It's like you build an autobahn for everyone, and then one monster haulage company moves in and dominates the road, and the road isn't really as useful as envisaged.
If a ISP's customer wants to spend 100% of their bandwidth talking to netflix (or anybody else), that's their business. Netflix is sending that data only because the ISP's customer's asked for it.
> autobahn
An ISP isn't a shared commons. It's offering a service to transit data to/from other hosts on the internet, usually metered at either a fixed rate per unit time, or by the total carriage "weight" (bandwidth). Complaining about Netflix "using 37% of traffic in N.A." is like complaining about Amazon "using 7% of UPS' N.A. volumes"[1].
The way customer's actually want to use their bandwidth might not be compatible with the ISP's wishes or a particular business plan based on oversubscription or promoting local services, but that's a risk of being in the ISP business.
"If a ISP's customer wants to spend 100% of their bandwidth talking to netflix (or anybody else), that's their business. Netflix is sending that data only because the ISP's customer's asked for it."
I'm not sure you can rebut (parents) hypothetical with an appeal to free markets ... since it is free markets in telecom service that net neutrality subverts for (what is, in my opinion) the greater good.
"An ISP isn't a shared commons. It's offering a service to transit data to/from other hosts on the internet, usually metered at either a fixed rate per unit time, or by the total carriage "weight" (bandwidth)."
Are you drawing a distinction between transit ISPs (like he.net, etc.) and last-mile providers (like Comcast) ? Because I thought the entire point of net neutrality was that an ISP was indeed, to some degree, a shared commons.
This isn't about markets (free or regulated). The entire point[1] of an ISP is to (for a fee) carriage IP packets. Just like UPS/FedEx (for a fee) carriage you physical packages. I'm appealing to the simple idea that both of those businesses have an obligation to fulfill the service the customer paid for.
If ISPs costs are too high, they should e.g. raise their {monthy flat rate,per-bit bandwidth fee} or any claim that they provide access to the internet as an internet service provider is fraud.
> ISP was indeed, to some degree, a shared commons.
The internet is a shared commons. The actual carriage of packets from your house to the internet is usually some kind of leased flat rate or pay-per-use service. You are not sharing your ADSL line or contractually guaranteed portion of your local cable line's bandwidth.
[1] obviously they also handle associated technical minutia like assigning IP addresses
The customer paid the ISP for bandwidth and Netflix pays AWS for outbound bandwidth. Both parties are paying providers for the requested capacity. ISPs in other countries can provide service at lower prices that US ISPs so I find it hard to believe this is a cost of service argument. The truth is that cable TV is being displaced by network delivered video and the ISPs know they can’t easily replace the cable revenue b6 jacking up internet access fees. Repealing net neutrality provides cover to shift revenue from cable to internet.
Sure, if the customer's contract says that their packets need to all be treated with equal priority. But the whole point in repealing net-neutrality is to allow for contracts which don't need to treat all packets with equal priority. In that case the ISP isn't violating the contract and the customer wanting to spend %100 of their bandwidth talking to netflix for instance is the ISP's business too.
If the ISP wants to be involved in monitoring and regulating (or charging differently depending) where your packets go, then they can be liable for providing child pornography, being a party to all copyright infringements, etc... If they want to take action depending on the data, then they can be held liable for the data as well. This is why the telcos wanted "common carrier" status in the first place.
But now they're too greedy having seen the cable TV model where they get to charge rent on both ends for content they didn't even create.
Regarding ISPs creating original content, they have tried that and the quality of their stuff just couldn’t stand next to Google, Facebook, etc.
I think we all know a relative who used the “install CD” that came with their 2000s-era ISP and ended up with a junk homepage & browser toolbars, and “ask Jeeves” as their default search engine.
> In that case the ISP isn't violating the contract and the customer wanting to spend %100 of their bandwidth talking to netflix for instance is the ISP's business too
That's garbage. I don't need my ISP shaking down the content business to be able to put their own content up front while requiring payment from others for equal level treatment.
Taxpayers built this infrastructure and there are still regional broadband monopolies all over the place. It's entirely anti-consumer. We built the damned thing in the first place with the agreement there would be sufficient service. Fact is, our service is lousy, even in many dense urban areas!
