Net Neutrality Gives 'Free' Internet To Netflix and Google, ISP Claims (arstechnica.com) 361
Frontier Communications is asking employees for help in its fight against state net neutrality rules in California, claiming that the rules will give "free" Internet to major Web companies while raising costs for consumers. From a report: The Internet service provider urged employees to submit a form letter asking Governor Jerry Brown to veto the net neutrality bill that was recently approved by the state legislature. Frontier sent an email to employees and set up an online form for them to send the form letter to Brown. "I am proud to work at Frontier and help operate a network that is part of an incredibly successful Internet ecosystem that is the backbone of our economy and daily life," the form letter says. But net neutrality rules "will harm consumers and impose complex layers of costly regulation," and therefore "deter investment and delay broadband deployment in California, especially in rural areas that still lack high-speed Internet access," the letter says. The letter claims that net neutrality rules "will create significant new costs for consumers" but did not make it clear what those new costs would be.
Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the easiest way to make money.
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Because american ultra capitalist culture admires greed, treachery, and deceit. Until social norms will change, what you call "lying-ass trash" will continue to be celebrated as heroes.
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Because american ultra capitalist culture admires greed, treachery, and deceit. Until social norms will change, what you call "lying-ass trash" will continue to be celebrated as heroes.
Right? Let's put those greedy lying-ass ultra capitalists in perspective for a moment, shall we?
You would think that the companies with the most resources would be interested in helping invest in the infrastructure needed to reach their customers (and their customers to reach them), rather than sp
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are corporations all a bunch of lying-ass trash?
It's all about feedback loops. There is no penalty for them to constantly lie but there is plenty to gain from deceiving people.
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Frontier is special, even in real of Evil Empire corporations. They are the worst phone company in the world, and always have been. Their takeover of Verizon's landline business was a disaster. It made service as bad as the areas they already had.
If Frontier is against it, then I'm for it, regardless of what "it" is.
There's a special place in Hell for Frontier, and it's a management position.
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Agreed, part of Frontier used to be Roseville phone. Which was at the time, the 'worst phone company in the world'.
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Frontier is not lying. Correctly implemented Net Neutrality does give Netflix and Google free Internet. You see, under Net Neutrality, ISPs are not supposed to double-bill. Once the end user has paid for "Internet," they can't charge the content provider for the same "Internet." Can't charge Netflix for the same bytes that the end user has already paid for.
Since the end user has already paid for those bytes, Netflix gets them for free. Frontier isn't lying; they're "spinning" a desirable trait as if it was
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Incidentally, the technical name for this is "settlement-free reciprocal peering." It means that without either company paying the other, they trade data packets whose destination has already paid the receiving ISP to handle those packets. ISPs who refuse a peering request are usually double-billing.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
They are only sending content that the end user has requested. The content publishers are paying their ISP for every bit that they send out and receive (via a leased line of a specified bandwidth) and the end user is paying for every bit that they send out and receive from their ISP. They want to be able to double charge though. They want to charge the end user to receive the data, but also want to charge the content publisher for letting the customer receive the data.
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Correct, this is such a great point.
ISPs have customers who request services outside the ISP network, same as it ever has been for end-user Internet access. Netflix etc don't get access for 'free', they pay for peering connections also.
God, these people sound like your typical peer. They would LOVE to offload the cost of connectivity to their 'customers', us, and if they could they would bypass the whole NN debate. We would, of course see this in our bills.
There is probably no way out of paying, but I'd lik
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why this whole entire scheme is utterly dependent on the monopolies granted to the ISPs by the local government. If you had a choice of multiple ISPs and your ISP began throttling a content publisher for not paying them, you would simply cancel service and subscribe to a different ISP. The only reason they have the temerity to try to charge content publishers is because they know their customers are captive, and cannot flee to a different ISP. Essentially, not only do they have a monopoly on providing service to their customers, they also have a monopoly on giving content publishers access to those customers.
The whole thing is probably the best current example of government regulation run amok. The initial service monopolies granted by the local governments may have been well-intended (to prevent telephone poles from being strung up with dozens of unsightly wires, for guarantees to provide services to low income areas, etc). But it should be clear by now that they're doing far more harm than good, and should be abolished. We've tried government regulation of ISPs for 20+ years and it's failed miserably. Give competition a chance. Aside from access speed, things were actually better back in the 1980s and early 1990s when everyone used dialup connections. I remember canceling service with several ISPs which dissatisfied me before I found one I liked.
