
Streaming Is Laying Bare How Big ISPs and Big Tech Work Together Against Users - torgian
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/streaming-laying-bare-how-big-isps-big-tech-and-big-media-work-together-against
======
bregma
I live in a country in which all internet is divided by a vertically-
integrated duopoly.

One of the companies (let's call is "Bell") owns a national fibre network, the
last mile of copper or fiber to the home, ISP service, mobile phone service,
and several national content networks. It receives significant subsidies from
the federal government for providing national backbone service, fixed wireless
service in rural areas from its extensive network of towers, and content
production on its networks. The other duopolist is similar, but started in the
cable TV business instead of the telephone business.

These duopolists are required by law to allow third-party ISPs to use their
backhauls and last-miles in exchange for some of the government subsidies.
They do this grudgingly, using loopholes like providing twisted copper pairs
to the third-party offices even when fibre passes outside their door.
Regulations allow (and there is plenty of admission of, and lawsuits over)
deep packet inspection to allow "traffic shaping" based on content and
connection. At one point the cable company was successfully sued because they
throttled all encrypted traffic on the assumption that it was VPN streaming
pirated video content in competition with their own service., causing gaming
to be useless for half the country.

I understand these are first-world problems. I own shared of some of these
companies, and they pay good dividends. It doesn't mean they are not
unethical.

~~~
golergka
> I understand these are first-world problems.

They are. Second (and some of the third) world countries often have much
better internet, both in terms of competition, prices, and overall quality,
than US and Europe, in my experience.

~~~
mtrovo
I have the same impression and don't understand why. Maybe it's because it's
such an important part of the infrastructure that having slow internet is not
the biggest concern.

I have my bunch of anecdotes from the time I lived in Berlin, one of the best
was how on my building I had access to 500mbps fiber and a friend living on a
building one block from me had to register on a wait list, wait for more than
3 months to get a 50 mbps ADSL, this was the only provider still accepting new
customers at the time for his address. And this was happening just 3km from
city center.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Comms infrastructure is often greenfield in emerging-markets so there’s no
legacy systems getting in the way, and the companies doing the deployment have
the incentive to deploy the then-latest-and-greatest. But in 20-30 years’ time
they’ll be having the same problems we have :)

Another issue is a lack of the kind of regulations (or their enforcement) that
comms companies really dislike: things like regs about how to correctly bury
cables and land-use rights or how to share overhead cable line poles - and
most importantly: minimum service requirements. It’s easy to focus your entire
org on a flashy new FTTP set-up in one single rich urban city when you’re not
legally required to also keep a 75+ year-old unprofitable rural copper system
running.

(No, I’m not a libertarian - and I’m happy to pay more for my service with the
understanding that I’m subsidising a system that keeps isolated and vulnerable
people connected.)

Certain types of corruption at the local level also play a part - which
ordinarily would lead to worse outcomes overall, but in my case, at least, I’d
love it if the suits that run BT’s OpenReach could be bribed to stop propping
up copper :/

------
stingraycharles
Yeah we have similar things here in The Netherlands. Vodafone acquired one of
the major cable internet providers (Ziggo), and are giving benefits to people
who are customers of both; effectively a discount on the bills + a free cable
tv package, which includes HBO Go.

The good thing is that it’s not expensive (I’d argue that they are giving a
deal that’s cheaper than anything else out there), but they do make it nearly
impossible for eg ADSL providers to compete.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. I consider the root problem the monopoly
the cable providers have, as its by far the fastest way to driver internet
compared to ADSL. As such, I’ve put my hopes on fiber optical arriving soon,
which exposes a much larger market on which multiple providers can compete.

Incredibly annoying by the way that HBO Go is not available for Apple TV, so
it’s pretty much worthless to me and I just end up torrenting anything of HBO
I want to watch. Not sure about the legality about it, but it sure as hell is
a better experience.

~~~
fyfy18
> I’ve put my hopes on fiber optical arriving soon, which exposes a much
> larger market on which multiple providers can compete

I live in Lithuania which has a pretty good fiber rollout, and has fair rules
for consumers on common access to physical infrastructure by different
providers.

In reality though it means you still only have one choice on who your internet
provider is. It's not worth it for multiple providers to wire up an apartment
or neighbourhood when there is already an existing provider there.

