As an ISP you can't give your customers (the very vast majority, I realize that a small minority have symmetric connections) vastly asymmetric pipes (usually in the order of 10:1, if not 20:1), and then "complain" about how your inbound upstream traffic is asymmetric and thus "unfair" to the peering arrangements.
It is as it was designed.
Give users symmetric pipes and they'll use them differently. Far more uptake of offsite backup, other services from users with a lot of outbound bandwidth.
Will ISPs scream about how unfair it is if Dropbox, Crashplan, BackBlaze, Carbonite and the like start charging THEM more because "oh gosh, look, your users are sending far more data to us than we are to them, so you're abusing our peering relationship"?
It's a bunch of willfully ignorant BS. Design a traffic model and then complain that the usage pattern dictated by the traffic model is unfair to you, and therefore you need to double dip your billing.
Now, you probably want the ISPs to be operated or regulated by your local government so that the marketplace they encourage is favorable to the citizens. But please no more federal regulations on the pipes of communication between citizens.
My point is that the cost of distribution is going to be paid one way or the other. I don't see why we should make federal rules about it. You really want a society where the national government is not in charge of communications.
Net neutrality (or the lack thereof) isn't about paying for what you use (your argument about trucks is incorrect because of this). It's about paying based on who you are, so your ISP can discriminate based on who the data is coming from.
The original analogy was correct, it's about toll roads where cars of the same size and build pay different prices depending on their brand. "You have a BMW, so you must have more money, so pay more, even though you use the same as a Toyota."
But it does take a genius mayor to also be fully aware of the more technical arguments thrown around by ISPs to fight regulation such as NN. We are not discussing roads. As much as the analogy helps, someone might not be there (who isn't working for ISPs) to tell the mayor or governor about it. A small town mayor might not have any idea what impacts a decision like that could have on the local area, and if they make the wrong choice, an entire town is basically held back from an open internet, and therefore communication, point of view.
As an aside, "flushing out the analogy" in this case would mean you were holding the trucks as high-bandwith users, like you've stated previously. I'm not sure if you were admitting a mistake with your comment or not, but I'd like to support the other comments arguments against this.
I also am not sure I understand the point of nitpicking the analogy. A roadway is like a cable. Sort of. A truck would be like a superposition of a large content provider, the upstream ISPs, and all the customers requesting data from that domain. The point I am trying to make is that when you try to charge this ``truck'' for its use of the cable, well its like taxing economic activity between all these entities and we should be careful when making rules about this: we may lock ourselves into the current model of ISPs without realizing it.
This does pertain to Net Neutrality because how else is NN assessed than by getting into these details?
Netflix sends data via a number of backbone providers that charge Netflix for traffic. The backbone providers connect to other backbone providers via peering agreements. If the amount of traffic between the peers gets out of balance, they settle up via payments. Those payments eventually get passed on to the consumer that's how it should be.
I'm not sure I understand. Netflix pays for it's high bandwidth to deliver data to users. And you pay for your bandwidth to receive that data.
You could have 10 services that are using bandwidth equally or 1 service using (and paying for) 10x the bandwidth -- what is the significant difference here? The total data is the same.
Net Neutrality isn't about the "what" it's about the "who". Netflix is a big popular service so your ISP wants to extract more money from them -- not because of what they do, but who they are. 1 big service vs. 10 smaller ones.
The premise that the ISP payment should be born by only one side of the transaction should not be codified into law.
Also I do agree we should regulate protections for the ``who''. I just think these should come from the cities under whose streets the fiber is laid, not the FCC. There is even a strong case to be made for municipal ISPs.
If household customers were provided internet for free and ISPs earned all their money from servers the cost would be distributed through this network. ISP #1 with the customers would charge ISP #2 with the servers for the traffic and it would somewhat balance out (as ISP #2 can make no money if it can't get to customers). Netflix is, for example, already paying your ISP indirectly to deliver content to you when it pays its ISP.
I think you're confused about what net neutrality means. ISPs can still charge whatever they want how they want as long as they don't discriminate on the content of the data (who it's from and what it is). The quantity of data, the physical location of the data, and whatever else is free game. In your thought experiment, the net neutrality has no impact one way or the other.