We should stand up together and vote this anti-NN crap down, regardless of whether it takes 2 weeks or 2 years.
>Taxpayers built this infrastructure and there are still regional broadband monopolies all over the place.
Taxpayers building modern ISP infrastructure is a myth. Very little public money went to last mile ISPs. In fact, they are typically taxed fairly highly by local governments. Governments see ISPs are a money raising source not a place to spend money .
There are still regional "telecom" companies like AT&T and Verizon, but they don't have monopolies over ISP service. In most areas its actually the cable company that has more customers.
> Taxpayers building modern ISP infrastructure is a myth.
The deregulatory 1996 Telecom Act included provisions for a particular level of broadband penetration and performance. Those provisions were not met. Instead, now we have an FCC trying to reclassify broadband to 10 Mbps.
Look at the distribution of throughput speeds in the green image posted here [1]. ISPs haven't fulfill their end of the deal with regards to speeds, and the country is mostly covered by regional broadband monopolies.
Well, if you as an ISP advertise and sell subscriptions for 200mbps (with the “up to” hidden in 7pt, 10 pages down into the contract) and customers buy the service it is none of your business how those 200mbps are being used, only to shuffle them along at the speed that has been paid for.
If the sold speed is only achievable when nobody else in the neighborhood is using the service then it’s a lie, and it’s no one else’s fault but the ISP’s if they get caught
It's not on page ten. It's not hidden. Comcast/Xfinity puts it directly next to the speed in their advertising materials. Just check out their website (https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/speed). Yes, it's a slightly smaller font, but companies have been putting "FREE" in bigger letters for complimentary products forever - I'm afraid I don't see the difference.
But decreasing the average usage of customers, despite fixing maximum will mean profit. If somehow video sites get blocked, the average internet usage will very likely drop down many fold.
> Pissing off customers has many failure points.
Without video many people could just stick with their cellphone bandwidth and drop their cable plan entirely.
Congratulations, you have just made anti Net Neutrality argument.
Could you expand on this a bit? I haven't heard this argument, and I just listened to a pretty long conversation with FCC Chairman Pai (on the Fifth Column podcast, if you're interested). His argument was that it will reduce the burden on small ISPs, which would then pop up everywhere, creating a pro-consumer competitive market. (Which is either magical thinking or just disingenuous, but that was his argument, such as it was.)
"Pissing off customers has failure points" is the core of the anti-NN arguments. There's no need to regulate what ISPs can do with the traffic - if they slow down access to some websites, or stop providing access to some of them or increase prices on the access of the "entire internet", then the customers would go to competitors who do not impose such restrictions.
What competitors? Many Americans have access to one ISP, and if they have access to more than one, it's often a false choice (DSL v Cable, e.g.) where the speeds are not comparable. I live in Chicago, the third most populous US city, and I have access to only AT&T and Comcast. I've searched for alternatives, but RCN isn't allowed to service my area for some reason, WOW! doesn't serve my area. So I'm stuck with Comcast. AT&T is completely insufficient for my needs, so if I don't like Comcast (which I do not, at all) what do I do?
That's a different argument from Net Neutrality. What you should argue for is that localities cannot interfere with IP traffic via franchising the rights to provide telecom/cable services.
It is an argument that goes along with it. The refrain (and argument given by parent) about NN is that you can use your voice as a consumer to go elsewhere (to another competitor) in a non-NN world if they are dissatisfied with their ISP's NN policies. The problem I outlined shows that isn't really an option for many Americans.
The issue is that the population of localities does not want competition. That's why the population does not want cell phone towers ( eyesore ), the population does not want more wires on poles (wires, eww!) etc etc etc. And the population wants to protect the busy bodies that attempt to block things ( because busy bodies are typically nice old people who should really be helped to remain in their homes and they really really really like stuff to be the same as it was fifty years ago ).
Nah, I've retired from dealing with ISP issues at about the time I realized aunt 82 year old aunt Suzi actually did block a roll new cell cite for American Tower because she did not want to see it across from her house.
The argument for net neutrality is entirely that it is necessary in the absence of competition, and that competition is indeed absent in practice. The two things are inseparable - if there were a competitive market for internet service, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Of course, that’s assuming that competitors will pop up to do that. Sadly, the airline, cable, cellular plan and ISP industries have all demonstrated that oligopolies are alive and well - you can bet that ISPs will use the new income from enhanced market segmentation to shut out competitors, not improve their service.
