
Differential Pricing of Traffic in the Internet - lainon
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.09334
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awalton
Study pretty firmly starts with the assumption that all content providers are
fungible, and that's clearly not the case.

In fact, it's almost exactly the opposite of reality, apart from aggregators
and news outlets, which could use kilobits of data to transfer but are usually
bloated with an extra meg or two of markup, fonts, and javascript (and now,
more often than not, video content that is literally some local news reader
reading the written content...)

If you charge a billion extra dollars to transit YouTube or Netflix, those
businesses go under. The economics doesn't require a mathematician to figure
out.

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kfk
So here is what I understood. Price differentiation will impact the
equilibrium as content providers (CPs) are now competing also on connection
speed. Lower quality CPs have incentive of paying ISPs to get better speed for
their sites. If lower quality CPs pay ISPs more than the good ones everyone
gets worst off. In this scenario CPs are also worst off as now they are
diverting money to ISPs instead then profits or investment.

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gumby
Good analysis. Having only one provide is _de facto_ the situation for most of
America, FCC maps not withstanding.

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wskinner
“Most of America” as in most people, or most land area? I have lived in cities
my whole life and have never had less than 3 choices of provider at purchase
time.

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wtallis
Are you counting wireless ISPs? They're not a viable alternative at scale.

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drdaeman
What's wrong with wireless? (Unless that means LTE or WiMax or some broadband
tech like that)

I've always had FTTH, but at current residence (non-US) I have a radio bridge
for the last ~500 meters - there's a railroad nearby so my ISP can't lay fiber
directly to my house.

I've expected worse (esp. in a bad weather), but have zero problems
whatsoever. Besides an extra half millisecond to what it could've been - which
is insignificant - I have no issues.

~~~
wtallis
Broadcast wireless (including LTE and WiMax) obviously doesn't scale. Point to
point wireless can make far better use of the spectrum, but requires a lot
more equipment at the endpoints and doesn't scale to large numbers of
customers as easily as broadcast wireless. It's much closer to wired
connections both in terms of cost and performance, but is fairly rare because
it doesn't have a compelling business case except in cases like yours where
the simple straightforward reliable wired solution is unavailable.

