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Comment by akerro | Hacker News Reader

>As a Dutchie my Internet is largely unaffected by the FCC.

You can't be more wrong. Since Netflix, Amazon, youporn, imgur, reddit will be affected by this and they will have to pay more to keep their bandwidth on the same level as now, or slower by only 10% (hey, they could slow down their network links by 60%, but since they pay 20M per year, its slower by only 10%!) you as the end, you the end consumer will have to pay for this more. It doesn't matter where you live, as long as you use any of US internet services, you will pay for this more, sooner or later.

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Traceroute from Germany shows that none of leave continental Europe, at least not this morning. Are you suggesting that they'll cross-subsidise? That they will raise their euro-denominated prices in order to compensate for increased costs in the US?

They might. Of course. Vendors will raise prices where they think the market will bear it. But it seems strange to assume that by default, vendors will respond to raised costs in one market by raising prices in another.

I don't think you're in opposition - the argument being, what's going to happen to the location of those services if they're held to ransom by new data transfer fees?

Move them to another jurisdiction without them.

Investment into the EU (in the form of datacenters, locating jobs to prove the work is done there, and the transit costs in the new location).

That being said, the cynic in me agrees that broadly you're right, and whatever the companies do to mitigate the effects of it by moving hosting/transfer elsewhere, they'll use this as an excuse to jack the prices up regardless.

>> As a Dutchie my Internet is largely unaffected by the FCC.

> You can't be more wrong. Since Netflix, Amazon, youporn, imgur, reddit will be affected by this

The same Netflix that reportedly has very poor show selection outside US? The same Amazon that has its data centers all over the world? And the three sites that are a pastime of little use and importance?

You need to do much better job at selecting examples to make your point compelling.

His Internet will still not be affected.

The Internet is not just Facebook, reddit, google, youporn and Netflix or the dozen or so popular companies.

Not to mention that most of those have servers in the EU which will not be affected by this. Sure they could raise prices there, but since this would just subsidize US costs a local competitor would have a competitive advantage.

What this non-Net Neutrality does is largely saying "if you want to build an internet-based startup the US may not be the place for you".

Are you saying it will create positive competitive edge for companies from Holland?

Well, the servers even of USian internet services need not be located in data centers in the US. So we'll just add the emigration of data centers to the list of negative consequences for the US.

> Since Netflix, Amazon,

The thing is, that if that would happen, a lot of people who got onto Netflix/Amazon for streaming content because it's a good convenience/price ratio, will simply revert to illegal downloads from local servers if the prices go up much. I recommended Netflix to people here in my poor farmer village and they got off it again and went back to illegal download simply because they did not want to pay the same price Americans pay while getting much less (quality) content.

So those companies move their servers out of the USA, which would be good anyway, or their competitirs get an edge.

Not really, these charges were be born by the consumer. This is about the ability to offer consumer tiers. Sure there might be companies that pay the consumer fee to be included, like QVC did to be on everyone's cable.

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