
Net neutrality gives “free” Internet to Netflix and Google, ISP claims - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/net-neutrality-gives-free-internet-to-netflix-and-google-isp-claims/
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dunpeal
"Our consumers are using dozens of entertainment devices for free" raged
electric power providers. "They watch films, play video games, and even binge-
watch Netflix shows for hours, using our power for which we receive no special
compensation. Why should we sell electricity for a fixed price for all
purposes? Clearly, we should be able to charge premium fees for premium uses!
Our customers couldn't watch Netflix without our power, yet Netflix pays us no
fees for supporting its business model. Where's our rent, err I mean, proper
piece of the action?!"

~~~
jatkins
Bad analogy, since the ISP lays a (figurative and real) pipe between Netflix
and the user; this isn't correct for electricity.

~~~
dunpeal
And the delivery of electric power doesn't require any infrastructure, pipes,
wires, etc?

An odd argument by an account created right after this story was posted...

~~~
jatkins
What I mean is that Netflix pushes the bytes from one side. Bosch doesn't push
electricity from one side to make my Bosch washing machine work for example.
(Which highlights another reason this analogy is bad: the electric company
gives you power which they have to generate themselves, while an ISP is pipes)

~~~
dunpeal
Naw, dawg, this is what you replied to me originally:

> Bad analogy, since the ISP lays a (figurative and real) pipe between Netflix
> and the user; this isn't correct for electricity.

Most readers can just glance out the window and see various manholes stamped
with the name of a power company. These are the very real pipes you claim do
not exist.

Your argument is blatantly false.

Now you came up with a new argument: that Netflix "pushes" bytes. I have news
for you: Netflix is already paying for internet connectivity to "push" these
bytes. Anyone renting even a single internet server does.

Are you just throwing stuff out there, hoping something sticks?

Together with the suspicious timing of your account creation, you don't seem
very objective or genuine.

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UncleEntity
Isn't the customers of said ISP who are _requesting_ the traffic being sent
down the tubes the ones who are ultimately paying for the '"free" Internet to
Netflix and Google'?

If I pay for 100kbps internets then who cares where the data comes from since
I'm paying for the _service_ and not the _origin_?

\--edit--

Though if they oversubscribe their tubes I can see how they'd have an argument
since they aren't truly fulfilling their contractual terms to all customers at
all times but that's more a case of their problem than the Google or Netflix.

~~~
drdaeman
For wireless, it could be last-mile congestion issues rather than ISP's
peering.

I don't know how this works with e.g. LTE, but I had a little experience with
cheaper-grade WiFi networks that had lots of active users. Some stuff
(especially early uTP traffic, when it was a high-PPI network killer) made
service severely degrade.

~~~
UncleEntity
I can see wireless as an issue -- where I live I share a tower with rush-hour
traffic which leads to very slow LTE speeds during the commute times,
streaming anything is just painfully slow at those times.

Still, charging the source isn't going to solve the last-mile congestion
issues. At most it gives them extra "free" money to upgrade their network (or
give bigger CxO bonuses) so they don't have to charge their customers more and
risk loosing them to the competition.

~~~
nbhuik
If you are getting paid to deliver traffic to consumers then you would have a
lot of incentive to not have congestion, since that would be losing potential
revenue. That would if not solve at least improve the last mile issue.

~~~
drdaeman
I'm not sure it's that simple.

E.g. with WiFi just throwing in more APs may actually make things worse.
Better hardware is a way, but up to a certain extent, then you hit the ceiling
and need a new technology. Like the only working solution for a noisy
environment is to just forget about the 2.4GHz band and go to the wider and
less busy 5GHz. My (uneducated) guess is this is somewhat similar for stuff
like LTE, too.

~~~
nbhuik
Not to be all "the market will sort things out", but in general if there is
incentive to serve traffic there is at least a lot more potential to fix these
things. If you lose potential revenue by congestion, you want to invest in
more infrastructure to capture that revenue. Whether that is more base
stations for LTE, wifi on public transport or something else. Today that is a
cost that you have to recoup from the consumer.

~~~
drdaeman
My point was, for very-high demand situations, sometimes tech is just not yet
there to support it. And new tech either requires lots of upfront investments
(like, replacement of all the existing routers) or doesn't even exist (e.g.
that 5G stuff).

I don't know how high the demand is, though. It could be hitting the ceiling,
or it could be nowhere near that (and issues could have a different cause).

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HillaryBriss
IMHO, the legal question here is the interesting bit: _...broadband providers
... would claim that the FCC 's net neutrality repeal preempts states from
imposing their own rules._

~~~
mdasen
It is interesting. I haven't read all the laws, but I'd guess that the "occupy
the field" standard could come into play. Basically, even when there is no
direct conflict between state and federal law and even when federal law does
not expressly say that the states can't legislate on the topic, sometimes the
federal law is so broad and pervasive that it's clear that it's meant to
preempt state laws on the topic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_preemption#Field_preem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_preemption#Field_preemption)

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B4CKlash
I'm sure the argument made by the ISPs is valid. It's the basic concept of
supply and demand. The demand for the service provided by the ISP is extremely
price agnostic. Milk & Eggs use to be this way; prices have to rise
astronomically before people start to consider supplements.

The point the ISPs are missing is that this is the opposite of progress. A
society does not prosper when everyone is paying the maximum amount they would
be willing to pay. The opposite is true. Society prospers when they unlock
discretionary income by spending less on something they would have paid more
for...

Furthermore and to that same point; the purpose of classifying something as a
utility is to ensure they leave money on the table. If everyone was allowed to
charge exactly what something was worth water would be infinitely more
expensive.

