5 ms·

I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm honestly curious: why is pay-for-use bad for internet access but okay for water, electricity, and phone?

by jchendy 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- jchendy 12y ago
  That would be covered by net neutrality, wouldn't it? If all data has to be treated equally, that type of abuse wouldn't be possible regardless of whether you're paying by bandwidth or by usage.
  - ep103 12y ago
    yeah, you're right, I misunderstood the question
WillPostForFood 12y ago
Pay for use for water and electricity is good because the resources are finite, and you want to conserve them. The advantage of unlimited internet use is it promotes the creation of services that need more bandwidth.
- jchendy 12y ago
  Isn't network usage also finite? I.e. wouldn't there be issues if every device connected to an ISP simultaneously tried to stream large data?
  - WillPostForFood 12y ago
    At any given moment it is finite, but it is always expandable, and not a consumable resource. Using more bandwidth helps push the expansion. If we had extremely high rates, and low caps, you'd never get things like video services, and bandwidth providers would never have incentive to expand the network. So the more use the better.
    - tedunangst 12y ago
      The same could be said for electricity, no? I should leave the lights on all the time to increase energy demand so they build more wind farms and solar plants?
      - WillPostForFood 12y ago
        Only if you ignore the consequences of recklessly burning fossil fuels, and are 100% sure wind and solar can replace it. So, no. But to be clear, I didn't say waste bandwidth to drive growth, I said unlimited bandwidth promotes growth of services that use bandwidth.
  - adventured 12y ago
    There's a clear difference between these resources. If you could use 100 times more electricity and water at the same cost (with no damage to the environment), would you? We might find uses for doing that, if those resources weren't relatively scarce. If you give an average consumer a 10tb hard drive, will they use it all? Probably not even close. The amount of storage wasted by consumers is beyond epic, thrown away with the next system upgrade (someone want to count how much storage America has thrown away in the last decade?). That's the bandwidth context. We can keep boosting the amount of bandwidth for an exceptionally long time, at little additional cost over what the present infrastructure cost. You can go from 100mbps to 200mbps while not having to rebuild everything. Try doubling the output of or availability of water or electricity like that. Put another way, bandwidth - like storage or processing power - is a hyper expanding resource; one in which we can even expand just by being clever while using most of the existing infrastructure. Water and electricity are nothing like that. Humans could easily consume all the fresh water on this planet. We can expand storage, bandwidth and processing power to such an extent that we can never saturate the total capacity. In fact, in the first world, that has already mostly occurred for consumers with storage and processing power (and for the radical majority of all server side use cases). Will 99.99% of all web sites ever need a 1gbps pipe? Nope, and they also won't need 1tb of storage, or 64gb of ram, or a 16 core modern Xeon processor. Those sites will never have enough content to consume such resources, and certainly not in the next decade.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      The waste is less, if you weight storage by performance or energy efficiency. Then, we're throwing away low-yield storage and replacing it with high-octane storage. The 'waste factor' becomes small. Also consider most discarded storage is a fraction of the size of what it is replaced by. So the fraction of waste is always small (compared to its absolute value).
      - adventured 12y ago
        Right, and that's another way in which bandwidth, storage and processing power as resources have absolutely nothing in common with water or electricity. The ability to waste exponentially greater amounts each generation. Do I need to watch a late night talk show at 1080 on YouTube instead of 720? No, it has only modest impact on my experience, but I do it anyway because there's no cost associated to doing so. I can freely waste vast amounts of bandwidth (or storage, or processing power) with minimum concern, rather than focusing on conservation. My phone is another marvel in that regard. It costs $0.50 per year in electricity, about 1% to 2% of what my desktop PC consumes. I can waste my phone's resources freely with very minimum concerns for the environment, especially relative to most other things in my house or life that use electricity. Water and electricity will never have these properties. It's unlikely the average person will ever be able to waste vast amounts of either without concern.
ploxiln 12y ago
If the pay-for-use you mean is "data caps", I think the reason a lot of people are fully against the idea is because historically they've been unreasonable. Like if your water was charged at a dollar a gallon. Because there's just one provider. To continue the analogy, people had "unlimited" water before, and they might use 10, or 100, or 400 gallons in a month, they're not really sure. And then TWC applies a cap of 60 gallons and wants double the money if you want 100 gallons. If you hit 200 gallons before for some reason, forget it. No one in your area is offering you that. So people said "what's this caps, screw caps, no more caps!" because they were crazy caps, and you couldn't just pay a roughly linear rate for more data. Comcast used to have a 250GB cap, which is more reasonable. But it's flat, for all consumer tiers. And you can't pay less for 100GB or a bit more for 270GB. And various companies at various times have had "unofficial" caps. I think pay-per-gig-used could be reasonable, but I understand why many people are dead against it, so far it's only been a way to screw them.
thedufer 12y ago
Water, phone, and, to a lesser degree, electricity, are all reasonable for the average person to understand. A shower obviously uses more water than a tap, and when it's off it uses none. A phone costs me minutes while it's off the hook and doesn't when it isn't. And I know about how long a minute is. Turning on my computer, lights, or microwave costs electricity (although I may not have a great idea of how much, I can make decent guesses to the ratios). But do even the most tech-savvy have a reasonable intuition for how much bandwidth a computer uses while idle with a given set of applications running? How much a game of StarCraft uses? How much streaming video costs? (The last one is a trick question - it can change dynamically depending on your downstream speed.) It's just unreasonable to ask people to make good decisions about these things.
LLWM 12y ago
It's not bad for consumers but companies like Google and Netflix have a vested interest in keeping everyone away from that model because their own businesses rely on average joes moving large amounts of data. At this point they have so much PR leverage that usage-based pricing can't realistically happen.

