5 ms·

US ambassador: Internet fee proposal gaining momentum

52 points by 1337biz 14y ago

rwmj 14y ago
Ah .. rent-seeking telecoms companies. Imagine for a minute if these companies had to compete to the death with each other. I guess I wouldn't have to pay more for the same service now as I used to have to back in 1999 (with no discernable increase in the service over 13 years).
- rjzzleep 14y ago
  i just moved to the us, and I'm really wondering where on earth you can find more expensive service than here.
  - pyre 14y ago
    Canada, where the competition is even less.
    - westicle 14y ago
      Add Australia to that list, where you can pay $80 per month for a connection with a 50GB download limit. http://www.telstra.com.au/internet/home-broadband-bigpond-elite-plans/ http://www.telstra.com.au/internet/home-broadband-bigpond-el...
      - kalleboo 14y ago
        At least Australia has a good excuse - they have to pull wires underwater for many miles to get any connectivity, so there's some scarcity there. The U.S. is the hub of the internet, the costs must be the lowest.
        Evbn 14y ago
        The US is much less dense than Europe and East Asian.
        pyre 14y ago
        I really view the "US is less dense" argument with a grain of salt. If it were true, then we would have awesome connections within highly populated cities, and it would maybe just be the suburbs or rural areas that were complaining. As it stands, everyone is complaining, with the exception of a handful of suburbs across the nation that got experimental FIOS roll-outs.
  - beagle3 14y ago
    Ethiopia. Yes, I've discovered the same. In Germany, $25/month gets you unlimited mobile minutes, text and web with no contract. And something like $25 gets you serious broadband internet. In the US, mobile costs 4 times as much, internet "only" twice. And most Americans think that the US market is actually healthy. It's not in anything resembling telecomm, education, finance or healthcare.
ewillbefull 14y ago
There is no sense to this proposal. If it cost a telecom more to relay international traffic, they could charge their customers more for it to make up for the expensive peering costs. The telecoms must not be able to charge their customers more to relay traffic through expensive peers due to market forces -- which is why they want the government to be involved. It doesn't compensate the telecom for anything, it's just mandated jealousy.
- lusr 14y ago
  I have to wonder how many of the members of government pushing this also happen to be shareholders of telecoms companies. (I long for the day somebody builds such a graph of all influential people so such questions could easily be answered).
  - jauer 14y ago
    Oversimplified, The caller-pays model of telephone compensations was a way to funnel money from richer countries to poorer countries with government-owned telephone monopolies. This fell apart with the internet where the state telecoms had to pay for pipes to western carriers because they had all the desirable content. This situation with the ITU is all about recreating that money flow.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rabidsnail 14y ago
Ugh, now we're going to have to stretch our already practically non-existant political capital even further to defend against this shit. Do the CCC and the Pirate Party have official positions on this? Edit: In case they don't (and that's what it looks like from some cursory googling), here are some talking points that might be effective. Disclaimer: I'm not European, so I probably have a bad intuition about what would play over there. * This measure is a form of trade protectionism that will result in retaliation from the US (think import duities). That retaliation will harm EU companies more than American ones, since the US is far larger than any single market in the EU * Many EU startups have grown in the US market first, even though they are based in the EU (soundcloud and last.fm come to mind). Higher costs across borders would at best limit new companies like these to their home markets and at worst kill them on the vine. * Popular services like Google and Twitter (Facebook seems touchy, so I would leave them out) have no domestic alternatives, so jeopardizing access would harm consumers.
adaml_623 14y ago
Can we just call proposals like this: 'double charging' So we'd rewrite this to be: 'US ambassador: Internet double charging proposal gaining momentum'. We all know that we pay for our internet access to websites. Those websites shouldn't be charged again. We should have that fact built into the language we use discussing these issues. I think it's easier to oppose this type of thing when stating the problem states your argument. EDIT: Actually I've just reread the article. This is just FUD being spouted by the US government to scare it's citizens. They want the US to retain control of the internet (which is totally understandable) and are saying bad things will happen if they let the UN take control. It's building a justification for not going along with the rest of the world if all the other countries agrees to something it doesn't like. It's possibly not worth worrying about as long as you live in a country with a competitive telecoms market.
- bluedanieru 14y ago
