on her Mac. You, me, Bob, and Alice all bought the same service from our ISP at the same price, so it seems pretty reasonable to expect that we would be treated the same. We should share the effects of congestion equally. If the ISP wants to bring supply and demand into this, they could offer service level agreements for an extra cost. You pay a certain amount per month and they guarantee, say, 90% of rated speed even during congestion. I think this would be allowed under net neutrality. What they want to do with paid prioritization, though, so go to the MOOC I'm trying to use, Netflix, the place where Bob got the video game, and Apple and say "Hey...if you pay us $X per month, when our network is congested we will prioritize the traffic for our customers of yours". There are two bad things with this: 1. Suppose that Netflix buys paid prioritization, and nobody else does. That means that during times of congestion you get good service, and the service for the rest of us gets even worse. Even though we are paying our ISP for the exact same service, you are now getting preferential treatment because a company that has no relationship with the ISP other than they and the ISP have some common customers was able to pay to give you preferential service and degrade ours. 2. It may discourage the ISP from building out more network capacity as demand grows. They may instead focus on getting paid prioritization agreements from the most popular internet services. That could mean that those who use smaller services that even if they wanted to could not afford to make prioritization deals with every ISP, might be doomed to perpetual terrible performance, as the ISPs only need to build out their networks enough to provide good service to those who use services that have paid prioritization deals with the ISP. Essentially ISPs want to reverse their role. Right now, their role is to sell to us (the end users) access to the internet. They want to turn that around, and make their role be to sell the internet access to us. And they still want to charge us while doing that...basically they want to be the pimps of the net, with us as the prostitutes and the websites as the johns.
dmschulman 9y ago
It's evil because the cost of the actual service you're paying the ISP for (data transmission) has gone down and continues to get cheaper every year. These companies are able to flaunt the laws of the marketplace by forcing consumers to pay more for a product despite the "physical good" becoming cheaper and cheaper every year for the ISP to produce. https://broadbandnow.com/report/much-data-really-cost-isps/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/much-data-really-cost-isps/
notfromhere 9y ago
Should the power company charge you more based on what appliances you plug in at home, block appliances that it doesn't like, or slow down power to appliances it doesn't like on a whim? That's basically what the ISPs want to do.

djschnei 9y ago

Yes, yes... don't explain, just downvote.

paulmd 9y ago
Explanation: you have not even done a bare minimum of attention or research on a pivotal internet-freedom issue that has been slow-boiling over the past 3 months and you are still weighing in as if your opinion is informed (let alone intellectually significant) in any respect whatsoever. It's not like it's a real deep and multi-faceted issue or anything here, you just didn't bother to do even a bare minimum of research. Maybe consider doing the google before weighing in on a major issue before demanding that it be spoon-fed to you. This sort of post is actually subtly demeaning to everyone else on this forum and lowers the level of discussion here. Try to elevate it instead.
- djschnei 9y ago
  Yup, I don't hold your opinion so I am uninformed. Asked for your POV, but I'm too dumb to even attempt to explain it to. Must revert to personal slights and putdowns. Ahhhh, politics in 2017.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    Joke's on me, you were only pretending to be an idiot! You were actually just a sealioning libertarian all along!
    - djschnei 9y ago
      Dude, I am trying to understand your POV. F&$%# me right? People paying more for something that costs more to provide seems completely logical to me. The anti-competitive nature of the regional monopolies isn't fair and turns all the normal rules on their heads, I understand that. I wish we would fix that rather than regulating the monopolies.
      - wtallis 9y ago
        > I wish we would fix that rather than regulating the monopolies. See, that's the kind of bullshit that makes it hard to tell whether you're honestly misinformed, or disingenuous. The ISPs at issue are the ones providing last-mile connectivity. That's a textbook example of a natural monopoly. You can't make it not a natural monopoly. The free market will never settle on a strategy of providing competition in the form of multiple parallel and competing cables along every residential street and driveway. Regulation of the inevitable monopolies is the only solution that doesn't completely ignore reality and basic economic concepts. There's no alternative that can be expected to be at all effective.
- oreo81 9y ago
  This is r/Iamverysmart material. Wow.
  - djschnei 9y ago
    Seriously! haha
  - paulmd 9y ago
    OP disagrees with the concept of natural monopolies because he's deep down the libertarian rabbit-hole, but instead of just coming out and saying it he phrases it as a question and expects people to explain the basics of the concept to him so he can obtusely disagree at every step. It doesn't really do us any good to have a 101-level discussion of microecon and market failures on every single topic. It just happens that this is a topic where you can't even pretend there are two sides to it, and it's one that has been discussed to death over the past couple months, so the bad faith is pretty transparent. (the next stage of sealioning: "woah how dare you ascribe bad faith to my totally legitimate attempts to grok this issue, I totally would have agreed with you if you had just responded nicely but maybe there is something to this whole internet-fast-lanes thing after all!")
AquaMorph 9y ago
Downvoting things I dislike is easier than explaining why I think they are wrong
Jotra7 9y ago
I did, fella. But I'm not sure why I wasted my time trying to explain anything to a reactionary. Might as well explain calculus to a 3 year old.
sctb 9y ago
The guidelines ask us not to do this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Jotra7 9y ago

Because it's not paying for a "bigger pipe." It's so they can degrade service and not upgrade infrastructure. It's so they can prioritize their services over competing ones on the pipe that you paid for. Imagine a hypothetical electric company changing their electric service to make it only function 100% of the time with appliances they sell or appliances from companies that pay kickbacks to the electrical company, while the rest of appliances you have currently will stop functioning reliably. Unless you pay for the electricity "fast lanes."

