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Before we have the knee-jerk standard opposition comment, has anyone actually investigated these claims? Are they untrue? Are there any merits to the argument?

Before we have the knee-jerk standard opposition comment, has anyone actually investigated these claims? Are they untrue? Are there any merits to the argument? Would non-Netflix users essentially be subsidizing bandwidth?

DougWebb 8y ago
That's not a useful question, because it's a shared resource. I'm on Verizon Fios, and so I'm "subsidizing" everything every other Fios user is doing over their Fios connections... and they are "subsidizing" my usage as well. So what? That's how paying for a shared resource works.
- nbhuik 8y ago
  Not sure what you are saying since the whole issue is about who is going to pay. In the west you are paying $40-$80 as a consumer while a lot of companies make money. In Asia it is common that high speed Internet access itself is cheap, but traffic costs more money for the companies providing services.
  - DougWebb 8y ago
    Everybody pays. I, and other Fios subscribers, pay a flat monthly fee for our internet service at a specified bandwidth. There's usually a monthly total data cap as well, but it's either in the contract fine-print or an unspecified policy that you won't find out about unless you surpass it. Companies providing services pay as well; they also have to buy internet service for a given bandwidth, and their contracts are more explicit about total data usage. My understanding is that the difficult bit is that the consumer's ISP and the service provider's ISP are often not the same company. So, Netflix is paying their ISP a ton of money for all the data they're sending, but my ISP doesn't have any contract with Netflix even though they're carrying the data to bring it to me. My ISP finds that unfair. But here's the thing: I'm already paying for MY service, which I'm using to get that data. As long as I'm within my contractual limits, everything I'm doing is paid for, and my ISP has no basis for crying about not getting a share of what Netflix pays their ISP. This is all just a cover story to hide the fact that my ISP wants legal cover to offer their own service that competes with Netflix, to make it cheaper and crappier than Netflix, and to compete by charging their customers more for Netflix's "premium" bandwidth, while offering their own service for a "discount" bandwidth.
talltimtom 8y ago
The ISP take payments from both sides independent of net neutrality. The claims are just bogus attempt of trying to get popular support for their position. And their positions is that they should have every possible avenue of monetization available to them.
- benlorenzetti 8y ago
  This exactly. The number of parties involved in any information transaction can be reduced to three: the consumer, the immediate producer, and the canonical producer. Prohibiting one of the participants from paying is not good for economic distribution of resources. Whether or not this is "bogus" is political economics.
freeone3000 8y ago
No. They would pay a share equal to their usage. Outsized users would pay the same per GB as smaller users, and would pay more because they use more. ISPs who were zero rating partner content now have to either zero rate the entire category (therefore putting spotify and itunes and play music in the same bucket), or not zero rate. This appears to be the "subsidization" argument, and it's nonsense, since the ISP could just zero rate nothing.
csydas 8y ago
With all due respect, I think the claim being made by Frontier should be examined first from their statement on it [1], and compare it to the actual bill [2] Frontier has made a claim that this will: >threatens to disrupt the incredibly successful Internet system that fuels business, innovation and economic growth in California. Yet, there is no evidence provided for this claim and nothing to substantiate it. It goes on to say that the bill will: > it will harm consumers, impose complex layers of costly regulation and delay broadband deployment in California, especially in rural areas. Once again without any actual explanation as to how this will happen, especially when Net Neutrality formerly was the standard. The entire statement from Frontier begins with: > Frontier Communications supports an open Internet where providers do not block, throttle, or interfere with customers' ability to access and navigate the Internet. Which is basically what the bill reinforces -- so the question from a simple person like myself is, "If you believe in not blocking or throttling or interfering with someone's ability to access/navigate the Internet, then how exactly will a law meant to prevent such things affect your business?" To get specifically to the question of "Free Internet for Netflix, et. al.", again, where is the argument? This is a statement made by Frontier without anything to substantiate it. Frontier is welcome to make an argument, and it would be interesting to hear -- maybe there is a case to be made (I have no love for Netflix, can't even use them in the country I currently live in), but hearing such statements makes me suspicious, regardless of who issues them. And living in a country where ISPs charge far less and offer far more than most US ISPs, these kind of statements from an ISP make me really suspicious. Frontier may indeed have a point, but they have not made it. [1] - https://frontiercommunications.nationbuilder.com https://frontiercommunications.nationbuilder.com [2] - https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB822 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... edit: formatting and added last sentence to the second-to-last paragraph.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > Which is basically what the bill reinforces -- so the question from a simple person like myself is, "If you believe in not blocking or throttling or interfering with someone's ability to access/navigate the Internet, then how exactly will a law meant to prevent such things affect your business?" They're saying they support something that everyone wants (basicaly, net neutrality) while not really wanting it to pass, but are arguing that the only way to implement it is to do things that completely undermine it. It's a common tactic I've seen other companies use in other fields too. Basically a "we want to redefine what <blank> is in such a way that it suits us and undermines what everyone else thinks <blank> should be."
shakna 8y ago
In the same sense that non-gmail users are subsidizing bandwidth. The ISP has likely already been paid by Netflix to position hardware to make access have less latency, and less downtime. Now they would also like the user to pay them to access that equipment, despite being paid by the user to supply access to everyone.
paulie_a 8y ago
There is zero merit. That is the ISP business model, I am paying for a resource. I will use it as I see fit. Whether that means YouTube or Netflix I really don't care how other users decide to use their paid service. The ISP is expected to provide the service I signed up for. I am giving them money, so are the other customers. Some will utilize it more and some will to a lesser extent. But at the end of the day, everyone paid for that service.
