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FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

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Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#131

Post by toast0 »

deelowe wrote: post #68
brightball wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile providers are a different beast because there’s a limit on radio spectrum. Throttling is necessary.

Let's take the null hypothesis that these incentives push all video streaming to Apple+. The total bandwidth hasn't changed, all that's happened is that is it's only streamed over Apple+ now. How does this help with their spectrum constraints?

T-Mobile USA has a pretty user friendly version of this on many/most of its plans.

If a music streaming service participates to label its traffic, that data is zero rated for eligible users.

If a video streaming service participates to label its traffic and limit bandwidth (advertising says 480p, but I think it's really a bitrate cap), then data is zero rated for eligible users. On plans with a high speed data cap, users can opt out of the bandwidth limiting and get potentially higher quality streaming (depending on network conditions) but the data usage will be charged against the cap.

There's no charge for providers to participate.

I don't know how zero-rating music streaming helps with spectrum; that's probably more of an inducement to use data, but music streaming is low bandwidth, and maybe there's some magic to accumulate those packets and send as a batch rather than one at a time and therefore save some framing bandwidth.

For video it's clearly a bandwidth thing. If you can reduce to the target, that's good for their spectrum management, so you get a carrot. Also, it encourages bandwidth sensitive streaming (which many services were already doing), so that if the conditions are poor for a particular user/cell, video bandwidth will be responsive and reduce automatically.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#132

Post by vlovich123 »

josephg wrote: post #70
cptskippy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the guise to justify the caps but Comcast was setting caps around the data usage of someone streaming Netflix. The overage charges were ridiculous as well, if you used 2x your data cap it would cost you 100x your regular bill. I had some Nest cameras in addition to Streaming and ended up taking them down because I kept going over.

In Australia my first broadband internet connection worked like that - though when you went over, your bandwidth was heavily throttled until the end of the month unless you upgraded your plan for the month. As inconvenient as it is, honestly I think data caps are fair pricing. The load difference between a light internet user and a heavy user is orders of magnitude of capacity for the ISP to deal with. Having a flat…

Sonic charges you $30/month for gigabit and $50/month for 10gigabit if I recall correctly. No data caps. These prices are similar to what fiber costs in Europe (or at least France).

Data caps are not fair pricing in a competitive environment but it seems that way when you have a duopoly of competition that collude on plans, pricing, and messaging.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#133

Post by lotsofpulp »

_fat_santa wrote: post #59
brightball wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile providers are a different beast because there’s a limit on radio spectrum. Throttling is necessary.

Eh, I'd argue it's still a business decision. It's still possible to find "true unlimited" data plans with some companies. I've got one with Cricket Wireless.

All mobile networks throttle in terms of different people’s data having different levels of priority.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QoS_Class_Identifier

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#134

Post by Karunamon »

wredue wrote: post #91
mattnewton wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn’t lose merit because the fight isn’t over. It’s not like all major ISPs are going to immediately ramp up to 11; even if they wanted to make that blunder while people are still clearly educated about the issue and paying attention, negotiating payments for services exempt from traffic shaping is a long b2b sales cycle that has only started. They are going to slowly boil the frog after watching the others g…

Yeah. This thread is getting to me. Okay. Net neutrality died and ISPs didn’t immediately turn the internet in to subscriptions to different cloud providers. The fact is that they CAN, and to be so deliriously ignorant as to believe that “it didn’t happen yet, so it will never happen” is just… what is happening here? Is this thread just ChatGPT bots? Regardless of if Microsoft, google, Amazon and ISPs have not yet ma…

>The fact is that they CAN, and to be so deliriously ignorant as to believe that “it didn’t happen yet, so it will never happen” is just… what is happening here?

What is happening here is see you are disingenuously misrepresenting the opinion of those who disagree with you, and then dehumanizing them by comparing them to robots. Both of these are gross and should stop.

The actual argument is something like this:

1. ISPs are profit seeking monopolists who will do anything to increase their profits (axiomatic, at least on HN)

2. ISPs have had the opportunity to "turn the Internet into subscriptions for different cloud providers" in the United States for not just the last six years, but rather throughout most of the life of the Internet.

3. Despite ample opportunity (especially for mobile carriers who were exempted from most of the requirements), they have never taken the steps to do so.

4. Therefore, it is likely they have decided that this kind of extreme siloing is not in the best interests of their profits.

It's not too hard to imagine why point four would be true;

- Most users are loyal to products, not companies. Most use products that are owned by or hosted on entities that compete with each other. This would severely complicate any kind of negotiation between the ISP and provider of the services.

- The result would be a product that is confusing from a customer standpoint. Nobody knows whether the product they interact with is hosted on Azure or GCP or AWS.

- Managing it sounds like a logistical nightmare (so, expensive).

- It opens a new venue for competition (which contradicts point 1) that a competitor automatically wins by virtue of simply doing nothing.