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There is no such thing as a government granted local monopoly on telecom services. No local government can bar an over-builder from coming into an area regardless of what some illegal language in some other agreement says.
I really wish you people would stop trotting out this as some explanation. There aren't over-builders in your area because telecom services are a natural monopoly. If you local jurisdiction was stupid enough to sign agreement limiting access to the ROW to only those with a franchise agreem
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with net neutrality, content publishers and distributors get to peer directly with an isp and flood their network with whatever data the content provider wants.
Content publishers don't get settlement-free peering by default. Peering agreements are usually only settlement-free if the traffic is symmetrical or each party receives an equal benefit. Content publishers have to pay for their internet access the same as anybody else, albeit they generally have a little more negotiating power than you or I would.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
content publishers and distributors get to peer directly with an isp and flood their network with whatever data the content provider wants
What utter nonsense. The content providers are what make the internet work - without content there is no internet. The ISP's users are who is "flooding the network with whatever data they want", because they are requesting it. If the ISP has too much traffic they need to ask their users to stop asking for it.
Don't be a stooge for the ISPs.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes yes, we know that argument. It's been passed around for a while now. It's no less bullshit now than it was then. The customers are paying for their pipe. The content producers are paying for their own pipe. Everyone is *already* paying for their access.
The reality that has been demonstrated is that ISPs only want to double-dip, making their customers pay AND make the content-providers pay for the exact same traffic. There is absolutely no evidence that says ISPs ever have or ever will lower prices for consumers by having content-creators pay the difference.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... [eff.org]
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I'm not convinced the consumer will always pay more:
1) for "Free" services (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) the consumer is paying every penny that can possibly be extracted from selling them ads etc (for example in the US, Facebook makes about $13/month/user)
2) for ISPs without competition (all of them), the price charged is the highest they can get away with
3) for pay services (Netflix, YoutTube Red etc) likely the costs will pass on.
It's unlikely that companies in group 1 can pass on any of the expense
for compa
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the consumer is paying more in one way or the other. there is a real hidden cost that cannot be ignored anymore due to the sheer explosion of users on the internet.
in the end, we the consumer will pay more. in order to keep tomorrow's prices the same today, that's where traffic shaping and active management comes into play.
It's not the number of consumers. It's that the average consumer is consuming more and more bandwidth per user. The correct solution is give up on the idea of "unlimited" internet. Let the consumer decide how they want to throttle their internet. If they want unlimited for 2 hours a day for netflix then let them sign up for that. If they want 1M/s 24/7 then let them sign up for that. An ISP shouldn't be traffic shaping or actively managing the types of service. One consumer might only watch netflix w
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I'm in Canada, with net neutrality. I pay for 250 GBs a month and how the household uses it is up to us. It's simple and there are other plans as well. We're careful because it is a hundred dollars a GB for overage.
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You are getting hosed. You're probably with an incumbent provider. You should look at going with a third party internet provider, you'll get the same (or better) service for a lot less.
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I'm rural with an LTE connection so there aren't too many choices.
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That's nuts.
The cellco's have the highest rates in the state's i'm aware of and they only charge $15/GB overage.
Of course a 250GB plan isn't available on those.
AT&T does a fixed wireless offering with 170GB then $10/50GB overage.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Does lying on the behest of your boss pay that well?
with net neutrality, content publishers and distributors get to peer directly with an isp
False. Netflix pays an ISP, just like anyone else. That gives them an Internet connection with a specific bandwith limit.
and flood their network with whatever data the content provider wants
Again, their Internet connection has a specific bandwith limit. If your network can't handle the bandwith you've sold, that's you committing fraud, not the "content provider" being a free rider.
ISPs eat the cost
False. ISPs sold bandwith to a customer (Netflix). They also sold bandwith to consumers. There is no cost to eat, they are being paid for what they sold.
Without net neutrality, content publishers must pay the transit costs
Oh, I see. You didn't sell any bandwith to Netflix, and want to charge them anyway. That's not how peering works.
