Appeals court upholds FCC's net neutrality order

Re:Appeals court upholds FCC's net neutrality order by tzs on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @01:01PM (#11903403)

1. Suppose that I run a subscription music service, and I have no relationship with T-Mobile other than the fact that some of my customers use T-Mobile to access my service.

I track each of my customer's usage, figure out from IP addresses how much of their usage was on their T-Mobile connection, and rebate them my estimate of what T-Mobile will charge them for that usage.

Is there a problem with this? If so, how would you address it?

2. Similar to #1, except now my subscription service includes a bandwidth limit. A given subscription plan is allowed a specified amount of music data per month from my servers. Again, I have no relationship with T-Mobile or any other carrier other than some of my customers using those carriers to access my servers.

Each month I buy each customer a prepaid data card for their carrier with sufficient bandwidth to cover one month of their subscription to my service.

Is there a problem? If so, how would you address it?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Appeals court upholds FCC's net neutrality order by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @02:41PM (#11904253)

The issue is that nobody would ever do this because it's against their own interests. If one ISP charges per byte and you offer to pay the charge, you've deprived that ISP's customers of the incentive to switch to an ISP that doesn't do that (which you then wouldn't have to pay for) and given every ISP that doesn't do that an incentive to start, so that you have to pay for them too. And then the ISPs can raise their fees without having to worry about losing customers because the people paying aren't the people deciding which ISP to use. It's economic suicide. Which is why it's rational to presume that anybody who suggests it is in bed with the ISP, which is then the obvious antitrust problem.

But let's just put the final nail in the coffin here. Does the music service want to pay their customers $1 for every gigabyte of music their customers listen to? Fine, pay it regardless of what the customer's ISP charges for bandwidth, the same amount to any customer on any ISP. If doing that is profitable then it's profitable regardless of what the ISP charges the customer, it's better for the music service because it doesn't give the ISP any pricing leverage on bandwidth charges, and if paying the customer money to encourage them to use the service works for customers with per-byte billing then it should work just as well for customers with unlimited plans, so the proposal will earn them even more customers.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Appeals court upholds FCC's net neutrality order by criddell on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @01:36PM (#11903725)

I don't think there's a problem because the ISP isn't involved. As soon as the service decides to deal with the ISP directly for the sake of efficiency (ie one rebate vs many), suddenly there's a problem because something shady could happen? I don't think that makes sense.

Netflix has a program where they will place servers inside an ISP's network. This allows them to deliver video without paying a third party for transit. If this lowers their costs, they could theoretically pass those savings on to the customers of that ISP (Google Fiber customers, for example). I wonder if Netflix offering their service to those customers for $5 / month and other ISP customers for $10 / month would be a net neutrality violation?

The same goes for movies on YouTube. Because Google doesn't have to pay for transit, they could undercut Amazon and Apple. Is charging less because their costs are less anti-competitive?

[ Parent | on HN ]