The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least). Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either.
Weird.
The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. In most places it's pretty crap too. Many places have no competition. Some providers are in clear breach of contract in not providing customers service as they promised to do.
But apparently all that's not enough. We get the argument that the likes of Netflix are "pushing" their data at no cost onto "their" network. This is such a ridiculous argument and is nothing more than an effort to extort Netflix and other streaming services because it's eroding their cable TV services.
No one is "pushing" data onto the network. Customers are pulling that data and those customers, by definition, are already paying for the bandwidth and the network access. But this doesn't stop lobbyists pushing this narrative onto Luddite elected officials. It's double-dipping. No more, no less.
I really hope CAlifornia's net neutrality laws stand and get copied by other states.
I'm not American, but I ran into this issue while discussing with some people living in the US (foreigners no less) and it's crazy how much they bought into the ISP propaganda. They're not stupid people, but they got convinced that they can't check their email because their neighbour is on Netflix and this is all Netflix's fault. When you hear the same argument repeated in the same way, it's always an indicator that the people saying it got brainwashed.
I don't really understand this American mindset because my current bandwidth "problem" is being "forced" to setup a wired Ethernet network because WiFi isn't enough for cheap 5Gbps FTTH.
More importantly, I'm used to ISPs wasting their lobbying on not paying for laying out fiber and their trust and goodwill budget on deceitful and greedy pricing, bad customer care and capricious geographic coverage: if nobody trusts them more toxic types of propaganda are out of the question.
What are the communication strategies of American ISPs? Even in monopoly and near-monopoly situations, why do people believe them?
5 gbps signal rate doesn't give you the full story about actual data transfer rates to important services, but its a start. Ran into this problem with AT&T Fiber (1 gbps) in Houston, Texas
I’ve had both AT&T and Comcast 1gbps and never had any noticeable data transfer issues. A lot of things like Usenet downloads were close to saturating the wire speed, close to 100MB per second. Comcast’s upload speed is abysmal (coaxial), AT&T was symmetrical (FTTH).
Not if your ISP is priotizing your traffic (only) when you go there :-)
As it happens all around the world, and has been told here several times.
One possible symptom is that your lagging Video conferencing, VPNs, other remote working stuff, even simple down- and uploads to/from whereever are suddenly fast.
As long as you are visiting these speedtesting sites.
I wonder what percentage of the people who hold that opinion regarding Internet connection bandwidth hold the exact opposite opinion regarding road capacity and car usage. In those cases, I have a feeling they blame government entities for "not building enough roads" rather than blaming excessive usage of cars.
Wow, I’m an American and I’ve never heard anyone say anything like this before. I wonder if it’s some ISP marketing this to their customers in their locale?
Yes, but the problem is on the ISP side. For example, lets assume a building with 10 apartments has guaranteed 100Mbit connection to the building.
If ISP was honest, they would sell 10Mbit connection to each apartment. What they do (at least here) is sell 100Mbit to each apartment and hope their usage isn't all at the same time since it can't support it.
I ended up paying more for a 200mbit connection straight to my apartment because of this. I was on a 500mbit connection before when working from home, then lockdowns started and everyone started to work from home and during work hours, if I would get 10-20mbit I would be happy. They sold me 500 but never had that capacity, so they 'blame' netflix and not them selling only what they can (like gyms, they sell over capacity and if for some reason all show up, they are screwed)
Yeah the real problem is that ISPs aren't offering partially dedicated connections like 10mbit/s "guaranteed" * and up to 100mbit/s. ISPs are basically lying to you and they blame the users that actually use what they are owed.
I disagree with this. You're touching on two separate issues.
The first is that many US broadband connections are on traditional cable systems (or HFC). And these are a shard bus design, meaning you and your neighbours are competing for bandwidth. This is a common cause of degredated connections.
Compare this to fiber The fiber connection isn't shared at all... until you reach some junction, exchange or node. There are various flavors of fiber (eg FTTH/FTTP, FTTN, FTTC).
This brings us to the second issue: bandwidth beyond the last mile is also oversubscribed and it makes zero sense to do it otherwise. Residential customers in particular just don't use that much bandwidth and they don't use it consistently. I mean a gigabit connection is enough for 30+ 4K streams at once at pretty much max quality. But being able to burst bandwidth for fast downloads is really nice.
They're selling a service that provides "up to" the quoted speeds. Generally, the provisioned rate is actually higher than the quoted speeds, so unless the ISP is particularly awful they definitely can provide those speeds. Just not 100% of the time, which is why they're "up to."
The amount of capacity required to guarantee speeds would be massive. And how far does that extend? Does the ISP have to maintain that capacity just within their network? Or would every peering connection also have to be able to handle 100% of subscriber bandwidth?
The whole idea quickly falls apart as soon as you look at it a little deeper.
> They're selling a service that provides "up to" the quoted speeds. Generally, the provisioned rate is actually higher than the quoted speeds, so unless the ISP is particularly awful they definitely can provide those speeds. Just not 100% of the time, which is why they're "up to."
No, the "up to" is written in such tiny print that it's practically invisible. It's not what people think they are buying.
The ethical thing to do would be to sell it as "X, bursts up to Y", with legislation ensuring that X is displayed at least as prominently as Y.
isp contracts usually include something called an Service Level Agreement (SLA) that gives room for this sort of service degredation.
maybe there should be some discussion over statistical properties of that degredation and minimum service levels, because ppl tend to watch tv at roughly the same time.
Instead of regulating the statistical properties of the degradation, what if we just required ISPs to refund customers for times when they tried to use the bandwidth they were sold but couldn’t? Maybe the refunds could be 1.2 times the original price of that bandwidth. So if there’s an outage, you don’t pay for that time. That might line up the incentives better.
cable customers routinely see service degredation (reduced bandwitdh, packet loss) at peak usage hours, because the lastmile topology is a shared resource (ring/bus) with an oversubscription ratio >20. (tbf docsis 3.1 did get it somewhat under control)
most (non gamer/tec) customers don't bother/notice unless it's so bad that their voip or netflix craps out. isp support will shift the blame to wifi (also shared resource) and noones the wiser.
That's an absurd proposition. If you can't guarantee to not oversubscribe at least 10mbit/s on a 100mbit/s plan what's the point of advertising it as such?
Oversubscription should be regulated and totally transparent to the customer. Something on the monthly statement like:
"You pay for symmetric gigabit internet access. You share this line with 4 customers, and load balancing means your service performance will be equally distributed among the users of the line at any given time. The internet egress point where you leave Honest Joe's network is a 25gbps connection and is shared by 382 other gigabit residential customers. The average load at egress is 14.5gps down, 5 gbps up."
Allowing customers to pay a premium for dedicated access is a net good as well, because that can finance infrastructure improvements.
It's greed and lack of transparency that causes shitty service. It's repeatedly merged isps that are so big that they can afford to not give a shit about the last mile.
The sick joke is the unused fiber capacity. Many of the large isps have residential fiber presence, but don't want to invest in towns under 100k people, so they leave the fiber to rot. A lot of ambitious small isps funded and deployed fiber throughout all sorts of places in small town America but didn't stipulate the use of the fiber when they sold out.
In theory they can, obviously. In practice if you pool 100's of users, the "regression towards the mean" kicks in with a vengeance and it almost never happens.
How do we know this? Well in other jurisdictions like Australia say (which is where I live), ISP's are required to guarantee a minimum peak period bandwidth. If their customers don't get it, they can complain to the government and _the government_ will prosecute the ISP.
The ISP's squealed like stuck pigs when this rule was implemented. What actually happened when it was introduced was nothing, apart from a few prosecutions when the ISP's lied. When I say "nothing" I don't mean absolutely nothing as every ISP had to label their wares with the real bandwidth and cap they would give you. For example, if you had a nominal 100Mbps internet link (which is the number they always quoted before the rule) an expensive ISP might say it was 95Mbps guaranteed. The cheap ISP, surprise surprise, might say they only guarantee 85Mbps on that same link. But no prices changed, and mostly no speeds changed. "Mostly" because a few liars had to stop lying and once the truth was visible the were driven out of the market.
Economic textbooks tell you a well informed market functions better than when there is an information imbalance between buyer and seller. All Australia did is correct that imbalance in the internet market, so it functioned a little better at matching buyer to seller.
But Australia went much further than that. There are no ISP monopolies in Australia, so there _always_ many alternatives for every retail purchaser. I won't going into how they achieved that, but I will tell you one consequence you might not expect. It means there is no need for net neutrality in Australia either. An ISP might advertise Netflix gets preferential treatment, perhaps Netflix traffic doesn't contribute to caps. That's all fair, but if an ISP penalised a customers Netflix viewing because Netflix didn't pay them a bribe - well churning to a new ISP is just a few clicks on a new ISP's web page. You don't have to ring up Comcast and plead your case - being able to change ISP's without contacting the old one is the law.
Australia solved it's internet delivery problems, including thorny problems like net neturality using the most basic of capitalist tools - putting systems and laws in place to ensure there is a highly functional market. It is remarkable how well capitalism works. It's amazing to many of us that the USA seems to prefer crony capitalism instead.
That's the joke. People and corporations streaming HD video use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth which require more hardware capacity and peering deals. I think it's not crazy to ask that they pay a fair price for it. As someone who doesn't stream HD video I would like to have cheaper connections available if I don't want to pay for the bandwidth usage of other customers.
Ballpark FMV for 1Mbps for a month is currently around $0.08/Mbps in the US at scale in carrier neutral datacenter.
If you watched a Netflix HD stream all month long, it would cost maybe $1.
But of course it doesn't actually cost Verizon or ATT or Cox that - Netflix almost assuredly *pays them* to carry that stream.
Blaming the users is a ridiculously bad take - the issue is that the ISP didn't invest in fixing their last mile, or is needlessly congested at their head end, and they could fix it for trivial amounts of money.
There are. There are 5Mbps/10Mbps connections, that while being unusable for streaming HD are FAR cheaper and usable for other services.
The consumer is paying the price of what they can get out of the connection. Conversely I pay extra (higher bandwidth pipe) so I can stream more HD videos, and even extra so I can do so without a overages fee per GB after a TB.
The consumer in this case just paid to have a bigger pipe (more HD videos) and a use more data (unlimited bandwidth fee extra).
Over $100 a month extra to stream more HD videos, and to not get double the bill just for going over on bandwidth.
>I would like to have cheaper connections available if I don't want to pay for the bandwidth usage of other customers.
The anti net neutrality argument is all about taking that freedom away from you. ISPs don't want to change their business model. They want to offer up to X mbit/s but they don't even want to guarantee 5 mbit/s. If there was net neutrality ISPs would be forced to offer plans that are only partially oversubscribed not 100% oversubscribed.
If you wanted a 5mbit/s plan the ISP would still oversubscribe and you would get screwed over by them.