But should the transarctic link be able to make extra money prioritizing traffic between financial centers in NY, London, and Tokyo? I say yes.
More at home, lets say the peering agreements were set up with a DNSy system allowing you to do breadth first search for the cheapest route to serve data from one domain name to another. The cost ought to vary depending on which path through the small ISPs you take, for example an ISP which had Netflix servers high in its topology could advertise cheaper rates for netflix.com requests to its neighbors.
Such a market system would be required for my renaissance of the internet vision. And consequently, consumer-facing ISPs would have to be allowed to discriminate against high volumes of requests from domains which it cannot cheaply access. One way of correcting this would be charging those domains on the side, i.e. discriminating.
You would also need to be able to discriminate on content type and other pricing schemes to help fund those backbone ISPs. If traders in NY, London, and Tokyo will help finance an undersea link through higher pricing for preferential service, why not let that happen?
You still need regulation and democratic oversight of the local ISPs though, to prevent corruption from harming consumer access.
Finally there is the concern that this would unfairly burden small content providers who have only one server. But this is silly even if it costs more to obtain data from the breadth-first search to this lone server in the middle of nowhere, its a small volume so you can ignore it and average that cost in elsewhere.
Thus regulating for net neutrality directly impede the possible creation of a more distributed, more free system. In such a system all data is inherently not equal and the system could never function if we pretended it was.
> If traders in NY, London, and Tokyo will help finance an undersea link through higher pricing for preferential service, why not let that happen?
One can already pay more for faster service by paying for priority traffic (QoS). One could even pay for a private link. It happens all the time. In fact, my business already pays for multiple tiers of traffic for different purposes (video streaming, phones, regular Internet traffic). This not any sort of violation of net neutrality.
Honestly, net neutrality is not significant impediment. I would argue that it boils down to simply treating all traffic fairly. If you can imagine a scenario where an ISP could treat your data or another service's data unfairly, it's probably a violation of net neutrality.
But I still don't think it is appropriate or even productively useful for the federal government to mandate this and declare what is fair. And ISPs should have the right to use their position to get payment agreements with:
1. the end consumers,
2. intermediaries, per peer networks--thank you for calling these to my attention, and
3. from the domain of origin if serving that domain from external ISPs incurs a higher than average costs for the local ISP.
National scale network neutrality laws would make 3 very difficult and I absolutely do not think selectively applying 3 to only the flushest companies is wrong.
Why not let cities, who already have to have plans for integrating cable into roadways be the regulatory/ownership entities?
The fact is that nearly all service providers in North America are monopolies (or duopolies). This is the reason the federal government needs to be involved. There are no market forces to correct for being unfairly treated by your ISP. You literally have no choice. If your ISP were to charge you $5 more to visit hacker news, what could you do? What if hacker news had to pay your ISP $5? What if they just didn't bother?
Because naway.com's server is so far away, it could cost isp0 more than average to serve this data. If there is a lot of traffic from naway.com, the ISP could compensate by raising prices on all end consumers, throttling the speed to reduce demand, or negotiating with naway.com for extra $$.
Note that isp0 would only bother to do this with domains of sufficient size. If you had regional ISPs answerable democratically to the city entity that owned the roads, your ISP would be fighting for your lower prices and it would still be important to the ISP to provide access to these in demand sites.
Net Neutrality seems to try to correct a symptom of a federally created, legal monopoly's concentration of power with more federal regulation. In the same way that the FCC allocates airwaves for the entire US, we need to acknowledge that the natural size for a ISP monopoly is the size of the government entity that owns the streets. Open protocols and market forces could be used for the rest of the network.
> Because naway.com's server is so far away, it could cost isp0 more than average to serve this data.
The distance makes no difference to the Internet. I'm not sure how much better to explain how the Internet works but you do keep inventing new ideas to support the idea of an ISP charging a specific domain but it has no basis in reality of how the Internet works.
