6 ms·

I don't get this whole net neautrality discussion that is going on in US (and maybe somewhere else, just haven't paid attention). Consumers pay based on speed

I don't get this whole net neautrality discussion that is going on in US (and maybe somewhere else, just haven't paid attention). Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices. Service providers (not ISPs, but the ones who run servers that consumers connect to) pay based on speed of their connection. If the ISP feels like service providers are not paying enough, raise the prices. Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps? I'm four years old. So please keep that in mind when explaing this to me. :)

pavel_lishin 12y ago
> I'm four years old. I feel like this isn't quite right.
- masklinn 12y ago
  I'm guessing it's a reference to ELI5.
masklinn 12y ago
> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes Because once the middleman has established himself as a monopoly and everybody has to go through him with no alternative, he can make bank by having everybody pay more. > and data caps? Lets the ISP oversubscribe even more and extract even more money out of the system without providing any additional value whatsoever.
grandalf 12y ago
> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps? It's just an alternate way of pricing the service. You could ask similar questions about a lot of industries: - Why does Github charge the way it does and not just price the service per megabyte of data stored or per commit, etc? - Why do fast food restaurants offer free soft drink refills for $0.99 but not offer a single fill for $0.50? - Why do residential bandwidth providers not offer a service with guaranteed gamer-quality low latency? - Why do restaurants not offer a discount for customers who decline the free bread and water?
- politician 12y ago
  - Why does the water supplied to my home come in clear and polluted varieties? - Why does the electricity supplied to my office come in normal power and brown power versions? Oh, wait.
  - rickyc091 12y ago
    Why do business services always cost more! Cable Internet for Residential / Cable Internet for Business...
    - masklinn 12y ago
      > Why do business services always cost more! Because SLA.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Those examples are funny, because, e.g. our water infrastructure is the subject of underinvestment to the tune of $55 billion a year: http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2011/12/asce-report-on-the-impact-of-under-investment-in-water-infrastructure-in-the-us-.html http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2011/12/asce-report-o... When you make an industry a public utility, and eliminate market-rate profit incentives, you get underinvestment, which is exactly what we see in water, power, etc: http://www.asce.org/failuretoact http://www.asce.org/failuretoact. You can talk all you want about making internet service into "dumb pipes" but you can't make investors and shareholders pour billions of dollars a year into the "dumb pipe" business. They'll just dump their regulated business lines and shift the money to something more profitable, like Goldman is encouraging Verizon to do: http://stopthecap.com/2012/01/09/wall-street-encourages-verizon-to-get-completely-out-of-landlinefios-business http://stopthecap.com/2012/01/09/wall-street-encourages-veri....
    - politician 12y ago
      Investors and shareholders are not in favor of pouring billions of dollars a year into infrastructure either. That's why we're seeing this rent seeking behavior, and one reason why we have slower speeds than other modern nations. Yes, I am in favor of municipal fiber-to-the-home solutions paid for with public dollars given the critical importance of these "dumb pipes".
JoshTriplett 12y ago
ISPs would like to charge a fee from services that produce a huge amount of traffic, to carry that traffic to their consumers with a higher priority rather than mixing it in with all the other content. (Some people worry that ISPs would throttle high-bandwidth content lower than other content to force the services to pay to avoid degredation.) Note that large ISPs have done this for years, via in-ISP CDNs: if you have enough content, it makes sense to have copies of it to serve up directly from the ISP's network. The primary concern I've seen raised by network neutrality advocates: because many people have very few available high-speed ISP choices (one cable provider and sometimes one fiber provider, since most people can't get competitive DSL), it may not work to just say "pick another ISP if you don't like what yours does". (That assumes enough ISP customers care enough to switch ISPs over this issue.)
adamio 12y ago
Comcast: Video streaming services must pay 40x the base cost, or suffer from a data cap. Amazon: OK, we'll sign a 4 year contract for 30x the base cost. Comcast: Great Year 5 comes around, Amazon wants a discount. Comcast refuses. Comcast then blocks all Amazon IP Address traffic until they reach a deal. Comcast: Customers, you cannot access Amazon video on our service, but here's a $5 coupon to our own video on demand service
- joelcollinsdc 12y ago
  "After weeks of public outcry over the proposal, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the agency would not allow for unfair, or "commercially unreasonable," business practices. He wouldn't accept, for instance, practices that leave a consumer with slower downloads of some Web sites than what the consumer paid for from their Internet service provider." From what I understand, your example would not be permissable. I know there are downsides to this, but a lot of the negative sentiment I see about this seems like an exaggeration which may not work in our favor.
  - j2kun 12y ago
    Comcast has regularly ignored rules set by the FCC in favor of long court battles (that they eventually won). In the mean time, consumers have to deal with it.
    - danielweber 12y ago
      If the worry is that Comcast won't follow the FCC rules, then why bother with anything?
      - Karunamon 12y ago
        By placing what they want to do so far out of the realm of legality that the court battle never happens. This entire scenario simply couldn't happen if internet were a Title 2 service.
  - DannyBee 12y ago
eloff 12y ago
You need to think like an evil cable monopoly. It's a great thing because then they can charge consumers for their broadband service and charge content companies as well. A whole new source of revenue. And they can keep on jacking up the prices whenever they want, because they've got the customers of the content company hostage and can ransom them for nearly any level that would still let the content company turn a small profit.
rayiner 12y ago
> Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices. Imagine you build a road. Who benefits? Drivers, obviously. But also store owners, because customers can now get to their stores. It's equally legitimate to charge the driver, via tolls, or the stores they drive to (via special tax districts). If you charge only the driver, you tap into only part of the net positive value created by the road. This basic premise applies to cables and other infrastructure as much as it does to roads.
- corford 12y ago
  Except without the content, the ISPs wouldn't have much of a business. What's the point connecting people to the internet if there's nothing on there to see? It's supposed to be a symbiotic relationship not a robber baron one. Netflix should be able to just block Comcast until they give in and agree to improve their peering. I live in the UK though, where we have a competitive broadband market. The above tactic is less effective in the US because Comcast's users don't have anywhere else to go.
- fixedd 12y ago
  Both parties are already paying. Netflix, as an example, isn't getting their bandwidth free, and neither are we.
ryanhuff 12y ago
ISP's believe that internet services should have to pay to reach their consumers. This is the first step.
im3w1l 12y ago
Because in this way they will be able to price discriminate more. Running a high bandwidth low profit margin site? Ok, carry on. Running a low bandwidth high profit margin site? Shame if anything were to happen to your latency... All I want is 20% of your profit. Could also be used to make backroom deals where you "slowban" political undesirables.
jberryman 12y ago
> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps? Well, supporters of net neutrality say there is not a need, and that this is just ISPs being greedy. My pet theory on why they've have been able to argue their case effectively: internet traffic (or at least some notion of "website popularity") follows a distribution with a long tail, meaning a small number of sites will always be responsible for a large % of traffic; this makes it easy and attractive for ISPs to target a few players for "protection", because it's easy for them to make the fallacious claim "hey, look Netflix is taking up X% of our bandwidth; that's not fair!" when this doesn't have much to do with Netflix per se, and when that scenario is actually much cheaper (because of caching, etc) to handle than a hypothetical one in which the same traffic is distributed more evenly.

