How is that remotely the same thing? The infographic above and others clearly claim that ISPs will be blocking services then requiring you to pay for them separately.
Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, and for example has been regular practice all across Europe (which has "net neutrality").
Isn't it just shifting the goal posts after the original claims of NN campaigners were discredited and never materialized in any remote fashion after NN was abolished?
Let us not forget that net neutrality campaigning was primarily pushed by Netflix, who refused to pay Verizon for infrastructure upgrades as per industry standard going back decades.
The standard is that the disproportionate data user pays to upgrade the ports, equipment and/or line infrastructure. This is absolutely fair. A parallel is electricity capacity for homes and businesses, if you require more electricity than the local street infrastructure can provide you pay the power company to upgrade it to accommodate you. Only fair, the heavy users pay.
The movement carried water for deadbeat corpos. Netflix wanted to saturate internet links and balked at paying Verizon for new switches and pipes -- so they got their subscribers to complain.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality
What, in your perspective, is the difference between "I'll charge you more for A than for B" and "I'll charge you less for B than A"? Or a difference between "Charging more for a 'website' such as Yahoo" vs "Charging less for a 'service' such as Netflix"?
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Further, all the utility analogies you provide feel inapplicable to the point of being disingenuous. The "Heavy users pay" is "I need a bigger pipe" and is the segregation of internet service tiers by bandwidth ($10 for 100mbps, $100 for 1gps, or whatever). The "I will then, on top of that, charge you extra for arbitrary content that I don't produce, and you will have no choice as I have an effective government approved monopoly", has limited parallel that I'm aware of.
A person using more electricity will pay more. A person needing more bandwidth will pay more. Those are valid analogies in my mind. Other shenanigans such as IPSs blocking certain websites, injecting ads or weird stuff into your pages, asking more money for certain websites (or less money for other, which is equivalent), imposing their own DNS, spying on you, etc, are fairly unique to this industry I think.
>The "I will then, on top of that, charge you extra for arbitrary content that I don't produce, and you will have no choice as I have an effective government approved monopoly", has limited parallel that I'm aware of.
It has limited parallel because it's nuts. It'd be like BMW/Toyota/whoever charging you an extra monthly fee if you want to drive your car to work and otherwise the car just refuses to go there. For a slightly closer analogy, the car would be leased rather than owned, but it's an extra clause in addition to the mileage limit.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, and for example has been regular practice all across Europe (which has "net neutrality").
UPS doesn't care if it is a Nike shirt or a Gucci shirt in a box, They just deliver the box where it is meant to go. Why should it be any different for an ISP?
> UPS doesn't care if it is a Nike shirt or a Gucci shirt in a box, They just deliver the box where it is meant to go. Why should it be any different for an ISP?
While I like NN there is a strict different between an ISP and UPS because of the digital/physical realm.
When UPS delivers a Nike shirt they have to deliver that specific shirt to that specific person. An ISP needent deliver a specific shirt that originated from Nike Factory to that specific person; they can give a "locally" stored copied of the shirt. This means that the ISP could locally store say the top 4 million songs and so the expense of delivering those songs is practically zero while transporting a song from LA to NYC covers significantly more miles of fiber.
My privacy is my own. The ISP does not have a right whatsoever to determine whether it has content I want. The content that the ISP has is tainted specifically because it's not the exact content that I wanted. It's not the same bitrate, it's not the same quality, it's not the same lack-of-advertisements, and it's not the same guarantee of privacy.
It's not particularly enlightening to point out that two things in an analogy are different – if they weren't, the analogy would be useless. "An apple is like an apple." Okay.
An ISP that wishes to store a "local copy" of t-shirts or songs, in order to make more money, can store a Nike t-shirt just as easily as a Gucci t-shirt, and can store a Nikki Minaj song just as easily as a Gucci Mane song. Thus, nothing actually blocks the ISP from treating the two equally.
Alternatively, the ISP can store nothing, and just be a basic ISP. Nobody is forcing them to store anything, much less do so preferentially depending on brand. And if they personally choose to, to make more money, it's their responsibility to make sure they don't differentiate between brands, because that violates net neutrality.
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.
Of course they do, its just invisible to the consumer. It is way cheaper for amazon to ship something via UPS than it is for you, because Amazon and UPS have negotiated contracts in place.
Which is a specialty service offering set up and agreed upon by buyer and seller of the service using the dumb pipe.
So, opt-in versus required. Net neutrality certainly allows special pipes and protocols to be set up where desired, if you desire to stretch the analogy beyond its intent.
UPS cares if you are shipping something that is a physical or legal hazard for them, because they are responsible for the safety of their employees, facilities, and the other packages.
If you can make a reasonable argument that one kind of data or another creates a meaningful hazard for the pipe that carries it, please do.
I just think this analogy sounds like someone who has never actually shipped something. There are many rules for shipping—-it is silly to say that UPS just takes the box and ships it without a care. UPS cares if the content is fragile, illegal, dangerous to ship, overweight, alive, high value, perishable, tobacco, magnetic.. the list goes on and on.
