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I literally don't know what to make of this disingenuous argument. Of course delivering traffic to the end customer is expensive. That's why customers are payi

I literally don't know what to make of this disingenuous argument. Of course delivering traffic to the end customer is expensive. That's why customers are paying for that. ISPs just want to get paid on both sides, and extract a new rent out of their (government created and paid for) monopolies.

betaby 8y ago
Not really both sides, it's balance, I would say ISP recover about 80% from the end customers (eyeballs) and 20% from the data centres, CDNs, Cloud providers. Big and popular guys like Google pretty often get settlement free peering in major metros.
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  Why that nonsense? The ISP has to create a sustainable business model by setting the pricing for the customer properly. If the market changes, eg streaming becomes a thing, they have to adjust prices accordingly, not try to charge other parties. The net has always been unfair in that not everyone was charged exactly according to what cost they generated. We couldn't have flat rates if it weren't for that. Even before that we mostly charged people by time spent online instead of traffic generated, which doesn't make too much sense either and mostly was just carried over from the analogue modem days.
  - betaby 8y ago
    Because it's not really a nonsense. It's an asymmetry in the multiple places. We can turn it around and say, let's customers (eyeballs) pay zero and content generators pay all the expenses. By asymmetry I mean that -who's calling who? With telephone it's established practice that one who calls pay, and what works. With traffic we may pretend the same thing, one who sends let say GET - pays, but that super complex technically. Another option is to pay only by outgoing traffic, that eliminates doble dipping. So in this case, because of asymmetry most of traffic should be paid by Google. Alternatively, let's pay by incoming - in this case customer pays a lot and Google nothing. Tables turned in case on Backblaze - customers should pay zero. I love bashing ISP like other guy, yet situation is much complex then we a tryong to pretend it is.

betaby 8y ago

Not really both sides, it's balance, I would say ISP recover about 80% from the end customers (eyeballs) and 20% from the data centres, CDNs, Cloud providers. Big and popular guys like Google pretty often get settlement free peering in major metros.

iforgotpassword 8y ago
Why that nonsense? The ISP has to create a sustainable business model by setting the pricing for the customer properly. If the market changes, eg streaming becomes a thing, they have to adjust prices accordingly, not try to charge other parties. The net has always been unfair in that not everyone was charged exactly according to what cost they generated. We couldn't have flat rates if it weren't for that. Even before that we mostly charged people by time spent online instead of traffic generated, which doesn't make too much sense either and mostly was just carried over from the analogue modem days.
- betaby 8y ago
  Because it's not really a nonsense. It's an asymmetry in the multiple places. We can turn it around and say, let's customers (eyeballs) pay zero and content generators pay all the expenses. By asymmetry I mean that -who's calling who? With telephone it's established practice that one who calls pay, and what works. With traffic we may pretend the same thing, one who sends let say GET - pays, but that super complex technically. Another option is to pay only by outgoing traffic, that eliminates doble dipping. So in this case, because of asymmetry most of traffic should be paid by Google. Alternatively, let's pay by incoming - in this case customer pays a lot and Google nothing. Tables turned in case on Backblaze - customers should pay zero. I love bashing ISP like other guy, yet situation is much complex then we a tryong to pretend it is.