pavel_lishin 12y ago

> I'm four years old. I feel like this isn't quite right.

masklinn 12y ago
I'm guessing it's a reference to ELI5.

masklinn 12y ago

> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes Because once the middleman has established himself as a monopoly and everybody has to go through him with no alternative, he can make bank by having everybody pay more. > and data caps? Lets the ISP oversubscribe even more and extract even more money out of the system without providing any additional value whatsoever.

grandalf 12y ago

> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps? It's just an alternate way of pricing the service. You could ask similar questions about a lot of industries: - Why does Github charge the way it does and not just price the service per megabyte of data stored or per commit, etc? - Why do fast food restaurants offer free soft drink refills for $0.99 but not offer a single fill for $0.50? - Why do residential bandwidth providers not offer a service with guaranteed gamer-quality low latency? - Why do restaurants not offer a discount for customers who decline the free bread and water?

politician 12y ago
- Why does the water supplied to my home come in clear and polluted varieties? - Why does the electricity supplied to my office come in normal power and brown power versions? Oh, wait.
- rickyc091 12y ago
  Why do business services always cost more! Cable Internet for Residential / Cable Internet for Business...
  - masklinn 12y ago
    > Why do business services always cost more! Because SLA.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Those examples are funny, because, e.g. our water infrastructure is the subject of underinvestment to the tune of $55 billion a year: http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2011/12/asce-report-on-the-impact-of-under-investment-in-water-infrastructure-in-the-us-.html http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2011/12/asce-report-o... When you make an industry a public utility, and eliminate market-rate profit incentives, you get underinvestment, which is exactly what we see in water, power, etc: http://www.asce.org/failuretoact http://www.asce.org/failuretoact. You can talk all you want about making internet service into "dumb pipes" but you can't make investors and shareholders pour billions of dollars a year into the "dumb pipe" business. They'll just dump their regulated business lines and shift the money to something more profitable, like Goldman is encouraging Verizon to do: http://stopthecap.com/2012/01/09/wall-street-encourages-verizon-to-get-completely-out-of-landlinefios-business http://stopthecap.com/2012/01/09/wall-street-encourages-veri....
  - politician 12y ago
    Investors and shareholders are not in favor of pouring billions of dollars a year into infrastructure either. That's why we're seeing this rent seeking behavior, and one reason why we have slower speeds than other modern nations. Yes, I am in favor of municipal fiber-to-the-home solutions paid for with public dollars given the critical importance of these "dumb pipes".