I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm honestly curious: why is pay-for-use bad for internet access but okay for water, electricity, and phone?

by jchendy 12y ago

I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm honestly curious: why is pay-for-use bad for internet access but okay for water, electricity, and phone?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jchendy 12y ago
That would be covered by net neutrality, wouldn't it? If all data has to be treated equally, that type of abuse wouldn't be possible regardless of whether you're paying by bandwidth or by usage.
- ep103 12y ago
  yeah, you're right, I misunderstood the question

WillPostForFood 12y ago

Pay for use for water and electricity is good because the resources are finite, and you want to conserve them. The advantage of unlimited internet use is it promotes the creation of services that need more bandwidth.

jchendy 12y ago
Isn't network usage also finite? I.e. wouldn't there be issues if every device connected to an ISP simultaneously tried to stream large data?
- WillPostForFood 12y ago
  At any given moment it is finite, but it is always expandable, and not a consumable resource. Using more bandwidth helps push the expansion. If we had extremely high rates, and low caps, you'd never get things like video services, and bandwidth providers would never have incentive to expand the network. So the more use the better.
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    The same could be said for electricity, no? I should leave the lights on all the time to increase energy demand so they build more wind farms and solar plants?
    - WillPostForFood 12y ago
      Only if you ignore the consequences of recklessly burning fossil fuels, and are 100% sure wind and solar can replace it. So, no. But to be clear, I didn't say waste bandwidth to drive growth, I said unlimited bandwidth promotes growth of services that use bandwidth.
- adventured 12y ago
  There's a clear difference between these resources. If you could use 100 times more electricity and water at the same cost (with no damage to the environment), would you? We might find uses for doing that, if those resources weren't relatively scarce. If you give an average consumer a 10tb hard drive, will they use it all? Probably not even close. The amount of storage wasted by consumers is beyond epic, thrown away with the next system upgrade (someone want to count how much storage America has thrown away in the last decade?). That's the bandwidth context. We can keep boosting the amount of bandwidth for an exceptionally long time, at little additional cost over what the present infrastructure cost. You can go from 100mbps to 200mbps while not having to rebuild everything. Try doubling the output of or availability of water or electricity like that. Put another way, bandwidth - like storage or processing power - is a hyper expanding resource; one in which we can even expand just by being clever while using most of the existing infrastructure. Water and electricity are nothing like that. Humans could easily consume all the fresh water on this planet. We can expand storage, bandwidth and processing power to such an extent that we can never saturate the total capacity. In fact, in the first world, that has already mostly occurred for consumers with storage and processing power (and for the radical majority of all server side use cases). Will 99.99% of all web sites ever need a 1gbps pipe? Nope, and they also won't need 1tb of storage, or 64gb of ram, or a 16 core modern Xeon processor. Those sites will never have enough content to consume such resources, and certainly not in the next decade.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    The waste is less, if you weight storage by performance or energy efficiency. Then, we're throwing away low-yield storage and replacing it with high-octane storage. The 'waste factor' becomes small. Also consider most discarded storage is a fraction of the size of what it is replaced by. So the fraction of waste is always small (compared to its absolute value).
    - adventured 12y ago
      Right, and that's another way in which bandwidth, storage and processing power as resources have absolutely nothing in common with water or electricity. The ability to waste exponentially greater amounts each generation. Do I need to watch a late night talk show at 1080 on YouTube instead of 720? No, it has only modest impact on my experience, but I do it anyway because there's no cost associated to doing so. I can freely waste vast amounts of bandwidth (or storage, or processing power) with minimum concern, rather than focusing on conservation. My phone is another marvel in that regard. It costs $0.50 per year in electricity, about 1% to 2% of what my desktop PC consumes. I can waste my phone's resources freely with very minimum concerns for the environment, especially relative to most other things in my house or life that use electricity. Water and electricity will never have these properties. It's unlikely the average person will ever be able to waste vast amounts of either without concern.

ploxiln 12y ago

If the pay-for-use you mean is "data caps", I think the reason a lot of people are fully against the idea is because historically they've been unreasonable. Like if your water was charged at a dollar a gallon. Because there's just one provider. To continue the analogy, people had "unlimited" water before, and they might use 10, or 100, or 400 gallons in a month, they're not really sure. And then TWC applies a cap of 60 gallons and wants double the money if you want 100 gallons. If you hit 200 gallons before for some reason, forget it. No one in your area is offering you that. So people said "what's this caps, screw caps, no more caps!" because they were crazy caps, and you couldn't just pay a roughly linear rate for more data. Comcast used to have a 250GB cap, which is more reasonable. But it's flat, for all consumer tiers. And you can't pay less for 100GB or a bit more for 270GB. And various companies at various times have had "unofficial" caps. I think pay-per-gig-used could be reasonable, but I understand why many people are dead against it, so far it's only been a way to screw them.

thedufer 12y ago

Water, phone, and, to a lesser degree, electricity, are all reasonable for the average person to understand. A shower obviously uses more water than a tap, and when it's off it uses none. A phone costs me minutes while it's off the hook and doesn't when it isn't. And I know about how long a minute is. Turning on my computer, lights, or microwave costs electricity (although I may not have a great idea of how much, I can make decent guesses to the ratios). But do even the most tech-savvy have a reasonable intuition for how much bandwidth a computer uses while idle with a given set of applications running? How much a game of StarCraft uses? How much streaming video costs? (The last one is a trick question - it can change dynamically depending on your downstream speed.) It's just unreasonable to ask people to make good decisions about these things.

LLWM 12y ago

It's not bad for consumers but companies like Google and Netflix have a vested interest in keeping everyone away from that model because their own businesses rely on average joes moving large amounts of data. At this point they have so much PR leverage that usage-based pricing can't realistically happen.