What exactly is a slow lane? Does the Internet work in a slowlane? What speeds are we supposed to envision when we think of a slow lane? Dial-up? 10mbps? 20?
The slower the speed, the greater the price an ISP can charge websites for access at normal speeds, so it would be a balance between slowing down more, and maximizing revenue from content providers, and keeping speeds high enough not to lose customers. The customer would be both a subscriber, and an extra member of an audience which could be sold to a website.
If you're talking about a situation where the ISPs are monopolies within a particular geographical area (at least for wired internet) that balance could mean very significant speed reductions. If the revenues from content providers reduced subscription costs by a meaningful amount, it would probably mean quite a significant slow-down even when there's competition, because I suspect many consumers would pick the lowest cost subscription regardless of other factors.
So what you're saying is below 56kbps? How long do you think a "slow lane" website will take to load? What would viewing resolutions be for something like Netflix in the "slow lane"?
Why are you being intentionally obtuse on this issue? I can't tell if you're trolling, shilling or just using poor rhetoric to support a genuine opinion.
Ending net neutrality is an opportunity for the very few large Telco companies to profit from their monopolistic position in the market at the expense of all customers.
Aside from the direct and immediate impact of a degraded experience for internet users, in the long term it also kills innovation by making it harder or impossible for new services to compete with existing companies that can afford to pay AT&T, TimeWarner, etc their extortion.
No, it's not just about video. Yes, your latency playing Starcraft will be effected (either blizzard pays your ISP to let you access their servers on the fast lane or your traffic gets deprioritized and you get more lag). No, you can't circumvent this by using a VPN and most importantly, you shouldn't have to even think about using a VPN to route around your own ISP intentionally degrading your connection to force payments from the services you're trying to access.
I want a legislative solution that doesn't stab me in the back, which is what I think I'm going to get if we don't talk these things out.
I don't think it's as simple as, "No more peering agreements" (the internet infrastructure would be overloaded) or "every ISP must accept all peering agreements" (one-sided peering agreements are something that needs to be addressed somehow -- Netflix can't keep flooding Comcast's network with impunity).
I absolutely don't want to pay extra to my ISP just to watch Netflix in HD, but I don't want to have my Netflix degraded to SD just because Comcast and Netflix aren't legally allowed to make deals together anymore. There's a middle ground here, and everyone seems to be ignoring it.
People seem to have a chicken little view of this, and won't accept any dissent or disagreement whatsoever. Look at how you wrote what you did! You just threw in like 5 or 6 very uncertain things, and pretended like they're undeniable fact. That's not how a discussion happens.
It's too bad Hacker News doesn't appear to be a place where a discussion can take place. It's sad, because if we can't get our heads out of our asses about this, there's zero chance anyone in congress has a hope of doing so.
> Netflix can't keep flooding Comcast's network with impunity
You mean, Comcast's customers can't keep causing Netflix to flood Comcast's network with impunity. Netflix only sends traffic that Comcast's customers request. I don't think the issue was a "one-sided peering agreement"; I think this issue was Comcast using a monopoly position to extract more rent. Your own next comment explains why:
> I absolutely don't want to pay extra to my ISP just to watch Netflix in HD
In other words, Comcast's customers don't want to pay for the extra bandwidth to watch Netflix in HD, so Comcast is trying to get Netflix to pay instead. Which, of course, means Comcast's customers will end up paying anyway, by paying more to Netflix...what was it you said you didn't want to pay for, again?
Why should the cost of Netflix traffic be put on all of Comcast's customers, instead of just the ones with Netflix?
The solution is to charge Netflix. That way, Netflix customers are the only ones paying for the extra traffic, in the form of price increases, instead of Comcast customers who don't pay for Netflix at all.
This is like business 101, why is this even an argument?
Because Netflix is not the only application that requires more bandwidth than Comcast' network can support in high volume. So what will end up happening is that Comcast will get paid multiple times for the same bandwidth, because they will pull the same sort of scam that The Producers did: sell the same "bandwidth" to ten different applications, so they get paid ten times for a network upgrade that they only actually have to do once.
What's more, it's not always predictable what applications will need more bandwidth. Forcing individual applications to make individual deals with ISPs to get faster service puts a huge roadblock in the way of new services.
Finally, as I posted in another response to you upthread, Comcast and other ISPs have been extracting monopoly rents for years, and a major reason why they were allowed to do that was their own claim that they were going to use that extra money to keep the capability of their networks in line with demand. They have not done that. Why should we users now have to pay for something we already paid for?
> Because Netflix is not the only application that requires more bandwidth than Comcast' network can support in high volume.
Netflix and YouTube, but the argument is the same. Why should people who don't use Netflix and YouTube pay for the upgrades that help only users who make use of these things? If I don't use any streaming video services, why should my money go to upgrading the systems those services need?
As for the monopoly discussion, that's different than this one, though ultimately it does effect this (if there were alternatives, we'd just all move over to them and Comcast would rot).
