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Nobody was ever doing that. The image in question was a crafted example of what someone imagines is possible. Data caps aren't necessary from a technical sense

Nobody was ever doing that. The image in question was a crafted example of what someone imagines is possible. Data caps aren't necessary from a technical sense, no. But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets. Artificially limiting network speed is intentional crippling of service. Rather than pay for "very slow service", "slow service", or "fast service", providers should give everyone the best possible service their network is capable of... and then charge us for how heavily you use it. Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.

unityByFreedom 6y ago
> Nobody was ever doing that. Zero-rating + data caps means you're paying more for some websites than others. Comcast/XFinity gives you unmetered "free" access to NBC, for example, while charging you for overages caused by your Netflix traffic.
cbozeman 6y ago
> But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets. Ridiculous. Bandwidth is no different than electricity. Hell, it mostly is electricity. Meter it by the megabyte and let the customer decide. A flat connection fee per month just like your electrical service, and then you pay for whatever you use. If you stream from the time you get up until the time you go to bed, you'll pay for it. If you stream three movies a week, you'll pay for that.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I'd be totally on board with a flat connection fee per month plus by-the-megabyte metering. I've advocated for it many times before. But in lieu of that, charging a 600 MB a month user one fee, and a 1.4 TB a month user a higher fee seems entirely legitimate to me.
akersten 6y ago
> Nobody was ever doing that. It's immaterial to me whether ISPs had gotten around to creating their a-la-carte packages yet. I want it to be impossible for them to do so. Why leave the option open? > Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day. You do realize that ISPs already tier their offerings in such a way that this is a non-issue? Grandma would buy the 10Mbit/s package, the family would buy the 1Gig/s. I have no issue with that sort of tiered pricing. That's a perfectly fine division to make. But, slapping arbitrary data xfer caps on top of that is dirty double-dipping.
- unityByFreedom 6y ago
  Exactly. It's double dipping to charge for the rate of flow and the amount. We don't do that for water. The only reason the major ISPs want this is because the old content providers are desperate to maintain their positions in the market. They think they can squeeze out competitors by joining forces with the biggest ISPs [1] and implementing zero rating and data caps. That way no one will be able to compete with them. You won't want to pay for your overages on the next Netflix when the current one has a free-pass arrangement with your regional-monopoly broadband ISP. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_NBC_Universal_by_Comcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_NBC_Universal_b...
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    > It's double dipping to charge for the rate of flow and the amount. We don't do that for water. Well we do. A commercial user with a 3 inch water line pays more for the basic service than a house with a 3/4 inch line. And they both pay for gallons used.
    - unityByFreedom 6y ago
      Wouldn't that mean the 3-inch water line cost more to setup? You'd probably need to add bigger piping over the standard sized pipe. The cost to setup broadband far exceeds the cost for varying amounts. If you use 1 TB and I use 1 GB, the cost to the ISP is basically the same. We already pay different amounts from tiers defined by the speeds we chose.
jevgeni 6y ago
Yes, that is what we are demanding. And it's fine. What you are referring to is "the freerider problem", like you, for example, have with public transportation or any publicly available good or service. From the experience that public services in Europe had, it is fine to tolerate some amount of freeriders, since it makes most services run leaner and more efficient.
Naac 6y ago
Your scenario is already covered by different speed tiers. We're talking about total amount downloaded, not bandwidth. The amount of electricity ( read: cost ) used by Comcast is not affected whether I download frequently or infrequently. The reason it is affected, is because they oversubscribe their customers, so when everyone downloads at the same time it causes a bottleneck. If I'm leased a 1 gigabit pipe, I want to be able to use the entire gigabit pipe for as long as I want. Limiting this with data caps is at best misleading to customers and at worse a scummy business practice. And while we're here, lets do some math. An unmetered gigabit pipe downloading at the theoretical limit gives you 328.5 Terabytes of data in 1 month. Under Comcast's 1.2 Terabytes per month rule, that gigabit pipe you're leasing is equivalent to downloading 24/7, on a 4 megabit pipe!
- baskire 6y ago