> If there is a lot of traffic from naway.com, the ISP could compensate by raising prices on all end consumers, throttling the speed to reduce demand, or negotiating with naway.com for extra $$.
There is absolutely no traffic from naway.com coming to ISP0. All the traffic comes from ISP1. And that traffic is an aggregate of all the traffic requested by ISP0 customers. This is arguing about charging more for different tap water based on the source reservoir; at some point it's all just water. Every router reads a bunch of fiber lines, copies that data, and aggregates that output to another line. Both sides agree on how much data they are willing to accept and the router drops anything over that amount.
It's really not feasible for an ISP to have a business relationship with every possible end point.
> Note that isp0 would only bother to do this with domains of sufficient size.
That is the problem. In effect, only large domains would either suffer or get the benefits of these business relationships. Would Facebook ever be possible in a world where Myspace had exclusive relationships with all the major ISPs? Your ISP is effectively picking the winners and losers on the Internet by whom it chooses to do business with.
> Net Neutrality seems to try to correct a symptom of a federally created, legal monopoly's concentration of power with more federal regulation.
One could argue that monopoly concentration in providing Internet is a natural physical consequence of the world. There is only so much right of way, so much wireless spectrum, etc. In a situation where it's physically impossible to start a new ISP, competition is going to be very limited. Perfect is the enemy of good; you want perfection but net neutrality is a good solution to today's problems.
No one is attempting to create a new concept here; net neutrality simply attempts to codify into law what has been convention for most of the existence of the Internet. It's what allowed the Internet to thrive when so many closed networks failed.
Arguing against legislation for legislation sake begs the question that all legislation is bad by default. But that's an entirely different argument. The argument here is whether or not net neutrality is bad policy and I would say that it's entirely not. You have not found an argument, based on the physical reality of how the Internet works, where net neutrality has any real negative consequences. It absolutely doesn't have any for consumers or Internet businesses. And ISPs have been doing brisk business for the last 20 years without issue.
> we need to acknowledge that the natural size for a ISP monopoly is the size of the government entity that owns the streets.
The only solution to this problem of monopoly ISPs is more federal regulation. But as you are against federal regulation in one form you should also be against it here as well.
> The distance makes no difference to the Internet. I'm not sure how much better to explain how the Internet works but you do keep inventing new ideas to support the idea of an ISP charging a specific domain but it has no basis in how the internet works.
I feel you are attacking me personally. It is true I am libertarian and opposed to many federal laws, but not all. There are many that are appropriate. I know how ethernet and tcp/ip works. I have read RFCs on domain names, DNS, etc.
From physics, it is not true that distance doesn't matter. I am not arguing about how the internet business models are structured today, but about they should be structured. I am ``inventing'' reasons that are logical, to refute them and convince me, please read my model (isp0...isp n) again and say which part is illogical without reaching for how the current ISP monopolies work.
The idea that all data is equal is false. It depends on where its coming from and by what path. You may say that this would not be NN discrimination, but the mere fact that we are talking past each on this example suggests it would be super complicated if not impossible to enforce NN correctly. It will become yet another part of the legal framework which helps keep monopoly ISPs in control.
> One could argue that monopoly concentration in providing the Internet is a natural physical consequence of the world. There is only so much right of way, so much wireless spectrum, etc.
I support federal level, FCC auctioning of spectrum. And you further make my case, the ``natural'' physical monopoly size for wired ISPs is the city or regional government entity. Thus regulation should be at that level. This is a big power grab for the feds to regulate our communications at what should be a local level.
> The idea that all data is equal is false. It depends on where its coming from and by what path.
There is some truth to this but an ISP's only concern is it's immediate connections. It has connections to other peers (and it's own clients) and it has a certain capacity to each of those connections. That's it.
Imagine you have two scenarios, one is content is generated in ISP1. So the data travels from ISP1 to ISP0. The second scenario is that the content is generated 10 routers away. The data is copied from ISP10 to ISP9 to ISP8 and so on till it gets to ISP1. It's then copied from ISP1 to ISP0. There is no difference between this data and the data generated by ISP1 in the first scenario as far as ISP0 is concerned. If the data packets did not have addresses there would actually be no way of telling the difference.