If you're peering agreement is not currently making enough money for you greedy fuckholes, then you need to renegotiate your peering agreement.
in the end, we the consumer will pay more
Yes, that is currently your plan, thanks to the lack of net neutrality. Your C-suite is masturbating over the thought of selling a "Streaming package" and "gaming package" to consumers to turn off the arbitrary throttling you are applying. Heck, when they want a bigger bonus, they can just turn down the bandwith a little more.
you are never prevented from going with a non-subsidized provider (e.g. cogent, xo, or running and lighting up your own fiber).
I am fascinated by your delusional world where every ISP serves every geographic location.
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Did you even research who they are? LOL An ISP that serves every geographic location
They don't have fiber to my building. Thus they do not serve my geographic location. This really isn't complicated, but it does get in the way of the bullshit fountain so I can see why you failed to understand it.
That's why the rest of your post is bullshit. Someone needs to pay the cost and you don't want to pay it.
1. Netflix pays the cost of their Internet service.
2. The ISP's customers that use Netflix pay the cost of their Internet service.
3. Peering agreements between ISPs frequently require payment when the bandwith is not symmetrical.
Everyone is already paying. What they are not doing, and what you g
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Allowing the ISP to extort money from content providers will not prevent the consumer from paying a higher price.
The extortion will just ensure that the ISP's get to pick winners and losers. And winners will get to enforce their "winning"
And the ISP is not going to funnel that money into infrastructure in any case, it will go to profits.
Profits are great, by the way. Go earn them.
The content providers have to pay their own ISP, they already have an incentive to keep the number of bits low, they have to pa
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
with net neutrality, content publishers and distributors get to peer directly with an isp and flood their network with whatever data the content provider wants.
No, that's not how that works. Content publishers' ISPs get to peer with other ISPs because that's how the Internet works. Without peering, there's just a bunch of unconnected networks, of "walled gardens", and not the Internet. You want to go back to the days of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe? Fine. Go start that business and see how it goes. Meanwhile, the rest of us want access to the Internet.
And content providers don't "flood their networks". That shows another fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. This is not a broadcast network. A company like Netflix isn't just sending out all their video, all the time, to everyone. Their users request the video, and then the request goes over the ISP's network, over to Netflix's ISP, to Netflix's server, and Netflix allows the download. Verizon is trying to charge Netflix for Netflix allowing Verizon customers to download something.
Without net neutrality, content publishers... have an incentive to keep spurious traffic low
They have an incentive to keep their traffic low regardless. Again using Netflix as an example, they already pay a boatload of money for internet access. They have to move massive amounts of information very quickly, and that's expensive. If they could cut their bandwidth needs by 20%, they'd save a bunch of money. They'd do it if they could.
... and pass on the costs to the consumer.
This is another one of those fundamental misunderstandings of how things work. While it's true that when a company has to pay more, they sometimes "pass on the cost to consumers," that's not necessarily how that works. That economic model imagines a world where businesses set their prices by figuring out their costs and just adding a set percentage to everything. Businesses don't set prices that way!
Let's say you were paying $100 for a product last year, and this year the price is increased to $110. Was that because prices went up somewhere in the supply chain and the product now costs $10 more to produce?
Probably not. Yes, it's possible that the product costs $85 to bring to market, and the cost went up to $95, and they increased their price to account for the difference. Or it might be that it costs $70 to bring to market, and the price went up to $90, but they decided that they could only get away with raising the price by $10. Or it might even be that the price went down from $85 to $75, but they raised the price anyway because demand was high and they thought people would still buy it at the higher price.
Companies don't just transparently pass costs on to consumers. They set the price based on supply and demand, with varying levels of profit margin.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is my favorite quote. It turned out that less than 1.5% of people had to change their insurance plans due to the ACA. Which means that Obama's biggest lie was when he was only 98.5% correct. Compare/contrast with what the current president says this week. (I don't know what he'll say, and it doesn't matter; we all know it will be far less than 98.5% correct).
Back to the original point: certain people and organizations lie because their followers will believe them no matter how ludicrous their claims may be. In the case of most ISPs, the people who matter (lawmakers) believe them because their campaign contributions depend on it. In the case of politicians, well, you can tell a lot about a person by seeing what political folks they vote for.
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(I don't know what he'll say, and it doesn't matter; we all know it will be far less than 98.5% correct)
As of this morning [cnn.com]:
The GDP Rate (4.2%) is higher than the Unemployment Rate (3.9%) for the first time in over 100 years!