- dominotw 8y ago
  You don't get to define what is being sold, the seller defines it.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    I agreed to pay for the defined service, they are expected to deliver. Calling it a subsidy to other customers is meritless. Either they need to deliver as expected or go out of business. Frontier is a terribly incompetent company so I am not surprised they would attempt this sort of idiotic argument.
    - ddingus 8y ago
      Basic offer and acceptance.
  - ryanschneider 8y ago
    In a totally free market, yes. But as a utility provider ISPs should not be considered a free market. In exchange for near monopoly power over the internet access of a particular region (in the US), these companies have to play by extra rules protecting consumers’ access to 3rd party content. Imagine if your electric company charged different rates because of the brand of electric car you charged. Sure, they can charge more per kWh based on time of day, total household usage, or total network availability of power at the moment, but charging more (or less) per kWh going into a Tesla than a Leaf would give that electric company monopoly too much power to pick winners and losers. I like to think of ISP deep packet inspection using the same analogy; I for one would not like my power company to know the make and model of everything I have plugged in in my house, beyond total usage it’s really none of their business. I recognize these aren’t perfect analogies but hope that they help get the point across.
kittiepryde 8y ago
IANAL, I'm thinking that net neutrality doesn't prevent ISP's from charging for access to the internet -- on either the consumer or the business end.
toast0 8y ago
Looking at the bill, it does prohibit: >Requiring consideration, monetary or otherwise, from an edge provider, including, but not limited to, in exchange for any of the following: >(A) Delivering Internet traffic to, and carrying Internet traffic from, the Internet service provider’s end users. It's not clear to me if that prohibits charging an interconnection fee (often charged at a per port rate), or just prohibits charging based on bandwidth used. It doesn't appear to require offering interconnection to edge providers either. It may be unlawful to discontinue existing edge provider interconnects, but it doesn't seem unlawful to simply never upgrade anything. Generally speaking, ISPs tend to have congestion in two places -- at or near the last mile, and where they connect to other networks (transit, peering, etc). Interconnections with edge providers helps with congestion to other networks, but depending on the size of the ISPs and the traffic flows, ISPs may have been charging someone for that flow, or using that flow to justify settlement free peering with a larger network. Historic norms are that when data flows are unbalanced by a significant amount, the sending network pays for the bandwidth; but also historically, most ISPs were using some amount of paid transit to receive some of this traffic. Early content networks were able to negotiate settlement free peering by reducing the amount of paid transit the ISPs used. As residential ISPs consolidated, they have become vendors of paid transit themselves, so it's gotten pretty weird. Anyway, not being able to charge edge providers for bandwidth, is certainly a negative for ISPs; and to the extent that they were raising revenue through that activity, I'm sure they'll pass along those revenue drops to customers in the form of higher bills or reduced capacity through limiting network upgrades, including interconnections to other networks. I don't think this is necessarily non-Netflix users subsidizing bandwidth, more it's that currently any revenue generated from Netflix bandwidth fees are subsidizing the rest of the network. Unfortunately, network neutrality does nothing to increase competition; and without competition, there's not much incentive to upgrade networks. The only positive in my book is increased transparency -- one can hope that because there are a few markets where ISPs compete, the transparency requirements will encourage them to operate in all of their markets with the same levels of service they provide to competitive markets.
DannyBee 8y ago
No. Others have spoken about paying, but let me touch on one of the issues not talked about really so far: Peering. Netflix/Google/et al have peering points where they connect to networks like Frontier. (Non-large customers peer with their own ISP and the ISP has peering points with other ISPs, etc). These peering arrangements are either paid or settlement-free. That is, the two networks either pay each other for the traffic for money (details vary), or do it "settlement-free". It's called settlement free because there is no process needed to settle out the charges between the two peers. One thing to realize is that large ISP's (AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon) have always had paid peering for larger customers. They are oligopolists, so they have no reason not to. To be fair, some also have settlement free agreements, but they generally would not apply to most customers: https://www.xfinity.com/peering https://www.xfinity.com/peering To give a sense of scale: comcast has 40+ settlement free agreements in place, and 8000+ commercial agreements in place. Additionally, netflix/google/etc often do provide benefits for settlement free peering. For example, for netflix, if you allow them to peer settlement free, netflix will place caching appliances with significant portions of their content library, inside your datacenters. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ The alternative is generally "not peering with netflix".That alternative means the ISP is probably paying for the bandwidth transit (to someone) for their customers to view that netflix content. Since netflix represents 30%+ of traffic at peak times, I would bet frontier/et al save more not paying for the netflix traffic. Instead what you see is that they want, essentially, netflix to be forced to peer and pay. (like they are with oligopolists). That way they pay essentially three times for the traffic - customer a, interconnect, customer b. In practice, this game is mostly a waste of time. In truth, silicon valley could end this game end time it wanted by getting together. The top 10-20 websites account for most of the time spent daily on the internet. If 10 of them (Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc) got together and said "okay, great, there is no net neutrality, we are no longer serving comcast customers because it's too expensive", i'm pretty sure i know who would win that and how long it would take. (At worst, you end up with a net neutrality bill being approved!) It's the lack of togetherness that enables the "divide and conquer" strategy. (It would also be hilarious to watch comcast complain about unfair competition).