~~~
blooalien
"It's not worth it for multiple providers to wire up an apartment or
neighbourhood when there is already an existing provider there."

Except that it __is __kinda worth it if they 'd think for a moment just how
many folk would __instantly __switch to any competition that arrived in an
area that 's been consistently screwed over by the __only __provider there…
All they 'd have to do is offer honest services at a fair price and they'd
steal a massive chunk of the area's subscriber base.

~~~
michaelt
Imagine the cost of providing fiber is $50/month, and Company A has wired up a
town and charges customers $100/month.

You're the CEO of Company B, and you have two choices:

You can wire up the same town, charge $60/month, Company A will drop their
prices to match, and you get to make a profit of $10/month from half the town.

Or you can wire up a different town, and charge $100/month - giving you a
profit of $50/month from the entire town.

Which one would you do first?

~~~
wayoutthere
It's actually more like "Company A will drop prices to $40/mo in your coverage
area as soon as you start your build-out". Company A has already sunk cost
into the infrastructure so they can afford to do this and remain cash-flow
positive. As soon as you go out of business they know they can just raise the
price again.

For this reason, "overbuilders" tend to target high-income areas where
additional bundled services increase the ARPU (annual revenue per user) beyond
the base service. There's also usually a higher "take rate" (subscribers per
total homes served) in high-income areas. The up-front capital investment
required to build out telecom services is absolutely staggering -- we're
talking billions for even a small area of a city.

------
AlexandrB
I'm still shocked that AT&T's acquisition of Warner Bros and HBO was approved.
I think a fair rule would be that if you're a company that wants to be a
"natural monopoly" like AT&T, you shouldn't be allowed to enter other
verticals like content production or advertising.

~~~
3pt14159
(Disclosure, my mom works for AT&T.)

For better, or for worse, content is the new strategy at AT&T. The physical
layer of the internet is a margins game and it's getting harder and harder for
large organizations to compete. I'm not for it either, but it is
understandable that AT&T would want to be more like Disney than the reverse.

~~~
maxsilver
> The physical layer of the internet is a margins game and it's getting harder
> and harder for large organizations to compete

This is only true because AT&T arbitrarily decided it so.

AT&T could easily make more money by offering a better internet service. They
just willingly gave away their market to Comcast, and have decided it was
easier to compete against Comcast in content than compete against Comcast in
infrastructure.

------
austincheney
Let me give you an example of expensive.

At home in Texas I pay $70 for 1gbps internet. It actually performs at around
890-920mbps both up and down. Perhaps that is expensive compared to other
countries, but I am happy with the price and the customer service/response is
fantastic.

I am currently in Kuwait (modern first-world nation) where the pricing tiers
in my location are $30 for 1.5mbps, $50 for 3mbps, or $90 for 6mbps.

~~~
ab_goat
Let me give you an example of expensive.

I live in MA USA where my only option is Verizon DSL 3mbps down and 0.8mbps up
for $74.57

~~~
briffle
Until I moved west in 2017, I lived 4 miles from Madison, WI (one exit south
of the beltline) and the best I could do was a WISP that was $62/month for 2
Mbps down and 250Kbps up

------
ikeboy
The article conflates mobile and home internet. It correctly claims that most
people don't have a significant choice for home internet, but doesn't say that
for mobile because it's obviously not true - there's at least three major
carriers plus over a dozen resellers. But then the article complains about
zero rating, which as it concedes only applies to mobile, and tries to argue
it's a result of lack of competition.

~~~
cbsmith
The trend is within the next year that at least in major metropolitan areas,
wireless 5G providers will compete for home Internet. It's a dumb way to solve
the problem, that becomes the smart way to solve it once the
regulatory/protective measures around the last mile overwhelm the other
inefficiencies.

~~~
ikeboy
It won't be cheap enough for a couple of years, I think, but agreed. Tech
solving thorny political problems is always my favorite.

~~~
cbsmith
Here in LA, Verizon's 5G Home Wireless plan is $50/month if you already have a
Verizon mobile plan that is $30/month or more. It includes a year of Disney+,
and the first three months free. That's very competitive in the LA market.

------
nottorp
That's one problem. The other problem is that the fragmentation of streaming
(HBO has 3 streaming services now ?!?) will make the pirate bay popular again.