What makes you say that? It is caused by the physical reality that it doesn't make sense to build the same last-mile infrastructure multiple times. We figured this out decades ago when competing cables blotted out the sky in New York. If you think there are better solutions, that might be an interesting thing to discuss, but there are physical limitations that you can't just hand wave away.
Spending first ten years building a promising local ISP, directly in the trenches.
The "there's no need to do last mile infrastructure multiple times" is bunk. It is easy, it is doable and no, you won't have 100 companies running lines. You would have 4-5 and that will be enough to push Comcasts and Verizon to get their prices down.
An ISP can leach off of internet traffic by shaping it so say Netflix is limited to low quality. But, that doesn't not mean they can simply block it without getting into issues. The problem is as demonstrated by China simply degrading websites bandwidth is is massive leverage.
Beyond the observation that ISP customers are paying lots of money so they can use things like Netflix, I wanted to expand on a key point made by DiThi and others:
Netflix gives away free servers to cache popular content near the users so the ISP doesn’t need to pay for the bandwidth to stream multiple copies of the same thing:
My ISP (RCN) uses this and we’ve never had a slowdown using Netflix, no matter what time it is. Using fast.com (which uses Netflix’s network to benchmark comnection speed) always shows that the limiting factor is that I use WiFi and don’t have a device which supports enough 802.12 channels to get more than 150Mbps.
When a large ISP complains about Netflix congestion it inevitably turns out that they have refused this help because they’re trying to use performance as an extortion point.
> Netflix gives away free servers to cache popular content near the users so the ISP doesn’t need to pay for the bandwidth to stream multiple copies of the same thing
You have to be a decently large ISP to qualify. So, this is helpful to big players BUT big players can also afford a PoP in a major hub where they can likely directly peer with Netflix.
This is also a "black-box" system on your network, likely behind your edge firewalls and DMZs. So, you will have to deploy extra network infrastructure and monitoring protect the rest of your network from Netflix. If it was outside your edge routing/firewalling it may as well be on a peer network.
So, this isn't exactly a "free pass" for anyone to have superior Netflix service. And it would only serve Netflix. The ISP I worked with had a few racks devoted to this type of machinery (Google Global Caches, Akamai CDN edge nodes etc). We were not large enough to qualify to host an OpenConnect Box.
Even with one you have the additional issue that most last-mile providers don't exactly have a 40gigabit back-haul to all of their DSLAM or CMTS PoPs. So, some part of "congestion" happens down stream of the data centers. This is why companies like Comcast will put one of their On-Demand video storage boxes in that giant green box that is at the end of your street. You are literally talking with a server next door. OpenConnect style boxes cannot compete with that proximity and that deployment strategy is partially responsible for one of the "smoking guns" in this debate where people claim proof that Comcast slows Netflix in favor of their services.
It's not really any business of the ISPs which services their customers want to use. If demand for bandwidth increases such that the price isn't viable anymore, charge customers more if necessary. You don't find restaurants charging potato suppliers because diners like to eat lots of fries.
And Netflix is also paying for that data, albeit out of profits generated by you paying them.
Everyone pays for their connection to the notional Internet. Individual households tend to pay for all-you-can-eat of a nominal speed, which is fractionally provisioned upstream at whatever rate the ISP thinks that they won't get too many complaints about - typically 10:1. Medium and large companies either buy all-you-can-eat at less underprovisioned services, or pay for 95th percentile billing that is calculated monthly.
Really large corporations pay for interconnections to peering locations, and do a mix of paying for transit and swapping traffic with willing peers. Finally, backbone network companies buy or lease fiber, peering points and data centers and try to pay for as little transit as is economically feasible while shipping data around their networks at lower costs.
Everybody pays for what they use. The larger the scale, the lower the price per bit.
"Fast lanes" and "Zero-rate" traffic are purely subsidies and extortion. Rent-seeking.
Depends on your plan, in the UK I've only recently shaken off a metered plan. And mobile plans are usually metered at about 1GB per month for something vaguely affordable.
Why does it matter if it's "one" video company that takes-up 40% of the network traffic vs 100 video companies sites taking the same 40% traffic? It would be the same traffic amount.