I explained already, multiple times, why this makes sense. Once you assume the costs will all get passed onto users, then why should I, Comcast customer who doesn't have Netflix, have to pay for upgrades that ONLY help out Netflix users? If the costs are shifted to Comcast, then that's what happens - EVERYONE pays for Netflix. If the costs are shifted to Netflix, then only the users who actually HAVE Netflix have to pay.
And multiplayer online games, and others that have been mentioned in this thread, and... The basic error you are making here is to think that the set of applications with these bandwidth requirements is small and easily predictable. It isn't. And it will get less and less so as time goes on.
> Why should people who don't use Netflix and YouTube pay for the upgrades that help only users who make use of these things?
They shouldn't, and they aren't. They just buy a cheaper, lower bandwidth Internet plan from their ISP. They're doing that already--certainly I am. I don't want or need Netflix so I don't pay Comcast for that level of bandwidth.
If your reply is that that money still ends up going to pay for network upgrades that I don't need, first of all, if that were really true, Comcast wouldn't have had to try to charge Netflix for the privilege of faster connections, because, as I said before, they would have actually been using the monopoly rents they've been extracting for the purpose for which they were intended--network upgrades to keep pace with demand.
But more importantly, network upgrades that increase aggregate bandwidth benefit everybody, not just Netflix or Youtube users. Except for the "last mile" connection to each individual house (which is not affected by deals like the Comcast-Netflix deal), everybody's traffic travels over the same network, and network upgrades speed up all that traffic. Which is precisely what net neutrality is trying to preserve, and what Comcast charging Netflix for faster connections does not preserve.
In other words, your claim that passing the costs on to users will make everyone pay for Netflix will only come true if we allow ISPs to privilege Netflix traffic over other traffic. Otherwise everyone is just paying for increased aggregate bandwidth from which everyone benefits. And if everyone pays just for the bandwidth they need, what's the problem? Everyone then contributes their fair share to keeping up the network that everyone uses.
> So every single Comcast customer should have to pay for what just the Netflix customers use?
How did you get that from what I said? I was merely pointing out that you are not paying Comcast for guaranteed bandwidth; you're only paying for some nominal bandwidth that isn't actually guaranteed. That's true regardless of what the bandwidth is used for.
But that doesn't mean every Comcast customer has to pay for the same nominal bandwidth; AFAIK Comcast, like pretty much every ISP, has several "tiers" of service with different nominal bandwidths. If you don't need to watch Netflix, you pay for a lower tier of service.
The real question is: would you be willing to pay Comcast more for bandwidth that was guaranteed, instead of just nominal? If the answer were "yes", then Comcast could just charge its Netflix customers, who really want the guaranteed bandwidth, more, and use the proceeds to upgrade its network. But from what you've posted in this thread so far, I would guess your answer is "no", because you think you're already paying Netflix for the service, when in fact you're only paying Netflix for access to its content; you're not paying them for the bandwidth you actually need to watch the content, because they don't provide you bandwidth, Comcast does.
The fact that Comcast is going after Netflix for that money instead of its customers would seem to indicate that Comcast thinks the answer is "no" too; they think (apparently correctly) that their customers either don't realize or don't care that the Comcast network they are currently paying for is not sufficient to stream Netflix content to the number of Comcast customers that want to watch it. So since, from Comcast's point of view, they can't get their customers to pay for upgrading their network to handle Netflix traffic in high volume, they're trying to get Netflix to pay instead. Which ultimately means the customers (i.e., you) are going to pay anyway, since Netflix is going to pass on the increased cost of accessing Comcast's (and other ISPs') network somehow.
(Btw, please bear in mind that I'm stating all this from Comcast's point of view, but that doesn't mean I agree with Comcast's point of view. From my point of view, Comcast should already have been upgrading its network, using the extra money they've been getting by extracting monopoly rents for many years now. But the fact is that they haven't, so there is now a capability gap that needs to be filled somehow. Filling it by allowing Comcast to charge Netflix for faster access to its network just means Comcast's customers end up paying, as I said above. Net neutrality is at least an attempt to make ISPs, instead of users, pay for the upgrades they should have already done but didn't.)
You're not paying to receive traffic from the internet at a minimum designated speed? Than you aren't buying an internet service good enough to receive streaming data from netflix or other similar services. Your options are to either pay more and get decent internet service or make netflix pay for it (and charge you via their fees). That second option would destroy the internet as we have it today.
From the Internet? Yes. I pay for a certain speed (up to, but whatever), but Netflix->Comcast doesn't go through the Internet. Currently, Netflix uses some of the 8 bucks I give them to ensure my videos are in HD by entering into peering agreements with my ISP.
I'd like to not have to pay Comcast too, as they already charge Netflix.
That's not what's going on. Netflix wants to plug a cable into Comcast's network so that you can receive the data quicker. This would save both Comcast and Netflix money because they don't have to pay another company's bandwidth fees. Regardless, Comcast wishes to charge for Netflix for the priviledge of connecting to their network. They want to charge Netflix access to Comcast's customers (you, the one already paying the big bucks for the service), not to plug a cable into a router.
Yes except the gun is used to kill anybody who doesn't pay up.