~~~
verylittlemeat
I wish I could find that viral image passed around for decades demanding the
ideal à la carte cable tv - just want a handful of good channels not 1000
channels of crap.

I guess we got what we wanted but not quite the way we expected.

~~~
lotsofpulp
People want high quality content that takes risks, but don’t want to pay for
it.

I find it a lot cheaper to just pay the $2 to $20 to rent/buy the media from
the various vendors since I consume so little of it.

The situation is vastly improved from my childhood when you had to deal with
one company having control of delivering all the media into your home, and it
was on a schedule you couldn’t control and with ads.

Now I just tap a few buttons and it’s on.

~~~
nottorp
$2 to $20 sounds reasonable. But the trend now is to have 20 services with
different content, each costing $2 to $20. Will you subscribe to them all?

~~~
Mindwipe
It means $2 - 20 per title.

Streaming services are a bargain compared to that.

Netflix really did give everyone daft pricing expectations while it burnt
venture capital to price itself artificially cheaply.

~~~
bjo590
I didn't watch Netflix last month and I was still charged for it. Streaming
services are only a bargain if you watch a lot of TV. If you watch
<5hours/month/service than the value proposition begins to become
questionable.

------
tzs
The EFF continues to conflate zero-rating and "sponsored data". Both _can_ be
anti-competitive, but in different ways.

Zero-rating is an ISP not charging for data from a particular source.
Sponsored data is someone other than the user paying the ISP's charge for
user's data from a particular source (usually data from the entity paying for
it). (In cases like HBO and AT&T, where the company paying for the data and
the ISP are part of the same company or subsidiaries of the same company, I'd
count that as a form of disguised zero rating rather than sponsored data).

The case for regulating zero-rating is much stronger than the case for
regulating sponsored data.

Note that a company could in effect do sponsored data without even having an
arrangement with an ISP. E.g., a company could keep track on its end of how
much data from them each customer used each month, map that to ISPs based on
IP address, and then give each customer a discount on their monthly bill based
on that ISPs rates and that customers use.

Let's call this "manual sponsored data".

It's hard to make a case that manual sponsored data is automatically bad, of
even usually bad. Companies are usually allowed to bundle products from other
companies or provide discounts on products from other companies that go well
with theirs.

In particular, its hard to make a case that even if someone does do manual
sponsored data in a way that is bad, we need separate regulation for it
instead of letting it be dealt with under antitrust just like you do for other
third-party bundling arrangements.

But if manual sponsored data is allowed, it is then hard to make the case that
it is bad to allow ISPs to facilitate it by offering a service where they
track the usage for you, and then bill you for your customer's data usage
instead of billing the customer.

Zero-rating, on the other hand, because it is the ISP itself choosing what to
zero-rate, and because the ISP is providing last mile infrastructure for which
there is very little competition in most areas, is much more likely to be
anti-competitive.

It could still also be dealt with by antitrust, but because it is already
taking place under highly constrained competition you can make a decent
argument that it is worth specialized regulation.

Conflating the two just makes it much less likely that such regulation will
happen.

~~~
donmcronald
Both are bad. They hide the real cost from the user.

The manual thing would never work because the rates I pay as a user are
astronomically higher than the rates that would get paid for sponsored data.
That’s half the reason the huge companies like it. It costs very little to
sponsor data where I’d normally pay inflated rates, so it’s “good value” for
me. The problem with that is you need to be a huge business to have a chance
of negotiating those deals, so it disadvantages anyone who wants to compete as
a startup.

Both are bad and should be illegal imo. Let users pay for their data. There’s
no reason to obfuscate the costs.

------
daniel-s
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the ISP monopolies in the US all/mostly
the result of government monopoly protection/non-compete agreements with
cities?

When governments grant monopolies the consumers get screwed. There's nothing
new or mysterious about this.

~~~
Teknoman117
You are correct - but also note government in this case also includes city,
county, and state governments, not just the federal government.

If you ignore the cases in which a town has granted a monopoly to any given
provider, we also have many cases where the ISPs own the poles the lines are
on, or own the underground cable channels. They are not required to provide a
way to buy or rent space on the poles or in the underground channels.

You end up in a situation where any upstart competitor has to duplicate the
entire infrastructure in order to begin competing. It's one of the reasons the
ISPs have been super freaked out by the high bandwidth microwave links
(AirFiber for instance), because it significantly reduces the cost of
establishing baseline service.