  Really should be billed on a combination of peak utilization and total consumption. Having the ability to download at 1Gibps for a few minutes a day is a lot less strain than downloading 24x7 at 1Gibps. Such complex billing models are pretty common with electrical utilities. With many industrial consumers even installing Flywheels to reduce their utilization spikes.
  - detaro 6y ago
    IP transit in data centers etc is often a combination of a base rate + extra fees based on the 95% percentile (if that value is over the base rate). E.g. you might buy a 500Mb/s base rate over a 1 Gb/s link, and then end up with a 95% percentile value of 600Mb/s at the end of the month, so you pay an extra fee for the 100Mbit difference. Whereas if you use the link fully for 2 % of the time, but then stay under the base rate the rest of month, you only pay the base price.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I imagine that model would work really well for a lot of data usage too: Downloading updates for applications and games could be scheduled for off-peak times, and users might even be incentivized to pre-cache streaming content they want to watch during primetime hours if they can save by doing so.
Maakuth 6y ago
> Nobody was ever doing that. The image in question was a crafted example of what someone imagines is possible. This is precisely how it works in many countries without net neutrality. Here's a classical example: https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701871092441088/ https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701871092441088/
- fat_pikachu 6y ago
  That's Portugal, a country with Net Neutrality.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  So, no it's not. Side note, Ro Khanna has been paid an obscene amount of money by Google. He claims "No PAC $$" on his profile, but Google is his top donor, and Google's top law firm is his second top donor: https://www.opensecrets.org/races/contributors?cycle=2020&id=CA17&spec=N https://www.opensecrets.org/races/contributors?cycle=2020&id... He is basically a paid advocate for Google's political positions, not the public interest. The service pictured in that screenshot solely is offering zero-rating packages on top of an existing metered data package. Additionally, this is for a mobile carrier, not a home ISP. And finally, Portugal has net neutrality! Snopes fact checked this claim as "mostly false": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/portugal-net-neutrality/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/portugal-net-neutrality/
KMag 6y ago
In an ideal world, all of our clients would use RFC 2474 DSCP values to mark the QoS/Traffic Class IP header fields in order to voluntarily participate in traffic shaping prioritization with ISPs. Exceed your monthly quota at high priority, and all of your traffic gets dropped to base priority. Though, realistically, nobody is properly incentivized to make use of QoS/ToS (except internally to some networks), because ISPs aren't incentivized to implement anything until application developers label traffic, and consumers won't pressure application developers to implement anything until ISPs provide incentives to consumers. Also, OS/API support isn't great at present, and application developers in most cases would just always label traffic as high priority. At least for phone apps, tagging traffic as high priority could be a an app permission that could be flagged/denied to the app at installation time (or later granted/revoked).
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day. And there is a reason for that -- it costs about the same to provide that service. Nearly the entire cost of operating an ISP is getting the wires on the pole, keeping them there against weather and drunk drivers, answering customer support phones, paying for staff and buildings and electricity etc. None of which costs any less for the person who uses 1/1000th as much data. Charging the amount actually attributable to additional data usage would cause the difference to be so small that basically everybody would just pick the unlimited plan so they don't have to worry about it. But they don't charge the actual cost, they charge more. Because the point is to suppress usage of Netflix et al (the main reason nearly anyone would exceed the cap) in favor of cable TV and zero-rated partners.
- asplake 6y ago
  Until that infrastructure no longer handles the demand and they have to build out again. So no, bandwidth isn’t free
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    There is no "build out again" -- they use the same wires, which was the expensive part. They just replace the cards in the box. The upgrade itself is a tiny fraction of their costs. It's also something you benefit from regardless of how much data you use, because when they go from DOCSIS 2.0 to DOCSIS 3.0 you get 1000Mbps downloads instead of 40Mbps whether you're downloading 40GB or 40TB.
    - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
      > There is no "build out again" -- they use the same wires, which was the expensive part Who told you that? ISPs run new fiber all the time.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago

unityByFreedom 6y ago

> Nobody was ever doing that. Zero-rating + data caps means you're paying more for some websites than others. Comcast/XFinity gives you unmetered "free" access to NBC, for example, while charging you for overages caused by your Netflix traffic.

