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Makes sense to me. Highways have toll roads and freight trucks pay more than cars. The same concept can apply here. Twitch, Netflix and others make up the lion
by rchaud 3y ago
Makes sense to me. Highways have toll roads and freight trucks pay more than cars.
The same concept can apply here. Twitch, Netflix and others make up the lion's share of bandwidth use, dwarfing everything else. They should be paying something to improve capacity and contribute to maintaining the infrastructure.
- darkwater 3y agoThe toll is already paid by the ISP customers and their monthly fees. Now, I would never defend FAANG or similar, but as I see this is just that ISPs would like really much to get money from both sides at the same time. If they were really into this, they could offer very cheap plans at 3/5$ per month with capped data. The difference? If you are in SK or similar would be on Netflix side, in other countries you would pay a premium for an uncapped connection.
- rchaud 3y agoRoad tolls are a usage-based tax on top of what is already covered by the taxpayer. You don't pay it if you don't use it. Factories that use a lot of electricity will contract directly with a energy seller instead of paying utility rates, because of the variability of peak period charges. This is apparently what Netflix did (pre-pay for bandwidth), as they dropped their case against SK Telecom. It's not economically viable to charge Twitch, which transmits thousands of petabytes per month the same amount as a business that sends emails or handles online shopping.