Not remotely correct.
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It turned out that less than 1.5% of people had to change their insurance plans
That is misleading. Obamacare only covers about 11 million Americans. The others are covered under employee plans, Medicare, Medicaid, or VA. 1.5% of Americans is 4.5 million, or about 40% of those covered.
But this was not really a "lie" anyway, since it is unlikely that Obama knew it was false when he said it.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Not all of them were being ripped off (Score:3)
Of course the proper solution, one that every other civilized nation uses, is single payer. We even have the system in place. All we need to do is expand Medicare to cover everyone. I mean, it's not like I'm not already being taxed. They call them premium, but it's really just a tax I pay to a mega
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
> Nonsense. ACA banned catastrophic health insurance/health saving accounts.
Not even remotely true. I still have my HSA.
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They did ban the catastrophic care plans which basically didn't provide actual care, but HSAs did continue to exist....I certainly have made use of them during the period that PPACA has been in operation.
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They did ban the catastrophic care plans which basically didn't provide actual care, but HSAs did continue to exist....I certainly have made use of them during the period that PPACA has been in operation.
Hey, my Deductible is $5500 per year; meaning that, unless I have some pretty high medical bills, my $862 per MONTH insurance Premiums are just G-O-N-E.
I'd call that "Catastrophic Health Insurance"; but without the benefit of having that nearly $12,000 per year in an account with MY name on it!
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
ACA banned catastrophic health insurance/health saving accounts.
Since I currently have a HSA, I'm gonna have to point out you're wrong.
The ACA banned catastrophic health insurance plans and HSA-backed plans from the ACA marketplace. The ACA marketplace is not "insurance". In fact, it's a small percentage of insurance plans. Employer-based plans can still be HSA plans, and employer-based insurance dwarfs the ACA marketplace insurance.
Where you pay for your own routine doctor visits and only have coverage for actual medical emergencies.
The problem with this plan is people just don't do routine doctor visits when they have this plan. Which means they end up getting far more medical emergencies.
If your response is something like "but I paid for my checkups!!!!", you're forgetting the cost-sharing aspect of insurance. You paid more for your insurance because the vast majority on these plans did not get regular medical care
It's much cheaper to pay for someone's $100 annual visit for a couple decades and catch that they have high blood pressure instead of waiting for them to show up in an ER with complications. Strokes aren't cheap.
When they pass 'ACA for car insurance', it will require coverage for oil changes, which will cost you $5,000 once all the costs are rolled in.
This might be funny if you forget most states have mandatory car insurance, as well as minimum requirements for that insurance.
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The skyrocketing premiums are directly related to the ACA.
Wrong.
The skyrocketing premiums are directly related to insurance carriers' unconscionable GREED. They used the ACA as an excuse to throw out all the Actuarial Tables and recalculate EVERYONE as if they are on death's door from every costly disease they could think of.
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In some markets, health Insurance companies have little reason to do what you describe. Under the PPACA they must pay out 80% of the incoming claims dollars for medical services. The other 20% covers all administrative costs (claims processing, salaries, utilities, negotiating networks, leases, computers, training, HR, claim review, approval review, etc) related to servicing existing customers and advertising (necessary to replace existing customers who pick a different plan, leave the service area, or die)
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The skyrocketing premiums are directly related to insurance carriers' unconscionable GREED. They used the ACA as an excuse to throw out all the Actuarial Tables and recalculate EVERYONE as if they are on death's door from every costly disease they could think of.
But when Trump repeals ACA the companies will lower the premiums. Right?
Re: Why? (Score:3, Funny)
No, no, Mr. Coward (if that is your real name), that's not true.
Had the ACA not been signed, global temperatures would have increased by 17.152 degrees (NOT 17.149 degrees that some Republican thinktank lowballed).
I get sick a
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Had the ACA not been signed, global temperatures would have increased by 17.152 degrees (NOT 17.149 degrees that some Republican thinktank lowballed).
I get sick and tired of the Trump disciples low-balling the amount the temperature would have increased. Scientists said 17.152 degrees, and they don't lie. In fact, Science never lies. Except when it claims that there are only two sexes because there are only two chromosome combinations.
. . .
Depending on your echo chamber, Poe's Law already applies to this whole post. Sarcasm/teenage trolling was so much more easily recognizable when I was young...