cbozeman 6y ago

> But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets. Ridiculous. Bandwidth is no different than electricity. Hell, it mostly is electricity. Meter it by the megabyte and let the customer decide. A flat connection fee per month just like your electrical service, and then you pay for whatever you use. If you stream from the time you get up until the time you go to bed, you'll pay for it. If you stream three movies a week, you'll pay for that.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I'd be totally on board with a flat connection fee per month plus by-the-megabyte metering. I've advocated for it many times before. But in lieu of that, charging a 600 MB a month user one fee, and a 1.4 TB a month user a higher fee seems entirely legitimate to me.

akersten 6y ago

> Nobody was ever doing that. It's immaterial to me whether ISPs had gotten around to creating their a-la-carte packages yet. I want it to be impossible for them to do so. Why leave the option open? > Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day. You do realize that ISPs already tier their offerings in such a way that this is a non-issue? Grandma would buy the 10Mbit/s package, the family would buy the 1Gig/s. I have no issue with that sort of tiered pricing. That's a perfectly fine division to make. But, slapping arbitrary data xfer caps on top of that is dirty double-dipping.

unityByFreedom 6y ago
Exactly. It's double dipping to charge for the rate of flow and the amount. We don't do that for water. The only reason the major ISPs want this is because the old content providers are desperate to maintain their positions in the market. They think they can squeeze out competitors by joining forces with the biggest ISPs [1] and implementing zero rating and data caps. That way no one will be able to compete with them. You won't want to pay for your overages on the next Netflix when the current one has a free-pass arrangement with your regional-monopoly broadband ISP. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_NBC_Universal_by_Comcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_NBC_Universal_b...
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  > It's double dipping to charge for the rate of flow and the amount. We don't do that for water. Well we do. A commercial user with a 3 inch water line pays more for the basic service than a house with a 3/4 inch line. And they both pay for gallons used.
  - unityByFreedom 6y ago
    Wouldn't that mean the 3-inch water line cost more to setup? You'd probably need to add bigger piping over the standard sized pipe. The cost to setup broadband far exceeds the cost for varying amounts. If you use 1 TB and I use 1 GB, the cost to the ISP is basically the same. We already pay different amounts from tiers defined by the speeds we chose.

jevgeni 6y ago

Yes, that is what we are demanding. And it's fine. What you are referring to is "the freerider problem", like you, for example, have with public transportation or any publicly available good or service. From the experience that public services in Europe had, it is fine to tolerate some amount of freeriders, since it makes most services run leaner and more efficient.

Naac 6y ago

Your scenario is already covered by different speed tiers. We're talking about total amount downloaded, not bandwidth. The amount of electricity ( read: cost ) used by Comcast is not affected whether I download frequently or infrequently. The reason it is affected, is because they oversubscribe their customers, so when everyone downloads at the same time it causes a bottleneck. If I'm leased a 1 gigabit pipe, I want to be able to use the entire gigabit pipe for as long as I want. Limiting this with data caps is at best misleading to customers and at worse a scummy business practice. And while we're here, lets do some math. An unmetered gigabit pipe downloading at the theoretical limit gives you 328.5 Terabytes of data in 1 month. Under Comcast's 1.2 Terabytes per month rule, that gigabit pipe you're leasing is equivalent to downloading 24/7, on a 4 megabit pipe!

