

US ambassador: Internet fee proposal gaining momentum - 1337biz
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/261863-us-ambassador-warns-internet-fee-proposal-gaining-momentum-abroad

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adaml_623
Can we just call proposals like this: 'double charging'

So we'd rewrite this to be: 'US ambassador: Internet double charging proposal
gaining momentum'.

We all know that we pay for our internet access to websites. Those websites
shouldn't be charged again. We should have that fact built into the language
we use discussing these issues. I think it's easier to oppose this type of
thing when stating the problem states your argument.

EDIT:

Actually I've just reread the article. This is just FUD being spouted by the
US government to scare it's citizens. They want the US to retain control of
the internet (which is totally understandable) and are saying bad things will
happen if they let the UN take control. It's building a justification for not
going along with the rest of the world if all the other countries agrees to
something it doesn't like.

It's possibly not worth worrying about as long as you live in a country with a
competitive telecoms market.

~~~
bluedanieru
Can you make the case that it's better off under the control of the UN? I'm
not too keen on the stewardship of the US especially with regards to
copyright, and this "promote a global Internet free from government control"
Congressional resolution is double-speak bullshit as they are trying their
hardest to do the exact opposite. But I can't say allowing countries like
Iran, China, North Korea, etc., _any say at all_ in the functioning of the
Internet at a global level sounds any more appealing.

Ideally we just need an Internet that is inherently unmanageable at the most
basic levels. Wireless (or wireless enough, anyway), distributed DNS, end-to-
end encryption, onion routing, etc.

~~~
Evbn
Many millions of people feel the same way about US control of the Internet.
Now what?

~~~
bluedanieru
Devil-you-know. I don't like US control of the Internet either (said as much
in my post in fact). But that doesn't mean I think we should hand it over to
the UN.

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vidarh
I'm confused. Some _are_ already charging fees to carry international traffic.
Or rather, they do it indirectly, by offering packages that offer access only
to their peering relationships at specific interchanges or full transit.

E.g. at work we have a customer that has 95%+ UK traffic, and one operator
offered us bandwidth at about 20% our current price for a peering package that
included access to pretty much all UK and most larger European ISP's, but no
transit, that we could mix and match with a smaller amount of full transit. If
our bandwidth needs had been larger, we'd have looked seriously into it, but
as it stands, our customers UK only traffic is low enough that the cost
difference isn't worth the hassle of managing our own BGP routing and an extra
port.

In other words, it sounds like what these operators really want is to make
this mandatory in some form, so that they won't have to deal with those pesky
competitors that might undercut them and offer prices actually based on what
it costs to provide the service. Many of them will also see it as a way to
prevent relative strength in negotiations from deciding on peering costs.

It also means that today, when buying full transit, you _are_ paying a
substantial premium for the costs your provider incurs in procuring
substantial capacity for international traffic. Almost nobody forgoes paying
the premium today because almost everyone _does_ have substantial
international traffic, and pretty much nobody can afford not doing so. You can
bet your provider does everything they can to peer with everyone who can lower
their transit bill, but all but the very largest will still end up paying for
transit for a fairly substantial percentage of their traffic, and that cost is
of course passed on to their customers.

I ran an ISP in the mid 90's in Norway. At the time, we had "massive"
international bandwidth, because we bought 512kbps full transit via Sweden.
For that privilege we paid about twice what it would cost us to get a 10Mbps
port at the switch at NIX (the then only Norwegian interchange) and suitable
line capacity to our office. Our nearest competitor in terms of price and size
had 128kbps full transit + 1Mbps to NIX (it was a mixed bag: our customers
were ecstatic about the speed of international downloads - personally I
remember waiting up to download the newest version of Netscape a few days
after we'd upgraded from 256kbps, and had the line almost exclusively to
myself and found it absolutely amazing to download at a speed I'd find
shockingly slow on my home connection today... But they were annoyed at the
performance for Norwegian sites, especially latency - see below).

The only reason we didn't connect immediately is that at that point, to be
able to connect you needed at least one peering agreement in place first,
which required you to first demonstrate a reasonable amount of traffic.

But it demonstrates the cost differences this industry operates with: If you
could fill that 10Mbps with traffic via peering arrangements, your bandwidth
cost would still be only twice what someone would pay for 512kbps full
transit. Even worse: Those 512kbps of pure transit at the time did _not_
guarantee your provider had peering at NIX (ours didn't for the first year or
two), and so you might find massive lag as your traffic went via D-GIX in
Stockholm and back to Norway...

I don't know current relative prices, since I've not been directly in that
market since '99, but I do know the gaps are still massive and there's
probably still also money to be made in arbitrage in some locations in
offering custom "bandwidth mixes" for someone who can do a good job of
negotiating the right contracts given the 5-times difference I mentioned I was
offered. Even more so because of a proliferation of peering points.

Effectively this is what companies that are large enough to do their own
peering gets - but it is far harder to make it pay for itself if you're "only"
buying in the <200-300Mbps range or so (guesstimate). We "only" do an
aggregate of 45Mbps at the moment), and bandwidth makes up less of our
operating costs than the personnel cost to my employer of the time I'd have to
spend configuring and managing a BGP setup and peering arrangements alone,
much less equipment and interconnect fees.

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rabidsnail
Ugh, now we're going to have to stretch our already practically non-existant
political capital even further to defend against this shit. Do the CCC and the
Pirate Party have official positions on this?

Edit: In case they don't (and that's what it looks like from some cursory
googling), here are some talking points that might be effective. Disclaimer:
I'm not European, so I probably have a bad intuition about what would play
over there.

* This measure is a form of trade protectionism that will result in retaliation from the US (think import duities). That retaliation will harm EU companies more than American ones, since the US is far larger than any single market in the EU

* Many EU startups have grown in the US market first, even though they are based in the EU (soundcloud and last.fm come to mind). Higher costs across borders would at best limit new companies like these to their home markets and at worst kill them on the vine.

* Popular services like Google and Twitter (Facebook seems touchy, so I would leave them out) have no domestic alternatives, so jeopardizing access would harm consumers.

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ewillbefull
There is no sense to this proposal. If it cost a telecom more to relay
international traffic, they could charge their customers more for it to make
up for the expensive peering costs. The telecoms must not be able to charge
their customers more to relay traffic through expensive peers due to market
forces -- which is why they want the government to be involved. It doesn't
compensate the telecom for anything, it's just mandated jealousy.