DougWebb 8y ago

That's not a useful question, because it's a shared resource. I'm on Verizon Fios, and so I'm "subsidizing" everything every other Fios user is doing over their Fios connections... and they are "subsidizing" my usage as well. So what? That's how paying for a shared resource works.

nbhuik 8y ago
Not sure what you are saying since the whole issue is about who is going to pay. In the west you are paying $40-$80 as a consumer while a lot of companies make money. In Asia it is common that high speed Internet access itself is cheap, but traffic costs more money for the companies providing services.
- DougWebb 8y ago
  Everybody pays. I, and other Fios subscribers, pay a flat monthly fee for our internet service at a specified bandwidth. There's usually a monthly total data cap as well, but it's either in the contract fine-print or an unspecified policy that you won't find out about unless you surpass it. Companies providing services pay as well; they also have to buy internet service for a given bandwidth, and their contracts are more explicit about total data usage. My understanding is that the difficult bit is that the consumer's ISP and the service provider's ISP are often not the same company. So, Netflix is paying their ISP a ton of money for all the data they're sending, but my ISP doesn't have any contract with Netflix even though they're carrying the data to bring it to me. My ISP finds that unfair. But here's the thing: I'm already paying for MY service, which I'm using to get that data. As long as I'm within my contractual limits, everything I'm doing is paid for, and my ISP has no basis for crying about not getting a share of what Netflix pays their ISP. This is all just a cover story to hide the fact that my ISP wants legal cover to offer their own service that competes with Netflix, to make it cheaper and crappier than Netflix, and to compete by charging their customers more for Netflix's "premium" bandwidth, while offering their own service for a "discount" bandwidth.

talltimtom 8y ago

The ISP take payments from both sides independent of net neutrality. The claims are just bogus attempt of trying to get popular support for their position. And their positions is that they should have every possible avenue of monetization available to them.

benlorenzetti 8y ago
This exactly. The number of parties involved in any information transaction can be reduced to three: the consumer, the immediate producer, and the canonical producer. Prohibiting one of the participants from paying is not good for economic distribution of resources. Whether or not this is "bogus" is political economics.