scoon1329 9y ago

The issue is more complex than just a bigger pipe. As a site owner, you pay a service provider (or cloud hosting service or whatever) to offer you a certain amount of bandwidth to host your site. The problem comes when other ISP's implement their fast lanes and traffic from your site doesn't get equal priority to traffic from another site who has paid that specific ISP to prioritise their traffic when serving their customers. So you end up having to pay multiple ISP's to prioritise your traffic on their networks. Your site could appear slow even if you've paid your own service provider for a high bandwidth.

notyourday 9y ago
That's also not correct. If you, as the site owner, are still talking about ISPs or cloud hosting you are someone who is riding a bicycle on a shoulder of I-95 next to semis doing 80mph in 65 zones. You are, frankly, irrelevant. Also you do want to make sure that those semis use <blah>-bypass instead of clogging your highway. The real issue is that we allow those ISPs to determine which semis are allowed to use a bypass. Public's ( even technologically advanced public's ) mixing of the two issues is why NN fight would continue to be lost.
- djschnei 9y ago
  So, I guess, my question still stands, right? I'm assuming this bypass costs money for the ISPs to provide. Why is it evil for them to charge people to use it?
  - notyourday 9y ago
    I was responding to my parent, not your comment. To address your point, I do not see an issue for ISPs charging for PNIs as long as those charges are uniform. If I, JoesFlix, have 100Gbit/sec traffic to Comcast and Comcast says "In order to access EP-Bypass, traffic has to come from AS that has more than 90Gbit/sec traffic to us" then Comcast should not be allowed to prevent me from accessing EP-Bypass. Congestion is bad for business. Sane PNI rules are easy: 0. there's some access fee ( typically it is actually - you must show up in X places - how you get there is your cost ) 1. we get even number of PNIs. 2. i order and pay for half 3. you order and pay for half

justaskqs2017 9y ago

Youre getting downvotes for JAQing off - low value “just asking questions” post that’s been more and more prominent in the last 15 years. This specific post isn’t a clear cut JAQing off post, but you made it clear in your follow up.

Brockenstein 9y ago

As a customer you're already paying the ISP to access the Internet. The websites you're paying your ISP to access already pay for bandwidth and whatnot from their providers. But now they need to also pay your ISP to ensure you get optimal performance. So you've got 30mbps internet? Sorry, Netflix is in the 256k lane so your speed doesn't matter. And this is Netflix's fault because they haven't paid us. Also Netflix costs $19.99 a month to cover the costs of paying your ISP. And now maybe your ISP wants to also charge you a premium on to of your normal bill to view Netflix. It won't be a bigger pipe, this won't create a fast lane. It's just going to create a slow lane.

tzs 9y ago

The issue is who they are trying to charge. Supply and demand is great...when it is between the right parties. To keep things simple, imagine an ISP with only one plan: 1 TB of data/month at 100 Mb/second for $50/month. Note that at 100 Mb/second it would only take 22 hours to use all your allotted data for the month. Because of this they do not have to build their network out to where it can handle everyone doing 100 Mb/second all the time. In fact, building it out to where it could do 100 Mb/second all the time would be prohibitively expensive. So they just build their network out to where most of the time, most people get their 100 Mb/second, but during some peak times there may be congestion and things may slow down. Imagine now that it is during one of those congested times. I am trying to watch a video lecture at a free MOOC. You are trying to watch, say, Netflix. Bob is trying to download a video game he just bought. Alice is trying to do a major OS and XCode update on her Mac. You, me, Bob, and Alice all bought the same service from our ISP at the same price, so it seems pretty reasonable to expect that we would be treated the same. We should share the effects of congestion equally. If the ISP wants to bring supply and demand into this, they could offer service level agreements for an extra cost. You pay a certain amount per month and they guarantee, say, 90% of rated speed even during congestion. I think this would be allowed under net neutrality. What they want to do with paid prioritization, though, so go to the MOOC I'm trying to use, Netflix, the place where Bob got the video game, and Apple and say "Hey...if you pay us $X per month, when our network is congested we will prioritize the traffic for our customers of yours". There are two bad things with this: 1. Suppose that Netflix buys paid prioritization, and nobody else does. That means that during times of congestion you get good service, and the service for the rest of us gets even worse. Even though we are paying our ISP for the exact same service, you are now getting preferential treatment because a company that has no relationship with the ISP other than they and the ISP have some common customers was able to pay to give you preferential service and degrade ours. 2. It may discourage the ISP from building out more network capacity as demand grows. They may instead focus on getting paid prioritization agreements from the most popular internet services. That could mean that those who use smaller services that even if they wanted to could not afford to make prioritization deals with every ISP, might be doomed to perpetual terrible performance, as the ISPs only need to build out their networks enough to provide good service to those who use services that have paid prioritization deals with the ISP. Essentially ISPs want to reverse their role. Right now, their role is to sell to us (the end users) access to the internet. They want to turn that around, and make their role be to sell the internet access to us. And they still want to charge us while doing that...basically they want to be the pimps of the net, with us as the prostitutes and the websites as the johns.

dmschulman 9y ago

It's evil because the cost of the actual service you're paying the ISP for (data transmission) has gone down and continues to get cheaper every year. These companies are able to flaunt the laws of the marketplace by forcing consumers to pay more for a product despite the "physical good" becoming cheaper and cheaper every year for the ISP to produce. https://broadbandnow.com/report/much-data-really-cost-isps/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/much-data-really-cost-isps/

notfromhere 9y ago

Should the power company charge you more based on what appliances you plug in at home, block appliances that it doesn't like, or slow down power to appliances it doesn't like on a whim? That's basically what the ISPs want to do.