You are not in the right on this one. Your argument is drifting far away from what net neutrality even is.
UPS does not care what what they're carrying unless it shits or explodes. Anything meeting most of your criteria, they simply will not ship in the first place. Net neutrality specifically mitigates rent-seeking behavior, implying if UPS knew there was something expensive in the box, they'd shake you down for more money to ship it. The only time they do this is in handling hazmat.
They sort of do this in reverse though when it comes to damage claims. They'll first try to find a reason not to pay out, but once they know what's in the box, they angle to reimburse you the least possible amount of money for it. I can't tell you how many times we would lose/destroy priceless stuff like a signed baseball from some World Series and write a check...for the $3 it cost to buy a new baseball (TBF, especially with prototypes/historical artifacts, many such claims are dog-ate-my-homework fraudulent).
Here's an actual case: a container ship carrying designer leather products from Italy took on water and a claim was made for $100k worth of retail losses. We were never going to pay that, since there's no guaranteeing any amount of it would have sold at that price, and anybody that makes money from loss is either profiteering or committing fraud (see: coffin ship). The most we would have paid out was at the price the factory sold it to the designer for ($2-$10 per diem), but IIRC we denied it since no damage was reported along the way. They didn't insure anything, on paper $100k worth of product was lost, and they didn't give a shit-- in reality they lost $2k in drop-shipped crap stamped with an expensive logo. Designer goods are inherently worthless.
Net neutrality is, quite literally, treating all packets of data the same, not caring about what type of data it is. An analogy that says it’s like UPS, because UPS will ship any box and it doesnt care about what’s in it, is a bad analogy because UPS will gladly refuse to ship many things—-it DOES care what’s in the box.
They care about own safety, not about the service segmentation here. If the packets themselves could be dangerous for some reason (for example exploits for the core routing hardware), of course net neutral ISPs would drop them too.
>Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality,
Excluding some services from bandwidth cap is perhaps slightly less extreme than throttling specific services, which is itself less extreme than blocking those services outright. All are violations of net neutrality. The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it.
> The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it.
They do that.
If your plan has, say, a 1 TB cap with no services that are exempt from the data cap you can pick any 1 TB from any mix of services you want without hitting your cap.
If your plan has 1 TB cap but say Netflix is exempt from the cap you can still pick the exact same 1 TB from the exact same mix of services without hitting your cap.
A 1TB cap really hides the issue. Let's reflect on the impact with a more restrictive cap, say, 10GB.
If my ISP gives me 10GB from any service that isn't big_video_streamer but unlimited data from big_video_streamer it's immediately obvious that while they're not 'deciding' how I use their connectivity they're definitely 'coercing' me into going with big_video_streamer if I want to stream videos, which isn't their job as - ideally - a neutral conduit for traffic.
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 decide entirely on your own how to use it, then whether or not the ISP also gives you some free data with usage restrictions doesn't change that.
If your ISP does not have any exemptions and then adds some and you miss the announcement you would never even notice, except maybe if you track your usage throughout the month to make sure you aren't going to go over and you notice they are reporting lower usage than you expect.
Yes, it is putting a thumb on the scale, but I don't see how this is really different than any of the other ways companies often give free access to third party products to try to make the company more attractive to customers.
That may be anticompetitive, but if so it should be dealt with under antitrust. Network neutrality should just cover things that restrict what you can do with the network.
> The infographic above and others clearly claim that ISPs will be blocking services then requiring you to pay for them separately.
Exempting your own and partner services from a data cap that effectively limits use of other services is functionally the same thing, but with only one package available that is mandatory for purchase.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality,
IIRC, it would have on generally violated the most recent set of US net neutrality regulations and violates the broad principles articulated for net neutrality, whether or not it violates specific regulatory franeworks existing in Europe.
Netflix pays their upstream ISP to saturate the link they pay for.
Why should Verizon, Comcast and others demand payment from Netflix?
They are connecting customers to the internet, and should be peered to IXs that can feed what their customers need. Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network to lighten the burden on their IX uplink.
It will get untenable if every random ISP charges each content provider.
That's not what happened. Netflix pays their bandwidth middleman, and their bandwidth middleman subsequently refused to pay for upgrades for the massive usage of their customer.
Netflix should have either demanded their middleman pay, moved to a different middleman, or offered to sign an agreement with the companies directly.
Let's put it another way. Let's say Netflix's bandwidth middleman hosts both Netflix and a critical telehealth operator. Should Verizon shake down or throttle the telehealth service, potentially putting health at risk, in order to prop up entertainment content streams for a deadbeat company? Of course only Netflix gets throttled, they're degrading the rest of the internet and not paying for upgrades.
Netflix being able to degrade the internet for other services traversing the same lines while refusing to pay (again, industry standard) is greed.
>Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network
We don't want to pay, but give us free rack space to solve this problem?
Netflix shouldn't pay their ISP and some other ISP to deliver traffic. That's unreasonable.