It may be, but the whole "it's Netflix's fault and they should pay" was elegantly debunked by the post I replied to: Netflix doesn't push anything, ISP customers pull. And I'll add: the customers that want to pull more already pay more to begin with.
This is a bad answer, it conflates the ISPs role in transit and entities like Facebook which are not ISPs.
NN is currently a regulatory thing that can change at the whim of whoever Congress puts there currently. Of course the telecom lobby isn't going to overplay their hand with the current Senate split and D majority in the House, they are going to wait until things are more favorable. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean the stage is not set for it to happen in the near future.
I remember a pretty ridiculous image going around that depicted a hypothetical Internet service package that was sold to you on a site by site basis, for instance you would pay $20 a month and have access to the top 100, another $10 for social media, and so forth.
Given the length of time the Internet has been around, and a complete absence of any of these doom and gloom stories coming to pass despite no such regulation the entire time, I am forced to conclude that neutrality advocates' fears were overblown.
But those images did briefly become reality to some customers. T-Mobile and AT&T had services which would be cheaper to access than other competing services.
On AT&T, watching TV on DirecTV Now was zero-rated against mobile data caps. Watching TV on Hulu or Fubo or any other provider was an extra cost.
On T-Mobile, streaming music on Spotify or Apple Music was zero-rated against mobile data caps. Streaming from home or from any non-approved music services was an extra cost.
That doom and gloom image was starting to take shape. It was the passage of California's NN laws and the support in the courts which killed these programs, as they didn't want to have to manage a different set of rules in CA or any other states which implemented these kinds of rules compared to just having a standardized nation-wide platform.
You’re being downvoted, but these were the same criticisms I had several years ago. I have no love lost for ISPs if NN is passed again, but the pro-NN rhetoric at the time (like every other issue from 2016-2020) was hyperbolic and toxic. Unfortunately I think NN is too much of a partisan issue for much healthy debate. :/
This is pretty tinfoil hat of me. I have this theory that many companies that are “competing” with each other in an area (Cox and AT&T for me) seem to be ceding areas to each other by upgrading certain sections and not others while avoiding overlap for long periods, functionally only giving buyers one choice.
In New Orleans, Cox has offered “gigablast” (yes that’s what it’s called) Internet in some areas while AT&T offers fiber. Now they often don’t overlap, which isn’t wild given they are incrementally upgrading a large area section by section, so I can easily see wanting to be first to an area your competitor isn’t offering a comparable product. But here’s the rub: Cox also offers 5mb down/600kb up in some areas of downtown New Orleans. That is unusable Internet. No one would get anything but AT&T, who hasn’t laid fiber in that area yet, but gives you 25+.
That’s not competition, that’s the appearance of it.
It’s not tinfoil at all, it’s just normal decision making.
You have 10k customers (out of a possible 20k) - do you upgrade your lines where it would make you fastest by far, or do you upgrade your lines where you’d just be as fast?
The second probably has fewer customers, the first will get you new customers.
I suspect there isn't just because they don't really need to "coordinate" which would cause anti-trust issues, they can just "watch" and adjust based on what they see.
I'm not sure that anyone can seriously believe there isn't collusion happening among telecom companies, the failed Comcast and Time Warner practically had it in writing that there was collusion. Anti-trust action isn't ever going to happen though, so there isn't much that can be done.
> Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either.
It's pretty wild - it's absolutely a federal concern because it is utterly impractical to enact & enforce state-by-state... but they (Pai & co) know that.
> The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least).
An effective method for defeating geographic internet monopolies is to force ISPs to rent out their lines at fair prices. This is the status quo in the UK, where competition forced internet prices to lower. That this common sense pro-consumer policy is not pursued by the Democratic FCC commissioners is evidence of some lesser level of regulatory capture of their side as well.
> The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world.
Really? Some highly developed countries have fairly expensive Internet as well. Not sure the US is much of an exception, if you consider not just the cheapest countries.
> the United States ranks second on the list of OECD countries, behind only Mexico, for most expensive internet prices
> When we look at Europe as a whole, we can see that the United States pays more for broadband internet access than any other country on the continent; in fact, rates in the US are more than double the average
I don’t think data that is eight years old is really relevant anymore, especially on a technical topic like this. Is there anything newer? I'd expect prices for bandwidth to decrease over time.
wholesale connectivity is getting cheaper, but consumer bandwidth cost is largely driven by last mile cost, where not that much has changed in the last decade (docsis3 has made cable somewhat tolerable and falling optics prices have made ftth attainable) .
Not per megabit. It's middle of the pack. It's also like half to a quarter as dense as most Europeans areas being discussed. It's expensive in large part because of our myriad land use nightmares.
Net neutrality has real impacts. It wasn't that many years ago where weirdly Netflix was basically unusable on FIOS. And of course it worked like a dream over a VPN. Verizon had minimal peering with Netflix to extract fees for "pushing" data and because Netflix competed with their cable TV business.
Competition is a trickier issue because in most cases overbuilds make little economic sense. The best situation is probably municipal fiber (who builds and maintains it) and retail ISPs rent that infrastructure to provide services.
But instead the US incentivized cable network builds in a terrible way: by providing franchises. The ISPs would pay the city for a monopoly, basically. Cities got addicted to this income and were allies in opposing competition as a result.
I'm sure NN could be helpful, I'm just saying I would rather fix the root cause. There's a lot of problems with the ISP monopoly that NN can't address, for example, the relatively high costs for shitty service.
If ISPs could do anything to the Internet content their subscribers requested, including block it, zero-rate it, or modify it, how many ISPs would a competitive landscape need in order to guarantee there is at least one that performs no blocking at all?
I doubt poles could physically handle the number of lines to ISPs that are needed to guarantee this.
Probably not very many--few ISPs would throttle if their customers could easily switch to the single ISP who doesn't throttle. We also don't need to approach this as a theoretical problem: much of the world has ISP competition and they don't seem to have these problems. Further still, throttling Netflix is just one of many problems that derive from lack of ISP competition. High prices for generally shitty service is at least as big of a problem, and NN can't to do much to help there.
I'm not opposed to net neutrality, I just care more about fixing the anti-competitive stuff. If we can do both, all the better.
>> Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either.
I don't think anyone noticed back when Obama Care (ACA) was passed and challenged at the Supreme Court. When deciding to hear the case they said it was not a tax, but when they actually debated the issue suddenly it was a tax.
> The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world.
Lol what? I can get 5-10Gb/s fiber in my town for $120-$200/month.
If I want 1Gb/s fiber it’s $55/month.
If I want 100mb/s it’s $20/month.
To your point it’s about regulatory capture. Not all states and localities have that issue, it’s almost entirely to do with several corrupt states that get targeted.
I can get that most decent sized towns in my state. I think you’re vastly overestimating the problem. It has to do with corrupt politicians in several corrupt states.
In New Hampshire (the state with the 3rd highest broadband penetration in the USA), about 1 hour from Boston, the cheapest possible internet I can get is $83/month from Comcast aka Xfinity
Well I’m jealous of you then. You must know that is an extreme outlier in the US though. I’ve been lucky to get 50-100mbps for $60 in most cities I’ve lived in.
Cities tend to have a fairly high level of corruption AND it’s expensive to put in new wires / fiber. Most suburbs I’ve lived in (3-4 in the past 10 years) have had very good internet, cheap and like I said you can get some beastly fiber now.
IME politics is based around clusters of concrete conclusions like "abortion should be legal". All arguments and abstract principles (like "states rights") are deployed and discarded opportunistically in the service of the fixed conclusions.
I wish people were more honest about it, but is it even bad to care more about political outcomes than arbitrary details about the structure of the government? Like is there any reason that normal people should have a first principles opinion on the exact distribution of responsibilities between two levels of government?
I would say caring about direct outcomes is okay, but probably myopic, as a citizen. The government is supposed to build a framework that seeks to put us on equal footing. People invisionong outcomes is short term thinking, and that seems to be often what gets us in trouble.
I think the responsibility distribution (and magnitude of power) strongly affects the long-term outcome of our country.
Concretely, I prefer power to be decentralized to the most local and smallest group of people that is feasible. (Feasible is doing a lot of work in that sentence; I acknowledge.) In the limit, the smallest group of people is a single individual.
Even if a more powerful federal government would be likely to decide “my way” on Friday April 22, 2022’s three most important topics to me, I’d still want that decision to be as local as possible because, over the course of my life and my children’s lives, I think we get better decisions and outcomes from more local decisions where the people affected know the people discussing and deciding.
Your state legislature may be more or less accessible to you than the federal government depending on how your state legislature is structured, the number of people in your state, and the relative concentration of people who share your special interest in your state vs. in the whole country.
>I wish people were more honest about it, but is it even bad to care more about political outcomes than arbitrary details about the structure of the government?
Of course it's not bad. What's bad is degrading the role of truth in political debates by selectively invoking states rights or federal rule as sacred principles, only to be abandoned or reaffirmed depending on the needs of any given debate.
I think that while this is definitely true of opportunistic politicians who will take any advantage they can, I don't this is actually true of most people who actually believe in states' rights as a real principle (as opposed to a politically malleable one).
For instance, I have close family members who are strong free-market conservatives (to a pragmatic extent, not anarcho-capitalists or anything) who I consider to be good, decent, and intelligent people.
Across the board they support states' rights to make decisions about loads of things, even those things they personally don't want (e.g. drug legalization, public healthcare, climate change regulation).
Not saying that those tribally-minded "our team must win at all costs" folks don't exist, but those who actually believe in free-market conservative values for their own sake (as opposed to for the benefit of their "team") are, in my experience, just as reasonable as most other groups, and I think we can criticize hypocrisy without painting with such a wide brush.
Yes. Unfortunately, we have to vote between two parties. When I vote I am typically voting for someone who I hope to agree with on 50% of the issues. There is no sane political party in the United States any longer. Pick your poison.
This has been my experience as well along both sides of the axis. If you're not "Lets Go Brandon" or whatever the equivalent is on the left, you usually are reasonable and have valid opinions.
Even more so, we usually share the same ideals just have different ways of getting there. There isn't huge division out there. Just two camps of dicks with most of us in the middle.
The entire reason "Let's Go Brandon" became a thing was that the incident validated conservative complaints about big media bias. It was "Were you saying 'Boo', or 'Boo-urns'??" in real life.
Sort of. AFAICT, it had more to do with the fact that you can't drop knowingly allow f-bombs on broadcast TV without having your license taken away, so sometimes reporters will pretend they misheard something so they don't have to cut away during live interviews.
Nah, the profanity rules are substantially relaxed for live broadcasts these days. "Fleeting expletives" will not trigger a fine. Indeed, just watch a Sunday afternoon NFL game and you're guaranteed to hear some naughty words. Primetime games generally use a delay so the audio can be dumped, but the afternoon games don't bother with it even though they're on broadcast TV as well.
