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FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

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Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#281

Post by opendais »

rayiner wrote: post #273
opendais wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain how all other utilities and common carriers are effective in the US and able to receive sufficient capital investment to provide reliable service? Having a near-monopoly reduces risk significantly. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/11/13/366988/over-half... We subsidize Utilities & Telecommunications roughly equally via tax breaks. Oh, and they get subsidies like Sweden too: https://www.ncta.com/ne…

> http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/11/13/366988/over-half... . We subsidize Utilities & Telecommunications roughly equally via tax breaks. Uh, please read the methodology of the linked article. Those aren't direct tax subsidies. It's a made-up number based on effective tax rates below 35%. By your logic, the government is heavily subsidizing Apple & Google, which pay much less than the 35% rate. > Please explain…

> Uh, please read the methodology of the linked article. Those aren't direct tax subsidies. It's a made-up number based on effective tax rates below 35%. By your logic, the government is heavily subsidizing Apple & Google, which pay much less than the 35% rate.

Fine, we'll use your definitions. That's cool.

> Sweden putting in $900 million is like the U.S. putting in $27 billion.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/242713/fcc_votes_to_end_telep... "The FCC will cap the broadband fund at US$4.5 billion a year, the current budget of the USF high-cost program, funded by a tax on telephone bills." Over 6 years.

4.5 * 6=27 billion

What is your next objection?

> They're not. Utility infrastructure in the U.S. barely gets enough investment to keep it operation, much less keep up with technological development: http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2011/12/asce-report-o....

Moving goal posts by switching to publicly owned water infrastructure isn't valid. Privately owned utilities.

Like these: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/indus...

An example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exelon

Exelon: ~2.5 billion net on ~55 billion assets Comcast: ~6.8 billion net on ~158 billion assets

And like any other market, Exelon isn't having trouble turning a profit from regulation but is losing money due to its own fuckups for failing to accurately predict what forms of energy are cheapest: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-03-09/business/ct-ex...

I'm sorry, but we just have to agree to disagree. Or are you planning to change goalposts?

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#283

Post by Karunamon »

danielweber wrote: post #274
j2kun wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast has regularly ignored rules set by the FCC in favor of long court battles (that they eventually won). In the mean time, consumers have to deal with it.

If the worry is that Comcast won't follow the FCC rules, then why bother with anything?

By placing what they want to do so far out of the realm of legality that the court battle never happens.

This entire scenario simply couldn't happen if internet were a Title 2 service.

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#284

Post by roc »

pit wrote: post #186
roc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more like conditionally charging people more to drive on the roads that already exist, based on destination, rather than vehicle. And it's pretty easy to see where that could lead to discrimination.

This is exactly how toll roads work. You get on, and then pay when you get off based on how many miles travelled. So, if you were starting in New York City, it would cost a lot more to travel to Buffalo than it would to White Plains.

Except none of the provisions for paid-prioritization mentions, let alone mandates, new roads. If this were about new toll roads, these already exist and are paid-peering arrangements, CDNs, etc. [1]

These new rules are explicitly about 'traffic shaping', by price, by destination, existing traffic along existing routes.

So this is less like using toll roads to cross New York State and more like selectively saying "everyone in New York State that's driving to a Starbucks needs to travel 10/mph slower -- however they're getting there -- or kick in $2/mo to drive the old speed limit."

[1] Microsoft pays Comcast gobs of money to ensure a performant network connection for XBox Live. This is quite different from Comcast being able to say "Sony isn't also paying us money for better service. Let's slow them down -- to protect the network -- until they pay up."

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#285

Post by drewcrawford »

rayiner wrote: post #265
drewcrawford wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Austin which is a very densely-populated regional tech hub. Here we have three 30-mbit FTTN ISPs which is more competition than pretty much anywhere else in the US. Earlier this year Google announced they were bringing Google Fiber here. Immediately all the ISPs announced that they, too, would be offering FTTH speeds. One company announced 300mbit, another rolled out 300mbit as part of a roadmap to gigabit,…

Ask yourself: why does Austin already have three FTTN ISP's when San Francisco doesn't? It wasn't because they had a higher level of regulation than other cities, it was because they had less.

Another nice narrative that doesn't fit with experimental data.

In spite of the fact that one would imagine a Texas city to be less regulated than a California city, it isn't really that simple.

In Austin a strong majority of the utility poles are owned by the city. The ones that aren't are largely owned by AT&T, which complains very loudly that it is required to sell access to anyone who wants it at a price dictated by the Federal Communications Commission nationwide.

Meanwhile California (get this) opted out of much of the FCC regulation around utility poles and effectively allows a large private company to own and control the poles. This private company is made up of all the usual suspects like AT&T, Sprint, PG&E, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc., who seem to have formed a holding company to buy utility poles without anyone at the state being concerned about antitrust concerns. I'm not exactly sure what the requirements are to join--if access is "open" (for some definition of open) this may be how they circumvent the Sherman Antitrust Act etc.

California did pass "fair access" laws in 2011 [1] but as far as I can tell they only apply to "local publicly owned electric utilities" which presumably would not include AT&T and its utility pole holding company. There probably is some kind of regulation that in principle regulates competitive access to poles but how it compares to the FCC's jurisdiction in Texas it is difficult to say.

