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The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least). Pai's argument for repe

• charcircuit 5y ago
  >Customers are pulling that data and those customers, by definition, are already paying for the bandwidth Downloading bandwidth is free. The person who is uploading is the person who pays.
  • unityByFreedom 5y ago
    You might get that deal on a server, but not a mobile or broadband contract. Now that I think of it, I don't know whether my capped mobile usage counts uploads towards my contracted limits. I assume it does.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      From my understanding this will still apply to the ISP you are using for mobile or broadband. How ISPs push along these costs to their customers is up to them, but that is different from the price of sending data between an ISP and Netflix for example.
  • wmf 5y ago
    That's not how it works. It's more like each side pays for half. Some telcos, mostly in Europe, are trying to force through sender-pays settlement because it would make them money but that's fairly recent and I hope it doesn't go through.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      >That's not how it works. It's more like each side pays for half. Buying internet transit typically works by paying something based on max(ingress, egress) * bandwidth cost where bandwidth is measured at the 95th percentile of utilization for a month.
      • wmf 5y ago
        Right; you don't just pay for egress. (It seems like your comments contradict each other but whatever.)
  • monocasa 5y ago
    I guarantee you I pay my ISP every month primarily for downloading bandwidth, but for both ends at the end of the day. Netflix in turn pays their ISP. Those ISPs then have (potentially indirect) peering arrangements. On top of this, Netflix offers to install CDN nodes within other ISP's networks to reduce that ISP's traffic across exchanges (connections between ISPs). If an ISP doesn't see the value in those and wants to treat Netflix like any other traffic that makes it's way to AWS, they're welcome to do so; it's just very not in their favor. Them using that as a cudgel to try and extort money out of Netflix is absurd.
• walrus01 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • whoisthemachine 5y ago
    It only matters when it's about laws that they favor. If the laws you mentioned were federal laws, and there were state laws that countered them, there would be nary a suggestion of states' rights from conservatives.
    • kfmfjfjf 5y ago
      [flagged]
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    IMO states' rights is a pretty nerdy issue if you take a step back and think about it. Very few people are such nerds.
    • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      That mostly because we've become accustomed to the federal government meddling in internal affairs more than it is supposed to. The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states.
      • vmception 5y ago
        Who woulda foreseen that all commerce would be interstate commerce, allowing the federal government to control all facets of life
        • MomoXenosaga 5y ago
          Yeah in 1776 the US was frankly a backwater. In 2022 it is an global economic superpower. Smart people wrote the Constitution but they were not prescient.
      • 5y ago
• kodah 5y ago
  > The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. In most places it's pretty crap too. Many places have no competition. Some providers are in clear breach of contract in not providing customers service as they promised to do. People say this, but we had net neutrality for years and it never improved the reach of broadband into rural areas. It mostly benefited cities. I would like to see a version of net neutrality that doesn't just do the bare minimum in terms of encouraging broadband development in rural areas, starting with the FCC redefining broadband so their little map is more accurate to how slow the speed and dismal the access really is.
  • vlunkr 5y ago
    Net neutrality isn't really related to end-user Internet speed. It's just about ensuring that all traffic is treated and billed equally.
  • d110af5ccf 5y ago
    > we had net neutrality for years and it never improved the reach of broadband into rural areas The issue there isn't net neutrality but rather open access. Countries with affordable internet generally have open access requirements for network operators. Net neutrality is a separate issue to do with ISPs attempting to double dip, leveraging a large customer base in order to do so.
  • msh 5y ago
    I don't think that is the purpose of net neutrality. Net neutrality is needed when there is not good competition. If there is only one or two ISP its important that they can't mess with the basic service.
    • kodah 5y ago
      I guess the irony that I've observed here is how little HNers know about the rest of the world. Usually rural areas are in this exact scenario.
  • tssva 5y ago
    Besides the confusion regarding what net neutrality is that others have pointed out I would also like to point out that we had net neutrality for about 2 years from 2015 to 2017.