I'm fairly envious of the European countries that forbid ISPs or cell
providers from owning (or at least having a monopoly on) the infrastructure
(such as poles, cell towers, underground channels, etc.)

------
Shivetya
AT&T fiber customer here, I didn't even know I had HBO* until I got a paper
mailing from them. I would never have purchased it otherwise as I find their
pricing out of line with their content; pretty much what I think of every
offering other than Disney+

Yeah, no app on my LG C9 but I can stream perfectly fine from my Verizon
connected phone with the AT&T app and it looks and sounds great.

If anything the HBO debacle isn't a Net Neutrality issue but more of how bad a
management team can fuck up a product launch. It is a product people know
exist but don't know exactly what it is or how you get it and the confusion
multiplied by too many names.

fwiw, my neighbor has three kids and between him and his wife they stream
everything under the sun. Neither he nor I have ever seen cap issues so these
might be regional or softly enforced.

also, be careful what you wish for, all utilities are metered and there is no
guarantee a final construct for internet being a utility does not inflict that
along with all sorts of associated fees to insure access beyond those we have
now.

~~~
cromulent
Sewage isn't normally metered, but yes.

~~~
Rychard
In my experience, sewage is billed based on water usage, which makes sense to
me.

If you use some water, presumably it has to go _somewhere_.

~~~
gruez
What if you're just watering your plants?

~~~
lostapathy
Here your max sewer bill is set based on the average water use of 3 winter
months. If you go over that in the summer, we assume it’s mostly landing in
the yard and not the sewer.

------
supergeek133
This is a little bit of my ignorance to public works and how much these
companies invest in infrastructure. Please correct me.

But the way I understand it, the ISP pays for right of way access to the
city/county/state to put in infrastructure to deliver internet access, right?
They also pay for the labor/material cost to get the work done, right?

If we really want net neutrality and a stop to the pseudo monopolies, wouldn't
the municipality have to buy the infrastructure from the private company?

~~~
ViViDboarder
> If we really want net neutrality and a stop to the pseudo monopolies,
> wouldn't the municipality have to buy the infrastructure from the private
> company?

Not necessarily. From a legal perspective, no. Laws could be passed mandating
someone as long as it’s not unconstitutional.

Additionally, there are two different things you’re conflating here. First is
the forcing of someone who is grated a limited monopoly to lease their
infrastructure to competitors. The infrastructure doesn’t have to be public to
mandate some kind of sharing. The company that seeds the investment still gets
some form of limited exclusivity and gets to charge competitors a (regulated)
fee for their use.

Net Neutrality is different. It’s stating that the service you provide must be
neutral in nature. This doesn’t seem directly relevant to an investment in
infrastructure. It’s just consumer protections because these companies are
grated limited monopolies.

In my mind, any further public sale of spectrum, copper, fiber access should
come with a neutrality clause. If any traffic they want to send over the new
property must be neutral, then it could start to change things without help
from our toothless FCC.

~~~
donmcronald
> In my mind, any further public sale of spectrum, copper, fiber access should
> come with a neutrality clause. If any traffic they want to send over the new
> property must be neutral, then it could start to change things without help
> from our toothless FCC.

Or take it a step further and include a requirement for infrastructure sharing
at regulated rates. Selling exclusive access to the rights of way for an
essential service is a type of regressive taxation. The government reduces the
tax revenue needed, but the costs get passed along to the public at flat
rates. The poorer you are, the higher the relative cost for that
infrastructure.

It should be illegal to sell exclusive access to infrastructure related
resources because it’s a system designed to benefit the wealthy more than
anyone else.

------
gitgud
Is this because ISP's can see DNS traffic? as it's in the clear over UDP...

If so, then perhaps DNS over HTTPS would make it impossible for an ISP to
rate-limit certain services. Since all DNS requests would be encrypted too...

(apologies for all the acronyms!)

~~~
Olreich
Traffic shaping can still occur as they see your data volumes and the networks
your connecting to. Sure it might not be as specific to the streaming service,
but it should be decently possible to identify other streaming services, and
any ISP-owned one.

~~~
csunbird
They can also do a reverse DNS lookup of the IP addresses that you are
connecting to, since you can not hide that.