To put another way, if you request content from something 3 hops away or 15 hops way -- it doesn't cost your ISP any more money to deliver it. The cost of the Internet as a whole is born by the entire network.
Why does ISP0 need to charge by domain? Where does that fit in anywhere in this system? ISP0 and domain1 could come to an agreement to move servers into ISP0's network to improve latency and decrease traffic and that is perfectly reasonable. But charging domains for simply putting data on the Internet somewhere else makes no sense -- it's pure abuse of monopoly.
> It will become yet another part of the legal framework which helps keep monopoly ISPs in control.
It's meant to keep monopoly ISPs from abusing their monopoly position. It even helps smaller ISPs as a neutral network allows anyone to provide service and receive service fairly without having to have financial agreements with larger services. I'd like to hear the opposing argument to this, if you have one. I don't want to attack you personally but you make the above statement as if it were fact without any argument. Simply that it's regulation so it must be bad.
If net neutrality helped large monopoly ISPs they wouldn't be fighting so hard to get rid of it.
As for regulating this on the federal level, the Internet is a global system. The idea that regional governments should be enacting rules that will affect large and small companies around the world seems a bit crazy. You already have individual states imposing streaming media taxes. So yes, in some states you can be taxed for Netflix but not taxed for an online game. Giving ISPs their own power to enact these taxes seems like madness to me.
This is a right every enterprise in a market has. And we have been having this good discussion so I know that we agree that ISPs are naturally a monopoly and need to be regulated or gov owned to prevent abuse. I'm just opposed to NN because I think that the appropriate regulatory/ownership level is the municipality, township, etc. federal regulation in this space risks future curtailment of free speech.
And as a internet constomer, why are you opposed to google or Netflix paying more and having your bill be less? (If your ISO were locally regulated and had an interest in providing the content you want)
> There is some truth to this but an ISP's only concern is it's immediate connections...
Exactly, it only has a business relationship with its neighbor ISPs. But if the server is in ISP1's network, as opposed to passing through ISP1s network from a further series of hops, then it is probably cheaper for ISP1 to serve data from its region than the cost of the data associated with its arrangement with ISP2 plus the costs of routing it through its own network. If you were to fight for a world of smaller ISPs with less power, then for that system to function ISP1 would have to be able to charge more for that domain, and then you would probably want city 0 to be allowed to negotiate with that domain directly for the privledge of having access when it is more expensive. Again I want ISPs regulated or municipalized. I am just an Internet customer and a citizen. No Comcast stock or whatever. I don't see why Chattanooga's city ISP shouldn't be able to try and shift some cost from its citizens to large data domains without fearing a lawsuit in that negotiation.
We have open standards, it's not like the Internet would cease to function if the federal goverment doesn't enforce that ISPs use tcp/ip. And I would argue it would be less madness to have local ISPs negotiate with a few big companies than to have them track traffic and share routing data with every other municipality or private/state backbone company who may be on the routing paths. Less "collusive" too.
Regardless of which way is more difficult, we as a free people should be always trying to reduce the federal government's interaction with enterprises that disseminate information.
We shouldn't fight for net neutrality on all battlefields. Only on the level of civic organization that owns the public right of ways, i.e. the size of the natural monopoly.
If these things haven't already been killed; they will be. Almost all municipal broadband projects are dead or dying. It some states it's now illegal for cities to provide broadband services. I would totally advocate for this but since the broadband monopoly effectively controls the legislature through aggressive lobbying this is a massive dead end.
Unfortunately, cities are affected by state laws and states are affected by national laws and national organizations.
The tax is gonna get collected, but whoever is the primary check writer can have market effects on the system. If Netflix had to write some of the check, we may see more investment in compression technologies and towards-the-edges network distribution.
You say this like you think Netflix is somehow using the internet for free.
My first inclination is that an ISP is like the taxman. If and end user transacts with netflix, then a tax is collected by the entity that provided the facilitating infrastructure. The tax is on the economic transaction, not one party xor the other. Just as government funds roads by a variety of taxes on different entities, individuals and companies.