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Hooray for ACA! I'm sorry, but forcing people to shittier coverage just to make it so that everyone can have shitty coverage is not a win for anyone. My personal premium costs went up 15% and my out of pocket responsibility went up by 1600 dollars (at the time). Why? Because my previous plan was considered a Cadillac plan, so the insurance provider was going to be penalized f
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Last I checked (Score:5, Insightful)
Netflix/google/whomever is paying for internet access, in a different way then regular consumers.
The teleco's can go fuck themselves.
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As much as I agree with that theory, this discussion is completely ignoring Peering [wikipedia.org].
There is no such thing as a single tube to the internet. The situation is a bit more complicated and you could choose to have a ridiculously small link to someone you don't like and a huge link to someone you want to favor. No QoS, no routing rule, just ... simple routing and .. an oriented hardware infrastructure.
And peering contracts is a never-ending battle between ISPs and service providers.
Maybe we should have some r
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All ISPs either peer, or pay for bandwidth, with other ISPs. The negotiations of which can be quite convoluted.
That said, if Netflix, or anyone, can convince an ISP to let them peer for free, they should absolutely do it. Just like if you could convince an ISP to let you use their service for free, you should absolutely do it.
I highly doubt any ISP is allowing Netflix to do this, and **even if they were** it would not negate the fact that even if Netflix isn't paying for their bandwidth, their ISP would be,
Re:Last I checked (Score:5, Interesting)
BS.
The internet was doing just fine before the corporations took it over.
It was actually better.
Re:Last I checked (Score:5, Insightful)
From my perspective it was considerably better. Tech sites were easier to find, and there was a lot less garbage. And almost no spam.
OTOH, there are lots of different use cases, and mine is a small subset. And if my use case were dominant, we'd all still be on dial-up.
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Wow! Someone on Slashdot aware that their wants/needs aren't those of everyone, and may in fact be the minority?!
That is indeed rare. Most of the minorities these days seem to think that everything needs to be revised for their convenience and benefit.
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It was stupendously better for all of your reasons and more.
There was almost no noise. Generally almost everything nowadays is just junk, fluff, filler, & clickbait.
Take recipes for instance. Even five years ago recipes were exactly that: recipes. A typical list of the ingredients with concise but clear directions. Nowadays looking up a recipe today invariably involves wading through screen after screen of some three-thousand word family history write-up about how the recipe is the author's grandmoth
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Mikey Powers... is that you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I hope Frontier burns... (Score:5, Insightful)
I paid for it. I the customer. I already paid for it.
When you say free, you mean you want to double-charge. You want to charge them to get to me, as much as you want to charge me to get to them. But they make all their money from me. This really boils down to, you want to double-charge me.
I already paid for it.
It doesn't cost you $100/month to move the electrons. You aren't buying $100/mo worth of equipment. Be honest. It is all profit, and you like profit with minimal cost. If you could get all your profit that way, you would love it. You prefer slavery. If you could, you would do it.
You drink blood. Eventually, you end up drinking your own, along with the vast pool of mine and everyone like me. It kills you when you do it. To watch you die at your own hand I just have to be able to wait long enough to see it.
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One way, both sides pay transit. The other way one pays transit
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Nonsense. "Peering" is just a group of ISPs that think they are the Internet. This is nothing to do with the Internet, it is purely a business model. One that is very profitable.
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No, they are not double charging. There are two ways to get a packet to a network. One way is to use transit. The customer pays for some amount of max bandwidth and the packet can go to any point on the Internet. The other service is peering. The customer pays for packets to be delivered to a single destination network (not THROUGH it). This cost is lower than transit. Since these are entirely different services, they are NOT double charging.
One way, both sides pay transit. The other way one pays transit and the other pays peering (much cheaper than transit).
Companies like Netflix already pay for peering agreements. What the ISPs want to do is double charge for transit. You aren't violating net neutrality by creating a mutually beneficial peering agreement with Netflix so that your customers can have faster access to Netflix. You are violating net neutrality (and double dipping) when you want to charge Netflix for sending packets across the public internet transit to your customer when you are already charging your customer to receive those same packets.
Less, not more (Score:4, Insightful)
Net neutrality on a technical level is less regulation and complexity, not more.
