Comcast, Verizon and others have recently tried to turn this on its head by witholding peering upgrades to Netflix, who wasn't even charging them a dime for all this data that their customers requested! This is not net neutrality, and performance degradations like this made Comcast uncompetitive in my neck of the woods since I have Fiber available by rare happenstance. That being said, my fiber provider (Centurylink) has even worse peering with Comcast, such that loading xfinity.net is a chore on gigabit fiber, let alone the Xfinity Go app. These performance issues caused me to cancel my TV service with them and get a different provider that worked better on my kids tablets, and so long as providers play games to throttle eachother, stories like this will be common.
Re:The FCC is stopping 9 companies from providing subsidized...
by adrr on Saturday February 04, 2017 @11:57AM
(#13567686)
Google or facebook could easily extract a $1 or more a month from any ISP. Start with cell providers where there's choice. If ISP doesn't pay, put up a page with the ISPs support number with a message that the ISP is preventing the user from seeing the page and to contact the ISP. You see this strategy employed on cable all the time.
Re:The FCC is stopping 9 companies from providing subsidized...
by equalunique on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:09PM
(#13565594)
Have you ever rented a VPS, Colo space, or served up content from a cloud service? Practically every service already charges for outbound data. The idea that somehow net neutrality will lead to an increase in those charges seems unlikely to me.
Re:The FCC is stopping 9 companies from providing subsidized...
by trome on Saturday February 04, 2017 @03:49AM
(#13566271)
If you have an ASN in North America you can get settlement free peering with most networks. That means all you pay for is the hardware/power cost to transport your content. Usually this is fairly unbalanced, and providers will compensate eachother (reach a settlement) if data is too skewed in one direction, almost always in the datacenter's favor (as ISPs are really upstream light).
That is the future without net neutrality. The large ISPs will charge content providers. It will start slowly and only affect the largest services (like Netflix) but when they need to juice the quarterly numbers they'll start working their way down the list. Because we don't have competition in this country they will just start severely degrading traffic from anyone they want to make pay.
Pai has made no proposal for actual broadband competition. In fact he thinks we already have "robust" competition among ISPs: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/washington/fccs-pai-br...