Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

281–290 of 302 posts

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

#281

I don't see the point of NN as long as the only "service providers" it applies to are the ones implementing layers And with NN being championed by a lot of the same services that cut off the above-mentioned it seems less like something meant to preserve the freedom of the Internet and more like something meant to keep one group of corporations in control of it.

I'd expect a neutral layer 3 to make it easier to implement protections against layer 8 attacks.

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

#283
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A duopoly? Wow, that sounds sweet. I have one cable company, and a phone company that gave up even offering Internet in my area at all. That phone company is AT&T.

PS: I live in a built-up suburb in a large metro area where the cities are all touching, not in the sticks.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree. If it does not affect other customers, and if it does not exceed the ISPs peering agreements such that they must spend extra to serve that bandwidth beyond what would pay normally... Then how is it "excessive"? But even if it was, then the ISPs are ethically obligated to publish what they consider to be excessive so that its customers can…

I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow. If another user is using 40gb per month, it seems unfair to me that both users should pay the same amount of money for their connections. The user who uses 10 000x the bandwidth should pay more than the person using 10kx less bandwidth. Not proportionally more - a lot of the…

I don't mind paying for bandwidth. I mind paying well in excess of 1,000x what that bandwidth costs.

Peering costs are effectively zero and so your costs are hardware to peer and bandwidth to the site. They already split bandwidth so we will consider that unimportant for this discussion.

You have a 10 Gb connection to a peer and that connection costs around $10k and lasts 5 years give or take.

So given a per year rate of $2k and 10% maximum utilization the entire bandwidth cost is ~$200/year.

Since that is 4.6 Petabytes that means it costs 4 cents per Terabyte of bandwidth.

Sure I could be off by a bit but an order of magnitude puts it at 40 cents per Terabyte.

Now let's compare Cox's price of $10/50 GB or $200 per Terabyte.

Even inflating the costs by 10x you are looking at 99.8% profit margin on bandwidth fees.

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

#285
post #208
post #176

This is good, but it's so obvious this was a super low priority thing for the Democrats. It's been almost three years since they took power, and they let the FCC sit in an Ajit Pai-inspired limbo for most of that time. They hit a roadblock and just stopped for years instead of adapting.

>They hit a roadblock and just stopped for years instead of adapting. When did they stop? Gigi Sohn was nominated in 2021 and was repeatedly renominated until she withdrew this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigi_Sohn#FCC_nomination

> When did they stop? Gigi Sohn was nominated in 2021 and was repeatedly renominated until she withdrew this year.

Exactly there. Instead of renominating her to perpetual failure, they should have nominated someone else. When they finally did the work to find another candidate, they actually got results. That should have happened years ago.

But it didn't and that either means they're insane (as in doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result) or the just don't care that much.

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

#286
post #209
post #176

This is good, but it's so obvious this was a super low priority thing for the Democrats. It's been almost three years since they took power, and they let the FCC sit in an Ajit Pai-inspired limbo for most of that time. They hit a roadblock and just stopped for years instead of adapting.

> It's been almost three years since they took power, and they let the FCC sit in an Ajit Pai-inspired limbo for most of that time. There ought to be a name for this fallacy, like "alternating dictatorship single color lump-government." Pretty much from day-one the Biden administration was trying to get a new FCC member to the understaffed commission, however with the slimmest possible 51-49 Senate majority it only t…

> Pretty much from day-one the Biden administration was trying to get a new FCC member to the understaffed commission, however with the slimmest possible 51-49 Senate majority it only takes one "blue dog" Democrat (or one heavily reliant on industry donations) to block it all. [0]

They nominated the same person, over and over, who failed to get nominated each time. The failure is totally their fault if they nominate someone who can't get confirmed.

They should have learned to count votes and nominate someone who could get enough.

> That state of affairs continued until the latest attempt finally passed this month. [1]

When they finally nominated someone different, someone who could get confirmed.

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

#287
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but say Netflix is exempt from the cap That's obviously and blatantly them putting their thumb on the scale. It'd be like if Burger King were to pay car manufacturers to make it so that the second half of the gas tank only works for driving to Burger King drive-throughs. That's not how cars should work and ISPs shouldn't pull the same kind of shit.

A closer analogy would be that its like if you go through a Burger King drive-through they also give you gas to bring your tank back up to what it was when you started on your trip to Burger King. You said that "The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it". My point is that if you have paid for a fixed amount of data per month, and you are going to use under that amount when you dec…

>and you are going to use under that amount when you decide entirely on your own how to use it

...but with inducement to use a particular service.

>Network neutrality should just cover things that restrict what you can do with the network.

But that's what this is. It's restricting every kind of traffic except Netflix. All other traffic is limited to a monthly quota.

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No idea, however from the linked page, they say they do: >Cricket compresses all images that are embedded in web pages in either of two industry standard formats (JPEG and GIF), regardless of the source or content of the web page or the application used to view it. Cricket strives to compress web page images to provide a high quality user experience where the average consumer should not notice a difference between th…

The only way is if there’s some cooperation between the site and ISP where the site knows to apply extra compression for the ISPs address range. Otherwise I don’t see how that could work (and also trivially bypassed when on VPN or even something like Apple Private Relay although the latter may still tunnel through some kind of mobile ISP info - not sure)

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

#289
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would honestly be shocked if UPS didn't have different agreements with big shippers.

They do, big shippers pay less because they cost less to support and UPS makes it up in volume. Pirateship.com takes advantage of that discounted volume rate, compare their prices to the ones on UPS’s website.

So UPS is not acting as a "common carrier" in the way the previous poster was claiming.

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

#290
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…

That's same as an ISP I used in 2006. My internet access was 128k, but I could get warez from the local DC++ at gigabit speeds.
Post reply on HN