• locallost 5y ago
  I'm not American, but I ran into this issue while discussing with some people living in the US (foreigners no less) and it's crazy how much they bought into the ISP propaganda. They're not stupid people, but they got convinced that they can't check their email because their neighbour is on Netflix and this is all Netflix's fault. When you hear the same argument repeated in the same way, it's always an indicator that the people saying it got brainwashed.
  • naoqj 5y ago
    "Brainwashing has caused people to believe in network congestion caused by high bandwidth usage."
    • mordae 5y ago
      Because of the bloated buffers along the way. It was empirically the truth.
    • jtbayly 5y ago
      Do networks not fill up and get congested?
      • naoqj 5y ago
        That's the joke. People and corporations streaming HD video use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth which require more hardware capacity and peering deals. I think it's not crazy to ask that they pay a fair price for it. As someone who doesn't stream HD video I would like to have cheaper connections available if I don't want to pay for the bandwidth usage of other customers.
        • sambull 5y ago
          There are. There are 5Mbps/10Mbps connections, that while being unusable for streaming HD are FAR cheaper and usable for other services. The consumer is paying the price of what they can get out of the connection. Conversely I pay extra (higher bandwidth pipe) so I can stream more HD videos, and even extra so I can do so without a overages fee per GB after a TB. The consumer in this case just paid to have a bigger pipe (more HD videos) and a use more data (unlimited bandwidth fee extra). Over $100 a month extra to stream more HD videos, and to not get double the bill just for going over on bandwidth.
• throwaway894345 5y ago
  Personally I would rather have a healthy competitive landscape than NN, but I’ll take the latter in a pinch.
  • jmyeet 5y ago
    Net neutrality has real impacts. It wasn't that many years ago where weirdly Netflix was basically unusable on FIOS. And of course it worked like a dream over a VPN. Verizon had minimal peering with Netflix to extract fees for "pushing" data and because Netflix competed with their cable TV business. Competition is a trickier issue because in most cases overbuilds make little economic sense. The best situation is probably municipal fiber (who builds and maintains it) and retail ISPs rent that infrastructure to provide services. But instead the US incentivized cable network builds in a terrible way: by providing franchises. The ISPs would pay the city for a monopoly, basically. Cities got addicted to this income and were allies in opposing competition as a result.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      I'm sure NN could be helpful, I'm just saying I would rather fix the root cause. There's a lot of problems with the ISP monopoly that NN can't address, for example, the relatively high costs for shitty service.
  • tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    If ISPs could do anything to the Internet content their subscribers requested, including block it, zero-rate it, or modify it, how many ISPs would a competitive landscape need in order to guarantee there is at least one that performs no blocking at all? I doubt poles could physically handle the number of lines to ISPs that are needed to guarantee this.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      Probably not very many--few ISPs would throttle if their customers could easily switch to the single ISP who doesn't throttle. We also don't need to approach this as a theoretical problem: much of the world has ISP competition and they don't seem to have these problems. Further still, throttling Netflix is just one of many problems that derive from lack of ISP competition. High prices for generally shitty service is at least as big of a problem, and NN can't to do much to help there. I'm not opposed to net neutrality, I just care more about fixing the anti-competitive stuff. If we can do both, all the better.
• Forgeties79 5y ago
  This is pretty tinfoil hat of me. I have this theory that many companies that are “competing” with each other in an area (Cox and AT&T for me) seem to be ceding areas to each other by upgrading certain sections and not others while avoiding overlap for long periods, functionally only giving buyers one choice. In New Orleans, Cox has offered “gigablast” (yes that’s what it’s called) Internet in some areas while AT&T offers fiber. Now they often don’t overlap, which isn’t wild given they are incrementally upgrading a large area section by section, so I can easily see wanting to be first to an area your competitor isn’t offering a comparable product. But here’s the rub: Cox also offers 5mb down/600kb up in some areas of downtown New Orleans. That is unusable Internet. No one would get anything but AT&T, who hasn’t laid fiber in that area yet, but gives you 25+. That’s not competition, that’s the appearance of it.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    It’s not tinfoil at all, it’s just normal decision making. You have 10k customers (out of a possible 20k) - do you upgrade your lines where it would make you fastest by far, or do you upgrade your lines where you’d just be as fast? The second probably has fewer customers, the first will get you new customers.