It may not have been fleeting by the dictionary definition of the word, but it definitely was by the way the rules are applied. I've worked in the broadcast industry and have had to deal directly with this subject, so I'm not just spouting nonsense here.
I've also worked in the broadcast industry; you are just spouting nonsense. You get fined for knowingly allowing several minute long continuous chants like that, and can get your license taken away.
It wasn't fleeting in either the dictionary nor the regulatory sense.
Oh yeah, the FCC would have smacked them but since the reporter "pretended to mishear the crowd" their plans were foiled!
Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds? The reporter has literally zero control over what gets aired aside from the words coming out of her mouth. What she "pretended" to hear couldn't be less relevant.
The reporter knows that a long chant repeating the word fuck makes an interview unairable unless they have some semblance of cover. It's literally their job to produce raw footage that can be aired. 'Not hearing' the profanity has absolutely worked before for getting out of fines. The FCC is a giant bureaucracy and can be sort of hacked that way if there's regulatory 'case law' like there exists for this situation.
I agree it's not full proof, which is why I think the production staff if anything went out of their way to broadcast "fuck joe biden", contrary to the discourse on the matter.
Not that one should need to qualify statements on here, but I happen to also not be a Trump fan.
To say that there is no "Let's Go Brandon" equivalent on the left, though, is just false: there are plenty of similar phrases on the left as well. Let me offer a few that pop up where I live:
* ACAB
* Defund/Abolish X
* Black Lives Matter (as a political statement, that is; if anyone disagrees with this at a values level, then that's something different)
* Drumpf / Cheeto / "Orange Man"
These are also buzzwords which are used to quickly communicate group membership. Another method is to dehumanize the opposition, e.g. calling President Biden "sleepy Joe" or "senile", or calling Trump a "mentally deficient fascist".
There's nothing wrong with not liking a political figure. There's nothing wrong with seeing tribal behavior and calling it out. If you can't even put yourself into your opponent's shoes long enough to see any such criticisms of your own tribe, though, you're willfully remaining ignorant of a whole world view.
"States' rights" is now a loaded term because it is inextricably intertwined with the historical revisionism around the Civil War.
Basically, some white supremacists argue the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights. It wasn't. There's plenty of historical evidence and facts to debunk this. But even if true, the particular right in question was to own black people as property.
That mostly because we've become accustomed to the federal government meddling in internal affairs more than it is supposed to. The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states.
> The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states.
Actually, not really. The EU is, in political science terms, a confederation (to the degree that it's a state and not a supranational organization in the first place). The constitution envisioned the US as a federal state (the first one ever), in explicit contradistinction to the confederation that preceded it, as well as other then-existing confederations. That the constitution was ratified meant that the people of the time agreed to disband a confederation and move to a federal state.
The primary difference between a federal state and a confederation is that in a federal state, both the federal government and constituent states have their own loci of authority and power, as opposed to a confederation (where the federal government exists at the behest of the states and derives all of its power from those states) or a unitary state (where the reverse is true). As the US was the first example of this kind of government, the US Constitution has several weird quirks that now seem anachronistic (e.g., the federal territory not having representation) that probably helped stabilize the government in its early years.
Arguments that center on what the Founding Fathers actually intended for the country fall flat for me because a) how do you know what they actually intended versus what you want to say that they intended, b) what makes you think that a government that made sense for the US 250 years ago would make equal sense today, and c) if you look up the history of treaty-making, you'll find that the first person to bin the original intended procedures of how the government would work was George Washington, barely a year into his first term in office.
> Arguments that center on what the Founding Fathers actually intended for the country fall flat for me because a) how do you know what they actually intended
I think it's further than that: regardless what they intended, it's very easy to see the opposing views of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists via their respective Papers. It's pretty clear that some of the founders wanted a strong central government, and some wanted a weaker central government with stronger states. Big surprise, politicians disagree on fundamental issues.
But it's also pretty clear that the Federalists "won", and quickly. Very early in the 1800s we see the federal government asserting itself much more strongly than the Anti-Federalists wanted.
So I think it's just flat-out wrong for someone to say something like "the founding fathers wanted a small, relatively weak central government". Sure, some of them did, but many did not, and, well... the small-central-government faction lost.
The thing people forget though, is that fight continues to this very day, and it is with We The People that the right to determine and change where that balance sits. Frankly, I think the Federal Government is just aggregating greater and greater degrees of power over time, and becoming a political sledgehammer reached for out of expedience.
That's a fair point, but I don't think either major political party seriously wants a smaller central government. Democrats explicitly want to provide more social services, and Republicans claim to want smaller government, but what they seem to actually want (through their actions) is less regulation, but with the government itself not really much smaller.
Certainly some parties -- like libertarians -- would actually enact policies to make the central government truly smaller were they to come into power, but they are guaranteed not to with our electoral system as it is.
While in theory We The People have the right to determine all this, in practice we have little choice, it seems.
Yeah in 1776 the US was frankly a backwater. In 2022 it is an global economic superpower. Smart people wrote the Constitution but they were not prescient.
> The really funny thing is how the "STATES' RIGHTS" free market conservatives get upset and indignant when an individual state does something to regulate things within its own borders.
I’m an independent liberal and I’m pretty apathetic about NN (none of the doomsday stuff has manifest, but it doesn’t seem like passing NN would be harmful either and also I would rather solve ISP issues with antitrust regulation). That said, this feels like a straw man or nut picking. I haven’t heard of any conservatives getting mad over this, and anyway there’s nothing inconsistent about arguing that NN at the federal level is a breach of states’ rights while also arguing against California implementing it because you think it’s bad policy.
It only matters when it's about laws that they favor. If the laws you mentioned were federal laws, and there were state laws that countered them, there would be nary a suggestion of states' rights from conservatives.
No, states either have the right to set their own laws or they don't, you don't get to pick and choose some categories of laws on ideological grounds. State level abortion laws and school textbook laws are okay to override federal regulations but not telecom laws?
Fact is there's a certain set of individuals right now spending a lot of time, money and effort to set new state laws based on conservative religious ideology. Conveniently enough, many of them also happen to be big fans of Ajit Pai and the people working to overturn net neutrality laws.
But then again, American politics and hypocrisy is nothing new, so it's not like I'm surprised in the slightest.
Nearly every prominent conservative politician of the past ten years has come out publicly against "net neutrality".
Particularly when a state like California sets its own regulations.
And yet these are the very same people who will vigorously defend the rights of other states to pass laws that directly contradict Supreme Court decisions, or pre-existing Federal laws.
I don’t think that’s the proper requirement. They need to be not only conservative, but demonstrably supportive of states’ rights.
Regardless, the entire thing line of reasoning is moot. Even people who believe in states rights and are truly principled in their actions don’t think that states rights are a blank check or that no federal laws should passed. For example you can be in favor of federal laws protecting access to abortion because you believe in individual rights being paramount while also believing the federal government overreaches in other domains.
The poster is really just pointing out a perceived hypocrisy in politicians, which isn’t interesting; and painting everyone else who believes in the same concept with the same brush even if they haven’t demonstrated that hypocrisy.
Just to backup the source the other commentor provided, here's 3 more "prominent conservatives" as you wanted -
The Republican attorneys general of Texas, Arkansas, and Nebraska want for the federal repeal of net neutrality to preempt states from enacting their own net neutrality rules -- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/fcc-quest-to-kil...
The USA is a propaganda haven, and the citizens are largely lemmings, and those that are not need lemmings to be taken seriously. This place is ruined.
> The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. In most places it's pretty crap too. Many places have no competition. Some providers are in clear breach of contract in not providing customers service as they promised to do.
People say this, but we had net neutrality for years and it never improved the reach of broadband into rural areas. It mostly benefited cities.
I would like to see a version of net neutrality that doesn't just do the bare minimum in terms of encouraging broadband development in rural areas, starting with the FCC redefining broadband so their little map is more accurate to how slow the speed and dismal the access really is.
> we had net neutrality for years and it never improved the reach of broadband into rural areas
The issue there isn't net neutrality but rather open access. Countries with affordable internet generally have open access requirements for network operators.
Net neutrality is a separate issue to do with ISPs attempting to double dip, leveraging a large customer base in order to do so.
I don't think that is the purpose of net neutrality.
Net neutrality is needed when there is not good competition. If there is only one or two ISP its important that they can't mess with the basic service.
Besides the confusion regarding what net neutrality is that others have pointed out I would also like to point out that we had net neutrality for about 2 years from 2015 to 2017.
I guarantee you I pay my ISP every month primarily for downloading bandwidth, but for both ends at the end of the day. Netflix in turn pays their ISP. Those ISPs then have (potentially indirect) peering arrangements.
On top of this, Netflix offers to install CDN nodes within other ISP's networks to reduce that ISP's traffic across exchanges (connections between ISPs). If an ISP doesn't see the value in those and wants to treat Netflix like any other traffic that makes it's way to AWS, they're welcome to do so; it's just very not in their favor. Them using that as a cudgel to try and extort money out of Netflix is absurd.
From my understanding this will still apply to the ISP you are using for mobile or broadband. How ISPs push along these costs to their customers is up to them, but that is different from the price of sending data between an ISP and Netflix for example.
That's not how it works. It's more like each side pays for half.
Some telcos, mostly in Europe, are trying to force through sender-pays settlement because it would make them money but that's fairly recent and I hope it doesn't go through.
>That's not how it works. It's more like each side pays for half.
Buying internet transit typically works by paying something based on max(ingress, egress) * bandwidth cost where bandwidth is measured at the 95th percentile of utilization for a month.
> California's net neutrality law is similar to the federal rules repealed under former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. California prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful traffic. It also prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers, bans paid data cap exemptions (so-called "zero-rating"), and says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality protections by slowing down traffic at network interconnection points.
I don't support this, but I can try to steel man this position.
Largely it comes with the idea that use = cost, and that infrastructure has limited capacity and is therefore zeroish sum. For example, a common idea is that we should tax trucks more than other cars because they cause a large amount of damage to our roads. Following that logic, the companies that encourage users to consume more bandwidth should be charged a price for that since they're the ones making money on it, and we don't want to raise costs on users.
But customers are already paying for 'unlimited internet' -- or for some amount of data up to a cap. You're suggesting that we should double charge the providers that the customers want to access, as well?
I think you're just angry at ISPs (I don't blame you, they're usually monopolies or oligopolies which engage in dirty behavior.) But given the state of the market, I don't know a _single_ ISP or customer that would confuse DIA for regular bandwidth. Buying DIA involves getting a quote from the ISP and going back-and-forth with an operator over how to connect. And the fine print for most ISPs explains what "unlimited bandwidth" generally means.