  Can you make the case that it's better off under the control of the UN? I'm not too keen on the stewardship of the US especially with regards to copyright, and this "promote a global Internet free from government control" Congressional resolution is double-speak bullshit as they are trying their hardest to do the exact opposite. But I can't say allowing countries like Iran, China, North Korea, etc., any say at all in the functioning of the Internet at a global level sounds any more appealing. Ideally we just need an Internet that is inherently unmanageable at the most basic levels. Wireless (or wireless enough, anyway), distributed DNS, end-to-end encryption, onion routing, etc.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Many millions of people feel the same way about US control of the Internet. Now what?
    - bluedanieru 14y ago
      Devil-you-know. I don't like US control of the Internet either (said as much in my post in fact). But that doesn't mean I think we should hand it over to the UN.
siculars 14y ago
The only thing this would accomplish would be to further distance the internet-centric innovations developed here in the US from the rest of the world. Consumers in tariff enforcing territories would be at a disadvantage. Fragmentation of the internet would surely ensue. Fees would no doubt be passed along to consumers who, in some non trivial fraction, would simply not make use of new innovative services. But perhaps, obviously, this is the intended result. This is complete political buffoonery.
vidarh 14y ago
I'm confused. Some are already charging fees to carry international traffic. Or rather, they do it indirectly, by offering packages that offer access only to their peering relationships at specific interchanges or full transit. E.g. at work we have a customer that has 95%+ UK traffic, and one operator offered us bandwidth at about 20% our current price for a peering package that included access to pretty much all UK and most larger European ISP's, but no transit, that we could mix and match with a smaller amount of full transit. If our bandwidth needs had been larger, we'd have looked seriously into it, but as it stands, our customers UK only traffic is low enough that the cost difference isn't worth the hassle of managing our own BGP routing and an extra port. In other words, it sounds like what these operators really want is to make this mandatory in some form, so that they won't have to deal with those pesky competitors that might undercut them and offer prices actually based on what it costs to provide the service. Many of them will also see it as a way to prevent relative strength in negotiations from deciding on peering costs. It also means that today, when buying full transit, you _are_ paying a substantial premium for the costs your provider incurs in procuring substantial capacity for international traffic. Almost nobody forgoes paying the premium today because almost everyone _does_ have substantial international traffic, and pretty much nobody can afford not doing so. You can bet your provider does everything they can to peer with everyone who can lower their transit bill, but all but the very largest will still end up paying for transit for a fairly substantial percentage of their traffic, and that cost is of course passed on to their customers. I ran an ISP in the mid 90's in Norway. At the time, we had "massive" international bandwidth, because we bought 512kbps full transit via Sweden. For that privilege we paid about twice what it would cost us to get a 10Mbps port at the switch at NIX (the then only Norwegian interchange) and suitable line capacity to our office. Our nearest competitor in terms of price and size had 128kbps full transit + 1Mbps to NIX (it was a mixed bag: our customers were ecstatic about the speed of international downloads - personally I remember waiting up to download the newest version of Netscape a few days after we'd upgraded from 256kbps, and had the line almost exclusively to myself and found it absolutely amazing to download at a speed I'd find shockingly slow on my home connection today... But they were annoyed at the performance for Norwegian sites, especially latency - see below). The only reason we didn't connect immediately is that at that point, to be able to connect you needed at least one peering agreement in place first, which required you to first demonstrate a reasonable amount of traffic. But it demonstrates the cost differences this industry operates with: If you could fill that 10Mbps with traffic via peering arrangements, your bandwidth cost would still be only twice what someone would pay for 512kbps full transit. Even worse: Those 512kbps of pure transit at the time did _not_ guarantee your provider had peering at NIX (ours didn't for the first year or two), and so you might find massive lag as your traffic went via D-GIX in Stockholm and back to Norway... I don't know current relative prices, since I've not been directly in that market since '99, but I do know the gaps are still massive and there's probably still also money to be made in arbitrage in some locations in offering custom "bandwidth mixes" for someone who can do a good job of negotiating the right contracts given the 5-times difference I mentioned I was offered. Even more so because of a proliferation of peering points. Effectively this is what companies that are large enough to do their own peering gets - but it is far harder to make it pay for itself if you're "only" buying in the <200-300Mbps range or so (guesstimate). We "only" do an aggregate of 45Mbps at the moment), and bandwidth makes up less of our operating costs than the personnel cost to my employer of the time I'd have to spend configuring and managing a BGP setup and peering arrangements alone, much less equipment and interconnect fees.