    • Forgeties79 5y ago
      I guess I should’ve been more clear: I think there may be some behind the scenes coordination happening between these companies.
      • bombcar 5y ago
        I suspect there isn't just because they don't really need to "coordinate" which would cause anti-trust issues, they can just "watch" and adjust based on what they see.
        • Forgeties79 5y ago
          Fair point
• ekianjo 5y ago
  > The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. Really? Some highly developed countries have fairly expensive Internet as well. Not sure the US is much of an exception, if you consider not just the cheapest countries.
  • lelandfe 5y ago
    It's definitely expensive (2014 data): https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared-worldwide https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared... > the United States ranks second on the list of OECD countries, behind only Mexico, for most expensive internet prices > When we look at Europe as a whole, we can see that the United States pays more for broadband internet access than any other country on the continent; in fact, rates in the US are more than double the average
    • ekianjo 5y ago
      > > the United States ranks second on the list of OECD countries, behind only Mexico, for most expensive internet prices Looking at absolute cost is not a good metric. You have to factor the cost vs the median purchasing power otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
      • lelandfe 5y ago
        That's a great point!
    • yywwbbn 5y ago
      Surely Canada must be worse? At least for consumers.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • Karunamon 5y ago
      I don’t think data that is eight years old is really relevant anymore, especially on a technical topic like this. Is there anything newer? I'd expect prices for bandwidth to decrease over time.
• phkahler 5y ago
  >> Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either. I don't think anyone noticed back when Obama Care (ACA) was passed and challenged at the Supreme Court. When deciding to hear the case they said it was not a tax, but when they actually debated the issue suddenly it was a tax.
• ZoomerCretin 5y ago
  > The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least). An effective method for defeating geographic internet monopolies is to force ISPs to rent out their lines at fair prices. This is the status quo in the UK, where competition forced internet prices to lower. That this common sense pro-consumer policy is not pursued by the Democratic FCC commissioners is evidence of some lesser level of regulatory capture of their side as well.
• lettergram 5y ago
  > The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. Lol what? I can get 5-10Gb/s fiber in my town for $120-$200/month. If I want 1Gb/s fiber it’s $55/month. If I want 100mb/s it’s $20/month. To your point it’s about regulatory capture. Not all states and localities have that issue, it’s almost entirely to do with several corrupt states that get targeted.
  • joshgachnang 5y ago
    Well I’m jealous of you then. You must know that is an extreme outlier in the US though. I’ve been lucky to get 50-100mbps for $60 in most cities I’ve lived in.
    • lettergram 5y ago
      “Cities I’ve lived in” is the issue. Cities tend to have a fairly high level of corruption AND it’s expensive to put in new wires / fiber. Most suburbs I’ve lived in (3-4 in the past 10 years) have had very good internet, cheap and like I said you can get some beastly fiber now.
  • jsjohnst 5y ago
    > Lol what? I can get 5-10Gb/s fiber in my town for $120-$200/month. Good for you, that puts you in the top 1% of US towns (maybe even 0.1%). Way to totally miss the forest for the trees.
    • lettergram 5y ago
      I can get that most decent sized towns in my state. I think you’re vastly overestimating the problem. It has to do with corrupt politicians in several corrupt states. See AT&T fiber options https://www.att.com/internet/fiber/coverage-map/ https://www.att.com/internet/fiber/coverage-map/ Where I currently live and where I lived previously I’ve had multiple cheap options. The issue has to do with regulation
      • jsjohnst 5y ago
• Casteil 5y ago
  > Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either. It's pretty wild - it's absolutely a federal concern because it is utterly impractical to enact & enforce state-by-state... but they (Pai & co) know that.