>> I don't know a _single_ ISP or customer that would confuse DIA for regular bandwidth
I mean, How could they? I'm an IT professional, read a fair bit, and know a random smattering of networking terms from MPLS to T1 to DSL to SMTP to FTP, setup my own VLANs and Access Points at home, but I didn't know what "DIA" is. Saying that "ISP customer would not confuse DIA for regular bandwidth" seems like an incongruous sentence.
>>And the fine print for most ISPs explains what "unlimited bandwidth" generally means.
Be that as it may be, I pay some amount of money for some amount of service, whether spelled out clearly or heinously. I agree that narrative "Netflix is pushing data onto poor helpless ISPs" is disingenuous at best, and double-dipping by any definition.
ISPs took tons of taxpayer dollars, often have lousy service, maintain regional monopolies, and lobby municipalities out of building their own networks with shady dealings. Who would be satisified with that? We can do better.
> But given the state of the market, I don't know a _single_ ISP or customer that would confuse DIA for regular bandwidth.
You brought up DIA. I didn't see anyone else comment on it.
ISPs pay enough to politicians that it’s not a problem they really have to solve. It works out through game theory. Solving it requires playing better and beating them.
There's no point being angry here, anger won't solve this mess or give you "unlimited internet". I'm just relaying the reality. There's _no definition_ of "unlimited internet" that's enforceable by law. The closest you have is a DIA circuit which is as close as you'll get to having an ethernet cable directly connected into an ISP router to your house. Other than that, "unlimited internet" doesn't mean anything. A residential ISP will do some best effort packet routing, and a business-grade non-DIA ISP package will give you prioritized packets and usually an SLA on your connection. Some connections may give you a data cap per month while others don't, but even without a data cap there's no guarantee that your packets will be prioritized or even not dropped due to congestion. The only industry standard that guides QoS and bandwidth metering is the standards that networking equipment vendors come up with in their implementations and that's the only thing offering a semblance of repeatability to this industry.
IMO the solution has to come from the FTC. The US has neglected to regulate telecoms in the name of innovation for a long time, but now so much of everyday life happens atop telecom companies that I think it's imperative they regulate properly. This includes term sheets showing exactly what internet service is being offered and maybe just doing away with the term "unlimited internet" altogether.
Have there been no attempts in Germany at introducing net neutrality?
Also, does the ISP who wrote that linked article, Hetzner, still support net neutrality? I can't find anything else in English about it since the linked article from 2015 (archive [1], and new link [2]), but maybe that's because other content hasn't been translated.
> Hetzner Online stands for high-performance and high capacity Internet. In the last few years, our network infrastructure has expanded little by little in order to provide our customers with optimal performance. Currently, about two-thirds of our network traffic is directly exchanged with cost-neutral peerings of various partners. Among them are privat peerings with large network operators.
> For this reason, we have been increasingly concerned with DSL and cable providers who have no open peering policy themselves but are also not connected to other Tier-1 carriers with sufficient capacities. During the peak traffic period of 7 pm to 10 pm in particular, the concerned DSL and cable providers hit their capacity limits and thereby impede the fluent data stream between individual networks. This has lead to increasing complaints from the providers' customers because the customers cannot access their servers with the level of performance that they are used to having from Hetzner Online.
> These customers already paid for comprehensive and quick access to the Internet with their monthly DSL and cable fees. However, providers are no longer satisfied with just this source of profit. They now also want to collect revenue by charging large content providers fees for access to their network. For this reason, interfaces are being operated at their highest capacity -- to make paid access to the DSL and cable providers' networks attractive for content providers. The end consumer is then forced to pay double for unlimited access to the Internet. We at Hetzner Online do not support such policies and declare our support for full net neutrality.
> Also, does the ISP who wrote that linked article, Hetzner, still support net neutrality?
They do, but had to relent on holding Telekom accountable because customers threatened to leave as their end-customers from Telekom complained that the services were not reachable or low-performant.
In the end, IMO it's safe to say that Telekom abused their customers to bully Hetzner into paying.
Telecommunication in Germany is a price-gouging, customer-abusing, mafia-like cartel that is taking the piss every step of the way. It's cheaper for me to have a foreign mobile provider than to take any local contract. I get more data volume, and much cheaper EU in & out calls than anything that can be found here, and I can network-hop to get semi-decent LTE coverage, as, where I live, each provider seems to be covering a different area.
After years and years of appalling DSL speeds (think < 5 Mbits/s) and no alternative except Vodafone LTE @ 50 euros/month for 10 GB of data, the (local?) government came up with subsidies for the first provider bringing glass-fiber to local towns. Ha! At once, they were all rushing to lay down fibers..
But, the subsidies were only for connections up to the local relays, not for bring glass fiber to the local customers. So once the scramble to the relays was finished, nothing else was done.
Two years down the line, slowly, you can start paying (1500 euros) for a connection to your door that should come in the coming months. And the breath-taking connection speed of 100 Mbits symmetric. Which, granted, is a good improvement for casual browsing, but not quite good enough for businesses.
The road-tax is neutral, it doesn't matter what goods you transport. Imagine charging the producers of the most transported goods to pay a fee in addition to the road-tax and otherwise blocking their goods being transported for the rest of the month.
Net neutrality asks the internet to work how road taxes work. You pay for a certain bandwidth (a truck) and you can transport whatever goods you want with that. It doesn't matter if you go to walmart 5 times a week or split your trips to costco, walmart and target. Or maybe whole foods has a deal with the state that makes the people driving trucks to them exempt from the additional fee.
Note that roads are not neutral in the “net neutrality” sense, since emergency vehicles are prioritized. There’s a cogent argument against net neutrality on similar grounds: i.e., prioritizing traffic with prioritized purpose, especially in the face of congestion.
Networks aren't neutral either, even under net neutrality rules: you might lose your data uplink of the tower is at capacity and someone dials 911.
I'm a proponent of weakening net neutrality for when lives are at stake, but that's hardly ever the case on the internet. The problem is that most non-neutral treatment is the result of business interests rather than the greater good.
In addition to what was noted by a sibling comment (emergency calls are given higher priority than your standard commercial voice or data traffic), there is specifically an exemption listed in California's Net Neutrality law [0] for emergency traffic.
> 3103. (a) Nothing in this title supersedes any obligation or authorization a fixed or mobile Internet service provider may have to address the needs of emergency communications or law enforcement, public safety, or national security authorities, consistent with or as permitted by applicable law, or limits the provider’s ability to do so.
In what way is “emergency vehicles need special access” similar to “we need to charge Netflix more because ISPs oversold their networks while failing to upgrade”?
Toll roads charge more for larger vehicles. Vehicle registration may be more expensive for heavier vehicles or vehicles with more wheels. Meanwhile, toll roads may have just as much traffic issues and no guarantee of average velocity.
How is that not similar to ISPs throttling?
Not that I care much either way. I care more about localities and states encouraging or enforcing monopolies.
That’s not similar to ISP throttling because you’re paying for the scale but a flat fee for any use of that same scale.
The toll road doesn’t forbid trucks or cars painted red just because traffic on the toll road is heavy. Paying for the size of your vehicle isn’t like throttling; it’s like paying different amounts for different bandwidths.
It’d only be similar to throttling if the toll roads charged different amounts based on the contents of the vehicles.
This incentivizes creation of artificial scarcity to squeeze more money.
The entire industry is built on free peering unless traffic is very asymmetric for the most part.
This is analogous to converting existing lanes to express lanes on highways, people are not going to pay if there is no congestion. The city makes more money removing a lane from regular use and also not investing further on road expansion / alternative routes.
This fight is not so much about usage “bandwidth” as it is about ISPs who want to prioritize traffic depending on the source and whether the source is paying them an additional “priority” fee.
Allowing them to do that creates an non-level playing field, which disadvantages the smaller sources that many users would be very interested to view.
"Big sources" also want this because they do not want to have to compete with, or these days be called out by new sources.
Look at YT and the hiding dislikes. That was all about establishment players being very widely and publicly disliked for poor quality information, outright lies in some cases.
How did people know?
Thos smaller sources able to get a lot of attention.
The minute ISP's get to prioritize, they get to create near infinite artificial value by making endless deals about who gets what and when.
Nobody but the ISP'S and establishment support that garbage.
There is no value added to anyone, except the ISP's and establishment.
The solution for that is already in place – charge for bandwidth. If users pay $30 for 100 Mpbs or $60 for 500 Mpbs etc., and on top of it there are caps on total data consumed, where does the idea of further segmenting and prioritizing traffic even come from?
Because they want to sell you 3Tb of bandwidth but you only use 2Gb, and they want you to pay extra for that 2Gb to not be slow - despite that you already paid for it to be a set speed.
There's no growth left selling bandwidth. So they need to get growth by being anti-consumer.
It's almost like selling a 3TB SSD with only 500GB capacity but it dramatically throttles down once you go past 400GB so that it is impossible to fill it up to 3TB in any reasonable time frame.
To hide the scam, they want to prevent your computer from running any software that would need the whole 3TB.
Most people aren't going to think about their internet usage in terms of total data used, because working out how much data a particular site or service will cost them is a lot of work and requires knowing technical details that most people don't pay attention to. That results in a market for internet products that offer unlimited access to particular sites, sometimes with restrictions like only standard-definition video in the unlimited video plan. In addition, there's not really such a thing as single-price bandwidth to the entire internet at the scale most large ISPs are operating at - they're setting up peering with particular networks, some of which like to try and push more of the costs of peering onto the ISP side than others.
It works for water and electricity. I think part of the issue is, it isn't billed that way so there's no incentive to improve the situation. It's a lot better in the mobile world where it's common to be billed by bandwidth
I think the question becomes who should be charged for bandwidth. The ISPs in this case are arguing they want to charge a small subset of above normal bandwidth consuming services rather than the ISP customers.
That's double dipping on both the rate and the amount. Charge for one or the other.
We already have massive media conglomerates which have consolidated even more in the last decade.
In order to maintain a competitive space, a neutral internet must be maintained. Otherwise you're cementing the position of those who own the content and means to provide it.
Not always. This is why ISPs refuse to peer with certain customers. If they don't see mutual benefit, they charge for network connections instead, aka IP Transit.
Why should the companies pay for it? There are agreements in place for bandwidth between the peering companies and last mile providers. They shouldn’t care how it’s consumed.
The issue is not use it’s prioritization. That’s the danger.
Netflix pays to prioritize their traffic over Discovery+ or your video streaming startup. Now when it’s busy and the pipe is fully consumed, Netflix is perfect and your company is dropping frames and buffering.