The only reason they are making a big stink about it is because when there's just one it's so much easier to put the blame on that company or ask it for money, than it would be to ask 100 or 1,000 video sites the same.
It's the same reason why those who want censorship start rearing their heads when you have only a couple of app stores, instead of apps/programs being offered from all over the web, or why law enforcement prefers to go to large companies to ask them for user data, and so on.
When things are centralized, they are much easier to target.
> This quotes netflix as having 37% of traffic in N.A.
Its irrelevant who creates this traffic. Wether it is The Pirate Bay or Netflix or Spotify or Google or DDoSers. The traffic is there. Only in the latter case do you want measures from the ISP(s).
ISPs could install CDNs.
Apparently the ISPs can handle the bandwidth, else they'd take measures. If ISPs can't handle the bandwidth they need to charge their customers more, decrease the overal max bandwidth the customers have, or decrease the monthly bandwidth caps. It is that simple.
> It's like you build an autobahn for everyone, and then one monster haulage company moves in and dominates the road, and the road isn't really as useful as envisaged.
You make it seem autobahn usage is unfair (that's a debate in Germany as the German government argues or argued tourists use the autobahn without paying so they're considering requiring a vignette).
What you do to deal with this is you increase the tax owners of cars pay, introduce a "vignette" as they have in Austria and Switzerland, or introduce toll roads as e.g. France notoriously has. Trucks pay more, but there's no other differentiation AFAIK. And each vehicle pays.
Netflix will give a sufficiently large ISP multiple Netflix CDN boxes ... for FREE.
This takes pressure off their outgoing interconnects (where the actual contention should arise, if they've designed their network correctly).
This was never about Netflix hurting their internet business, it was always about Netflix hurting their cable business, which is where more money lies for them.
I know you don't necessarily mean it this way but this sounds a lot like the cable companies' argument that it's "unfair" that the likes of Netflix can "push" all this data onto their network without paying.
Well someone is paying: the customer. Netflix isn't hogging anything. So ISPs want to double-dip and get paid at both ends but really what they want to do is protect their ailing TV businesses. It's naked protectionism, nothing more.
So to your comment: if customers can't get all this Netflix data then the ISPs have lied to them about the capacity of the connections they've sold. Or they're not charging enough (heh).
The 37% is accurate for peak usage. What makes it more complicated to measure is that Netflix and Google have private networks, CDNs that are uploading all of that data during peak usage, which is much closer to the user geographically. They've basically spent billions of dollars to unclog the internet backbone already.
If an ISP wishes to charge for different bandwidth tiers and monthly data allowances, they are free to do so. By doing so, they set themselves up to be competed against by other ISPs who can offer higher bandwidth and higher or "no" caps, which is also fine. (No power company would charge a flat monthly fee for all the power you can consume -- and ISPs don't generally truly mean "unlimited" either: try downloading a couple of petabytes in a month and see what yours thinks.)
What an ISP is not free to do is whitelist or bias one content source over another. The ISP absolutely is a utility and should be in the business of operating at layer 3 in the OSI model.
I think the biggest misconception among net neutrality sceptics is the assumption that bandwidth in general is a limited resource: It's not. The problem with 'others slowing down the internet' is usually on the last mile and it's cable providers oversubscribing this shared medium.
I don't have deep insight into the operation of HFC networks but I ran an ISP using fixed wireless communications technology and for that case what you say is 100% not true.
Users pay ISPs for bandwidth. If the ISP is unable to provide the bandwidth they have agreed to provide, how is that anyone's fault but the ISPs? If they can't meet demand, they should raise prices, not try to double-charge for bandwidth.
So, to fix this analogy we say all vehicles on the road travel at the exact speed because a single frame on fiber should move point to point at the same speed. To make this easier we will assume that corrupt/dropped cars ("frames") cancel out and we will just not mention them again. Because the speed is now constant, this becomes a pipeline and we can completely not worry about latency.
So, now we have an autobahn whose "bandwidth" is 40000 cars per second.
The way haulage works is by the car with no real guarantee about a steady rate of delivery. I don't care, just get 10000 cars from point a to point b. This is no-deadline data transfer like downloading a file.
The way streaming works is that it needs exactly 10 cars per second with no mention of total cars. I don't care, I just need a steady 10 cars per second.