52 points by 1337biz 14y ago

rwmj 14y ago

Ah .. rent-seeking telecoms companies. Imagine for a minute if these companies had to compete to the death with each other. I guess I wouldn't have to pay more for the same service now as I used to have to back in 1999 (with no discernable increase in the service over 13 years).

rjzzleep 14y ago
i just moved to the us, and I'm really wondering where on earth you can find more expensive service than here.
- pyre 14y ago
  Canada, where the competition is even less.
  - westicle 14y ago
    Add Australia to that list, where you can pay $80 per month for a connection with a 50GB download limit. http://www.telstra.com.au/internet/home-broadband-bigpond-elite-plans/ http://www.telstra.com.au/internet/home-broadband-bigpond-el...
    - kalleboo 14y ago
      At least Australia has a good excuse - they have to pull wires underwater for many miles to get any connectivity, so there's some scarcity there. The U.S. is the hub of the internet, the costs must be the lowest.
      - Evbn 14y ago
        The US is much less dense than Europe and East Asian.
        pyre 14y ago
        I really view the "US is less dense" argument with a grain of salt. If it were true, then we would have awesome connections within highly populated cities, and it would maybe just be the suburbs or rural areas that were complaining. As it stands, everyone is complaining, with the exception of a handful of suburbs across the nation that got experimental FIOS roll-outs.
- beagle3 14y ago
  Ethiopia. Yes, I've discovered the same. In Germany, $25/month gets you unlimited mobile minutes, text and web with no contract. And something like $25 gets you serious broadband internet. In the US, mobile costs 4 times as much, internet "only" twice. And most Americans think that the US market is actually healthy. It's not in anything resembling telecomm, education, finance or healthcare.

ewillbefull 14y ago

There is no sense to this proposal. If it cost a telecom more to relay international traffic, they could charge their customers more for it to make up for the expensive peering costs. The telecoms must not be able to charge their customers more to relay traffic through expensive peers due to market forces -- which is why they want the government to be involved. It doesn't compensate the telecom for anything, it's just mandated jealousy.

lusr 14y ago
I have to wonder how many of the members of government pushing this also happen to be shareholders of telecoms companies. (I long for the day somebody builds such a graph of all influential people so such questions could easily be answered).
- jauer 14y ago
  Oversimplified, The caller-pays model of telephone compensations was a way to funnel money from richer countries to poorer countries with government-owned telephone monopolies. This fell apart with the internet where the state telecoms had to pay for pipes to western carriers because they had all the desirable content. This situation with the ITU is all about recreating that money flow.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

rabidsnail 14y ago

Ugh, now we're going to have to stretch our already practically non-existant political capital even further to defend against this shit. Do the CCC and the Pirate Party have official positions on this? Edit: In case they don't (and that's what it looks like from some cursory googling), here are some talking points that might be effective. Disclaimer: I'm not European, so I probably have a bad intuition about what would play over there. * This measure is a form of trade protectionism that will result in retaliation from the US (think import duities). That retaliation will harm EU companies more than American ones, since the US is far larger than any single market in the EU * Many EU startups have grown in the US market first, even though they are based in the EU (soundcloud and last.fm come to mind). Higher costs across borders would at best limit new companies like these to their home markets and at worst kill them on the vine. * Popular services like Google and Twitter (Facebook seems touchy, so I would leave them out) have no domestic alternatives, so jeopardizing access would harm consumers.

adaml_623 14y ago

Can we just call proposals like this: 'double charging' So we'd rewrite this to be: 'US ambassador: Internet double charging proposal gaining momentum'. We all know that we pay for our internet access to websites. Those websites shouldn't be charged again. We should have that fact built into the language we use discussing these issues. I think it's easier to oppose this type of thing when stating the problem states your argument. EDIT: Actually I've just reread the article. This is just FUD being spouted by the US government to scare it's citizens. They want the US to retain control of the internet (which is totally understandable) and are saying bad things will happen if they let the UN take control. It's building a justification for not going along with the rest of the world if all the other countries agrees to something it doesn't like. It's possibly not worth worrying about as long as you live in a country with a competitive telecoms market.

