Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate • Hacker News Board

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#11

Post by netcan » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 12:59 PM UTC

fphhotchips wrote: post #2

Personally, I think zero rating is a good thing, especially as it operates in the Australian environment (or, at least, how it has operated previously). It has largely been consumer positive, allowing premium tier ISPs to differentiate themselves by making the effort to peer with service providers, and consumers benefit from the free quota. There are some distasteful uses though - where there are exclusive peering ag…

These sorts of conventions are rarely good for consumers in the mid-long term. They're like dealer financing, free device contracts, introductory rate loans.

They shift price around in a way that creates a local maxima or suboptimal equilibrium.

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#12

Post by fweespeech » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 2:42 PM UTC

fphhotchips wrote: post #2

Personally, I think zero rating is a good thing, especially as it operates in the Australian environment (or, at least, how it has operated previously). It has largely been consumer positive, allowing premium tier ISPs to differentiate themselves by making the effort to peer with service providers, and consumers benefit from the free quota. There are some distasteful uses though - where there are exclusive peering ag…

> Personally, I think zero rating is a good thing, especially as it operates in the Australian environment (or, at least, how it has operated previously).

> "Zero rating isn't great for consumers, as it has the potential to distort consumer choice in favour of choices selected by an ISP," Netflix spokesman Cliff Edwards says. "We'll push back against such efforts, but we won't put our service or our members at a disadvantage."

I think you just don't see the problems it creates.

> It has largely been consumer positive, allowing premium tier ISPs to differentiate themselves by making the effort to peer with service providers, and consumers benefit from the free quota.

They already have the incentive of the fact if they don't peer with service providers, they won't actually be able to connect you to the rest of the internet at a reasonable speed. Australia's market for the internet is worse than the US because of things like this distorting it + the distance from the rest of the world.

I would never setup a server in Australia because of the ISPs. I would stand them up on the west coast of the US instead precisely because of their behavior. I think you don't really understand how much the ISPs of Australia have made the entire Australian market completely uncompetitive with the rest of the world.

Here is a random example of a company that operates in Australia and abroad.

https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

> Bandwidth quotas listed are for North American and European locations. Overage is priced at $0.02/GB in North America, $0.02/GB in Europe, $0.05/GB in Tokyo and $0.10/GB in Australia. Full plan details are listed on the customer portal.

Why do you think Australia costs $.10/GB while the rest of the world [outside of Tokyo] costs $.02/GB?

> All in all, I think the CRTC has taken a pretty good approach. Perhaps the third-party only rule should be extended to refusing exclusivity arrangements, but a complete ban is over the top in my opinion - it discourages passing on savings made by peering with companies to consumers.

It has the opposite effect. It makes things more expensive. The only reason it appears "cheaper" in the Australian market is because they decided to screw not-consumers in the Australian market even harder.

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#13

Post by marcosscriven » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

mcbridematt wrote: post #8

fphhotchips wrote: post #2

Personally, I think zero rating is a good thing, especially as it operates in the Australian environment (or, at least, how it has operated previously). It has largely been consumer positive, allowing premium tier ISPs to differentiate themselves by making the effort to peer with service providers, and consumers benefit from the free quota. There are some distasteful uses though - where there are exclusive peering ag…

To give some context, zero rating in Australia came about as a response by smaller ISPs to the 'Gang of Four' 'cartel' of large telcos, who have settlement-free domestic peering between themselves[1], and until ~2009-2010, had a monopoly over international transit (via ownership of submarine cables to the US) Australia is a country which imports the majority of its content (submarine cables are not cheap), so smaller…

I lived and worked in Sydney for a year or so, and used iiNet while I was there. They had a mirror of free software, and also zero-rated most iTunes content. With most ISPs there having caps (mine was just 100GB), it was difficult to not see this as a benefit, but overall of course it's far from ideal.

The other problem was just terrible speeds; best I could get in a central district was ADSL2+, with about 16/0.8 mbit d/u, and that's not including the terrible latency issue you had to deal with for a whole host of US and EU based websites and services.

Then again, I'm back in London now with a 150/15 mbit d/u connection for under £30, no caps in sight.

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#14

Post by dfgsdfgs » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

I've lived in Canada and the US. Canada's providers made me like Comcast. The service is very bad, with caps on cable (80G when I left), high cost, collusion among the two service providers, a regulator in their pocket, and publicity campaigns to stoke nationalism to block foreign (i.e. US) providers from coming in.

Just like the US, but so much worse.

