11 ms·

I doubt we'll ever get the net neutrality we want until we swallow the pill of paying for what we use—like we do for other utilities—instead of some imaginary t

by _greim_ 12y ago

I doubt we'll ever get the net neutrality we want until we swallow the pill of paying for what we use—like we do for other utilities—instead of some imaginary total capacity. How do we make sure transfer amounts are monitored fairly? How do we make sure our software is accessing the network only when we want it to? Those are technical challenges we'll need to solve. But if we want ISPs to play fair, then we must absorb the simple concept: If you stream Netflix all day, you should pay more than the lady next door who checks Facebook a couple times per week, even if the bits are flowing at the same rate.

existencebox 12y ago
Honest question; if a very naive one (Since I haven't thought about it very hard...) But why wouldn't a very simplistic metering be acceptable by that definition? I'd be totally fine having my internet metered, if the costs were commensurate to the service provided, and the service was as regular as other metered services (e.g. water/power) I've heard why the common carrier argument isn't "the best solution", but I don't fully understand why metering hasn't been championed as a way to have the two sides (consumers and the companies) come to some common ground, or at least "call the bluff" of the companies using justifications like the above ("people use internet differently", "people will never use this amount"); so why not just see, and charge accordingly?
- Solarsail 12y ago
  Metering is used in Canada. Many have criticized the policy as backwards, unfair, and hampering creativity compared to other countries. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/a-metered-internet-is-a-regulatory-failure/article565228/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/a-metere... Tho I do agree that, at a first glance, it seems to have extremely good correlation with the cost of the service provided.
  - existencebox 12y ago
    They present a counterargument of the "heavy user", dismiss it, and don't seem to explain why it's not a fair example of why metering is useful. It seems that the main complaint of the article is simply that the overage charges are insane, as they are for cell. I agree. I also think that it's "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" to suggest an entire reversal of policy (when observing what unmetered use results in via the US) when a more iterative response would seem to be, "why don't we regulate costs to ensure that this pseudo-utility is actually accessable at a basic level (that grows with the times) to all people?" I'll have to tag another question on here, but is there any system in place for utilities to prevent, say, my water company for charging me 300$ per gallon? I'd assume there's simply some degree of regulation, why not apply that fix elsewhere; have a "hybrid utility" rather than treating it as all black and white.
    - dublinben 12y ago
      Utility rates are highly regulated. They can only charge what a government utility commission allows them to charge. Every few years, they generally plead the case to raise rates slightly, so they can keep up with rising costs or inflation.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  It's called the Insurance Effect. People are willing to pay more for flat rate, which includes "carrying" high volume users, to insure against bill shock if their usage patterns change. Humans are bad at estimating bandwidth use, and pricing that removes that requirement has real value.
  - _greim_ 12y ago
    It may be hard to predict bandwidth usage, but electricity, gas, and water aren't perfectly predictable either, and unlike bandwidth we're incentivized to estimate them and to self-throttle to the extent reasonable (e.g. turn the thermostat down at night).
  - saurik 12y ago
    "Insurance" is a form of risk mitigation. The reality of bandwidth is that we know someone who likes using FaceTime, or who has a Netflix subscription, is going to use more bandwidth than someone else. Sure: it makes sense if you aren't certain how large a web page will be to buy insurance on it, but you don't want to be in the same insurance bracket as a true "heavy user": I am happy to take part in a pool where everyone subsidizes the risk of accidental trauma, but I know someone who insists on smoking is going to increase their health costs, and they should be forced to take on that increased burden. This is especially evident when the playing field changes: the cost of insurance for all users goes up dramatically when something like FaceTime or Netflix is released, because the people using it are using dramatically more bandwidth than the people who aren't. If the bandwidth companies said "ok, thanks to Apple's FaceTime service, everyone's connection is now twice as expensive even if you don't own Apple hardware", people would be pissed. This is why insurance charges people differently for their inherent risk, and why you can't use insurance as a metaphor here (well, unless you want to make the opposite argument ;P).