------
tomp
I recently switched from a 3G wireless router to a copper ADSL-like physical
line (not fiber). To be honest, ... I don't notice a lot of difference. Some
days it's better (less ping, more bandwidth) other days it's worse (remote
desktop being barely usable). I'm using it for remote work / remote desktop,
video conferences, and streaming (movies), but not gaming.

Whenever I get too frustrated I switch to my iPhone's hotspot. The service is
_always_ better, but maybe that's because the line is less contested then
(unfortunately I have low data caps on my phones).

------
LockAndLol
Ah... zero-rating. Somehow that also slipped through the cracks here in
Europe. I was terribly surprised the union could even agree upon some form of
net-neutrality.

For some time European citizens somehow made some good choices at the voting
booths AND there must've been some strong business reason to introduce it.
Without economic incentive it never would've passed.

~~~
jakub_g
There's "unlimited WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook" in data plans in some EU
countries. Which is kinda nice, but probably only cements their monopoly.

~~~
zrm
Also kind of odd because messaging apps use a trivial amount of data unless
you're doing video. But most people may not know that and then switch to them
for "unlimited" and there you go.

~~~
jakub_g
There's this new pattern of communicating where you talk with multi-megabyte
reaction gifs back'n'forth instead of writing two or three words. Unlimited
data may prove useful in that scenario.

Also exchanging pictures/selfies with the family/friends generates quite a bit
of data if you do it on a daily basis.

~~~
brendawalsh
It is amazing what can be done with 20+ year old technology.

------
2Gkashmiri
in india, the recent internet boom due to reliance JIo and others like airtel
have brought incredible change in a short amount of time but sadly, FUP
remains. This is somehow seen as "part of the game" when it need not be.
[https://www.jio.com/fiber/en-in/plans](https://www.jio.com/fiber/en-in/plans)
here speeds range from 100 mbps to 1 gbps but with stupid stupid data caps.
like seriously, what is the need for 1 gbps when you can only use high speed
internet till 5 tb? same for smaller plans as well. stupid.
[https://www.airtel.in/broadband/delhi](https://www.airtel.in/broadband/delhi)
here the word "unlimited" is used but defined in FAQs as meaning "3 TB" of
data.

------
croes
We are living in the times of digital oligarchy. Guess we need to start a
revolution to reach democracy.

------
treis
>AT&T is already making money hand over fist on you,

AT&T doesn't make that much money. Their profit margin is consistently around
10% which is pretty much dead on average for the S&P 500. Half of what Apple
does and about 1/3 of Facebook.

~~~
bjo590
Amazon's profit margin is small, but only a fool would say they aren't making
money hand over fist. Profit isn't the only measure of 'making money'.

ATT's revenue was $181B in 2019.

~~~
rhino369
You could looks at return on capital, but AT&T isn’t that great in that
measurement either.

It makes a pretty fair return in a very large investment. They certainly work
for their money.

~~~
Dirlewanger
All the more impressive when they're also one of the better dividend stocks
out there.

------
ti_ranger
In my opinion, there is really only one valid complaint in the article:

> We need more choices for our ISPs

If you fix this, e.g. by requiring all last-mile owners to offer the last-mile
access at or below their (audited, sufficiently-profitable) input cost to
their retail products, most of the remaining problems would sort themselves
out, without having micro-managing of ISP features.

Unless you are going to start regulating OTTs in what features/value they can
provide, I think it's unfair on (non-monopoly) ISPs to prevent them from
providing innovative features because of "net neutrality should trump all"
opinions.

~~~
sumtechguy
There is two sides to this. The ISP basically becoming a monopoly (or duopoly
in many cases). Your idea could have the effect of creating a third one. I
think it would need to be something where all the ISPs have some sort of
financial stake in making that company/gov org work correctly. That could
however create more regulatory capture (which we already have).

The other side is the giant walled gardens these companies have created. To
fix that would mean that each of the companies would have to want to be
federated. I do not see that happening. These are the same companies that are
heavily filtering everyone and they said the ISPs would do it. What is the
point of having a 'freedom ISP' if the other end is not? We have to have the
whole chain working.

------
jeffbee
This article is using a really unusual definition of "Big Tech", isn't it?
Isn't AT&T alone the only bad actor here?

------
Vorh
Here's hoping that Starlink will resolve some of these problems instead of
just making them worse.

