Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

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I still don't understand "net neutrality". Further, reading other people's definitions and opinions, it feels like the pro and con advocates are talking past each other.

Here's my current stab at understanding each side:

Customer perspective: Rent seeking bad. Don't want to be gouged.

Broadband providers perspective: Mitigate the free rider problem(s), make the system fair.

Examples would be very helpful. Of course there are bad actors. I'm trying to not get sucked into that food fight. My hope is that we can curtail bad behavior (cheating) with better policies.

Surely we can design markets to satisfy the needs and concerns of both sides. Right?

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Mea culpa: My bro created and runs the ISP portions of a cable company. He relates examples of their struggles. Stuff like spending millions of dollars on gear and having other companies abusing it.

We pretty much don't agree on anything. But my bros examples and concerns are legit. So I've been trying to dig into his positions on net neutrality, to better understand the larger impasse.

I don't understand the "free rider" problem.

I pay my ISP for bandwidth. WHAT I choose to download with that bandwidth has no impact on their bottom line, unless they were counting on me not actually using it.

Websites and web apps pay for bandwidth. Anyone who has paid an AWS bill knows there's nothing free about it.

The only group of companies that are guaranteed to make money in any internet venture are the ISPs. The rest of us are gambling, hoping that our investments will be worth it. On top of that, we're all competing with a global market, whiles ISPs tend to only compete with a handful of local providers at a time, allowing them a lot more control over prices.

Meanwhile, they're selling pick axes in a gold rush and crying victim?

Doesn't make a lick of sense to me.

You pay your ISP for their transit and peering blend. The same as I pay my Web host for access to their transit blend.

This is a seprate issue from what most people see as net neutrality. If true net neutrality was enforced, then there would be no caching boxes for Google,Facebook or Netflix and they would have to rely on public peering with the congestion that comes with.

> This is a seprate issue from what most people see as net neutrality.

Exactly.

It really feels like the debate over "net neutrality" is conflating multiple issues.

I kinda get the ISP biz model. Overprovisioning and so forth.

I have no clue about the backbone biz model. How the transit fees work. I want the ELI5 (Ray Dalio, Courtney Love) covering how broadband works. What the basics? Who's screwing who? How companies deal with each other. How they deal with content publishers like Netflix, TikTok, etc.

Consumers are not the free riders my bro cares about. It's other companies. Like when he builds out new edge servers which get filled up by YouTube, TikTok, etc. He thinks the sources should pay their fare share.

I'd like to learn what fare means, how to curtail consumer throttling, how yo curtail free loaders (bypassing transit fees), what system would be more fair.

Surely we can design market mechanisms to balance these concerns.

> Consumers are not the free riders my bro cares about. It's other companies. Like when he builds out new edge servers which get filled up by YouTube, TikTok, etc. He thinks the sources should pay their fare share.

Is he letting those sources push content to him for free?

Or are his customers determining what's going through his network?

I don't get it. How do the sources not pay? Don't they pay for hosting and bandwidth? Aren't edge servers an implementation detail that's inherent in providing bandwidth?

Me neither. I don't consider my bro a reliable narrator. What I've gleaned is the transit fees were regulated for a while.

It seems to me that Generic ISP Inc would meter all the Netflix traffic and then send them a bill. And if Netflix wants to ensure their end users are getting whatever quantity and quality of bandwidth, the two parties will negotiate.

> I pay my ISP for bandwidth. WHAT I choose to download with that bandwidth has no impact on their bottom line

This isn't true in reality. For example, it's significantly more expensive to deliver video traffic from say, my computer to yours, than it would be to deliver from Netflix to your computer.

> This isn't true in reality. For example, it's significantly more expensive to deliver video traffic from say, my computer to yours, than it would be to deliver from Netflix to your computer.

At which side of the setup? To get the data from the neighborhood hub to my computer? To get the data from the start of the ISP's network to the neighborhood? To get the data from you to my ISP's network?

And are you meaning actually from Netflix or from a CDN or from a Netflix node in an ISP's location or what?

> At which side of the setup? To get the data from the neighborhood hub to my computer? To get the data from the start of the ISP's network to the neighborhood? To get the data from you to my ISP's network?

> And are you meaning actually from Netflix or from a CDN or from a Netflix node in an ISP's location or what?

Netflix has a proxy node on your ISP's network, or at least somewhere closer to it than where my computer sits. The video makes a smaller trip to your computer.

That's one optimization, among others, utilized by CPs.

You pay your ISP for bandwidth, but not for full and constant utilization of said bandwidth. Check the acceptable use policy of any major ISP, and you'll find they can throttle you whenever and however at their sole discretion.

> Mitigate the free rider problem(s), make the system fair.

Which free rider problem? The customer pays the ISP for access to the internet.

I understand that the ISP would like to double-dip on this deal. But I regard this as wrong.

Other broadband providers. My bro has never complained about their end users.

Possibly helpful example: the classic net neutrality example, in my mind, is a decade or so ago when Time-Warner Cable (in some markets) was throttling Craigslist to be painfully slow, because Craigslist was eating into the classified-ads business of other parts of the Time-Warner group.

Can you share more of what he considers abuse and any other sides of that story?

Of course. I'll try harder to ferret out my bro's grievances. Get some IRL details and not just his arm wavey stuff.

Most of our policy discussions quickly devolve into partisan bullshit. It's a lot of work to keep convos on track. And when he talks about topics I do know about, a lot of the stuff he says (repeats) isn't even wrong.

He is very good at his job, and knows the technical stuff cold, which is why I'm more open to his input on net neutrality.

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