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?
I'm not against net neutrality myself, just trying to add a bit of background behind why certain folks may oppose it.
It all went away when Netflix started installing CDN caches.
And it wasn’t just level3, it was L3, Akamai, and Limelight: https://www.businessinsider.com/akamai-to-lose-netflix-as-a-...
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.
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?
1. the destination customer can pay themselves into a tier such as "never drop" 2. the source customer cannot
That is, retain "money is power" for individuals but add a veneer of social respectability by denying Netflix etc. to just buy up the bandwidth.
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.
Why not ? From an engineering point of view, with a scarce resource, dropping only the biggest user (Netflix) looks reasonable.
Obviously, it should be illegal to ask money to do not have them dropped.
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.
> 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.)
Because settlement-free peering was a foundational piece of the internet until ISPs decided to ruin it: https://www.inap.com/blog/despite-comcast-netflix-deal-settl...