The idea is very simple, treat all traffic equally and design your network to peer with the other guy's in such a way that it keeps costs down for both parties.
Netflix is the reason your customers are buying faster tiers of internet,.
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You don't even know the definition of net neutrality.
Net neutrality doesn't make QoS illegal. It requires that all traffic of the _same_type_ be treated the same.
Which is the downside of course. A bunch of clueless fuckwit, government lawyers are in charge of the definition of QoS.
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Net neutrality doesn't make QoS illegal. It requires that all traffic of the _same_type_ be treated the same.
This is a terrible definition of network neutrality. It allows the ISP to make random decisions on what types of traffic get priority. The ISP could arbitrarily classify youtube and netflix as different "types" of video and give them different priorities. It also encourages consumers to masquerade their traffic as other traffic. ALL traffic should be treated the same by the ISP whether it is a torrent download or a real time video chat. The consumer is welcome to prioritize traffic and the ISP is welco
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You should suggest a new definition of 'net neutrality'.
I will continue using the standard one.
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Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers treat all data on the Internet equally, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication.
AT&T's "our pipes" BS all over again (Score:5, Interesting)
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
Form Letter (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it fascinating when a corporation "encourages" its employees to a certain political action and helpfully provide them a script. Corporations are people, money is speech, and coercing your employees's speech is a very pure expression of malignant capitalism.
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I find it fascinating when a corporation "encourages" its employees to a certain political action and helpfully provide them a script.
And of course they probably track everyone using the "script" and will penalize those that choose not to.
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They don't even have to penalize them. Just the fact that they would take note of it is enough to force a behavior in an employee. That it might become a note on an annual review.is enough.
ISP gets free Google and Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
They are right and it's called market power. ISP's should thank god Google and Netflix aren't charging ISP's yet for the privilege of having their service, as consumers would be happy to ditch any service that doesn't offer them.
Re:ISP gets free Google and Netflix (Score:4, Interesting)
I would love to see the backlash of Netflix dropping Comcast or League of Legends/DotA dropping Cox.
I'd get the biggest bowl of popcorn and just watch
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I'm just waiting for the day that Netflix or whoever institutes a "Comcast Customer Fee" for all customers of Comcast, with a nice information bubble explaining how Comcast is abusing access to its own customers to charge Netflix extra—despite having already been paid by those customers to retrieve the requested data and having already adopted peering agreements with Netflix's ISP to deliver the requested data—which has forced Netflix to institute a surcharge for Comcast's customers to make up t
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I think that Google and Netflix have a lot more to lose than the ISPs. Realistically, in the US at least, many users only have a choice of 1 or 2 providers. They are also often bundled with other services. If Google denied service to Cox, then people's option would be to either move to DSL, and probably get an increase in their Cable TV bill, or just switch over to using another search engine like Bing. Google and other internet service providers can't really fight back until the ISP monopoly is dealt wi
Former ISP Employee (Score:5, Insightful)
All the whining about Net Neutrality is garbage. Running an ISP is an inexpensive task, relatively, and it scales very well. The larger you are, the cheaper each additional customer is. I am literally baffled how large megacorps like Frontier, Spectrum nee Charter, and Comcast don't have 50% profit margins at their prices.
For all I know they do have 50% profit margins, and all this garbage about rising costs is just that... garbage.
The only reason that this has lasted so long, and the incumbent idiocy has not been ousted by competition, is because they don't have competition in most of their markets. Monopoly pricing has become the norm rather than the exception in the US. In the EU, which is no easier or more difficult to provide Internet to, consumer internet costs 1/2 to 1/4 what it does in the US. As far as I can tell the primary driver between the difference in price is that the EU municipalities never created monopoly markets for Internet.
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The actual numbers can be much higher than 50%. Try more like 97% [huffingtonpost.com].
It's tough to get hard figures (Score:3)
ISPs go out of their way to hide this figure because if folks knew how cheap modern telecom is they'd be furious.
Never heard such wild garbage in my entire life (Score:3)
Now, that having been said: If ISPs would stop over-booking their own networks, then maybe everyone streaming stuff from Netflix at the same time wouldn't max out their networks and make their customers complain.
Also, as a sidebar: ISPs are completely disingenuous. Some company like Comcast/Xfinity has competing services, and furthermore are both content creators and content deliverers; as such anything they say on the subject should be disregarded.