I think the general idea is that yes, all your services will degrade in quality except for the services that pay the ransom. Sure your VPN will make everything equal, except eventually if the QoS scheme works well for the ISPs they could also move to datacaps that don't get used up by the services that pay the ransom.
I don't think I ever said that all ISPs are going to do this. I also don't think any ISP needs to charge customers twice for accessing the internet (eg, own the gun in the first place).
I think this is where the gun simile breaks down because while a gun may have valid uses relating to protection, internet non-neutrality has no uses except to line the pockets of monopolies.
The whole point of the gun analogy is to illustrate how terrible the, "just because they can, means they will" argument is. That's it. Think no more of it beyond that.
FCC proponents will say what you have now. The rule says “sufficiently robust, fast, and dynamic for effective use by end users and edge providers.”
Opponents say that it will kill innovation.
I think the opponents have a point, but I'm actually okay with a "fast lane" approach.
Some degree of traffic shaping is probably a good thing. It doesn't make sense to equally prioritize by dropbox update and my VOIP traffic. I want that VOIP to have low latency and high enough bandwidth. Dropbox update can wait. I'd rather have my FPS game have a low latency connection than my neighbors bittorrent connection.
I'd propose a fast lane but also ensure the slow lane isn't intentionally slowed down for no reason. Punitive throttling shouldn't be allowed.
It might be more effective if the tech community made thoughtful input in the rulemaking process instead of pure rage and outlandish demands.
The issue with allowing net non-neutrality isn't packet shaping: it is that an entrenched player (say, Vonage) will be able to pay for a fast lane that a startup (in this case a VOIP competitor) wouldn't be able to afford, thus preventing incumbents from being disrupted.
What if the telecoms (who still make money on phone calls) had charged Skype more for bandwidth than other companies? They could have easily put Skype out of business and consumers would be much worse off for it.
I'm not saying the telecoms should be allowed to block or punitively degrade a company like Skype. I'd be okay with a "no discrimination policy." The telecom shouldn't be able to charge Skype more than it charges Conde Nast. And of course Antitrust law would still exist. Blocking Skype for anti-competitive actions is already illegal.
But I don't have a problem with them paying for priority.
That happens in virtually all industries. Amazon pays for faster shipping than a small webstore can afford. McDonalds can afford a better location than a mom and pop burger store.
It's just part of competition.
Sure its not ideal for start ups, but why should you have the right to make a law to tell Comcast how to use their network just so it benefits your start up?
Start up culture doesn't seem like regulation itself (Air B&B, Uber).
And it might actually benefit web start ups. If Netflix and Amazon pump in more cash to telecoms in exchange for faster service, that means the telecoms will build faster networks to make more money.
Net neutrality is the non-discrimination policy you want. It is also what has existed since the internet began.
Anti-trust doesn't help small companies when they go out of business before they can afford a decade-long court battle with a telecom. It also doesn't help if whole industries (VOIP, video streaming) are targeted.
"And it might actually benefit web start ups. If Netflix and Amazon pump in more cash to telecoms in exchange for faster service, that means the telecoms will build faster networks to make more money."
Or, given past US telecom behavior, they just shift more of their existing infrastructure to supporting the 'fast lanes', degrading performance for everyone else (which further incentivizes companies to pay for fast lanes) and enjoy larger profit margins. (Remember, most telecoms are in non-competitive markets, so they have little incentive to compete.)
But the fact is that you can't snipe tiered website access without also hitting packet shaping and the same peering agreements that make the Internet a useable tool for moving even reasonable amounts of data.
If you read the net neutrality proposals made by the EU and elsewhere, QOS is perfectly allowed and within the normal operation of networks. The Net Neutrality discussion has always been about punitive throttling, and if ISP are allowed to intentionally throttle a network service solely based on who and who hasn't paid them.
Thoughtful input in the rulemaking process has thus been done! Combat congestion is good thing, and no one is objecting to prioritizing VOIP traffic over bittorrent. Fastlane and slowlane has nothing to do with QoS.
The Net Neutrality discussion has always been about punitive throttling
Not on HN. Some here on HN insist that any interference with bits-in-bits-out, including QoS, violates NN.
I've mostly given up on NN debates. In addition to debating the merits of the various positions, we also have moving names for each position, and people really insistent (not you that I've yet seen) that their definition is the "right one."
That's what I mean, aren't there already "fast lanes" in the sense that Netflix doesn't have to use the "slow lane" we call the greater Internet to get its content to the Comcast network?
Yes. This isn't something many net neutrality proponents want to talk about, but allowing netflix to have sweetheart peering deals or offering rack space for caching at no cost inside ISP locations IS treating traffic differently.
I definitely want to talk about it. If an ISP is caching by using an algorithm that contains hardcoded urls, that is something other than just caching.
If folks here are in opposition to peering, they're attempting to literally destroy the Internet.
If we abolished peering agreements (setting aside the legal nightmare that'd cause, telling people what they can and can't do with their private networks), the subsequent Internet traffic that'd be generated would literally destroy the current Internet infrastructure.