But if Netflix connects directly to Verizon, Comcast, etc, it's not inheriently unreasonable for Netflix to pay for that connection. Verizon, Comcast and many other telcos and cablecos are national transit ISPs as well as residential ISPs, and paying a transit ISP to get packets to the ISP's customers (and peers) is totally normal.
If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in New York, they're using Comcast as a transit network. If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in Los Angeles, they're not, and getting the traffic between their house and the IX in Los Angeles is what Comcast is charging their own customers for.
What other transit ISP gives you a discount because the traffic is local?
Do you or your customer get a discount when you're both only connected with a transit ISP? No, both parties pay for connection to the transit ISP (even if it's the same).
Traditional wired telephone networks are almost always caller pays (although cellphones in the US are caller pays toll, callee pays for wireless segment), but IP networking has always been both end points pay. It's not some new thing Comcast (or whoever) invented in 2006 or whenever.
If you want to connect to customers behind ISP A, you typically need to pay an ISP that's connected to ISP A, or pay ISP A, or qualify for peering with ISP A. If you and ISP A are both paying ISP B for that data, then there's motivation for you an ISP A to peer; if not, ISP A says we're happy to take your traffic through peering with these ISPs or you can pay us for a direct connection. Maybe a bit less cost for 'paid peering' vs a full transit connection.
In the old days of dial-up, all you needed to start an ISP was two T1s, one for your uplink, one for your modem pool. Once you got a little bigger, you'd look to see what content networks you could peer with to reduce your transit budget. After the move to broadband which has a bias towards only two, maybe three companies running wires to homes, and the FCCs abandonment of mandatory line sharing from the telecom act of 1996, we run into the situation where there's a handful of residential ISPs nationwide, and they almost all run transit networks, and there's no longer an economic incentive for them to peer with content networks --- they can justify peering with most other transit ISPs, so there's no cost savings from peering; and they have no competitive need to offer better service.
The solution isn't mandating 'neutral treatment', it's mandating competitive local access markets via mandatory line sharing[1], and splitting up the national transit business from the last-mile business, ala 1984 AT&T.
[1] But with tighter regulations, so that incumbents can't cross-subsidize retail prices to be lower than wholesale pricing as was common in the early 2000s before mandatory line sharing ended; building out new wiring where line sharing was infeasible was another common loophole. It'd be way more competitive if the wiring providers weren't permitted to offer retail services, but that might be a bit too meddlesome.
> What other transit ISP gives you a discount because the traffic is local?
You don't need transit for local traffic, the destination network is already in the same IX as you are. Transit is the thing that carries traffic from one IX to the others.
> Do you or your customer get a discount when you're both only connected with a transit ISP? No, both parties pay for connection to the transit ISP (even if it's the same).
If you and your customer are both in the same IX you don't use a transit ISP at all.
> If you want to connect to customers behind ISP A, you typically need to pay an ISP that's connected to ISP A, or pay ISP A, or qualify for peering with ISP A. If you and ISP A are both paying ISP B for that data, then there's motivation for you an ISP A to peer; if not, ISP A says we're happy to take your traffic through peering with these ISPs or you can pay us for a direct connection.
Paying Cogent (or Comcast) to carry traffic from one IX to another is normal; otherwise you would need to run your own fiber or have a presence in the other IX and it allows you to avoid that cost.
But if you do have a presence in the other IX, what are you paying them for? It's just a monopoly rent because they control the only network path to their residential customers.
Zero rating has been banned in the EU because two court rulings found that zero rating's economic discrimination was just as bad as technical discrimination.
You can't find or subscribe to a zero rating plan in the EU any more.
Except in Portugal where the equivalent of the FCC has so little power the telecoms do what they want without any fear.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality
Erm... Exempting a service's traffic from a restriction is the literal textbook definition of 'against net neutrality'
Weird misinformation here.
Just to clarify for the benefit of the audience:
Net Neutrality is when a carrier treats all data packets as equal, without regard to origin, destination, or provider.
I believe 'fair' QoS is exempted (you're allowed to prioritise low-latency traffic such as VOIP) but only if you throw all VOIP packets into the same 'high priority' queue regardless of software, provider, destination, etc.
If you charge on a per-byte basis but exempt some traffic from those charges, you're absolutely violating net neutrality.
If you have a data cap but exempt some traffic from that cap, you're absolutely violating net neutrality.
Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, and for example has been regular practice all across Europe (which has "net neutrality").
Isn't it just shifting the goal posts after the original claims of NN campaigners were discredited and never materialized in any remote fashion after NN was abolished?
Let us not forget that net neutrality campaigning was primarily pushed by Netflix, who refused to pay Verizon for infrastructure upgrades as per industry standard going back decades.
The standard is that the disproportionate data user pays to upgrade the ports, equipment and/or line infrastructure. This is absolutely fair. A parallel is electricity capacity for homes and businesses, if you require more electricity than the local street infrastructure can provide you pay the power company to upgrade it to accommodate you. Only fair, the heavy users pay.
The movement carried water for deadbeat corpos. Netflix wanted to saturate internet links and balked at paying Verizon for new switches and pipes -- so they got their subscribers to complain.