Overall there are too many parasite corporations in this country and they need to be taken down a few notches.
Re: (Score:2)
Now, that having been said: If ISPs would stop over-booking their own networks, then maybe everyone streaming stuff from Netflix at the same time wouldn't max out their networks and make their customers complain.
Are you actually serious? In most cases, what you're asking is for an ISP to increase the available bandwidth by 10's to 100's of times their current if they didn't over subscribe. You could have that, you'd just pay 10 times as much. Of course I am taking your quote to mean that you want a 1:1 relation between your "purchased" bandwidth and the ISP available bandwidth. if what you mean is "they shouldn't over subscribe as much", then yeah, that seems more reasonable.
If Comcast is over subscribed to the
Re: (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:2)
While I understand their argument, I guess, shouldn't Netflix et al already be paying for what they use?
I mean, if I have a 100/20 connection, I pay for that. If Netflix has a 1 terabit connection to each of its movie servers in 36 different metro areas, shouldn't they already be PAYING for that?
I get that their regional fees mainly are for their local access to the trunk, but doesn't the pay-chain go up from there too? Essentially, this is the main cost (I presume) that Netflix's internet provider bears,
Re: (Score:3)
Mostly. They've also strong-armed Netflix into paid peering arrangements instead of relying on regular transit that Netflix purchased. So if you had this example (made up):
Netflix <-> Cogent <-> Comcast <-> Subscriber
Let's say Netflix is paying for transit from Cogent. Subscriber requests content from Netflix, it traverses Comcast, then Cogent, then to Netflix, and the data is sent back to the subscriber.
Now, holy shit, Comcast sees the utilization on their Cogent link is at 100% all da
They should be paying Netflix and Google's ISPs (Score:2)
This is just squatting from ISPs, who can set the rules (and the world view) thanks to being first on the pot. There should be no "peering points" on the internet, only connections, and the only logical way to charge is for the ISP/user generating the traffic requests to pay for their delivery. But ISPs grew up in the US telecoms market where people can be made to pay and receive phone calls and text messages...
Are they purposefully keeping rural areas dark? (Score:4, Insightful)
Frontier has it all wrong (Score:3)
Perhaps they should consider raising their rates if they think things are free. That is what the fees are for. I've not heard of them, but what unlucky slobs get Frontier in their geographic area?
Corps are like spoiled 10 year old kids.... (Score:5, Informative)
Help, government we are dying without corporate welfare and bailouts!!!! We need you and appreciate how much you do for us! ...15 minutes later
Whateva government you can't tell me what to do, I do what I want, you don't own me.
Ad nauseam.
Competition (Score:2)
Then let Google build their Fiber? (Score:3)
By this argument, Google Fiber should be self-limiting, because at some point Google not paying and Google also not paying should result in such a huge shortfall that they go out of business. Right?
That claim is bullshit. (Score:3)
Netflix has made sure that that claim is bullshit [netflix.com]. The only reason Netflix is a burden on an ISP's backbone is an ISP going out of it's way to make sure they aren't playing nice with Netflix.
Decades ago on 60 Minutes... (Score:4, Interesting)
They had a piece about a city which built a new baseball stadium but had no team. And any time another city would say no to their current baseball team demands, the team owner would say, "We could always move there." So, this empty stadium was continually used as an excuse for giving the team owners what they wanted. This city's empty stadium was constantly being used as a bargaining chip and a scapegoat.
I think of this story every time I read, "...deter investment and delay broadband deployment...in rural areas..."
No Human Fututure Without Net Neutrality (Score:2)
Telcos are upset because they oversold themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
So now, in order to meet customer demand, ISPs have to use some of the profits they've been racking in hand over fist to go out an upgrade their networks. But, instead of just getting the job done, they'd rather spend a few million on a political propaganda campaign and buying off politicians to try and kill Net Neutrality so they can keep their grubby mitts on the most profit possible.
Now, make no mistake, either way consumers are still going to get screwed in the end, but, better they get screwed while getting an upgraded infrastructure, instead of letting the ISPs rip off Netflix and others for the crime of serving content. Because without Net Neutrality, the ISPs get to demand tolls from Netflix, and Netflix's prices go up, while the ISPs sit back and do nothing. With Net Neutrality, the ISPs will raise prices and implement data caps - but they also build infrastructure to handle the demand.