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#15

Post by JoshTriplett » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 4:11 PM UTC

golemotron wrote: post #10

IBM wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no level playing field in business as it is. Incumbents have the advantage of having more resources than start-ups, that's what makes disruption hard. Saying zero rating shouldn't be allowed is worse for me as a consumer, I'd definitely like it if music streaming apps I use made deals with my wireless carrier so I could stream as much as I wanted. You (and startups) are basically asking for a subsidy that doe…

You should just say that you don't buy the argument of net neutrality. The intent is that network access is non-discriminatory. ISPs will not be allowed to offer special deals that benefit one service provider over another. It's not a subsidy, it's treating bandwidth as a regulated utility. You can choose to imagine cellphone hardware as a utility but clearly it is not.

So, an ISP that makes a deal with a content provider to host a server caching the content provider's data on their network, specifically to improve bandwidth and reduce transit costs, should not be allowed to pass on that savings to the customer, and should instead be forced to pocket it all themselves?

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#16

Post by timthorn » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 4:12 PM UTC

jkot wrote: post #4

A few centuries ago England used number of water channels for transportation. There was a law that owner of channel could not be associated with user in any way.

Until 1990, it used to be that the mobile phone networks in the UK were not allowed to have a relationship with the retail customers on their network, instead with the billing and account management performed by a range of third parties.

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#17

Post by wtallis » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 4:29 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #15

golemotron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should just say that you don't buy the argument of net neutrality. The intent is that network access is non-discriminatory. ISPs will not be allowed to offer special deals that benefit one service provider over another. It's not a subsidy, it's treating bandwidth as a regulated utility. You can choose to imagine cellphone hardware as a utility but clearly it is not.

So, an ISP that makes a deal with a content provider to host a server caching the content provider's data on their network, specifically to improve bandwidth and reduce transit costs, should not be allowed to pass on that savings to the customer, and should instead be forced to pocket it all themselves?

They shouldn't pass on the savings to just some of the customers; there's no reason they can't pass on the savings to all of their customers. After all, everyone benefits: those using the service with the CDN node get a faster path to that content, and everyone else gets a less congested path to the rest of the internet.

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#18

Post by JoshTriplett » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #17

JoshTriplett wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, an ISP that makes a deal with a content provider to host a server caching the content provider's data on their network, specifically to improve bandwidth and reduce transit costs, should not be allowed to pass on that savings to the customer, and should instead be forced to pocket it all themselves?

They shouldn't pass on the savings to just some of the customers; there's no reason they can't pass on the savings to all of their customers. After all, everyone benefits: those using the service with the CDN node get a faster path to that content, and everyone else gets a less congested path to the rest of the internet.

> They shouldn't pass on the savings to just some of the customers; there's no reason they can't pass on the savings to all of their customers.

So they shouldn't be allowed to pass the savings on to the customers who actually use the service in question and thus benefit from the colocated server? And this is supposed to be more "fair"? And somehow the ISP's rate model for their customers is yours to dictate?

Consider if ISPs actually charged customers by data transfer, the way many large datacenters do. What actually costs the ISP money is data transferred outside the ISP's network, going over peering connections. Many datacenters don't charge for bandwidth within their own network; for instance, bandwidth between AWS nodes in the same area is free. So why can't an ISP use the same model, and only charge for bandwidth going over their peering connections but not for bandwidth that stays inside their own network (such as to the YouTube or Wikipedia mirror they're hosting)?

For the record, I do believe in network neutrality in the sense that ISPs should not be artificially limiting bandwidth to particular Internet services (though I'd prefer to see that solved more naturally through ISP competition, but there's a severe lack of local ISP competition available). I don't, however, see anything wrong with setting up additional peering/colocation/etc arrangements that are designed to be mutually beneficial to the ISP, their customers, and the services whose data they're carrying.

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#19

Post by patcon » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 5:42 PM UTC

fphhotchips wrote: post #2

Personally, I think zero rating is a good thing, especially as it operates in the Australian environment (or, at least, how it has operated previously). It has largely been consumer positive, allowing premium tier ISPs to differentiate themselves by making the effort to peer with service providers, and consumers benefit from the free quota. There are some distasteful uses though - where there are exclusive peering ag…

I have to disagree. It limits new entrants, as new entrants can't get into the large agreements easy enough to have a fighting chance.

You mention sports, but that's a total anomaly, because upstart sports franchises are not common and they tend to be big entrenched players anyhow, due to the massive physical infrastructure required to run a league.

Sporting events is just not a good example of why zero-rating should be any sort of norm. And I can't think of a good one.

Re: Why 'zero rating' is the new battleground in net neutrality debate

#20

Post by cachesking » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 2:59 PM UTC

If used in the right context, I don't see a problem with 'zero rating.' T-mobile[0] has been doing this for a little bit now and, to me, it seems to be beneficial. The issues only arise when you are zero rating individual services belonging to one genre or vertical. Saying that Netflix won't count against your usage but Hulu does would be a problem.

[0] http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html