freeone3000 8y ago

No. They would pay a share equal to their usage. Outsized users would pay the same per GB as smaller users, and would pay more because they use more. ISPs who were zero rating partner content now have to either zero rate the entire category (therefore putting spotify and itunes and play music in the same bucket), or not zero rate. This appears to be the "subsidization" argument, and it's nonsense, since the ISP could just zero rate nothing.

csydas 8y ago

With all due respect, I think the claim being made by Frontier should be examined first from their statement on it [1], and compare it to the actual bill [2] Frontier has made a claim that this will: >threatens to disrupt the incredibly successful Internet system that fuels business, innovation and economic growth in California. Yet, there is no evidence provided for this claim and nothing to substantiate it. It goes on to say that the bill will: > it will harm consumers, impose complex layers of costly regulation and delay broadband deployment in California, especially in rural areas. Once again without any actual explanation as to how this will happen, especially when Net Neutrality formerly was the standard. The entire statement from Frontier begins with: > Frontier Communications supports an open Internet where providers do not block, throttle, or interfere with customers' ability to access and navigate the Internet. Which is basically what the bill reinforces -- so the question from a simple person like myself is, "If you believe in not blocking or throttling or interfering with someone's ability to access/navigate the Internet, then how exactly will a law meant to prevent such things affect your business?" To get specifically to the question of "Free Internet for Netflix, et. al.", again, where is the argument? This is a statement made by Frontier without anything to substantiate it. Frontier is welcome to make an argument, and it would be interesting to hear -- maybe there is a case to be made (I have no love for Netflix, can't even use them in the country I currently live in), but hearing such statements makes me suspicious, regardless of who issues them. And living in a country where ISPs charge far less and offer far more than most US ISPs, these kind of statements from an ISP make me really suspicious. Frontier may indeed have a point, but they have not made it. [1] - https://frontiercommunications.nationbuilder.com https://frontiercommunications.nationbuilder.com [2] - https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB822 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... edit: formatting and added last sentence to the second-to-last paragraph.

craftyguy 8y ago
> Which is basically what the bill reinforces -- so the question from a simple person like myself is, "If you believe in not blocking or throttling or interfering with someone's ability to access/navigate the Internet, then how exactly will a law meant to prevent such things affect your business?" They're saying they support something that everyone wants (basicaly, net neutrality) while not really wanting it to pass, but are arguing that the only way to implement it is to do things that completely undermine it. It's a common tactic I've seen other companies use in other fields too. Basically a "we want to redefine what <blank> is in such a way that it suits us and undermines what everyone else thinks <blank> should be."

shakna 8y ago

In the same sense that non-gmail users are subsidizing bandwidth. The ISP has likely already been paid by Netflix to position hardware to make access have less latency, and less downtime. Now they would also like the user to pay them to access that equipment, despite being paid by the user to supply access to everyone.

paulie_a 8y ago

There is zero merit. That is the ISP business model, I am paying for a resource. I will use it as I see fit. Whether that means YouTube or Netflix I really don't care how other users decide to use their paid service. The ISP is expected to provide the service I signed up for. I am giving them money, so are the other customers. Some will utilize it more and some will to a lesser extent. But at the end of the day, everyone paid for that service.

dominotw 8y ago
You don't get to define what is being sold, the seller defines it.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  I agreed to pay for the defined service, they are expected to deliver. Calling it a subsidy to other customers is meritless. Either they need to deliver as expected or go out of business. Frontier is a terribly incompetent company so I am not surprised they would attempt this sort of idiotic argument.
  - ddingus 8y ago
    Basic offer and acceptance.
- ryanschneider 8y ago
  In a totally free market, yes. But as a utility provider ISPs should not be considered a free market. In exchange for near monopoly power over the internet access of a particular region (in the US), these companies have to play by extra rules protecting consumers’ access to 3rd party content. Imagine if your electric company charged different rates because of the brand of electric car you charged. Sure, they can charge more per kWh based on time of day, total household usage, or total network availability of power at the moment, but charging more (or less) per kWh going into a Tesla than a Leaf would give that electric company monopoly too much power to pick winners and losers. I like to think of ISP deep packet inspection using the same analogy; I for one would not like my power company to know the make and model of everything I have plugged in in my house, beyond total usage it’s really none of their business. I recognize these aren’t perfect analogies but hope that they help get the point across.