JoshTriplett 12y ago

ISPs would like to charge a fee from services that produce a huge amount of traffic, to carry that traffic to their consumers with a higher priority rather than mixing it in with all the other content. (Some people worry that ISPs would throttle high-bandwidth content lower than other content to force the services to pay to avoid degredation.) Note that large ISPs have done this for years, via in-ISP CDNs: if you have enough content, it makes sense to have copies of it to serve up directly from the ISP's network. The primary concern I've seen raised by network neutrality advocates: because many people have very few available high-speed ISP choices (one cable provider and sometimes one fiber provider, since most people can't get competitive DSL), it may not work to just say "pick another ISP if you don't like what yours does". (That assumes enough ISP customers care enough to switch ISPs over this issue.)

adamio 12y ago

Comcast: Video streaming services must pay 40x the base cost, or suffer from a data cap. Amazon: OK, we'll sign a 4 year contract for 30x the base cost. Comcast: Great Year 5 comes around, Amazon wants a discount. Comcast refuses. Comcast then blocks all Amazon IP Address traffic until they reach a deal. Comcast: Customers, you cannot access Amazon video on our service, but here's a $5 coupon to our own video on demand service

joelcollinsdc 12y ago
"After weeks of public outcry over the proposal, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the agency would not allow for unfair, or "commercially unreasonable," business practices. He wouldn't accept, for instance, practices that leave a consumer with slower downloads of some Web sites than what the consumer paid for from their Internet service provider." From what I understand, your example would not be permissable. I know there are downsides to this, but a lot of the negative sentiment I see about this seems like an exaggeration which may not work in our favor.
- j2kun 12y ago
  Comcast has regularly ignored rules set by the FCC in favor of long court battles (that they eventually won). In the mean time, consumers have to deal with it.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    If the worry is that Comcast won't follow the FCC rules, then why bother with anything?
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      By placing what they want to do so far out of the realm of legality that the court battle never happens. This entire scenario simply couldn't happen if internet were a Title 2 service.
- DannyBee 12y ago

eloff 12y ago

You need to think like an evil cable monopoly. It's a great thing because then they can charge consumers for their broadband service and charge content companies as well. A whole new source of revenue. And they can keep on jacking up the prices whenever they want, because they've got the customers of the content company hostage and can ransom them for nearly any level that would still let the content company turn a small profit.

rayiner 12y ago

> Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices. Imagine you build a road. Who benefits? Drivers, obviously. But also store owners, because customers can now get to their stores. It's equally legitimate to charge the driver, via tolls, or the stores they drive to (via special tax districts). If you charge only the driver, you tap into only part of the net positive value created by the road. This basic premise applies to cables and other infrastructure as much as it does to roads.

corford 12y ago
Except without the content, the ISPs wouldn't have much of a business. What's the point connecting people to the internet if there's nothing on there to see? It's supposed to be a symbiotic relationship not a robber baron one. Netflix should be able to just block Comcast until they give in and agree to improve their peering. I live in the UK though, where we have a competitive broadband market. The above tactic is less effective in the US because Comcast's users don't have anywhere else to go.
fixedd 12y ago
Both parties are already paying. Netflix, as an example, isn't getting their bandwidth free, and neither are we.

ryanhuff 12y ago

ISP's believe that internet services should have to pay to reach their consumers. This is the first step.

im3w1l 12y ago

Because in this way they will be able to price discriminate more. Running a high bandwidth low profit margin site? Ok, carry on. Running a low bandwidth high profit margin site? Shame if anything were to happen to your latency... All I want is 20% of your profit. Could also be used to make backroom deals where you "slowban" political undesirables.

jberryman 12y ago

> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps? Well, supporters of net neutrality say there is not a need, and that this is just ISPs being greedy. My pet theory on why they've have been able to argue their case effectively: internet traffic (or at least some notion of "website popularity") follows a distribution with a long tail, meaning a small number of sites will always be responsible for a large % of traffic; this makes it easy and attractive for ISPs to target a few players for "protection", because it's easy for them to make the fallacious claim "hey, look Netflix is taking up X% of our bandwidth; that's not fair!" when this doesn't have much to do with Netflix per se, and when that scenario is actually much cheaper (because of caching, etc) to handle than a hypothetical one in which the same traffic is distributed more evenly.