And Netflix already has all the incentive in the world to research, develop, and adopt new video codecs like AV1 to make their content smaller, because they still need to pay to have their content mirrored all around the country. And the smaller that content is, the less they have to pay.
I have one ISP and they sue to keep others out (Score:2)
Free Internet? (Score:2)
I suspect Netflix and Google are already paying for their Internet connections. If you think you're not charging them enough for each byte, by all means, charge them more for each byte. But if you want to charge people more or less for communicating with certain companies using the bytes they're paying for, then get fucked.
Jesus Fucking Christ (Score:2)
Google pays it's ISPs to carry all of it's traffic. Doesn't matter if it goes to users, Google pays an ISP to carry it.
ISPs pay or peer with other ISPs to carry all of their traffic. Doesn't matter if it goes to Google or users, ISPs pay an ISP to carry it.
Users pay their ISPs to carry all of their traffic. Doesn't matter if it goes to Google, users pay an ISP to carry it.
Who is getting free internet again?
Couldn't be more wrong (Score:2)
Google and Netflix pay for their connections, same as us. And in fact, pretty much every commercial internet connection is metered. You pay for every bit.
Lies. Bandwidth is *cheap* (Score:2)
If you don't work in the ISP/telco industry, you have no idea how cheap bandwidth is these days. You can get a full gigabit for less than $100. You can get 10 gigabit circuits for less than $2000. With the typical oversubscription rate of about 30-to-1, that means I can provide 300 people with 1 gigabit connections for $2000/month. And considering every one of those 300 people is paying roughly $70 month, that means the ISP is making about $20k/month just *on the bandwidth*.
The ISPs just don't want to do it
*Give Us A Break* (Score:2)
The letter claims that net neutrality rules "will create significant new costs for consumers" but did not make it clear what those new costs would be.
That is pure, unadulterated horseshit.
A long long time ago (Score:3)
I predicted that ending net neutrality would kill cable ISPs.
We're getting closer.
Frontier just admitted it wants to charge Google and NetFlix more to send their content through. We can pretty much assume at this point that they'll slow transmission rates of Google and NetFlix traffic if they don't get it.
And this is the death kneel for Frontier and others.
Because if Frontier is allowed to slow...(effectively stop) transmission of Google and NetFlix traffic....then Google and NetFlix can slow (effectively stop) transmissions of their traffic to Frontier.
Google has already invested in backbone and last mile data (Google Fiber). There is NOTHING that would prevent Google from opening Fiber in Frontier's largest (most profitable) markets and slowly Frontier traffic to a crawl.
In fact...Frontier is DEMANDING that Google be allowed to do this.
Frontier hasn't realized that NO ONE buys Frontier access to view Frontier content.
Re: (Score:3)
No, they're fucking liars, and I don't often swear.
That said, that would make "unlimited bandwidth" more obviously impossible, and some people would object to having their accounts metered. Some people already do. But unlimited bandwidth is impossible. Everything has a limit. You pay for what you think you might need. But only marketers and suckers think that "unlimited access" means any more than "you can be connected whenever we're up". Read over what they actually promised you in the contract. The
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Is the bandwidth in your home network unlimited?
We're not talking about something "impossible" or by hardware constraints, we're talking about artificial caps imposed by the providers to encourage people to move to more expensive plans.
The artificial caps have a very good reason. Because the ISPs connection to the internet is not unlimited either. There are physical and hardware limits on the ISP side. Sure, your connection to them might be 100 mbps and the hardware is more than capable of handling that. The problem is that the ISP has 10k customers and they don't have a 1,000,000 mpbs connection to the internet capable of handling all 10k customers at max throughput at the same time. There needs to be some sort of system in place t
Re: (Score:2)
Are you not getting the speed you are paying for?
Re: (Score:2)
Netflix and Amazon Prime don't really take that much bandwidth anyway. You should really be worried more about people who use the full allotment of bandwidth for 10 minutes straight than about those who are using 5% of their allotment for 8 hours a day. On the weekend I downloaded Ubuntu to the wrong machine so instead of copying it over, I just downloaded it again on the other machine, because my internet connection speed is 150 Mbps and it takes only 2 minutes to download. I think downloaded a different
Re:It's true, though (Score:4, Insightful)