~~~
dnautics
> A society does not prosper when everyone is paying the maximum amount they
> would be willing to pay

Actually if someone is paying the maximum amount they are willing to pay it
maximizes incentive for an innovator to create efficiencies that bring the
cost down for someone. That doesn't of course _guarantee_ progress, because
structural barriers and rent-seeking might kneecap that progress.

If people are paying the lowest possible cost for something, then there is not
progress, though there might be prosperity. (Generally speaking though social
prosperity is destroyed by other things, like subsidies for the wealthy).

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hguhghuff
I suggest an automated system that identifies ISPs that throttle traffic.

Internet companies ban service to those ISPs.

What use is an ISP if the internet companies refuse to serve it?

It would make any ISP deeply reluctant to be caught throttling.

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yellowapple
Having used Frontier in California (and having seen the current state of
affairs for rural Californians), the assertion that Frontier is even the
slightest bit blameless in California's slow rural broadband rollout is rich
enough to make Jeff Bezos look broke.

Frontier is a textbook example of why we need net neutrality.

------
briandear
Before we have the knee-jerk standard opposition comment, has anyone actually
investigated these claims? Are they untrue? Are there any merits to the
argument? Would non-Netflix users essentially be subsidizing bandwidth?

~~~
DougWebb
That's not a useful question, because it's a shared resource. I'm on Verizon
Fios, and so I'm "subsidizing" everything every other Fios user is doing over
their Fios connections... and they are "subsidizing" my usage as well. So
what? That's how paying for a shared resource works.

~~~
nbhuik
Not sure what you are saying since the whole issue is about who is going to
pay. In the west you are paying $40-$80 as a consumer while a lot of companies
make money. In Asia it is common that high speed Internet access itself is
cheap, but traffic costs more money for the companies providing services.

~~~
DougWebb
Everybody pays. I, and other Fios subscribers, pay a flat monthly fee for our
internet service at a specified bandwidth. There's usually a monthly total
data cap as well, but it's either in the contract fine-print or an unspecified
policy that you won't find out about unless you surpass it.

Companies providing services pay as well; they also have to buy internet
service for a given bandwidth, and their contracts are more explicit about
total data usage.

My understanding is that the difficult bit is that the consumer's ISP and the
service provider's ISP are often not the same company. So, Netflix is paying
their ISP a ton of money for all the data they're sending, but my ISP doesn't
have any contract with Netflix even though they're carrying the data to bring
it to me. My ISP finds that unfair. But here's the thing: I'm already paying
for MY service, which I'm using to get that data. As long as I'm within my
contractual limits, everything I'm doing is paid for, and my ISP has no basis
for crying about not getting a share of what Netflix pays their ISP.

This is all just a cover story to hide the fact that my ISP wants legal cover
to offer their own service that competes with Netflix, to make it cheaper and
crappier than Netflix, and to compete by charging their customers more for
Netflix's "premium" bandwidth, while offering their own service for a
"discount" bandwidth.

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mamon
The most scary part was the claim that net neutrality will "raise the phone
bill by 30$ per month". I moved to California a month ago and I find internet
access to be one of the worst experiences compared to my home country, Poland.

In Poland I would have unlimited voice and text, plus 10GB of LTE internet per
month for about $10 fee. Here, similar plan costs $60, plus connection quality
is bad, especially in the evenings, when the traffic is high, and there are
areas where there's no signal at all.

~~~
betaby
California is one of those sates where net neutrality is a state law. On other
hand Poland does not have net neutrality law. There is zero correlation of the
net neutrality laws and consumer prises.

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betaby
There is misunderstanding of th "Netflix and Google, which already pay for
direct connections to ISP networks." Paying interconnection fee in major metro
for private peering is peanuts. On other side delivering that traffic to the
end customer is expensive. So if everyone OK that payment should be only on
one side, i.e. consumer of the traffic, that means that every data center
should be getting free bandwidth from ISPs, since that traffic is requested by
the customer. By that logic cloud provider bandwidth expenses should be zero,
so video streaming services and so on. Basically you create 8K streaming
service and DEMAND ISP to give you interconnect and they MUST deliver that
content to the end users and recover cost on the end customer side.

~~~
Dylan16807
> that means that every data center should be getting free bandwidth from
> ISPs, since that traffic is requested by the customer

More or less! If the ISP is already in the data center, they should freely
peer with just about anyone that's providing data their users request. Even if
they're not in that datacenter, datacenter bandwidth is cheap, and _should_ be
cheap, because it's very easy to get from a datacenter to the internet core in
bulk.

> Basically you create 8K streaming service and DEMAND ISP to give you
> interconnect and they MUST deliver that content to the end users and recover
> cost on the end customer side.

If you get your data to the peering point, yes, that should be viable. That's
explicitly what the end user pays for, everything between their modem and the
internet.

A streaming company doing that is basically being their own ISP. And there's
no reason for one ISP to pay another in this situation.

~~~
betaby
One ISP do not pay another same sized ISP is they maintain in and out traffic
ratios aka settlement free peering.

~~~
Dylan16807
Remember, Netflix could always have their clients sent back a bunch of random
garbage data to make the peering balanced.

So it doesn't really make sense to argue that they should pay because of the
ratio.

It's the end users that are responsible for the Netflix traffic, they're
requesting every byte.