- _greim_ 12y ago
  > why wouldn't a very simplistic metering be acceptable by that definition? It would be perfectly acceptable (assuming I've understood you). I think the reason nobody is championing it is twofold, ISPs don't like it because it would make them that much more utility-like, which they strenuously want to avoid. Active internet users don't like it because their bandwidth is largely subsidized by less-active subscribers, and leveling the playing field would be a net loss for them. To me it looks like pure selfishness on both accounts.
  - dublinben 12y ago
    Active internet users don't like metered billing because they understand it is a ruse. If I use my connection at full capacity all day long, except during the evening prime time, I might rack up several TB of data each month. I'm not causing any network congestion or costing the ISP any money though. The basic user who 'only' streams several shows on Netflix each evening might only use several dozen GB of data each month, but they cost the ISP much more in peak bandwidth congestion.
    - M2Ys4U 12y ago
      So have a peak rate and an off-peak rate. That's exactly what my ISP (Andrews and Arnold[0]) does. I pay for a specific number of 'units' which are consumed faster at peak times (09:00-18:00) than at all other times. A&A's policy[1] is to never be the bottleneck in the network and they also kick up a stink with their transit providers (mainly BT) when they detect a problem (which is very often, as they monitor their network's health closely). They even publish statistics[2] on dropped packets classified by their uplink - for instance over the last 28 days they have a 98.48% success rate at a 1-second granularity one of BT's backhauls, and 100% on TalkTalk's backhaul. They do work out to be more expensive than other ISPs (I pay ~£33 a month for a 40mbit FTTC connection with 4 units) but you pay for a good service and competence. [0] http://aaisp.net.uk/ http://aaisp.net.uk/ [1] http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-speed.html http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-speed.html [2] http://clueless.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi http://clueless.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi
- SkynetSystems 12y ago
  No because this is artificial scarcity. It does not cost these big internet service providers a single dime more to serve up Netflix than it does to serve up Wikipedia pages. The issue here is the relentless corporate greed that is going to make them continue to squeeze customers and content providers to get more and more profits without offering more service. After the bandwidth caps and the Netflix (content provider) extortions, they will find new reasons to force people to pay more money for the existing internet service they have always been using. This is what happens when you have no competition and you want profits going up year after year. The only cure is for the government to step in and slap some regulations down.
nitrogen 12y ago
Most of the cost is in building infrastructure, not delivering bits. A sensible metering approach would still have a high monthly fee, with a very small additional charge for bandwidth. Further, I don't want to live in a nickel-and-dime world where every single thing I do has the cognitive overhead of worrying about metered usage.
- shasta 12y ago
  > Most of the cost is in building infrastructure, not delivering bits. But there's significant cost in building infrastructure that can deliver more bits. > Further, I don't want to live in a nickel-and-dime world where every single thing I do has the cognitive overhead of worrying about metered usage. So stop worrying about it. How much cognitive effort do you spend factoring in the cost of electricity, gas and water when you're making spaghetti?
  - magicalist 12y ago
    I think the argument is that there's nothing about that tradeoff that's "fair", because it doesn't reflect reality. Unlike electricity, gas, or water, they aren't creating bits, storing bits to ensure supply, or depleting their supply of bits by transmitting them to you. Charging by the bit would just be a good way to increase telco revenue. Now, if you think it would be a good bargaining chip for getting them to accept being dumb pipes, that might be a good argument, but we should call it what it is if that's the case.
    - saurik 12y ago
      Electricity companies can only sort of store electricity: they produce electricity, and it is consumed at some rate by users; this is why electricity is priced differently in many areas during "peak usage hours": because electricity is more like bandwidth than you seem to realize. If you have a difficult time modeling this, try to model electricity in a world where everyone is using renewable energy sources like wind or solar (and if you find that "preposterous", hydroelectric is very common as a primary electricity source in many areas). I can see a strong argument for switching to some kind of billing based on the peak load you contributed to, but that turns into a pricing model almost as complex as Amazon Glacier ;P.
mhurron 12y ago
> until we swallow the pill of paying for what we use—like we do for other utilities What other utility gets to charge the manufacturer of whatever you use consume their service for? What power company gets to charge Lenovo because I plugged a Lenovo laptop into an outlet? You only touch on a portion of what the issue is. And quite frankly to deal with what you did mention, I pay for internet access, I expect internet access. Why should I be charged more because I then choose to use it? Why should I be penalized for the ISP oversubscribing and underestimating the usage. I shouldn't because that's not how they sold their service.
- saurik 12y ago
  That's the point: as users we have to pay for what we use in order to avoid carriers trying to bill website operators. If you aren't willing to pay more for using more bandwidth than your neighbor, because you use Netflix and your neighbor only haphazardly checks email, then the carrier is going to try to bill Netflix, and we don't want that to happen.
kumbasha 12y ago
Please tell me exactly what the person streaming Netflix is taking away from the little old lady checking Facebook.
- _greim_ 12y ago
  In many parts of the US, Netflix usage saturates neighborhood cable modem networks in the evenings, making things painfully slow for everyone.
anonymousab 12y ago
Sure. Then ISPs need to start listing what they can actually fulfill, under load, for all customers in a given area at any given time.
- saurik 12y ago
  If they billed by the byte instead of by some nebulous concept of connectivity then it wouldn't matter what they "can actually fulfill, under load": if they weren't able to get you all the bytes you wanted, you would be paying them less, and they would make less money. The maximum amount of money they could make from their infrastructure per hour would then be exactly their per byte cost times the number of bytes they could move per hour, leading to obvious incentives to increase their capacity.
SilasX 12y ago
The scarcity lies in apportionment of the pipe at any given moment, not in the total data transferred. Therefore, the only way that charging users (whether in money or some other form of opportunity cost) will alleviate scarcity is if it's assessed against he former (apportionment of the pipe), not the latter (total data transferred). Simply charging per unit of data downloaded just makes people cut back on total use, without concern for when they cut back. This does nothing for what you really want to discourage, which is usage at peak times. (My preferred solution is to reduce the fraction of the pipe that you get in proportion to how much you use at peak times. That way you have some incentive to cut back, but not in a way that forces you to eye your wallet.)
- saurik 12y ago
  Usage during peak times is already discouraged by the network degrading during peak times: rather than charge more you simply get less value, which is equivalent. This causes traffic to naturally smooth out some over time. You thereby in fact do need some way to cut back on the total usage, as a bunch of people randomly using Netflix really does cost more than a bunch of people randomly browsing the web. The goal of the network is not to support the peak load: this seems to be a key misconception in these arguments :/. It just isn't economically efficient to build a system that can support the peak load. If people really do want to have a system that can stream Netflix to everyone's house at 7pm when the traffic throughout the rest of the day is nothing like that amount, then someone has to bear those costs: either Netflix needs to subsidize the weird bandwidth requirement, customers need to opt in to "supports Netflix" plans, or we have to give up entirely on pricing models that don't take into account usage in some way. You might disagree with how that usage is calculated, but right now the problem is that most people just want "lots and lots of bandwidth for a flat rate", and that is inherently incompatible with a demand for network neutrality :(.
  - SilasX 12y ago
    I'm aware of all that and don't see how it refutes my assumptions or solution. Yes, the network is degraded at peak times naturally. My idea is to further penalize heavy users (weighted by time of use) but do it in favor of lighter users (which avoids the rent seeking problem). As you note, this inevitably penalizes total use, but does it in a way that accounts for when the use is bad.

by _greim_ 12y ago

existencebox 12y ago

Honest question; if a very naive one (Since I haven't thought about it very hard...) But why wouldn't a very simplistic metering be acceptable by that definition? I'd be totally fine having my internet metered, if the costs were commensurate to the service provided, and the service was as regular as other metered services (e.g. water/power) I've heard why the common carrier argument isn't "the best solution", but I don't fully understand why metering hasn't been championed as a way to have the two sides (consumers and the companies) come to some common ground, or at least "call the bluff" of the companies using justifications like the above ("people use internet differently", "people will never use this amount"); so why not just see, and charge accordingly?

Solarsail 12y ago
Metering is used in Canada. Many have criticized the policy as backwards, unfair, and hampering creativity compared to other countries. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/a-metered-internet-is-a-regulatory-failure/article565228/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/a-metere... Tho I do agree that, at a first glance, it seems to have extremely good correlation with the cost of the service provided.
- existencebox 12y ago
  They present a counterargument of the "heavy user", dismiss it, and don't seem to explain why it's not a fair example of why metering is useful. It seems that the main complaint of the article is simply that the overage charges are insane, as they are for cell. I agree. I also think that it's "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" to suggest an entire reversal of policy (when observing what unmetered use results in via the US) when a more iterative response would seem to be, "why don't we regulate costs to ensure that this pseudo-utility is actually accessable at a basic level (that grows with the times) to all people?" I'll have to tag another question on here, but is there any system in place for utilities to prevent, say, my water company for charging me 300$ per gallon? I'd assume there's simply some degree of regulation, why not apply that fix elsewhere; have a "hybrid utility" rather than treating it as all black and white.
  - dublinben 12y ago
    Utility rates are highly regulated. They can only charge what a government utility commission allows them to charge. Every few years, they generally plead the case to raise rates slightly, so they can keep up with rising costs or inflation.
Zigurd 12y ago
It's called the Insurance Effect. People are willing to pay more for flat rate, which includes "carrying" high volume users, to insure against bill shock if their usage patterns change. Humans are bad at estimating bandwidth use, and pricing that removes that requirement has real value.
- _greim_ 12y ago
  It may be hard to predict bandwidth usage, but electricity, gas, and water aren't perfectly predictable either, and unlike bandwidth we're incentivized to estimate them and to self-throttle to the extent reasonable (e.g. turn the thermostat down at night).
- saurik 12y ago
  "Insurance" is a form of risk mitigation. The reality of bandwidth is that we know someone who likes using FaceTime, or who has a Netflix subscription, is going to use more bandwidth than someone else. Sure: it makes sense if you aren't certain how large a web page will be to buy insurance on it, but you don't want to be in the same insurance bracket as a true "heavy user": I am happy to take part in a pool where everyone subsidizes the risk of accidental trauma, but I know someone who insists on smoking is going to increase their health costs, and they should be forced to take on that increased burden. This is especially evident when the playing field changes: the cost of insurance for all users goes up dramatically when something like FaceTime or Netflix is released, because the people using it are using dramatically more bandwidth than the people who aren't. If the bandwidth companies said "ok, thanks to Apple's FaceTime service, everyone's connection is now twice as expensive even if you don't own Apple hardware", people would be pissed. This is why insurance charges people differently for their inherent risk, and why you can't use insurance as a metaphor here (well, unless you want to make the opposite argument ;P).
_greim_ 12y ago
> why wouldn't a very simplistic metering be acceptable by that definition? It would be perfectly acceptable (assuming I've understood you). I think the reason nobody is championing it is twofold, ISPs don't like it because it would make them that much more utility-like, which they strenuously want to avoid. Active internet users don't like it because their bandwidth is largely subsidized by less-active subscribers, and leveling the playing field would be a net loss for them. To me it looks like pure selfishness on both accounts.
- dublinben 12y ago
  Active internet users don't like metered billing because they understand it is a ruse. If I use my connection at full capacity all day long, except during the evening prime time, I might rack up several TB of data each month. I'm not causing any network congestion or costing the ISP any money though. The basic user who 'only' streams several shows on Netflix each evening might only use several dozen GB of data each month, but they cost the ISP much more in peak bandwidth congestion.
  - M2Ys4U 12y ago
    So have a peak rate and an off-peak rate. That's exactly what my ISP (Andrews and Arnold[0]) does. I pay for a specific number of 'units' which are consumed faster at peak times (09:00-18:00) than at all other times. A&A's policy[1] is to never be the bottleneck in the network and they also kick up a stink with their transit providers (mainly BT) when they detect a problem (which is very often, as they monitor their network's health closely). They even publish statistics[2] on dropped packets classified by their uplink - for instance over the last 28 days they have a 98.48% success rate at a 1-second granularity one of BT's backhauls, and 100% on TalkTalk's backhaul. They do work out to be more expensive than other ISPs (I pay ~£33 a month for a 40mbit FTTC connection with 4 units) but you pay for a good service and competence. [0] http://aaisp.net.uk/ http://aaisp.net.uk/ [1] http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-speed.html http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-speed.html [2] http://clueless.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi http://clueless.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi
SkynetSystems 12y ago
No because this is artificial scarcity. It does not cost these big internet service providers a single dime more to serve up Netflix than it does to serve up Wikipedia pages. The issue here is the relentless corporate greed that is going to make them continue to squeeze customers and content providers to get more and more profits without offering more service. After the bandwidth caps and the Netflix (content provider) extortions, they will find new reasons to force people to pay more money for the existing internet service they have always been using. This is what happens when you have no competition and you want profits going up year after year. The only cure is for the government to step in and slap some regulations down.

nitrogen 12y ago

Most of the cost is in building infrastructure, not delivering bits. A sensible metering approach would still have a high monthly fee, with a very small additional charge for bandwidth. Further, I don't want to live in a nickel-and-dime world where every single thing I do has the cognitive overhead of worrying about metered usage.