kittiepryde 8y ago

IANAL, I'm thinking that net neutrality doesn't prevent ISP's from charging for access to the internet -- on either the consumer or the business end.

toast0 8y ago

Looking at the bill, it does prohibit: >Requiring consideration, monetary or otherwise, from an edge provider, including, but not limited to, in exchange for any of the following: >(A) Delivering Internet traffic to, and carrying Internet traffic from, the Internet service provider’s end users. It's not clear to me if that prohibits charging an interconnection fee (often charged at a per port rate), or just prohibits charging based on bandwidth used. It doesn't appear to require offering interconnection to edge providers either. It may be unlawful to discontinue existing edge provider interconnects, but it doesn't seem unlawful to simply never upgrade anything. Generally speaking, ISPs tend to have congestion in two places -- at or near the last mile, and where they connect to other networks (transit, peering, etc). Interconnections with edge providers helps with congestion to other networks, but depending on the size of the ISPs and the traffic flows, ISPs may have been charging someone for that flow, or using that flow to justify settlement free peering with a larger network. Historic norms are that when data flows are unbalanced by a significant amount, the sending network pays for the bandwidth; but also historically, most ISPs were using some amount of paid transit to receive some of this traffic. Early content networks were able to negotiate settlement free peering by reducing the amount of paid transit the ISPs used. As residential ISPs consolidated, they have become vendors of paid transit themselves, so it's gotten pretty weird. Anyway, not being able to charge edge providers for bandwidth, is certainly a negative for ISPs; and to the extent that they were raising revenue through that activity, I'm sure they'll pass along those revenue drops to customers in the form of higher bills or reduced capacity through limiting network upgrades, including interconnections to other networks. I don't think this is necessarily non-Netflix users subsidizing bandwidth, more it's that currently any revenue generated from Netflix bandwidth fees are subsidizing the rest of the network. Unfortunately, network neutrality does nothing to increase competition; and without competition, there's not much incentive to upgrade networks. The only positive in my book is increased transparency -- one can hope that because there are a few markets where ISPs compete, the transparency requirements will encourage them to operate in all of their markets with the same levels of service they provide to competitive markets.

DannyBee 8y ago

No. Others have spoken about paying, but let me touch on one of the issues not talked about really so far: Peering. Netflix/Google/et al have peering points where they connect to networks like Frontier. (Non-large customers peer with their own ISP and the ISP has peering points with other ISPs, etc). These peering arrangements are either paid or settlement-free. That is, the two networks either pay each other for the traffic for money (details vary), or do it "settlement-free". It's called settlement free because there is no process needed to settle out the charges between the two peers. One thing to realize is that large ISP's (AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon) have always had paid peering for larger customers. They are oligopolists, so they have no reason not to. To be fair, some also have settlement free agreements, but they generally would not apply to most customers: https://www.xfinity.com/peering https://www.xfinity.com/peering To give a sense of scale: comcast has 40+ settlement free agreements in place, and 8000+ commercial agreements in place. Additionally, netflix/google/etc often do provide benefits for settlement free peering. For example, for netflix, if you allow them to peer settlement free, netflix will place caching appliances with significant portions of their content library, inside your datacenters. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ The alternative is generally "not peering with netflix".That alternative means the ISP is probably paying for the bandwidth transit (to someone) for their customers to view that netflix content. Since netflix represents 30%+ of traffic at peak times, I would bet frontier/et al save more not paying for the netflix traffic. Instead what you see is that they want, essentially, netflix to be forced to peer and pay. (like they are with oligopolists). That way they pay essentially three times for the traffic - customer a, interconnect, customer b. In practice, this game is mostly a waste of time. In truth, silicon valley could end this game end time it wanted by getting together. The top 10-20 websites account for most of the time spent daily on the internet. If 10 of them (Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc) got together and said "okay, great, there is no net neutrality, we are no longer serving comcast customers because it's too expensive", i'm pretty sure i know who would win that and how long it would take. (At worst, you end up with a net neutrality bill being approved!) It's the lack of togetherness that enables the "divide and conquer" strategy. (It would also be hilarious to watch comcast complain about unfair competition).