"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet

You know Mark Cuban has a real clue. He started one of the first streaming companies that he sold to Yahoo! For $billions. He was one of the true pioneers, knows the same things I do, inside and out, and is a savvy tech investor. He's violently opposed to this govt. power grab.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...net-neutrality-i-want-there-to-be-fast-lanes/

 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/welcome-to-the-obamanet-1424998484

 

So you know I'm not just favoring the republicans' positions, they voted down this measure that I do approve of. It's no power grab, and it doesn't favor a Google over a Comcast.

This ruling is all that's needed.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/26/8114205/fcc-decision-municipal-broadband-internet

 

Basically...

The internet is a collection of public networks that are interconnected. AT&T paid LOTS of money to build a giant nationwide public network. Verizon paid lots of money to build one, too. Similarly for Comcast and other cable providers.

In order for a customer of one ISP (Comcast) to access a server that's connected to another's (AT&T), the networks have to be connected. By mutual agreement, AT&T and Comcast connect their networks in many places. It wouldn't be efficient to only connect in NYC because your communications from Oregon would have to go all the way across country and all the way back to access a server on the other network that's also in Oregon. "Peering" in NYC and Oregon (and many other places) allows the long haul connections to not be used (causing overloading and congestion).

This peering scheme has been the basis for how the Internet works since the beginning.

The requirements to get a big carrier to peer with you are considerable. They're not going to let anyone peer in one place, and the amount of traffic going in both directions needs to generally be the same - a fair trade. Peering also restricts the traffic being traded to the two companies involved. For example, on a peering connection between Comcast and AT&T, your packets won't go from Comcast across AT&T's network to Verizon's - only to AT&T customers. Comcast would peer with Verizon, too, and that's how you reach Verizon's customers.

When I say customers, I mean someone who's bought an internet connection from them. Be it a cable modem subscription or a commercial connection or hosting.

With that background, let's talk about Comcast as they (and other ISPs) are the victims of this government power grab.

Comcast spends $billions building big networks in cities. I'm talking about all the cable they pull from manhole to manhole to homes (or on phone poles). Plus all the equipment to connect it all together. Plus their own private long haul connections so they can ship on demand video (and internet traffic) from Chicago to Atlanta (and every other city they serve).

Netflix and Google (YouTube) consume 2/3 of all the traffic on the Internet. Streaming video is the most massive data intensive kind of thing you can do on the Internet. As

The thing is, Netflix and Google only build infrastructure that minimally suits their business objectives. Netflix does not have its own private network between cities, for example. Instead, they rely on peering arrangements with their hosting company to have their streaming data delivered to end users.

Comcast has been building bigger and badder metropolitan networks and long haul (between cities) networks to handle the increasing demand for Netflix and YouTube. And as the quality of the video streams increases, so does the bandwidth they require. Comcast is stuck paying the cost of building out really expensive infrastructure (pulling more wires, buying more expensive faster equipment, etc., while not charging consumers more money for it.

As I said, the peering arrangements are supposed to be fair trade - roughly equal amount of bandwidth in both directions. For argument's sake, let's say Netflix is hosted on AT&T. Whenever anyone on Comcast watches Netflix, the movie stream is going across one or more of those peering points. Netflix isn't paying for it. As the traffic from Netflix grows with consumer demand, the peering points overflow with data. They simply aren't fast enough connections to handle all the movies people want to watch. Movie streaming experience suffered.

Finally, Netflix and Comcast came to an agreement. Netflix BUYS peering in many places with Comcast. Those are dedicated connections, not unlike our cable modem ones. Comcast sells those to us, it sells commercial ones for peering purposes to Netflix. Netflix' movie streams now go over the dedicated peering connection and the old peering points aren't overflowing anymore. Everyone wins, though Netflix is actually having to pay for its bandwidth. As it should be.

There is no new 2nd internet leaving the old one behind, as pro net neutrality people claim.

Comcast didn't cherry pick which traffic at the peering points to slow down or filter or otherwise harm, as pro net neutrality people claim.

Net neutrality people want all traffic treated equally, which simply does not make sense. At the peering points, traffic was treated equally and Netflix customers suffered with poor experience. With the traffic treated unequally, peering, Netflix customers get better service and so does everyone else browsing every other internet site.

 

The short answer to your question is:

Netflix never paid for bandwidth from Comcast. All Comcast customers do, so why shouldn't Netflix?

The net neutrality ruling goes far beyond simple rules regulating how traffic is treated. It governs how peering connections will be made, contractual arrangements between companies that want or provide Internet connections, will no doubt end up in govt. taxes on your internet bill as you see on your phone bill, and worse.