This is a side note, but we should really be having less talk about how we think regulation works and more case studies about how it does or doesn't work in these comment threads. "Less regulation == better internet" is a plausible model but so was the Bohr Model of the atom. "Is it correct?" is the question and that question can only be answered by looking at empirically what happens.

[1] http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xht...

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#286

Post by mwsherman »

pdonis wrote: post #260
mwsherman wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true, and it’s also true when Netflix buys a dedicated circuit to Comcast. Their traffic is no longer going over the other circuits. Not saying it’s the right thing to do, but that it’s functionally the same. It’s also functionally the same to say that any traffic not on the CDN is in a slow lane or being held ransom, in the sense that it will be congested until the publisher pays.

> It’s also functionally the same to say that any traffic not on the CDN is in a slow lane or being held ransom You're confusing routes with endpoints. CDNs are endpoints--multiple endpoints containing the same data so that there is a much higher probability of having an endpoint close to any given user. The owner of the data has to do all the work of getting multiple copies of the data placed at all those endpoints,…

A CDN is a route, is my contention. Its value is being closer to the user.

CDNs are a good thing. But they are networks like any other, the difference being that the nodes are smart enough for to re-request data they already have. CDN nodes should be understood as caching routers.

Being closer to the user – the CDN’s value – rests in having a better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network. A better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network is what Netflix bought.

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#287

Post by politician »

rayiner wrote: post #270
politician wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comcast spent... Absolute dollars isn't as interesting as a trend. According to the National Cable Telecommunications Association, expenditure on broadband infrastructure has declined over the past 5 years. http://www.vox.com/2014/5/12/5711082/big-cable-says-broadban... > We compare quite favorably to countries like Canada and Australia. According to a 2013 report by Ookla, US ranks 31st in download speeds. http://…

And Canada ranks #37, and Australia #55. The average speed on Ookla's test for the U.S. was 24.34 megabits. Germany was at 25.38 and the UK at 27.01. It's insane to compare a country like the U.S. to a country like Belgium that is more than ten times more dense. If you look at the northeastern states, which have densities closer to Europe (500-1000 per square mile versus 90 per square mile which is the U.S. average),…

That's true; I would have loved to have found a source that provided speed by municipality rather than country which as you point out here (and earlier) is subject to density. Barring additional evidence, I concede the point.

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#288

Post by politician »

danielweber wrote: post #269
rayiner wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Investors and shareholders are not in favor of pouring billions of dollars a year into infrastructure either. Comcast spent $5.4 billion on capital expenditures in 2013: http://www.cmcsa.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=821438 . TWC spent $3.2 billion: http://ir.timewarnercable.com/investor-relations/investor-ne... . Verizon and AT&T regularly top the list of companies with the highest U.S. capital expenditures, and…

Comcast's average user uses 2-5 GB/month. This bears highlighting. The water company, regulated as a public utility, will fine people for using "too much" water when they decree they are running out. And water usage is a lot easier to model than broadband. Do you want that same mentality running the broadband companies?

Your question is about metered versus "unlimited, but not really" billing. With "unlimited, but not really" billing, you get throttled or cut off, but under a metered billing scheme heavy end-users pay more for the traffic generated as a result of their requests.

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#289

Post by pdonis »

mwsherman wrote: post #286
pdonis wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s also functionally the same to say that any traffic not on the CDN is in a slow lane or being held ransom You're confusing routes with endpoints. CDNs are endpoints--multiple endpoints containing the same data so that there is a much higher probability of having an endpoint close to any given user. The owner of the data has to do all the work of getting multiple copies of the data placed at all those endpoints,…

A CDN is a route, is my contention. Its value is being closer to the user. CDNs are a good thing. But they are networks like any other, the difference being that the nodes are smart enough for to re-request data they already have. CDN nodes should be understood as caching routers. Being closer to the user – the CDN’s value – rests in having a better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network. A better position vis-à-vi…

> A CDN is a route, is my contention. Its value is being closer to the user.

Being an endpoint that is closer to the user is not the same as being a route between that endpoint (or any other endpoint) and the user.

> CDN nodes should be understood as caching routers.

In some respects, yes. But in other important respects, no. For example, CDN nodes do not route traffic that does not have that node as either a source or a destination. The fact that the content at that node ultimately comes from another source does not change that; it simply means that some of the traffic to and from the CDN node is to and from the ultimate source of the content. It's still not at all the same as routing traffic to and from arbitrary endpoints.

> Being closer to the user – the CDN’s value – rests in having a better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network. A better position vis-à-vis the last-mile network is what Netflix bought.

You're conflating two different ways of taking a "position" in the network. A CDN takes advantage of the existing network and the existing routes to place copies of content closer to users. It can only use the existing "positions" in the network, not create new ones.

The Netflix deal created a new privileged route that didn't exist before, for Netflix content going to Comcast users only. So the "position" Netflix traffic is now in with respect to Comcast users didn't even exist before the deal.

Re: FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet

#290

Post by jblow »

seanieb wrote: post #170
ryanhuff wrote: post #51

The investment in Obama by tech luminaries must be a huge disappointment.

Obama proclaiming his "commitment to net neutrality" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-mW1qccn8k Tom Wheeler, the FCC Chairman, was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the majority Democratic U.S. Senate in 2013 (lead by Harry Reid who also claims to be pro net neutrality) is going to kill Net Neutrality. Please take some time to remind democratic politicians & supporters why practicing this sort of polit…

He also promised to close Guantanamo.
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