They pay to prioritize only because ISPs held their own customers hostage. Links would become saturated (because ISPs wouldn’t upgrade them) and they’d let customers suffer until people running CDNs paid ISPs to upgrade their own damn links. The same ones taxpayers already paid them to upgrade. The same taxpayers that paid the monopolistic ISPs for service. They weren’t double-dipping, they were triple-dipping. Look up “The Book of Broken Promises”.
Legislators let the ISPs get away with it and it’s why we have such high prices for such trash service compared to other first-world countries.
The irony here is... Paid priorization is a solution to a problem ISPs created. If they didn't oversubscribe, there would be no market for guaranteeing transit on an oversubscribed network
That scenario will be true regardless, though, because Netflix can and does set up interconnects at dozens of peering locations to skip half the pipes.
It's true that it'd be bad for Discovery+ to pay for prioritizing their traffic over yours, and I'm very sympathetic to net neutrality on those grounds, but opponents would point out (as far as I can tell correctly) that ISPs have never really tried to build such a program. Throttling and traffic fees rarely come up except at the scale where the actual components of the underlying infrastructure matter.
That's simply ISPs seeing a lucrative revenue stream and wanting in on it. Let's put company size and market cap out of the picture and think of the network architecture. I set up a server in Romania. Someone from USA makes a request to it and gets a response. Can their ISP (Comcast or AT&T or whoever else) now send me a bill at the end of the month?
> That's simply ISPs seeing a lucrative revenue stream and wanting in on it. Let's put company size and market cap out of the picture and think of the network architecture. I set up a server in Romania. Someone from USA makes a request to it and gets a response. Can their ISP (Comcast or AT&T or whoever else) now send me a bill at the end of the month?
I think it's the reverse: the idea is that your server in Romania keeps getting a low-priority until you send each ISP (Comcast, AT&T, etc) a cheque every month.
They don't need to send you a bill, they only need to wait for your money.
I agree that they're setting up a revenue stream. I also think that a business that charges customers on both sides isn't as crazy as you want it to be. For example, a customer of our pays SAP Ariba to be the SaaS for their procurement process. We also have to pay SAP Ariba to submit invoices to this customer. In your example I expect they wouldn't send you a bill for the request. I do expect they would send you a notice to join whatever program they run or they will stop routing to your server.
Again, I don't agree with what the ISP is doing, but I can rationalize how they think it makes sense.
> I don't agree with what the ISP is doing, but I can rationalize how they think it makes sense.
It only makes sense if they perceive no backlash for overreaching.
We need to look closely at what they are currently doing. They're expanding zero rating on mobile, and also on broadband in some areas by claiming that their network is "proprietary technology" and not subject to such net neutrality laws.
Meanwhile, municipalities are prevented from building their own networks to compete with regional broadband monopolies. It's internet-highway robbery.
I agree with your general point (a lack of competition is why they can get away with double-charging for traffic), though this feels like a theoretical concern as of yet.
But you're conflating different ISPs with different types of anti-competitive behavior. Prioritizing non-streaming-service (e.g. throttling Netflix at prime time) packets could, for example, help a regional ISP stay competitive. That's different than the anti-competitive behavior the big ISPs engage in when they lobby governments/help pass laws which _block_ ISP competition in regions like Denver. Different issues with different effects.
> this feels like a theoretical concern as of yet.
This was Ajit Pai's argument. That we should regulate nothing until there's a problem. There are two problems with it,
(1) It's already a problem. There have been documented examples of ISPs throttling, favoring their own partnered content. Also they are actively expanding or seeking to expand zero rating which is anti-competitive.
(2) At the point you actually have a barren landscape in which competitors cannot grow, you've already sucked in a slew of investors on the idea that these monopolies' business models are sound. If the government steps in at that point, they risk being seen as the bad guy for destroying all that investment, which can have political consequences.
We can avoid all that by acknowledging the existing problems, and encouraging competition among ISPs. There should be very few people advocating for monopolies, and we outnumber them.
> Prioritizing non-streaming-service (e.g. throttling Netflix at prime time) packets could, for example, help a regional ISP stay competitive.
That only helps Netflix and that ISP maintain their grip. It's only competitive if by competitive you mean stomping out any new ISP or content provider that is unable to make such agreements.
> With a cost-neutral peering, each network operator pays for the expansion of its own network itself. Likewise, every network operator shall bear the costs of its own router interfaces at the connections between the networks (peering points).
> Large content providers have a strong interest to reach the DSL customers of DPCs with the best possible performance, and therefore are looking for alternatives to congested interfaces between the carriers. These are found usually through direct connections of the major content suppliers to the respective DPCs. At this point, the DPC can use their market position, since as a result of congested interfaces no other carrier can reach the DSL customers of the respective DPCs with sufficient speed. Therefore, the DPC can set prices, free of competition, which interested content providers have to pay to achieve performant connctions to "its" DSL customers.
So effectively ISPs are incentivized to neglect peerings that they aren't currently double dipping on in order to use their customers to coerce payment. Note that (unfortunately) DTAG was eventually successful in coercing Hetzner to pay for peering with them. They did this by abusing their customers. It's textbook monopolistic behavior.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to steelman the argument properly and separate out two different issues. IMO there's room for the FTC to have an "unreasonable use" penalty but otherwise mandate net neutrality. It has to come from the FTC so we need to actually properly regulate telecoms.
I think the imaginations of some who would strike down net neutrality go far beyond that.
They would disconnect the net at every border imaginable and charge for access along every gateway. It's an authoritarian's wet dream to have such control, and we the people should oppose it at every turn.
Setting up a framework that cements existing monopolies isn't capitalist, it's anti-competitive.
If I pay you to bring me a package from <somewhere else>, all is well. If 10 other people pay you to bring them packages from <somewhere else>, all is well. If 100 want to pay you to bring them packages from <somewhere else> and you suddenly don't have enough manpower to deliver those packages... do you suddenly start charging <somewhere else> because they have too many people that want packages? No, because that would be ridiculous.
In your example I'd say you have the following entities:
* ISP = Government
* Client = Driver
* Netflix = Ford
* Shows = Truck
* Bandwidth = Roads
The Government (ISP) taxes the Driver (Client) when they buy a Truck (watch shows) because that act puts stress on the Roads (Bandwidth). They do not put a special tax on Ford (Netflix) for simply offering a Truck (show) for sale.
So if the ISP wants to get extra revenue from this they need to charge the client more as they use more bandwidth.
Doesn't Netflix already pay on a usage basis for their bandwidth? If you run a small website that gets 100 users a month, you pay very little for bandwidth. If you run a video streaming site with millions of users you pay a lot.
And the users also pay for the bandwidth to download. Exactly how many more times do the ISPs need to get paid?
Taxpayers also paid ISPs to both deploy rural broadband and to upgrade existing infrastructure, so they’re getting paid 3x if you count that. Look up “The Book of Broken Promises”.
Not necessarily. Small websites have to pay for their bandwidth, but bigger companies like Netflix have been pushing ISPs into various schemes that give them that bandwidth for free, either through peering arrangements where ISPs take traffic to and from Netflix systems for free or through installing caching boxes in ISP facilities with the power, data and space paid for by the ISP.
On the roads, we have a very rough estimate of the amount of the externalities of a given vehicle. On the Internet, we can have precise information on every bit of bandwidth consumed. Why not price the network equally for everyone?
In spirit I agree with you. The reality gets more complicated. The canonical example here is Netflix. Netflix's traffic is _mostly_ outbound and because it's video streaming, there's lots of it. If an ISP has a 10G circuit, then Netflix may end up taking up 50% of that circuit during prime after-work time. Because the circuit is limited in throughput, if Netflix takes up 50%, then remaining internet services need to fit in the other 50%, which can lead to a bad time for everyone (dropped packets from Netflix, dropped packets while trying to fetch your email, it's whatever the router decides to prioritize.) Now of course the ISP can add another circuit or upgrade their current circuit, but that costs them money. Or, the ISP could choose to drop Netflix packets first, which may degrade Netflix quality but not make it completely unusable the way dropping email packets might. The latter is an opposing perspective to net neutrality (the ISP is specifically choosing to drop Netflix packets at a higher rate than other packets.)
I'm not against net neutrality myself, just trying to add a bit of background behind why certain folks may oppose it.
>Now of course the ISP can add another circuit or upgrade their current circuit, but that costs them money.
generally when businesses have a cost they charge extra to cover that. Or theoretically they may be making enough money that they could have less profit for a year to improve service.
>the ISP is specifically choosing to drop Netflix packets at a higher rate than other packets.
yeah, and then they are saying we would like to be able to offer a service where we don't drop packets of particular customers if they pay us money. So the 'nice packets you got there, shame if anything were to happen to them' business model.
Netflix offered to pay for the circuit upgrade in the case of Verizon. They're both present at some of the facilites, so upgrading would be a small matter of adding more interconnects.. Verizon refused point blank.
This is exactly why it started because Netflix switched to a lower tier provider (Level3 iirc) and the big ISPs wanted money pay for the transit which Level3 and Netflix didn’t want to pay.
It all went away when Netflix started installing CDN caches.
It's not clear what this means. I guess in the context it means everyone pays the same unit rate per amount of data transferred?
I think there's more subtlety than this. I pay more for a 100MBit connection than a 10MBit connection, and also pay more for the data transferred over those connections? Are they allowed to charge higher speed customers a lower unit rate?
The question comes into play at the edges - when your ISPs upstream connection is filled what happens? Can they selectively drop packets or do they have to drop them randomly? And can you pay to be in a “never drop my packets” group?
Absolutely not. That practice should literally be illegal.
> or do they have to drop them randomly?
Yes. This is the only reasonable approach.
> And can you pay to be in a “never drop my packets” group?
No. That should be illegal to offer.
If the ISP's network is incapable of meeting their customer's demands during peak hours and they oversubscribed themselves so badly that they're contemplating such tactics then they ran their business dishonestly. They fraudulently made promises that they were incapable of delivering on and got caught. They need to fix their network or go out of business. And possibly should face legal consequences for their behavior.
> Absolutely not. That practice should literally be illegal.
This is correct for selection based on the remote endpoint. OTOH, it's very reasonable to drop packets selectively based on the local endpoint, so that packet loss affects customers who are actually using 90-100% of advertised bandwidth (eg for streaming), but not those using <10% for stuff like checking their email. (Arguably, local-selection should be required, to prevent the ISP from making anti-net-neutrality FUD along the lines of "my neighbor's Netflix is making my email not work" actually true.)
> From an engineering point of view, with a scarce resource, dropping only the biggest user (Netflix) looks reasonable.
The decision of who is the biggest user needs to be made in realtime at the point of congestion, not identified on a quarterly basis by the accounting department and pushed out as policy across the whole network.
The “American Way” of finding a good enough monopoly that one can afford to pay legislators to allow it to continue so long as taxpayers can be convinced that it’s not bad enough to favor a different candidate. Or, just get every candidate to support it! Then taxpayers have no choice and you win.