Prior to this ruling, AT&T was in the process of investing massive sums into vastly faster internet speeds for all its customers. Now that the government is going to dictate how they can exploit their own investment/infrastructure, they've put all that investment on hold. Why should they continue?

We lose.

Big government wins.

All I ever suggested was the Internet was working right. The peering was done right and everything works. The government should stay out of it as they always have. Without their intervention, the Internet has turned out to be a huge part of the economy and innovations. When government is involved, you get very large companies (Google, Netflix) bribing govt. officials to make rules that favor their bottom lines. All this is true.

 

AT&T, in your example, should be charging you to use bandwidth and Netflix. Just as you add more bandwidth and pay more for your use, so should netflix. It's common sense

A good read
http://fortune.com/2014/02/24/inside-the-netflix-comcast-deal/

 

Except big corporations do win. Google and Netflix profit off of AT&T's investment because the government mandates it so. After Google and Netflix spent considerable sums buying the opinion.

Government wins because now they have to monitor all this. In the process of putting in their gear to monitor the traffic, they can freely spy on everything going on.

We do lose.

 

Netflix and Google aren't driving 2/3 of the usage, only of the bandwidth. If you have 100 people in a neighborhood actively browsing the internet, and only one is watching netflix, that one person is using far more bandwidth than the other 99 combined.

Comcast has not cherry picked traffic to throttle in the past. My internet connection is 50MBit down and 5MBit up. They're throttling my up speed! (They should).

FWIW, I really like Netflix and watch it a lot. It's not like I'm against them or for the ISPs. I'm for keeping government out of it because there is no excuse for them to be involved (solving made up "issues" that don't exist in reality). The way this was done was to rule the ISPs as Title II carriers, which is just not the right tool for dealing with them in the first place.

The FCC has tried making idiotic rules in the past and been shot down in the courts every time. Looking for a loophole to centralize control of one of the last mostly free and democratic platforms (by the people for the people for real) is just wrong.

Without government oversight, the Internet has ruled itself fine and disputes like the Comcast/Netflix ones have been resolved exactly as they should be. There was no need of government intervention then, and never will be.

 

Almost all of this is wrong.

Only in a few countries is internet faster than the US.

The ISPs do not need government involvement to figure out pricing and bandwidth rates. They already offer a reasonable set of choices so gamers or other hardcore users can buy more bandwidth and those who just want to send emails and read facebook can buy low end service.

The ISP companies have built up their networks in absence of regulation to the point where they were rolling out 300MBit service in cities with plans to implement it nationwide. Time Warner was going to upgrade my service to that 300MBit for $0 extra cost. Measured in dollars per byte, bandwidth has gotten cheaper by factors of tens of thousands.

As for new startups, they are spit in the ocean, in terms of bandwidth. If they gain popularity, they will need to raise significant money for infrastructure no matter if the government is involved or not.

As for Netflix, they have maybe 70 million customers. There are at least a billion people who use the internet. They're a fraction of all users. They will charge $9 instead of $7 and only the people who actually use the service will be paying for the bandwidth costs Netflix incurs.

In fact, Netflix is not showing any financial hardship or loss of profits for paying for peering. The better quality streaming they are now able to provide is attracting more customers, and they have raised their fees.

 

Your chart is bullshit.

And any company that puts s server in each of two places has and advantage. If they pay to use a CDN, they have and advantage.

Clearly people who have no clue are giving other clueless people utterly false talking points.

No offense intended.

 

I owe you a better answer.

If Mayberry RFD issues bonds and raises taxes to pay the payments on the bonds, and uses the bond money to build 10 gigabit fiber to every home in Mayberry, you have 10 gigabit internet and 100% penetration. But you won't be able to browse a single WWW site outside of Mayberry.

I know why, I am 100% sure you don't know why.

Finland has ONE city of population greater than 500,000 and 108 total towns and townships. The united states has 25 cities > 500K population and 20,000 total towns and townships. Of course it costs a fraction of the money to wire up Finland with the cable of your choice.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/24/us-internet-speed_n_3645927.html

The U.S. now has the ninth-fastest average Internet connection speed in the world, behind South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Sweden. That's a slip in the rankings: In the last Akamai report, the U.S. was eighth, with faster average connection speeds than Sweden.

Given that Akamai surveys 243 countries to produce its "State of the Internet" report, ninth place might not seem too low. U.S. Internet providers, after all, contend with a bigger landmass -- and a larger population -- than those in South Korea or Japan. And in real terms, the U.S. average connection speed improved in the interval between reports, becoming 27 percent faster than last year. It just wasn't enough to beat ever-speedier Sweden.