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"I've got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing." Occasionally statistics are released by companies on how much

by rz2k 13y ago

"I've got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing." Occasionally statistics are released by companies on how much traffic leaves their site when it is 100ms slower, or the percentage drop in sales conversion rates. Furthermore, the sensitivity of visitors seems to be increasing. And yet I think it would be very difficult to argue in court the specific harm caused by 50ms of added latency in 2020. Consumer ISPs could easily offer 'prioritization' to companies for a fee. Perhaps a Facebook of 2014 could make a subtle case measuring the harm of low priority, or cover the nominal fees to get that prioritization, or get users to complain to their ISPs. However, a company equivalent to Facebook of 2006 on the other hand would just have its growth slowed by a degraded user experience. Already the structure of the industry for consumer ISPs encourages rent-seeking behavior. The slow spread of gigabit-tier broadband is likely related to those dynamics. Altering the landscape for content availability and latency, so that it is not neutral and is likely to favor incumbents, seems like it does not optimize the internet for innovation or the growth of new internet properties.

minimax 13y ago
You're saying you think ISPs would try and penalize all traffic by 50 or 100ms and let the big sites pay up to avoid the penalty? That seems like mustache twirlingly cruel and I'm not even sure you can do that with conventional network hardware (you'd have to buffer all that traffic in RAM). On the other hand, if we're just talking about allowing certain companies to pay ISPs for prioritizing traffic for certain applications (VoIP, gaming), then I don't think that's such a horrible thing.
- rz2k 13y ago
  I'm not just saying that not doing so is equivalent to leaving money on the table, I'm saying that the net costs to the economy would be greater than the revenue collected from content providers. In a certain sense the revenue collected from content providers could be seen as offsetting revenue that would otherwise be collected from subscribers, and may lead to faster deployment of network improvements. However, that neglects the full cost to the internet as a whole, which would be the increased barriers to entry for new companies. Blagojevich got in trouble because he pushed the envelope so far, but I used the quote because it reflects the reality that not cashing in on some opportunity is equivalent to losing money, and particularly so if you have a responsibility to shareholders.

by rz2k 13y ago

minimax 13y ago

You're saying you think ISPs would try and penalize all traffic by 50 or 100ms and let the big sites pay up to avoid the penalty? That seems like mustache twirlingly cruel and I'm not even sure you can do that with conventional network hardware (you'd have to buffer all that traffic in RAM). On the other hand, if we're just talking about allowing certain companies to pay ISPs for prioritizing traffic for certain applications (VoIP, gaming), then I don't think that's such a horrible thing.

rz2k 13y ago
I'm not just saying that not doing so is equivalent to leaving money on the table, I'm saying that the net costs to the economy would be greater than the revenue collected from content providers. In a certain sense the revenue collected from content providers could be seen as offsetting revenue that would otherwise be collected from subscribers, and may lead to faster deployment of network improvements. However, that neglects the full cost to the internet as a whole, which would be the increased barriers to entry for new companies. Blagojevich got in trouble because he pushed the envelope so far, but I used the quote because it reflects the reality that not cashing in on some opportunity is equivalent to losing money, and particularly so if you have a responsibility to shareholders.