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.
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.
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.
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.
Is he letting those sources push content to him for free?
Or are his customers determining what's going through his network?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.