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In the article the comparison of everyone sharing the same road infrastructure is given. Why is the analogy not carried over to public transportation? There are

In the article the comparison of everyone sharing the same road infrastructure is given. Why is the analogy not carried over to public transportation? There are plenty of people who are willing to pay a much lower cost per trip by riding public transportation instead of driving (or even owning) a car. Nobody is claiming that the bus system is anti-competitive to car manufacturers. In fact, the author even states that people could be satisfied by this approach. If people are satisfied with their walled garden, why is this an issue?

kazagistar 12y ago
Public transportation is public. Private shared transportation does not have nearly the same incumbent advantage. Anyone can build or buy a bus, and move people around. There is not Facebook to pay lots of money to ensure that competitors are locked out of providing a similar service. Moreover, users actually get meaningful choices when it comes to which car or bus to take. ISPs are more like roads, a utility where the options (in many places) are very limited.
tfinniga 12y ago
> Nobody is claiming that the bus system is anti-competitive to car manufacturers. Have you heard of the GM streetcar conspiracy?( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi... ) That doesn't make sense in this context though - the analogy breaks down. The reason why regulation is useful is because unregulated companies collude, form monopolies, fix prices, and eventually kill innovation and prey on their customers. Regulation is a useful tool to provide an even playing field. Sure, customers may be satisfied with a walled garden now, but how did facebook / twitter / netflix flourish? Using unbiased network traffic. We shouldn't shut the door on new startups.
SilasX 12y ago
I see what you mean: Public transportation can be welfare-enhancing when there is enough regularity of travel between certain (networks of) points that throughput is increased when e.g. a lane is converted from road to light rail. The benefits of higher throughput would exceed the opportunity cost of the space being usable for fewer routes. (tl;dr: it pays to bus people if they're all going between the same points.) In that sense, if some major sites can exploit the regularity of the traffic they get to the point that they produce less load on the network per bit transmitted, that it's (not un)reasonable that the user be billed less for that site, though "free" is still questionable. We should be careful to distinguish "bribing ISP for preferential access" vs "accounting for the reality of the cheaper carriage of one site's data". (tl;dr: cheaper data rates can reflect corruption or legitimately lower access cost, and our reaction should reflect that.)
biot 12y ago
The analogy is off. Bus vs. car riding on the road is equivalent to the packets which ride on top of the underlying internet infrastructure. That some people group their information into the same packet (a bus) vs. dedicating the packet to themselves (a car) isn't relevant to the discussion around why the cost of transporting the packet is based on the destination. Imagine if all the roads were toll roads. Regardless of whether you take a bus, car, taxi, bicycle, etc. the toll is waived if you're traveling to McDonald's whereas you have to pay the toll if you're traveling to Burger King. Shouldn't it be like electricity where you pay per kilowatt-hour regardless of the use? Or should powering, say, Sony devices cost you nothing but you get charged for powering other devices?
wvenable 12y ago
The comparison doesn't make sense. There are no fees to drive on the road so my car and the bus are on equal terms. Even if there was a fee, and riding on a bus makes me exempt, that's still not a close analogy. A better analogy is a situation where there are competing private bus companies, there's a road fee per user (paid by the user), and the city exempts users of its preferred bus company. In that situation, all other private bus companies are at a huge competitive disadvantage because their users are still required to pay the fee.

kazagistar 12y ago

Public transportation is public. Private shared transportation does not have nearly the same incumbent advantage. Anyone can build or buy a bus, and move people around. There is not Facebook to pay lots of money to ensure that competitors are locked out of providing a similar service. Moreover, users actually get meaningful choices when it comes to which car or bus to take. ISPs are more like roads, a utility where the options (in many places) are very limited.

tfinniga 12y ago

> Nobody is claiming that the bus system is anti-competitive to car manufacturers. Have you heard of the GM streetcar conspiracy?( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi... ) That doesn't make sense in this context though - the analogy breaks down. The reason why regulation is useful is because unregulated companies collude, form monopolies, fix prices, and eventually kill innovation and prey on their customers. Regulation is a useful tool to provide an even playing field. Sure, customers may be satisfied with a walled garden now, but how did facebook / twitter / netflix flourish? Using unbiased network traffic. We shouldn't shut the door on new startups.

SilasX 12y ago

I see what you mean: Public transportation can be welfare-enhancing when there is enough regularity of travel between certain (networks of) points that throughput is increased when e.g. a lane is converted from road to light rail. The benefits of higher throughput would exceed the opportunity cost of the space being usable for fewer routes. (tl;dr: it pays to bus people if they're all going between the same points.) In that sense, if some major sites can exploit the regularity of the traffic they get to the point that they produce less load on the network per bit transmitted, that it's (not un)reasonable that the user be billed less for that site, though "free" is still questionable. We should be careful to distinguish "bribing ISP for preferential access" vs "accounting for the reality of the cheaper carriage of one site's data". (tl;dr: cheaper data rates can reflect corruption or legitimately lower access cost, and our reaction should reflect that.)

biot 12y ago

The analogy is off. Bus vs. car riding on the road is equivalent to the packets which ride on top of the underlying internet infrastructure. That some people group their information into the same packet (a bus) vs. dedicating the packet to themselves (a car) isn't relevant to the discussion around why the cost of transporting the packet is based on the destination. Imagine if all the roads were toll roads. Regardless of whether you take a bus, car, taxi, bicycle, etc. the toll is waived if you're traveling to McDonald's whereas you have to pay the toll if you're traveling to Burger King. Shouldn't it be like electricity where you pay per kilowatt-hour regardless of the use? Or should powering, say, Sony devices cost you nothing but you get charged for powering other devices?

wvenable 12y ago

The comparison doesn't make sense. There are no fees to drive on the road so my car and the bus are on equal terms. Even if there was a fee, and riding on a bus makes me exempt, that's still not a close analogy. A better analogy is a situation where there are competing private bus companies, there's a road fee per user (paid by the user), and the city exempts users of its preferred bus company. In that situation, all other private bus companies are at a huge competitive disadvantage because their users are still required to pay the fee.