bluedanieru 14y ago
Can you make the case that it's better off under the control of the UN? I'm not too keen on the stewardship of the US especially with regards to copyright, and this "promote a global Internet free from government control" Congressional resolution is double-speak bullshit as they are trying their hardest to do the exact opposite. But I can't say allowing countries like Iran, China, North Korea, etc., any say at all in the functioning of the Internet at a global level sounds any more appealing. Ideally we just need an Internet that is inherently unmanageable at the most basic levels. Wireless (or wireless enough, anyway), distributed DNS, end-to-end encryption, onion routing, etc.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Many millions of people feel the same way about US control of the Internet. Now what?
  - bluedanieru 14y ago
    Devil-you-know. I don't like US control of the Internet either (said as much in my post in fact). But that doesn't mean I think we should hand it over to the UN.

siculars 14y ago

The only thing this would accomplish would be to further distance the internet-centric innovations developed here in the US from the rest of the world. Consumers in tariff enforcing territories would be at a disadvantage. Fragmentation of the internet would surely ensue. Fees would no doubt be passed along to consumers who, in some non trivial fraction, would simply not make use of new innovative services. But perhaps, obviously, this is the intended result. This is complete political buffoonery.

vidarh 14y ago

I'm confused. Some are already charging fees to carry international traffic. Or rather, they do it indirectly, by offering packages that offer access only to their peering relationships at specific interchanges or full transit. E.g. at work we have a customer that has 95%+ UK traffic, and one operator offered us bandwidth at about 20% our current price for a peering package that included access to pretty much all UK and most larger European ISP's, but no transit, that we could mix and match with a smaller amount of full transit. If our bandwidth needs had been larger, we'd have looked seriously into it, but as it stands, our customers UK only traffic is low enough that the cost difference isn't worth the hassle of managing our own BGP routing and an extra port. In other words, it sounds like what these operators really want is to make this mandatory in some form, so that they won't have to deal with those pesky competitors that might undercut them and offer prices actually based on what it costs to provide the service. Many of them will also see it as a way to prevent relative strength in negotiations from deciding on peering costs. It also means that today, when buying full transit, you _are_ paying a substantial premium for the costs your provider incurs in procuring substantial capacity for international traffic. Almost nobody forgoes paying the premium today because almost everyone _does_ have substantial international traffic, and pretty much nobody can afford not doing so. You can bet your provider does everything they can to peer with everyone who can lower their transit bill, but all but the very largest will still end up paying for transit for a fairly substantial percentage of their traffic, and that cost is of course passed on to their customers. I ran an ISP in the mid 90's in Norway. At the time, we had "massive" international bandwidth, because we bought 512kbps full transit via Sweden. For that privilege we paid about twice what it would cost us to get a 10Mbps port at the switch at NIX (the then only Norwegian interchange) and suitable line capacity to our office. Our nearest competitor in terms of price and size had 128kbps full transit + 1Mbps to NIX (it was a mixed bag: our customers were ecstatic about the speed of international downloads - personally I remember waiting up to download the newest version of Netscape a few days after we'd upgraded from 256kbps, and had the line almost exclusively to myself and found it absolutely amazing to download at a speed I'd find shockingly slow on my home connection today... But they were annoyed at the performance for Norwegian sites, especially latency - see below). The only reason we didn't connect immediately is that at that point, to be able to connect you needed at least one peering agreement in place first, which required you to first demonstrate a reasonable amount of traffic. But it demonstrates the cost differences this industry operates with: If you could fill that 10Mbps with traffic via peering arrangements, your bandwidth cost would still be only twice what someone would pay for 512kbps full transit. Even worse: Those 512kbps of pure transit at the time did _not_ guarantee your provider had peering at NIX (ours didn't for the first year or two), and so you might find massive lag as your traffic went via D-GIX in Stockholm and back to Norway... I don't know current relative prices, since I've not been directly in that market since '99, but I do know the gaps are still massive and there's probably still also money to be made in arbitrage in some locations in offering custom "bandwidth mixes" for someone who can do a good job of negotiating the right contracts given the 5-times difference I mentioned I was offered. Even more so because of a proliferation of peering points. Effectively this is what companies that are large enough to do their own peering gets - but it is far harder to make it pay for itself if you're "only" buying in the <200-300Mbps range or so (guesstimate). We "only" do an aggregate of 45Mbps at the moment), and bandwidth makes up less of our operating costs than the personnel cost to my employer of the time I'd have to spend configuring and managing a BGP setup and peering arrangements alone, much less equipment and interconnect fees.