Your argument makes zero sense and is completely divorced from what you preach.
I hate this direct form of hypocrisy. People pretend to be "righteous" and then act dishonest.
Cloud providers already bill network traffic at extremely high prices. The cheap ones oversubscribe their connections, according to the motto "you get what you pay for". The current system is "use = cost".
>For example, a common idea is that we should tax trucks more than other cars because they cause a large amount of damage to our roads.
And this is exactly why we should have net neutrality. If there is net neutrality on roads then we can just tax by axle weight. If there is no net neutrality then road companies would come up with a weird classification system that is completely independent of axle weight. For example. S-Pedelecs in Germany are just unthrottled electric bicycles that go faster than 25km/h. They are basically classified as a moped even though they are much lighter. Road companies would then charge S-Pedelecs more because of what they are classified as instead of how much they weigh. Truck companies will then try to develop trucks that aren't classified as trucks to avoid those higher fees (VPNs).
> Following that logic, the companies that encourage users to consume more bandwidth should be charged a price for that since they're the ones making money on it, and we don't want to raise costs on users.
That makes no sense. Just charge all commercial internet connections by traffic or capacity (oversubscribing does not count). You are so far away from "use = cost" that it's not even funny. The amount of brain twisting that is going on here is insane.
Bandwidth is already charged by consumption. What you’re suggesting here is to the idea that vehicles should be charged based on what they’re transporting. Sorry but that is preposterous. Weight is weight and should be considered as such. No cost preference for shipment of products that some private company likes.
There are reasonable arguments to be made for allowing infrastructure providers to limit the ability of bad actors to consume extreme amounts of resources before they tragedy-of-the-commons the whole shebang for everyone else. But any such system has to acknowledge that qualifying as infrastructure means that society relies on it to function, which means that demand for the infrastructure is, at the low end, inelastic, which means that a typical market structure would make no sense.
The conscientious way to do it is to determine what qualifies as a "reasonable" amount of consumption, then provide that level of consumption at a subsidized rate to all participants, then let market forces kick in if someone consumes more than that. Then the rub is to define "reasonable", which obviously the infrastructure providers shouldn't be allowed to do.
There's no denying that the internet is essential communications infrastructure. And in this era of videoconferencing and work-from-home, the network should be built out such that everyone can stream good-enough-quality video at peak hours without congestion; that seems reasonable to me. The government should also guarantee the availability of this minimum level of service to all citizens. If the network can't handle that, then the infrastructure providers need to build it out. Of course, they will drag their feet and complain, but that's because companies are self-serving sociopathic AIs.
> There are reasonable arguments to be made for allowing infrastructure providers to limit the ability of bad actors to consume extreme amounts of resources before they tragedy-of-the-commons the whole shebang for everyone else.
Except the "bad actors" are the ISP's customer. It's they who are asking for the bits to be sent. It's the ISP job to deliver the bits their customers requested.
The streaming services are not dumping bits on to the network like a chemical plant polluting a river. The streaming services are sending bits that the ISP's customers requested.
The streaming services are paying for their Internet connection, and ISP's customers are paying for their Internet connection, and it is the job of the ISP to connect the two.
"Extreme" here meaning ... the connection bandwidth that was explicitly paid for? Except for the fine print where the ISP notified the customer that they were going to horribly oversubscribe things. It amounts to fraud as far as I'm concerned.
"prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers"
This is not 'Net Neutrality'.
If data providers like Netflix want 'special service' then they can pay for it.
'Net Neutrality' is more like Carriers cannot charge more for email, than for games, than for messaging, than for something else.
Carriers should be able to charge whatever they want for whatever QoS (Quality of Service).
If Netflix wants more bandwidth with lower latency, fine, they can pay for that.
But Carriers cannot arbitrary charge 'more' to Netflix because they are 'richer' or because of the type of content.
Federal legislation needs to go further and separate content form data networks.
AT&T has a vast Content Empire that is in direct competition with Netflix, this is a gigantic conflict of interest.
AT&T can sell bytes of data at a quality of service. That's it. Maybe phones - so long as those phones can work on any network and other phones work on it's network.
Content? No way.
Same with cable distributors.
And more difficult to articulate but Apple shouldn't be able to compete with those in the App Store, for example and by law be very 'neutral' there as well: they have to treat everyone the same.
>If Netflix wants more bandwidth with lower latency, fine, they can pay for that.
Why should Netflix pay for this? They aren't the one choosing to send traffic onto that network, the ISPs CLIENTS are. The ISP shouldn't have any ability to charge Netflix for actions their clients are taking - and they should have to treat all traffic that a client asks for equally.
Can you imagine an electric company trying to get some sort of fee from Samsung because they sell a lot of electronics that people use in their houses...
Netflix pays for connectivity just like consumers do.
They can pay for better QoS, which will result in better QoS for their customers if they want.
Or their customers can, or both.
"Can you imagine an electric company trying to get some sort of fee from Samsung because they sell a lot of electronics that people use in their houses..."
That analogy doesn't work because Samsung, in that case, has nothing to do with the data flow. Netflix obviously does.
Netflix should not have to pay special fees because they are 'Netflix' or 'it's video' or 'it's movies' - but they should definitely have to pay fees relevant to QoS of their upload bandwidth. Just like you, I and everyone else.
> They can pay for better QoS, which will result in better QoS for their customers if they want.
Please, stop using QoS as a synonym for explicit prioritization. QoS strategies have advanced greatly since the 1990s, and the goal of providing better quality of service should not be used to defend obsolete non-neutral techniques. Net neutrality and QoS are not conflicting goals, and enforcing net neutrality is an excellent way to incentivize ISPs to transition to better QoS strategies.
I used to work in networking to help define such QoS terms, and clearly you didn't read what I wrote because I'm using QoS as an example of how to properly do Net Neutrality.
You seem to be using QoS to refer exclusively to stuff like DiffServ. That's wrong, even if it was widely accepted back in whatever decade you were working in networking. The DiffServ/DSCP mindset for how to achieve QoS is obsolete and inferior, and encourages non-neutral network management to the detriment of everybody except the ISPs that get to charge third parties extra for fast lanes and the few content providers who can afford to pay for the fast lane.
If your mental model of QoS treats packet scheduling as a zero-sum game and views latency and bandwidth as inversely related (implied by one of your other comments in this thread), then you're more than a decade out of date. Business models based on such wrong ideas do not deserve any protection from public policy.
If my neighbor streams a movie from Netflix and I download a Linux ISO at the same time, there's no reason why the ISP should be allowed to charge extra from my neighbor or from Netflix, but not charge me or the guy hosting the Debian mirror.
Netflix, the Debian mirror, my neighbor and I are all paying for our connections. If we saturate the agreed-upon bandwidth then the ISP's could offer to sell more bandwidth. If we don't, then it's up to the ISP's to fulfill their part of the bargain.
Imagine if Office 365 started charging email senders for storage, not recipients people were using all the storage they pay for, but because Microsoft oversold their product and didn't want to invest in new storage servers.
Of course there is a reason: QoS. You neighbour might want a low-latency, high bandwidth service that doesn't worry about packet loss. You might want a service which is better for downloads: no worries about latency, medium speed, no packet loss.
Different prices for different services.
Also - Netflix may choose to subsidize their service i.e. you don't even need an ISP bill with Netflix - it comes with the package.
2) Netflix, Debian, you and your neighbour are all paying different kinds of bills for different kinds of things. If Netflix's deal is that they get massive fast service until a certain threshold, after which their service is degraded ... when then users will see that degradation at their end.
What cannot happen is ISPs arbitrarily charging Netflix more for no reason, or charging for different kinds of content.
Everyone pays for a 'pipe' with different characteristics, ideally without price discrimination (i.e. if you want the same pipe as Netflix then you pay the same prices ass them), and that's that.
Frankly, I don't see why both me and my neighbor can't have low-latency, high-speed connectiosn without packet loss. We manage to have such things outside the US so I assume you lot should manage on the other side pf the pond too.
I like T-Mobile's zero-rating solution. Specific classes of data (sub-480p video) would be zero rated for all servers who filled out paperwork, no source-based discrimination. That made sense.
Also, kinda obviously, government emergency services (911, weather alerts, etc) being zero-rated just make sense.
I don't want zero rating to let FB subsidize plans that allow free access to FB. I think we can find some uses that avoid dystopia.
Well, I'd like my ISP to get their nose out of my traffic and stop sniffing like a coke addict. One of Net Neutrality arguments is that you sell me speed (and bandwidth where data caps apply, but shouldn't) and I can do whatever I want. It is I, that pays for the service, not Netflix nor Google or any platform, and if I want to watch YouTube in 4K because my speed allows me to, or if I want to turn my PC into a seeding machine for Linux iso images, I should be free to do so.
So there is an argument for DNS-over-HTTPS there on top of the NN one.
It doesn't stop you from watching in 4K video. It just provides another option. But critically, this is an option that you, the customer, negotiate with T-Mobile. You contract for X gigs plus unlimited sub-480p traffic. And tiered data (X gigs of high-speed, Y or infinite gigs of low speed) is really common in cellphone contracts. This is just making it clear you can get the low speed data without having to burn your high speed up first.
> X gigs of high-speed, Y or infinite gigs of low speed
But then why even bother with the paperwork to get approved to be a part of the program? Why doesn't T-Mo just ignore usage below some average throughput speed for any traffic?
A couple of reasons. One is that your paperwork guarantees you'll pay attention to their "throttle this down to sub-480p" request, which let them have their customers (who opted into it from t-mobile) not have to worry about how that apps streaming was free. That is, T-Mobile customers who turned that feature on could be presented whitelisted apps without needing to configure them. Two is that "free video streaming" sounds better when selling a service to their customers than "free Xmbps connections". Three is it allows a lot more freedom to T-mobile. They know they need to average X mbps so the stream doesn't jitter, but they can totally take advantage of an uncongested five minutes to let you download quickly to build your cache.
...but then T-Mobile customers are stuck with 480p video unless they want to pay for an actually reasonable amount of bandwidth.
On top of that, anyone hosting content who wants to be zero-rated has to make 480p copies of all their video, which may be common practice, but certainly isn't free.
And what about content that isn't video on the first place? There are plenty of mobile games that require several gigabytes of download.
No matter what it is for, zero-reading creates an artificial scarcity.
Recently I ran out of mobile data, and using my phone providers app, I couldn’t buy any additional data, because I had no data left to connect to them.
There are definitely circumstances where it makes sense to give users free access to data, just like how it makes sense that you can call toll free numbers.
The opportunity for abuse is probably large enough to warrant that we can’t have nice things.