For reference, I can service 10,368,000 of those haulage requests in a 30 day month (ideally) but I can only have 4,000 simultaneous streaming users, ever.
The internet, before streaming, was almost all haulage. Most of the infrastructure was built on the idea of haulage being the dominant use case. People needed to get information from point A to point B as fast as possible. Even torrenting, was haulage. "Congestion" at peak times was not as important because delivery deadlines were looser. As long as you were averaging more cars delivered over a time period (24hrs) than requested the congestion would eventually clear.
Then streaming hit. Now most of the traffic on the internet is on a tight deadline. That infrastructure built for haulage was completely incapable of handling it. We have 40000 cars per second but this is now "Rush Hour" and we have 20k users wanting to get 200k cars in THIS EXACT SECOND otherwise their experience suffers. It doesn't matter if we unused bandwidth at 3am, it doesn't matter if we have unused bandwidth ever. What matters is that we can cover the peak cars per second requested on our network. If we cannot, we have oversold the autobahn and are now "guilty of fraud".
The Internet was like an autobahn but these days consumers only care about what happens during rush hour. Imagine how different an autobahn would be if you had to guarantee a lane for every driver that wanted it on-demand. It is an autobahn that is huge and mostly empty most of the time (your lane is your lane and if you are not driving its empty), it was also far far more expensive to build.
You take the several billion dollars you're overcharging your customers and you improve the infrastructure so that supplying the bandwidth to the services that your customers demand is not a problem anymore.
Or you could just complain and ask for more money, whilst not improving anything.
That's not Netflix traffic, that's the consumer's traffic.
The ISPs are paid, by the consumers, to ship data to them. If they can't do this they need to fix their networks and charge their customers more, not try to extort third parties.
>It's like you build an autobahn for everyone, and then one monster haulage company moves in and dominates the road, and the road isn't really as useful as envisaged
If everyone pays $x per minute for road time, why does it matter whether they navigate it via haulage company A only, or via haulage companies A, B, C, D, and E? It's still the same road time.
The dominance of Netflix is about video streaming being a disproportionately bandwidth-heavy form of internet use and about Netflix being the dominant player in the video streaming market. If it disappeared tomorrow Prime Video or someone else would rise to take its place.
Yes it does. Meanwhile the end user pays for the bandwidth they get to use. Whether that’s to watch YouTube, Netflix or send email. It’s all already been paid for.
There are two underlying things driving this issue :
1. Corporate greed (rational desire to maximize profits).
2. Individual greed (subscribers' rational desire to pay very little for their Internet connection).
You can get off the couch and find an ISP willing to give you a decent SLA and QoS guarantees but it'll cost you 10+X the price that the regular Joe's are willing to pay.
No, it's like complaining that most of the cars on the roads are Ford. It's not your problem what people are using it for. They've paid and can use it for what they want.
Everyone worries about slippery slopes, but I think that limits should exist. Perhaps if you are consuming more than 10% of Internet’s bandwidth, you should have to pay some kind of tax to ISP’s, and those funds should then be required to be reinvested in the network to make it more reliable or increase bandwidth. That seems like it would be an all-around win.
Bandwidth isn't free. You pay for it, I pay for it, Google pays for it, Netflix pays for it, everyone pays for it.
Bandwidth is what we pay for. Net neutrality does not mean we get bandwidth for free. People who use more bandwidth have to buy more bandwidth already.
These services that drive massive increases in bandwidth demand are the services I’m talking about. The demand for Netflix, for example, has required investment on the part of ISPs to support. Most residential cable broadband systems weren’t designed with these kinds of constant bandwidth demands in mind. So Netflix gets to grow, while ISPs face massively increased investment, lest their networks will be overrun. Why shouldn’t Netflix have to contribute to the increased investment that they are benefitting from?
Just remember, the people watching Netflix are the ones consuming the bandwidth. I agree, though, the watchers of Netflix should pay a tax so the rest of us don't get our network congested to the point our torrents are slowing down. :)
This quotes netflix as having 37% of traffic in N.A. http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/20/netflix-boasts-37-...
It's like you build an autobahn for everyone, and then one monster haulage company moves in and dominates the road, and the road isn't really as useful as envisaged.