baskire 6y ago
Really should be billed on a combination of peak utilization and total consumption. Having the ability to download at 1Gibps for a few minutes a day is a lot less strain than downloading 24x7 at 1Gibps. Such complex billing models are pretty common with electrical utilities. With many industrial consumers even installing Flywheels to reduce their utilization spikes.
- detaro 6y ago
  IP transit in data centers etc is often a combination of a base rate + extra fees based on the 95% percentile (if that value is over the base rate). E.g. you might buy a 500Mb/s base rate over a 1 Gb/s link, and then end up with a 95% percentile value of 600Mb/s at the end of the month, so you pay an extra fee for the 100Mbit difference. Whereas if you use the link fully for 2 % of the time, but then stay under the base rate the rest of month, you only pay the base price.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I imagine that model would work really well for a lot of data usage too: Downloading updates for applications and games could be scheduled for off-peak times, and users might even be incentivized to pre-cache streaming content they want to watch during primetime hours if they can save by doing so.

Maakuth 6y ago

> Nobody was ever doing that. The image in question was a crafted example of what someone imagines is possible. This is precisely how it works in many countries without net neutrality. Here's a classical example: https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701871092441088/ https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701871092441088/

fat_pikachu 6y ago
That's Portugal, a country with Net Neutrality.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
So, no it's not. Side note, Ro Khanna has been paid an obscene amount of money by Google. He claims "No PAC $$" on his profile, but Google is his top donor, and Google's top law firm is his second top donor: https://www.opensecrets.org/races/contributors?cycle=2020&id=CA17&spec=N https://www.opensecrets.org/races/contributors?cycle=2020&id... He is basically a paid advocate for Google's political positions, not the public interest. The service pictured in that screenshot solely is offering zero-rating packages on top of an existing metered data package. Additionally, this is for a mobile carrier, not a home ISP. And finally, Portugal has net neutrality! Snopes fact checked this claim as "mostly false": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/portugal-net-neutrality/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/portugal-net-neutrality/

KMag 6y ago

In an ideal world, all of our clients would use RFC 2474 DSCP values to mark the QoS/Traffic Class IP header fields in order to voluntarily participate in traffic shaping prioritization with ISPs. Exceed your monthly quota at high priority, and all of your traffic gets dropped to base priority. Though, realistically, nobody is properly incentivized to make use of QoS/ToS (except internally to some networks), because ISPs aren't incentivized to implement anything until application developers label traffic, and consumers won't pressure application developers to implement anything until ISPs provide incentives to consumers. Also, OS/API support isn't great at present, and application developers in most cases would just always label traffic as high priority. At least for phone apps, tagging traffic as high priority could be a an app permission that could be flagged/denied to the app at installation time (or later granted/revoked).

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day. And there is a reason for that -- it costs about the same to provide that service. Nearly the entire cost of operating an ISP is getting the wires on the pole, keeping them there against weather and drunk drivers, answering customer support phones, paying for staff and buildings and electricity etc. None of which costs any less for the person who uses 1/1000th as much data. Charging the amount actually attributable to additional data usage would cause the difference to be so small that basically everybody would just pick the unlimited plan so they don't have to worry about it. But they don't charge the actual cost, they charge more. Because the point is to suppress usage of Netflix et al (the main reason nearly anyone would exceed the cap) in favor of cable TV and zero-rated partners.

asplake 6y ago
Until that infrastructure no longer handles the demand and they have to build out again. So no, bandwidth isn’t free
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  There is no "build out again" -- they use the same wires, which was the expensive part. They just replace the cards in the box. The upgrade itself is a tiny fraction of their costs. It's also something you benefit from regardless of how much data you use, because when they go from DOCSIS 2.0 to DOCSIS 3.0 you get 1000Mbps downloads instead of 40Mbps whether you're downloading 40GB or 40TB.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    > There is no "build out again" -- they use the same wires, which was the expensive part Who told you that? ISPs run new fiber all the time.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago