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"We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally." One assumes larger customers get more fa

"We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally." One assumes larger customers get more favorable processing rates than smaller customers. So if two services do largely the same thing and both use Stripe and one is substantially larger than the other then I suspect Stripe is directly, even if inadvertently, favoring one over the other. Stripe's in the payments business and they favor one set of customers over the other based on their size and pricing power. My issue isn't with Stripe. It's with the language around net neutrality. Basically 1000+ entrepreneurs and VC's who generally bemoan all things government are now asking that this area be protected from market forces. Very awkward. Any half way decent free market economist will tell you that every non Netflix user is subsidizing the crap out of Netflix users under the current set up and that's not very free marketish.

silverbax88 12y ago
They are asking that this area be protected from artificial scarcity (which is illegal in all markets), not 'market forces'.
protomyth 12y ago
"Any half way decent free market economist will tell you that every non Netflix user is subsidizing the crap out of Netflix users under the current set up and that's not very free marketish." Can you explain the reasoning of this statement?
- SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
  I second the motion. I think he means that people who pay for internet access and then barely use it subsidize the people who do use it. Just like gym memberships that aren't used subsidize those that are. But it's a specious argument. Just because some users are more profitable than others doesn't mean that it's OK to charge money to providers to not degrade the pipe that I'm paying for. If I want to download at full speed 24/7, I should be able to do that (barring any specific limits in my contract with the ISP). Yes, I will be a less profitable customer than one who sends an email once a week, but those are the breaks: Either change the contract so its limits are clear, or make sure that the average profit stays enough in the black to cover the cost of the outliers. I'm paying for a service. If they aren't providing that service, and they are limiting my connection to try to shake down providers, they're doing it by hurting my service experience. And if they're doing that in a market where there are no ISP options, then it's an abuse of monopoly power. And any "half way decent free market economist" should recognize that monopolies can and should be regulated. Especially when the monopoly is on something that the UN has declared to be a human right. [1] [1] http://www.thewire.com/technology/2011/06/united-nations-wikileaks-internet-human-rights/38526/ http://www.thewire.com/technology/2011/06/united-nations-wik...
  - seizethecheese 12y ago
    "If I want to download at full speed 24/7, I should be able to do that" Why exactly? Replace your reasoning with any other commodity and does it still make sense? What makes data streaming so holy?
    - addandsubtract 12y ago
      Because ISP's are selling unlimited bandwidth packages. If they don't want people downloading 24/7 then they should go back to selling limited bandwidth packages - and not divide the internet into a fast/slow lane.
      - dreamdu5t 12y ago
        That's a separate issue: fraud or false advertisement. You'll notice that they probably don't actually sell you unlimited bandwidth.
    - SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
      Another comment answered correctly: Because I am buying "unlimited" bandwidth. If they want to sell limited bandwidth, that's fine. But if they're selling me a product that claims it's unlimited, then they should be prepared to actually offer that product. What commodity DOESN'T operate in the manner it's advertised?
- seizethecheese 12y ago
  Explanation via analogy: imagine that your water utility had to charge the same price regardless of how much water you used. The price for water service would be set at a little above average cost per customer. Now imagine that 30% of water was used by people with pools in their back yard (Netflix users.) The pool owners would have an extremely subsidized service, while everybody else would be paying extra. This is bad for non-pool owners, and also bad for the utility who could be charging pool owners a lot more money. Now imagine the poorest household in town has to decide if they can afford water service. They would like to purchase a small amount of water for showers and cleaning, but must buy an unlimited supply of water just like everybody else. Some households may choose to go without water to pay for food. This is bad for the poor and bad for the utility who loses out on would-be customers. Now imagine if the utility proposed a variable rate structure. The businesses that sell products that are consumed along side water, like sprinklers or fish tanks, (Silicon Valley) would fight hard against the utility!
  - protomyth 12y ago
    Water is a physical commodity with a limited supply. Bandwidth is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. I don't see how your 2-party (supplier, consumer) limited commodity example relates to the 3-party (supplier, transport, consumer) non-commodity example.
  - ejain 12y ago
    Net Neutrality does not require ISPs to charge the same price regardless of how much bandwidth a customer is using, and it does not prohibit ISPs from having rates on a sliding scale in order to penalize heavy users (as some water utilities do). Water utilities btw have "pipe neutrality", i.e. it's none of their business what you do with the water you are paying for, and they certainly can't shake down dishwasher manufacturers for money to compensate them for the water that's being used by their customer's dishwashers :-)
jessriedel 12y ago
> My issue isn't with Stripe. It's with the language around net neutrality. Basically 1000+ entrepreneurs and VC's who generally bemoan all things government are now asking that this area be protected from market forces. Very awkward. Right. There's a good argument to be made that ISPs have local monopolies (due either to natural failings of utility markets, or to crony government intervention, depending on your political persuasion) and therefore government regulation is a necessary evil that can be accepted in this case even by people who are generally free-market oriented. But that distinction must be made clear by anyone who wants to salvage their free-market credentials. Likewise, they must acknowledge that net neutrality will unfortunately destroy benefits that would naturally accrue in a without government regulation: the ability for users who need it to pay a premium for fast or reliable service, a la first class mail. (You can try to carve out exceptions for this with even more complex regulation, but the serious downsides of this must too be acknowledged.)
- Terr_ 12y ago
  > the ability for users who need it to pay a premium for fast or reliable service, a la first class mail So in that analogy, did the postal service also begin to mishandle regular mail that was being sent to certain specific apartments and office suites, in order to force people to buy first-class?
- ejain 12y ago
  > the ability for users who need it to pay a premium for fast or reliable service, a la first class mail Net Neutrality does not prohibit an ISP from charging their customers more for a faster or more reliable Internet connection; it simply prohibits the ISP from accepting money from Dominos to speed up access to their website (or slow down or even block access to Pizza Hut's website).
  - jessriedel 12y ago
    But I only want to pay a premium for a fast connection to certain websites, and I don't want to have to renegotiate with Comcast every time I'd like to connect to a new website that is worth enhancing with a fast connection. Nor, in a perfect world, should it be illegal for a website to cover this fee if the website can derive unusual profits from it. If net neutrality applied to mail, then it would be illegal for Amazon to send me pre-paid first-class envelopes for returns. (This turns out not to be useful for mail, but the analogous case could be very useful for data.)
jbooth 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly Trust-busting and anti-collusion laws aren't "anti-capitalist", even though you could argue backroom deals are just the free market at work. The same goes for regulation of a natural monopoly.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Trust-busting and anti-collusion laws aren't "anti-capitalist" Sure they are. They are specifically directed at preventing capitalists from combining in certain ways to advance their interests as capitalists, and can't be anything but anti-capitalist.
  - webmaven 12y ago
    That depends on whether you parse 'anti-capitalist' as 'anti-people-who-are-capitalists' or 'anti-markets-which-are-capitalist'. Completely unregulated markets aren't very friendly to capitalism (although some individual capitalists may end up on top of the heap) either as they don't stay capitalist, so most capitalists go along with trust busting and anti collusion regulations as they (correctly) assume that their individual odds of ending up as the apex predator in a dog-eat-dog world are not very good.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Completely unregulated markets aren't very friendly to capitalism No, but markets which are regulated in favor of capitalists rather than restraining them are -- which is the feature of "capitalism" for which the system was named by its 19th century critics. (Of course, "capitalism" gets abused to mean "a system with whatever features of modern mixed economies the speaker likes but without those which the speaker does not like" frequently enough that it is getting close to the point of being a completely useless term.)
      - webmaven 12y ago
        I think you're glossing over the point that markets that at least minimally restrain capitalists to keep them from screwing over other capitalists is a basic feature of capitalism-friendliness (at least to the extent that you agree capitalism-friendliness requires that a market be prevented from devolving into some form of feudalism). That said, yes, I am aware of the 'what do you mean by capitalism' issue. I've found this article interesting in that vein: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/08/libertarian-anticapitalism/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/08/libertarian-ant...
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Any half way decent free market economist will tell you that every non Netflix user is subsidizing the crap out of Netflix users under the current set up and that's not very free marketish. Note that no form of net neutrality regulation that the FCC has ever proposed prohibited metered rates for broadband. You don't need the absence of neutrality to correct any problem with high-use users being subsidized by low-use users in the current "pay for peak bandwidth" system. But metering is more visible to customers and less effective and capturing the specific and proven profits of particular content firms than per-source tolls to the content firms.

silverbax88 12y ago

They are asking that this area be protected from artificial scarcity (which is illegal in all markets), not 'market forces'.

protomyth 12y ago

"Any half way decent free market economist will tell you that every non Netflix user is subsidizing the crap out of Netflix users under the current set up and that's not very free marketish." Can you explain the reasoning of this statement?

SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
I second the motion. I think he means that people who pay for internet access and then barely use it subsidize the people who do use it. Just like gym memberships that aren't used subsidize those that are. But it's a specious argument. Just because some users are more profitable than others doesn't mean that it's OK to charge money to providers to not degrade the pipe that I'm paying for. If I want to download at full speed 24/7, I should be able to do that (barring any specific limits in my contract with the ISP). Yes, I will be a less profitable customer than one who sends an email once a week, but those are the breaks: Either change the contract so its limits are clear, or make sure that the average profit stays enough in the black to cover the cost of the outliers. I'm paying for a service. If they aren't providing that service, and they are limiting my connection to try to shake down providers, they're doing it by hurting my service experience. And if they're doing that in a market where there are no ISP options, then it's an abuse of monopoly power. And any "half way decent free market economist" should recognize that monopolies can and should be regulated. Especially when the monopoly is on something that the UN has declared to be a human right. [1] [1] http://www.thewire.com/technology/2011/06/united-nations-wikileaks-internet-human-rights/38526/ http://www.thewire.com/technology/2011/06/united-nations-wik...
- seizethecheese 12y ago
  "If I want to download at full speed 24/7, I should be able to do that" Why exactly? Replace your reasoning with any other commodity and does it still make sense? What makes data streaming so holy?
  - addandsubtract 12y ago
    Because ISP's are selling unlimited bandwidth packages. If they don't want people downloading 24/7 then they should go back to selling limited bandwidth packages - and not divide the internet into a fast/slow lane.
    - dreamdu5t 12y ago
      That's a separate issue: fraud or false advertisement. You'll notice that they probably don't actually sell you unlimited bandwidth.
  - SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
    Another comment answered correctly: Because I am buying "unlimited" bandwidth. If they want to sell limited bandwidth, that's fine. But if they're selling me a product that claims it's unlimited, then they should be prepared to actually offer that product. What commodity DOESN'T operate in the manner it's advertised?
seizethecheese 12y ago
Explanation via analogy: imagine that your water utility had to charge the same price regardless of how much water you used. The price for water service would be set at a little above average cost per customer. Now imagine that 30% of water was used by people with pools in their back yard (Netflix users.) The pool owners would have an extremely subsidized service, while everybody else would be paying extra. This is bad for non-pool owners, and also bad for the utility who could be charging pool owners a lot more money. Now imagine the poorest household in town has to decide if they can afford water service. They would like to purchase a small amount of water for showers and cleaning, but must buy an unlimited supply of water just like everybody else. Some households may choose to go without water to pay for food. This is bad for the poor and bad for the utility who loses out on would-be customers. Now imagine if the utility proposed a variable rate structure. The businesses that sell products that are consumed along side water, like sprinklers or fish tanks, (Silicon Valley) would fight hard against the utility!
- protomyth 12y ago
  Water is a physical commodity with a limited supply. Bandwidth is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. I don't see how your 2-party (supplier, consumer) limited commodity example relates to the 3-party (supplier, transport, consumer) non-commodity example.
- ejain 12y ago
  Net Neutrality does not require ISPs to charge the same price regardless of how much bandwidth a customer is using, and it does not prohibit ISPs from having rates on a sliding scale in order to penalize heavy users (as some water utilities do). Water utilities btw have "pipe neutrality", i.e. it's none of their business what you do with the water you are paying for, and they certainly can't shake down dishwasher manufacturers for money to compensate them for the water that's being used by their customer's dishwashers :-)