> and says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality protections by slowing down traffic at network interconnection points
Here's an anecdote. Over 10 years ago, I worked for an ISP company in Russia. That was before they went draconian on the 'Net (beyond SORM-2, I mean) - I left around the time Russian government started to mandate blocking websites. Just to clarify - that was an age of rapid growth and users had a choice of ISPs (I had 7 possible to pick from), so providers had competed really seriously.
Which is why net neutrality wasn't a thing - on the contrary, providers were incentivized to set up local FTP servers. Uh, y'know, for warez, though, of course, officially ISPs just "didn't knew" what users were doing there - but that was before streaming services; even Steam was quite a novelty at the time. Those FTPs had faster access speeds (traffic shaping was turned off for their IPs entirely, so up to 100Mbps when 10Mbps connectivity was the norm) and unaccounted traffic. It was mutually beneficial - providers had saved (a lot) on uplink utilization and customers had exchanged content at much faster speeds. In '00s there were even citywide LANs communities, which were torn down only because of malware onset. Those were wild times.
Doing some funky shit like throttling certain traffic meant your users would be gone (people tolerated for a short while, then voted with their wallets). But we had to do this twice. First time it was disaster management, when the first uTP implementation happened. Users had updated their uTorrents and it was buggy and caused very high packet rate (and this is UDP we're talking about), so our edge routers started to choke on this UDP BitTorrent traffic. We had to identify those packets and push a rule that dropped them entirely. Second time was also about BitTorrent - in an university dorm, where we contracted to set up WiFi coverage - I don't remember the details but we had really struggled ensuring fair bandwidth distribution, as someone torrenting made network barely usable for others (because of radio interference, not bandwidth limitations), but we had to tune it down to make it work somehow.
Another story from those times. We had started to receive tons of complaints that YouTube was performing poorly. We've spent days trying to figure out what the heck was wrong there, and realized the problem was only manifested through one of the upstream providers. They had no clue either, so the temporary solution was to push a a bunch of excessive AS-PATH elements in BGP announce to deprioritize routing YouTube traffic from that direction, then wait until someone upstream figures it all out.
And yet another story is that we ran analytics (anonymized, we only looked at very coarse AS level traffic distribution) to understand where we talked to most and if we should peer with someone else to improve connectivity in those directions.
And, of course, we had blocked ports, such as tcp/25 or tcp/445. Would've been a disaster if we wouldn't have.
The morale of this is that as an ISP sometimes you have to violate neutrality in the interest of your customers, to ensure quality of service. Well, to think of it - QoS is inherently non-neutral since the whole point of it is to classify traffic and differentiate it. And sometimes it's hard to draw a line on what's fair and what's not. I mean, I questioned some things we did and only justified them as "well, I don't see any other options here to make it work". And I don't condone nor condemn those examples - just present them as an anecdote to say that there are always some nuances and sometimes things aren't exactly black and white.
Though when people speak about NN in the US they talk about shitty anti-customer moves like throttling Netflix trying to squeeze some money out of this.
I think there are two reasons for throttling. A user due to congestion and to prioritize content. Throttling a user for congestion to give a “fair” usage of a shared resource makes perfect sense, but throttling a specific type of content doesn’t. If it needs to be done split one line into 10 equal lines, but don’t say no one can view Netflix or some other service.
Afaik there was some somewhat legitimate concern it would effect mixed content networks. E.g. networks that carry voice, video, and internet or networks that provide different "tiers" (business vs consumer)
Theoretically it should make access cheaper by allowing ISPs oversubscribe networks while still guaranteeing performance to certain customers but, in practice, I find it highly unlikely that savings would ever get passed on to the customer (instead converted into "shareholder value")
The primary beneficiaries of this are basically Netflix and Google, no?
My understanding is most of these policies have always been targeted at the large streaming services that are putting the most burden on the networks and who often already have special interconnect agreements.
The claims that these policies would be aimed at small businesses seem largely to have not been realistic.
The whole situation with lying about what you’re ad spend is getting you seems like a much bigger small internet business issue.
> My understanding is most of these policies have always been targeted at the large streaming services that are putting the most burden on the networks and who often already have special interconnect agreements.
"large streaming services that are putting the most burden on the networks"?
That is completely non-sensical. It is not streaming services that are creating a burden, it is the ISP's customers. The ISP's customers are asking for the bits. They are using their Internet service / connection to get what they want (video). Is HN 'causing' the traffic to flow over my ISP's pipes when I reply to comments, or is it me (the ISP customer) when I click on "reply"?
The streaming services are not dumping bits on to the network like a chemical plant polluting a river. The streaming services are sending bits that the ISP's customers requested.
If the ISPs can't deliver the traffic that their customers want then they need to architect their network to handle it.
ISPs are selling access to the Internet, streaming service are on the Internet, and so ISPs need provide it or stop advertising that they're providing Internet access.
The streaming services are paying for their Internet connection, and ISP's customers are paying for their Internet connection, and it is the job of the ISP to connect the two.
But we (the ISPs) made assumptions about aggregate consumer bandwidth requirements back in the early 2000s and now they're cutting into shareholder value! Would someone please, PLEASE, think of the shareholders?!
There's simply no way for any ISP to allow all customers to use their full bandwidth, that just doesn't work, both technically and with the prices consumers pay. When building (and replacing parts to add capacity) the network ISPs look at current usage, average usage of each customer, account for future growth, etc, results in some cost that ends up as part of what customers has to pay. If traffic increases much more than expected then the upgrade/investment made that was expected to last X years would last years less, so a new upgrade is done which results in increased price for the end customer.
If the new investment was paid in part by Netflix and others like them, as they drive most of the increase in bandwidth, then the cost would be pushed to Netflix customers through Netflix.
Either way, end consumers pay what is needed to upgrade the network, otherwise the network is congested or the ISP goes out of business.
I would argue that ISPs should not have these massive profits, if they do then they are overcharging their customers. And the fix for that is to have actual competition, consumers must have multiple choices, which for the most part the US does not have in the ISP market as you have no sharing of last mile access and block municipal infrastructure at many levels.
> There's simply no way for any ISP to allow all customers to use their full bandwidth, that just doesn't work, both technically and with the prices consumers pay.
I know how over-subscription works.
But tough shit. As an ISP customer I'm paying for $x/month for x bps. I've cut a cheque now provide me with what you advertised.
> If the new investment was paid in part by Netflix and others like them, as they drive most of the increase in bandwidth, then the cost would be pushed to Netflix customers through Netflix.
The streaming services are paying for their Internet connection, and ISP's customers are paying for their Internet connection, and it is the job of the ISP to connect the two.
Do you think its feasible to build a network that is not oversubscribed? Do you think the current cost of Internet subscriptions could pay for a network that is not oversubscribed?
Netflix and others for sure do not pay a lot for their Internet connection, they do not really have one in this context. Most of the traffic comes from their CDN nodes, these are place directly inside ISPs own network (a server with multiple 10Gbit connections), they do not pay the ISPs a lot for this as its also a large benefit for the ISP since otherwise this traffic would come over peering instead and would have to travel further as CDN nodes can be geographically distributed.
The TCO of the ISPs network investments and operation is paid by their end customers, the current low cost is only possible if their network is oversubscribed.
All these things are simply solved by having a competitive market, countries that have that pay much less in Internet subscription costs. Competition is enabled by municipal networks (the ones here do not offer their own Internet service, they put down fiber when other stuff needs to be put in the ground, then let ISPs connect to their network), or by forcing ISPs to share last mile connections to other ISPs.
>ISPs are selling access to the Internet, streaming service are on the Internet, and so ISPs need provide it or stop advertising that they're providing Internet access.
How long until Comcast advertises its proprietary Comcast Network?
If ISPs promised not to try to get into the business of competing with those service providers this would be a stronger argument.
When this arose, it was partly a lever to make their own offerings more attractive.
Turns out they mostly sucked at those offerings and have shut down or spun them off so it's less urgent right now, but don't assume it won't happen again!
> I don't understand how anyone could oppose this.
Easy. If you operate a cell network, your bandwidth is extremely limited, so when it's congested, you throttle streaming video content so everything else is still fast. The same problems affect wired ISPs, but it's easier to run more fiber (often from a local office, not to homes) than to get more spectrum, install more towers, or create the next generation of wireless broadband.
The easiest, absurd case of cell networks falling over is at music festivals. They just don't have the bandwidth to handle thousands of people in a small area.
Operating costs for upgrading networks are obviously better served going into increasing net profits than actually building improved infrastructure. From a capitalist point of view it just makes good business sense to lobby for not having to upgrade the networks because people have no (or at least very few) competitors they could turn to as alternatives.
Depending on how this is applied/interpreted, I could see reasons to oppose it.
For example, there can be a lot of "lawful traffic" that is harmful to a network. T-Mobile's T&C say that these things are disallowed: "Uses applications which are designed for unattended use, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections, or applications that are used in a way that degrades network capacity or functionality", "Uses applications which automatically consume unreasonable amounts of available network capacity". I'm sure someone here is going to "but fetching RSS automatically..." but I'm going to ignore those straw-man objections. If someone is doing something that harms the network and the enjoyment of other users, it does seem reasonable to restrict that.
Likewise, many ISPs deprioritize data if a user has hit a certain threshold of usage. It isn't throttling, but they give priority to users who don't use as much data given the shared nature of the connection. That seems reasonable to me. It allows heavy users to use as much data as they want while light users aren't impacted by their heavy usage.
Many mobile ISPs throttle types of content like video. That's certainly controversial, but has become common.
> It also prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers
This always makes me wonder if that means that ISPs must deliver free transit. Most people aren't really aware of how money is paid to transmit things over the internet. For example, let's say that I want to transmit a video to a Comcast customer in LA. Can I hand it off to them in NY and say "it's your problem now since you can't charge me to deliver the traffic"? Or do I have to get it within a certain distance of the customer and pay for the transit myself? If Comcast won't advertise BGP routes non-locally if someone isn't wiling to pay them transit, is that a violation?
I know a lot of people say that they just want a "dumb pipe", but I think that's mostly because many companies are kinda scummy. We've seen ISPs do crappy things. But there is reasonable network management. For example, I've had friends who have worked at universities where 1% of the users end up consuming 50-75% of the bandwidth. They've done things like put BitTorrent traffic at a lower priority. They don't block it, but they do manage it so that the shared network works well for everyone. If a lab starts using a crazy amount of bandwidth, they don't want everyone else's usage to suffer. It's quite reasonable to manage traffic in good faith - and I think a lot of the no-management/dumb-pipe stuff comes from the fact that we've had some scummy ISPs.
a lot of the no-management/dumb-pipe stuff comes from the fact that we've had some scummy ISPs.
This is true, but that's how politics works. ISPs abused their position and lost the public's trust so now there's going to be an overreaction in the opposite direction.
...1% of the users end up consuming 50-75% of the bandwidth...