- It's almost certainly sure to result in expensive legal involvement from interests with the money to make the process painful.

- Even if every prior issue did not exist, this concept is legislatively contentious. As in, the rules are likely to change in four years. The rules also are different state by state.

Putting myself in the shoes of the CEO of the most greedy ISP imaginable, I don't see how this siloing idea is going to make my company enough money to make all of that worth it. It seems like a great way to fail to show quarterly growth, which is the last thing I want in my position

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#135

Post by vlovich123 »

no_wizard wrote: post #130
_fat_santa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I'd argue it's still a business decision. It's still possible to find "true unlimited" data plans with some companies. I've got one with Cricket Wireless.

They do mess with your data connection though[0]. For instance, they automatically downgrade video and appear to compress images "on your behalf"[0] regardless of what plan you're on. I'm somewhat dubious on the idea that their Cricket More plan is actually unlimited, but I'm pressed for time and can't read their more dense terms of service around the plan, but I'm assuming they have a congestion clause buried in the…

I know how they do that with video, but how do they extra compress images when most traffic is https?

It works with video because all video sites automatically adjust quality based on throughput so they just figure out when you’re streaming video and then throttle. But most websites don’t automatically change image quality based on throughput and pages load more quickly and are harder to shape…

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#137

Post by vxNsr »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #6
cddotdotslash wrote: post #4

One of the biggest arguments I remember being made back when net neutrality was a hot topic was that ISPs would bundle and sell specific websites as tiered plans. Infographics like this one [1] were shared widely. Has this happened in the US? I’ve definitely seen ISPs start to apply data caps and throttling, but haven’t seen the aforementioned packaging (at least with the major ISPs). I ask because this is one of the…

We have gotten it, but with services not websites. Mobile providers will sell you an "Unlimited" data plan that throttles everything after 25GB a month. Streaming Spotify and Apple Music won't count against that soft data cap. Streaming other music services will count against it. Video streaming over YouTube, Netflix, etc is capped at 480p levels. If you pay an additional monthly fee, you get upgraded to "Unlimited P…

My understanding of the previous NN rules was the exempted mobile anyway bec they called it necessary network management to ensure a smooth experience for everyone. So unless they also change that (which is unlikely) these rules won’t really fix or change anything, except possibly introduce regulations that will either a) push some polical agenda, or b) create a higher regulatory burden for small players and prevent new entrants.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#138

Post by toyg »

dahfizz wrote: post #105
cainxinth wrote: post #49

A lot of people in these comments are making the case that removing net neutrality didn’t do much harm, so why bother bringing it back. Let me make the counterclaim. The argument against net neutrality is that it might stifle innovation. Well, we had net neutrality for many years and innovation didn’t seem all that stifled. Hence, what’s the harm in bringing it back?

We are tired of the fear mongering and propaganda. We have seen the internet work just fine with and without net neutrality - its a micro-optimization as far as I am concerned. Political capital is limited. Instead of wasting it rehashing this bandaid, why not campaign for something like municipal internet that would fundamentally solve the problems of ISPs?

That's a false dichotomy if I've ever seen one.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#139

Post by toast0 »

jasonjayr wrote: post #17
0xy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that remotely the same thing? The infographic above and others clearly claim that ISPs will be blocking services then requiring you to pay for them separately. Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, and for example has been regular practice all across Europe (which has "net neutrality"). Isn't it just shifting the goal posts after the original claims of NN campaigners were discredited…

Netflix pays their upstream ISP to saturate the link they pay for. Why should Verizon, Comcast and others demand payment from Netflix? They are connecting customers to the internet, and should be peered to IXs that can feed what their customers need. Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network to lighten the burden on their IX uplink. It will get untenable if every random ISP charges each content provider.

Netflix shouldn't pay their ISP and some other ISP to deliver traffic. That's unreasonable.

But if Netflix connects directly to Verizon, Comcast, etc, it's not inheriently unreasonable for Netflix to pay for that connection. Verizon, Comcast and many other telcos and cablecos are national transit ISPs as well as residential ISPs, and paying a transit ISP to get packets to the ISP's customers (and peers) is totally normal.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#140

Post by toyg »

sershe wrote: post #115

Semi-unrelated, on bundling: about 20-25 years ago, there were a bunch of these tiny hyper-local ISPs in Russia that would wire up several adjacent flat blocks with a LAN, get an internet uplink and start signing customers within those flat blocks (your only other option at that time was dial-up). The uplink was probably expensive and so they charged per Gb (or had a very low cap) but... "a free local share with tera…

The first pure-fiber ISP in Italy effectively had the same for many, many years. Because speeds were so good between their customers but still slow towards the wider internet (this was the early '00s), they effectively closed both eyes as people established mega-shares with all sorts of goodness.

I think they eventually cracked down on it, but it went on for at least a decade.

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