~~~
lusr
I have to wonder how many of the members of government pushing this also
happen to be shareholders of telecoms companies. (I long for the day somebody
builds such a graph of all influential people so such questions could easily
be answered).

~~~
jauer
Oversimplified, The caller-pays model of telephone compensations was a way to
funnel money from richer countries to poorer countries with government-owned
telephone monopolies. This fell apart with the internet where the state
telecoms had to pay for pipes to western carriers because they had all the
desirable content. This situation with the ITU is all about recreating that
money flow.

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rwmj
Ah .. rent-seeking telecoms companies. Imagine for a minute if these companies
had to compete to the death with each other. I guess I wouldn't have to pay
more for the same service now as I used to have to back in 1999 (with no
discernable increase in the service over 13 years).

~~~
rjzzleep
i just moved to the us, and I'm really wondering where on earth you can find
more expensive service than here.

~~~
pyre
Canada, where the competition is even less.

~~~
westicle
Add Australia to that list, where you can pay $80 per month for a connection
with a 50GB download limit.

[http://www.telstra.com.au/internet/home-broadband-bigpond-
el...](http://www.telstra.com.au/internet/home-broadband-bigpond-elite-plans/)

~~~
kalleboo
At least Australia has a good excuse - they have to pull wires underwater for
many miles to get any connectivity, so there's some scarcity there. The U.S.
is the hub of the internet, the costs must be the lowest.

~~~
Evbn
The US is much less dense than Europe and East Asian.

~~~
pyre
I really view the "US is less dense" argument with a grain of salt. If it were
true, then we would have _awesome_ connections within highly populated cities,
and it would maybe just be the suburbs or rural areas that were complaining.
As it stands, everyone is complaining, with the exception of a handful of
suburbs across the nation that got experimental FIOS roll-outs.

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siculars
The only thing this would accomplish would be to further distance the
internet-centric innovations developed here in the US from the rest of the
world. Consumers in tariff enforcing territories would be at a disadvantage.
Fragmentation of the internet would surely ensue. Fees would no doubt be
passed along to consumers who, in some non trivial fraction, would simply not
make use of new innovative services. But perhaps, obviously, this is the
intended result.

This is complete political buffoonery.

