FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#41

Post by masklinn » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:06 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #33

hpaavola wrote: post #22

I don't get this whole net neautrality discussion that is going on in US (and maybe somewhere else, just haven't paid attention). Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices. Service providers (not ISPs, but the ones who run servers that consumers connect to) pay based on speed of their connection. If the ISP feels like service providers ar…

> I'm four years old. I feel like this isn't quite right.

I'm guessing it's a reference to ELI5.

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#42

Post by joelhaus » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:06 PM UTC

Can anyone make a serious argument on behalf of the carriers? Given the court decisions, the only way to protect the American people and the economy is to reclassify ISP's under Title II.

For the skeptics, it appears to come down to the question: which route offers better prospects for upgrading our internet infrastructure? Choice one is relying on a for-profit corporation with an effective monopoly that is beholden to shareholders; Choice two is relying on elected politicians beholden to the voters.

If you think there is a different argument that can be made on behalf of the carriers or if you can make the above one better, I would be very interested in hearing it.

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#43

Post by enscr » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:07 PM UTC

spacefight wrote: post #23

adamio wrote: post #12

The internet is slowly being transformed into cable television

Yes. And certain companies are pushing hard to make them succeed these days. Mozilla is one of them.

How so ?

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#44

Post by masklinn » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:08 PM UTC

hpaavola wrote: post #22

I don't get this whole net neautrality discussion that is going on in US (and maybe somewhere else, just haven't paid attention). Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices. Service providers (not ISPs, but the ones who run servers that consumers connect to) pay based on speed of their connection. If the ISP feels like service providers ar…

> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes

Because once the middleman has established himself as a monopoly and everybody has to go through him with no alternative, he can make bank by having everybody pay more.

> and data caps?

Lets the ISP oversubscribe even more and extract even more money out of the system without providing any additional value whatsoever.

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#45

Post by grandalf » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:08 PM UTC

hpaavola wrote: post #22

I don't get this whole net neautrality discussion that is going on in US (and maybe somewhere else, just haven't paid attention). Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices. Service providers (not ISPs, but the ones who run servers that consumers connect to) pay based on speed of their connection. If the ISP feels like service providers ar…

> Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps?

It's just an alternate way of pricing the service. You could ask similar questions about a lot of industries:

- Why does Github charge the way it does and not just price the service per megabyte of data stored or per commit, etc?

- Why do fast food restaurants offer free soft drink refills for $0.99 but not offer a single fill for $0.50?

- Why do residential bandwidth providers not offer a service with guaranteed gamer-quality low latency?

- Why do restaurants not offer a discount for customers who decline the free bread and water?

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#46

Post by serge2k » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:08 PM UTC

berrypicker wrote: post #29

kirualex wrote: post #3

Yet another blow to Net-Neutrality...

I don't see a problem. You can switch ISP if your current one isn't net-neutral. Why should you force businesses to operate in certain way? They're not breaking any laws.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_market

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#47

Post by altcognito » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:08 PM UTC

wtetzner wrote: post #38

spacefight wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And certain companies are pushing hard to make them succeed these days. Mozilla is one of them.

I don't understand this comment. Can you explain?

DRM

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#48

Post by twoodfin » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:09 PM UTC

ColinDabritz wrote: post #20

"And he promised a series of measures to ensure the new paid prioritization practices are done fairly and don't harm consumers." I have a measure in mind that won't harm consumers. Don't allow ISPs to discriminate against users regarding their already paid for internet traffic based on what they request. (Gee that sounds a lot like net neutrality.) Anything less is open for abuse. Perhaps "Discrimination" is a good w…

Don't allow ISPs to discriminate against users regarding their already paid for internet traffic based on what they request.

It's (relatively) cheap for Netflix or their CDN partners to connect their content-serving systems to a few dozen "meet me" rooms where it's "easy" for Comcast to hook as many wires up as necessary to receive the requested data into their network at an acceptable rate. That's all Netflix or their CDNs need to worry about. And so it's (relatively) cheap for them to scale the amount of data they serve as their customer base, average viewing time and stream quality grow.

But Comcast has to deliver all this data to tens of millions of customers spread out around the nation. While it would be nice if their networks were sufficiently provisioned to serve, say, half their customers 20Mbit/sec continuously during primetime, that is just not the network they have today. It will always be cheaper for Netflix to turn up the spigot than for Comcast to build out its infrastructure. Should "network neutrality" force Comcast to spend billions every time Netflix doubles its streaming rate?

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#49

Post by rayiner » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:09 PM UTC

natdempk wrote: post #30

ColinDabritz wrote: post #20

"And he promised a series of measures to ensure the new paid prioritization practices are done fairly and don't harm consumers." I have a measure in mind that won't harm consumers. Don't allow ISPs to discriminate against users regarding their already paid for internet traffic based on what they request. (Gee that sounds a lot like net neutrality.) Anything less is open for abuse. Perhaps "Discrimination" is a good w…

This seems like a valuable approach. If we could come up with examples of services like nonprofits that would be unable to pay and have their services negatively affected I think that could make people care about this issue. Maybe if we focused on things like Khan Academy, where their content is largely video. I think in that case its clear their money would be better spent developing a larger knowledge base instead…

I think if people would get away from this nebulous message that mostly seems to benefit for-profit companies, and focus on issues like ensuring access for non-profits and educational organizations, that there would be a lot more bi-partisan traction. Right now, the optics, for those not invested in the issue, come across as being mostly about Comcast and Netflix bickering over profits.

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#50

Post by JoshTriplett » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:09 PM UTC

hpaavola wrote: post #22

I don't get this whole net neautrality discussion that is going on in US (and maybe somewhere else, just haven't paid attention). Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices. Service providers (not ISPs, but the ones who run servers that consumers connect to) pay based on speed of their connection. If the ISP feels like service providers ar…

ISPs would like to charge a fee from services that produce a huge amount of traffic, to carry that traffic to their consumers with a higher priority rather than mixing it in with all the other content. (Some people worry that ISPs would throttle high-bandwidth content lower than other content to force the services to pay to avoid degredation.)

Note that large ISPs have done this for years, via in-ISP CDNs: if you have enough content, it makes sense to have copies of it to serve up directly from the ISP's network.

The primary concern I've seen raised by network neutrality advocates: because many people have very few available high-speed ISP choices (one cable provider and sometimes one fiber provider, since most people can't get competitive DSL), it may not work to just say "pick another ISP if you don't like what yours does". (That assumes enough ISP customers care enough to switch ISPs over this issue.)