The correct and neutral solution to this is per-customer fair queueing. (It's not my problem that there isn't any equipment to implement that.)
Net neutrality really highlights the ratchet effect that arises wherever a conflict of interest between the general public and special interests exists.
They never stop. Legislative lobbying. Massive Legal efforts. Attempts at influencing the executive/government activities.
Can someone explain a technical issue I see with net neutrality?
From a network engineering perspective, it seems sensible to me that CDN servers are located as close as possible to end users. So I assume that implies residing in whatever data centers the ISPs use at their edge.
Is there some way to get the networking-efficiency benefits of those colo arrangements while still having net neutrality?
It seems to me more about charging extra or artificially throttling.
If a streaming provider has massive connection at a shared upstream peering location as an ISP, but their competitor doesn't, the result could likely be that the bandwidth is better to that provider, while it's congested going to anywhere else on the internet (including competitors). Is this a violation of net neutrality, and if so, by who?
Some other situations I can think of that are less clear:
"Sorry streaming service, we can't host your CDN appliance because we already have an appliance from your competitor and our agreement with them disallows it"
"Sorry streaming service, we can't host your CDN appliance because we have no more physical space"
"Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, if you pay $$,$$$,$$$ to cover the cost of expanding our datacenter"
"Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, it will cost you $,$$$,$$$ per year"
"Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, it will cost you $$ per month per client IP"
Net neutrality does not regulate the peering/colo end of the transaction. Though Mozilla argued that it should, after Comcast let their Level 3 link clog up to coerce Netflix into paying to peer with them directly.
Even if we did have peering neutrality on the books, this wouldn't outlaw edge CDNs. It would just prohibit Comcast from charging Netflix more money for the same equipment or access to their network than, say, YouTube.
I've been asking this exact question for years. I feel like most people got some well-meaning propaganda on this and see net neutrality as an anti-censorship thing (which, hooray for anti-censorship) without thinking through all the totally reasonable and useful things that would violate the letter of it.
If locating the CDN node in the ISP network makes financial sense for the ISP (smaller lines to the internet backbone) or the CDN (lower egress charges / better latency), then one of those two businesses will seek out an arrangement.
What does throttling traffic or charging customers different amounts for different sites have to do with whether the CDN machine will lower network operating costs?
(Other than that the law makes it clear ISP's can't run a over congested line to the backbone in hopes of artifically forcing CDN deals.)
That's exactly my point: "seeking out an arrangement" is exactly what net neutrality outlaws, and while it's obviously bad to artificially slow someone down, NN proponents also say they're against artificially speeding some traffic up. That seems dangerous to me, like we could accidentally outlaw CDNs or something.
I don’t fully understand how anti-censorship is a virtue when defending Google and Netflix but then becomes a vice when defending regular people’s ability to not be arbitrarily banned on Twitter.
Corporate media instills corporate values. Corporations being censored is bad for profit. But corporations not being allowed to censor regular people is also bad for profit.
Because the Republicans were hypocrites on this issue. No more and no less. "But Twitter is a private platform" is entirely a way for Democrats to wave that in their face.
Trump called Net Neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet" and gave Ajit Pai the power at the FCC to kill it. The GOP was all for "ISPs are private platforms" and "regulating ISPs violates their free speech" back then, when they thought they were on "their side".
To their credit, they were, kind of. Twitter decided to give Trump special treatment under their World Leaders policy, allowing him to break rules[0] with minimal consequences. They did this because Trump[1] gave Twitter clout and relevance that they wanted. This all changed after Jan 6; when a mob of extreme-right Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Suddenly, big tech flip-flopped on Trump and decided they weren't going to serve extreme right-wingers anymore.
Republicans had taken tech companies as public utility for granted, while at the same time they were hard at work ensuring there would be no legal basis for actually regulating tech companies as public utilities. Yes, there's a few right-libertarian arguments[2] against this kind of regulation, but that entire wing of the GOP has been a lame duck for half a decade by now[3]. As far as I can tell, Republicans saw that liberals had been screaming their heads off about Comcast censoring the net, and that was apparently good enough justification to oppose Net Neutrality. The Stupid-Partisan wing of American politics wins again.
I'm not saying it's good that Twitter censors politicians that I don't like; of course. I'm saying that those politicians need to apologize and admit they were on the wrong side of the argument[4], because "censorship is OK when Comcast does it but not Twitter" is not a coherent argument. It's just self-dealing.
[0] Most egregiously: Donald Trump was exempted from DMCA 512 takedown notices, so if he used your song in a video and posted it on Twitter, you couldn't take down the tweet for stealing your song.
[1] More generally, any @POTUS account
[2] e.g. "How does Comcast pay for better routers if they can't double-bill Netflix"
[3] Source: I used to be deep into right-libertarianism back in college, during the "Ron Paul R[3vol]ution" days. As far as I can tell everyone involved either went alt-right, or left-libertarian. Or their name is Louis Rossman.
If you're wondering, I still support Net Neutrality and I think large social media platforms should also be regulated under common-carrier rules. However, I don't think even that should get Trump back on Twitter. The World Leaders policy was itself a common-carrier violation.
Sort of. It's more like one side is being inconsistent because the other side has given them adversarial license to do so by also being inconsistent, but in the opposite direction. Both sides should want common-carrier regulation for both residential ISPs (Comcast) and OSPs (Twitter).
There's also a related problem in which both sides not wanting something their constituents want will use each other as an excuse to not do the thing. For example, Right to Repair polls very favorably with basically anyone, but politicians do not want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. It is an "antipartisan issue", one that has popular support but bipartisan opposition. One way you can kill an antipartisan issue is by turning it into a partisan one, so that your side's supporters shut up about it and the opposing side's supporters are deadlocked by yours. There have been attempts to do this by R2R opponents, by say, telling angry farmers that R2R actually only benefits rich, MacBook-toting liberals.
To start, there's no single globally recognized definition of net neutrality. California enacted a law with a few specific provisions such as disallowing exemption of selected traffic from data caps and artificial throttling. Setting up CDNs doesn't go against that law. Of course you could say that prioritizing certain traffic means throttling the rest, but if those servers are physically close to the ISP then you can't really argue against physics doing its job.
My impression is net neutrality is oriented for the end user to preserve fair content deliverability, not necessarily the content provider, with the primary goal to prevent throttling any or all content based on who is willing to pay for no or less throttling. This is not incompatible with cdn colo at an isp. Colo is not akin to providers paying to not be throttled, but more like having a data center very close to the isp, which like the colo would still be subject to physical rent costs.
I’ve never seen any definition of Net Neutrality that mentions CDNs co-located in ISP data centers as a problem, so the issue you’re mentioning doesn’t exist.
It would be an NN issue if ISPs were to try to charge customers a different price for content located on their CDNs, or prioritize traffic going to sites hosted in their data centers.
Most definitions of net neutrality simply don't prevent ISPs from hosting CDN nodes (although it would be nice if ISPs treated all CDNs the same). Likewise net neutrality doesn't prohibit direct connections between broadband ISPs and content providers because such connections generally benefit everyone involved.
My guess, instead of charging netflix to place a CDN in their data center, they may offer youtube / netflix et all free CDN space/power, perhaps even PAYING youtube to put their stuff inside their network perimeter.
For those who are thinking, "why do we need Net Neutrality? When have you actually seen an example of providers throttling content?" - there's a pretty egregious one that's been present for years now.
For those with American mobile phone plans, switch over to LTE or 5G, and run two "speed tests": One on Ookla Speedtest[0], and one on Netflix's fast.com[1]. If you don't have the top-tier plan on T-Mobile or AT&T, or have the $10/line "Premium Streaming" addon on Verizon (which pushes, but doesn't remove, the throttle), your speeds on Speedtest should appear quite a bit faster than on Netflix.
If you're seeing very low speeds on both tests, there's more likely something else at play (wireless interference, circuit congestion, poor signal, etc).
California's Net Neutrality law specifically outlaws this practice, and this is one of the big reasons carriers are upset about it. I'd recommend reading the text [2] of the law - it's fairly short and easy to understand, with definitions provided.
A few ISPs, like Sonic, maintain neutrality by their own policies. Then I read not only of throttling but of horrors like replacing ads on websites with different ones that pay the ISP.
That would only be possible if they proxy your connections and you have accepted their certificate.
The entire point of SSL is to create an End-to-End encrypted connection between you and your target server. That includes anyone who can view and try to manipulate your traffic.
Net neutrality sucks for one reason - it makes paid fast lanes illegal.
Hear me out . . .
A connection to the internet should be basically a dumb pipe, not filtering, accelerating, or slowing down anything.
However . . .
An ISP should be able to have a side-pipe to a specific service that provides for unregulated access to something thru that pipe.
For instance you might watch Netflix all the time and want to pay a couple bucks for a side-pipe access to Netflix at a consistent throughput. Or maybe you work in finance and want access to Bloomberg, or Fidelity.
Or maybe you work remotely and would love to access your Microsoft email and SharePoint with higher upstream throughput.
Or maybe you’re a gamer and want a lower latency link to your game.
Why can’t you have that?
It is things like that which drive me crazy. The intent of the law is great but the implementation is lacking.
Net Neutrality is the greatest example of two sides that want the same outcome but can't get past their petty differences.
The only reason Republicans want this blocked is because they see the writing on the wall when the state gets totalitarian control over communication (oddly enough, playing out right now in Russia).
Democrats don't want to do deal with the Monopolistic behavior of ISPs, which is just an alternate version of totalitarian control.
The common solution to appease both sides: break up the fucking monopolies into small township sized chunks. Both sides would support it. Why this is so hard?
Why shouldn't a company or person be discriminated against based on content type? content type is not a protected category. Ultimately, net neutrality is good for the rich since it lower their cost so it will all be supported by the gov. If you people didn't already know, the the rich are the ones who make the calls in the USA. I don't want to bring them down though, I want to elevate my self to their level.
If I remember correctly, the issue with Net Neutrality legislation (as with almost all legislation) isn't what you think it is. It had to do with services like Netflix being able to host servers within ISPs to make them close to the end users.
Not sure what article I had read though, it was quite a few years back.
Weird.
The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. In most places it's pretty crap too. Many places have no competition. Some providers are in clear breach of contract in not providing customers service as they promised to do.
But apparently all that's not enough. We get the argument that the likes of Netflix are "pushing" their data at no cost onto "their" network. This is such a ridiculous argument and is nothing more than an effort to extort Netflix and other streaming services because it's eroding their cable TV services.
No one is "pushing" data onto the network. Customers are pulling that data and those customers, by definition, are already paying for the bandwidth and the network access. But this doesn't stop lobbyists pushing this narrative onto Luddite elected officials. It's double-dipping. No more, no less.
I really hope CAlifornia's net neutrality laws stand and get copied by other states.