jessriedel 12y ago

> My issue isn't with Stripe. It's with the language around net neutrality. Basically 1000+ entrepreneurs and VC's who generally bemoan all things government are now asking that this area be protected from market forces. Very awkward. Right. There's a good argument to be made that ISPs have local monopolies (due either to natural failings of utility markets, or to crony government intervention, depending on your political persuasion) and therefore government regulation is a necessary evil that can be accepted in this case even by people who are generally free-market oriented. But that distinction must be made clear by anyone who wants to salvage their free-market credentials. Likewise, they must acknowledge that net neutrality will unfortunately destroy benefits that would naturally accrue in a without government regulation: the ability for users who need it to pay a premium for fast or reliable service, a la first class mail. (You can try to carve out exceptions for this with even more complex regulation, but the serious downsides of this must too be acknowledged.)

Terr_ 12y ago
> the ability for users who need it to pay a premium for fast or reliable service, a la first class mail So in that analogy, did the postal service also begin to mishandle regular mail that was being sent to certain specific apartments and office suites, in order to force people to buy first-class?
ejain 12y ago
> the ability for users who need it to pay a premium for fast or reliable service, a la first class mail Net Neutrality does not prohibit an ISP from charging their customers more for a faster or more reliable Internet connection; it simply prohibits the ISP from accepting money from Dominos to speed up access to their website (or slow down or even block access to Pizza Hut's website).
- jessriedel 12y ago
  But I only want to pay a premium for a fast connection to certain websites, and I don't want to have to renegotiate with Comcast every time I'd like to connect to a new website that is worth enhancing with a fast connection. Nor, in a perfect world, should it be illegal for a website to cover this fee if the website can derive unusual profits from it. If net neutrality applied to mail, then it would be illegal for Amazon to send me pre-paid first-class envelopes for returns. (This turns out not to be useful for mail, but the analogous case could be very useful for data.)

jbooth 12y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly Trust-busting and anti-collusion laws aren't "anti-capitalist", even though you could argue backroom deals are just the free market at work. The same goes for regulation of a natural monopoly.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Trust-busting and anti-collusion laws aren't "anti-capitalist" Sure they are. They are specifically directed at preventing capitalists from combining in certain ways to advance their interests as capitalists, and can't be anything but anti-capitalist.
- webmaven 12y ago
  That depends on whether you parse 'anti-capitalist' as 'anti-people-who-are-capitalists' or 'anti-markets-which-are-capitalist'. Completely unregulated markets aren't very friendly to capitalism (although some individual capitalists may end up on top of the heap) either as they don't stay capitalist, so most capitalists go along with trust busting and anti collusion regulations as they (correctly) assume that their individual odds of ending up as the apex predator in a dog-eat-dog world are not very good.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Completely unregulated markets aren't very friendly to capitalism No, but markets which are regulated in favor of capitalists rather than restraining them are -- which is the feature of "capitalism" for which the system was named by its 19th century critics. (Of course, "capitalism" gets abused to mean "a system with whatever features of modern mixed economies the speaker likes but without those which the speaker does not like" frequently enough that it is getting close to the point of being a completely useless term.)
    - webmaven 12y ago
      I think you're glossing over the point that markets that at least minimally restrain capitalists to keep them from screwing over other capitalists is a basic feature of capitalism-friendliness (at least to the extent that you agree capitalism-friendliness requires that a market be prevented from devolving into some form of feudalism). That said, yes, I am aware of the 'what do you mean by capitalism' issue. I've found this article interesting in that vein: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/08/libertarian-anticapitalism/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/08/libertarian-ant...

dragonwriter 12y ago

> Any half way decent free market economist will tell you that every non Netflix user is subsidizing the crap out of Netflix users under the current set up and that's not very free marketish. Note that no form of net neutrality regulation that the FCC has ever proposed prohibited metered rates for broadband. You don't need the absence of neutrality to correct any problem with high-use users being subsidized by low-use users in the current "pay for peak bandwidth" system. But metering is more visible to customers and less effective and capturing the specific and proven profits of particular content firms than per-source tolls to the content firms.