shasta 12y ago
> Most of the cost is in building infrastructure, not delivering bits. But there's significant cost in building infrastructure that can deliver more bits. > Further, I don't want to live in a nickel-and-dime world where every single thing I do has the cognitive overhead of worrying about metered usage. So stop worrying about it. How much cognitive effort do you spend factoring in the cost of electricity, gas and water when you're making spaghetti?
- magicalist 12y ago
  I think the argument is that there's nothing about that tradeoff that's "fair", because it doesn't reflect reality. Unlike electricity, gas, or water, they aren't creating bits, storing bits to ensure supply, or depleting their supply of bits by transmitting them to you. Charging by the bit would just be a good way to increase telco revenue. Now, if you think it would be a good bargaining chip for getting them to accept being dumb pipes, that might be a good argument, but we should call it what it is if that's the case.
  - saurik 12y ago
    Electricity companies can only sort of store electricity: they produce electricity, and it is consumed at some rate by users; this is why electricity is priced differently in many areas during "peak usage hours": because electricity is more like bandwidth than you seem to realize. If you have a difficult time modeling this, try to model electricity in a world where everyone is using renewable energy sources like wind or solar (and if you find that "preposterous", hydroelectric is very common as a primary electricity source in many areas). I can see a strong argument for switching to some kind of billing based on the peak load you contributed to, but that turns into a pricing model almost as complex as Amazon Glacier ;P.

mhurron 12y ago

> until we swallow the pill of paying for what we use—like we do for other utilities What other utility gets to charge the manufacturer of whatever you use consume their service for? What power company gets to charge Lenovo because I plugged a Lenovo laptop into an outlet? You only touch on a portion of what the issue is. And quite frankly to deal with what you did mention, I pay for internet access, I expect internet access. Why should I be charged more because I then choose to use it? Why should I be penalized for the ISP oversubscribing and underestimating the usage. I shouldn't because that's not how they sold their service.

saurik 12y ago
That's the point: as users we have to pay for what we use in order to avoid carriers trying to bill website operators. If you aren't willing to pay more for using more bandwidth than your neighbor, because you use Netflix and your neighbor only haphazardly checks email, then the carrier is going to try to bill Netflix, and we don't want that to happen.

kumbasha 12y ago

Please tell me exactly what the person streaming Netflix is taking away from the little old lady checking Facebook.

_greim_ 12y ago
In many parts of the US, Netflix usage saturates neighborhood cable modem networks in the evenings, making things painfully slow for everyone.

anonymousab 12y ago

Sure. Then ISPs need to start listing what they can actually fulfill, under load, for all customers in a given area at any given time.

saurik 12y ago
If they billed by the byte instead of by some nebulous concept of connectivity then it wouldn't matter what they "can actually fulfill, under load": if they weren't able to get you all the bytes you wanted, you would be paying them less, and they would make less money. The maximum amount of money they could make from their infrastructure per hour would then be exactly their per byte cost times the number of bytes they could move per hour, leading to obvious incentives to increase their capacity.

SilasX 12y ago

The scarcity lies in apportionment of the pipe at any given moment, not in the total data transferred. Therefore, the only way that charging users (whether in money or some other form of opportunity cost) will alleviate scarcity is if it's assessed against he former (apportionment of the pipe), not the latter (total data transferred). Simply charging per unit of data downloaded just makes people cut back on total use, without concern for when they cut back. This does nothing for what you really want to discourage, which is usage at peak times. (My preferred solution is to reduce the fraction of the pipe that you get in proportion to how much you use at peak times. That way you have some incentive to cut back, but not in a way that forces you to eye your wallet.)

saurik 12y ago
Usage during peak times is already discouraged by the network degrading during peak times: rather than charge more you simply get less value, which is equivalent. This causes traffic to naturally smooth out some over time. You thereby in fact do need some way to cut back on the total usage, as a bunch of people randomly using Netflix really does cost more than a bunch of people randomly browsing the web. The goal of the network is not to support the peak load: this seems to be a key misconception in these arguments :/. It just isn't economically efficient to build a system that can support the peak load. If people really do want to have a system that can stream Netflix to everyone's house at 7pm when the traffic throughout the rest of the day is nothing like that amount, then someone has to bear those costs: either Netflix needs to subsidize the weird bandwidth requirement, customers need to opt in to "supports Netflix" plans, or we have to give up entirely on pricing models that don't take into account usage in some way. You might disagree with how that usage is calculated, but right now the problem is that most people just want "lots and lots of bandwidth for a flat rate", and that is inherently incompatible with a demand for network neutrality :(.
- SilasX 12y ago
  I'm aware of all that and don't see how it refutes my assumptions or solution. Yes, the network is degraded at peak times naturally. My idea is to further penalize heavy users (weighted by time of use) but do it in favor of lighter users (which avoids the rent seeking problem). As you note, this inevitably penalizes total use, but does it in a way that accounts for when the use is bad.