> Consider that prior to the internet, they were pretty much created to do the opposite of what people want from net neutrality.
You can scale broadband almost infinitely. You _cannot_ scale phone service or television or radio the same way. There are simple limits on physical space and on carrier allocations that require there to be a licensing body. The FCC is required to be reasonable and non-discriminatory and broadcasters are required to serve their local communities directly. The FCC can only license broadcasters and can place no limits on receivers at all. This is because these airwaves collectively belong to the people.
It was created to serve these purposes. None of these are the "opposite" of net neutrality in any way whatsoever.
Just my 2 cents, but I don't really see how your first paragraph proves the assertion you make in the second... Arguments about Netflix using too much bandwidth on an ISPs network are exactly the kind of thing I'd expect FCC personnel to be sympathetic with considering it's the same argument they use for all the other mediums they cover... It ultimately devolves all discussions into crappy metaphors involving phone and radio when the Internet is really it's own thing and should be treated as such.
Meanwhile the FTC handles consumer protection, they are by nature going to be more proactive about this kind of thing. If they handle it then it aligns with their existing incentive structures and they can brag about it to congress in the same way they do for everything else they do when budgeting discussions come up.
No matter how I think about it, the FCC just seems incompatible with what most net neutrality advocates, such as myself, actually desire.
> Netflix using too much bandwidth on an ISPs network
Netflix doesn't use any ISP's bandwidth without a colocation agreement. The ISP customers use the bandwidth they have already paid for. If you're going to sell IP services you have to deliver those services honestly and fairly.
Indeed. This situation reminds me of when SMS was new, where you had to pay 25¢ to send a text, and the recipient had to pay 25¢ to receive the text. The ISPs want to double dip, get paid twice for the same data like cell phone companies were doing in the 90s.
Not necessarily since you pay for wireless connectivity. RX/TX doesn't matter. Recipient could be on a different network too. You want a text, you cover the costs.
Banks still charge me on both ends for int'l wires.
Now I personally agree with you and not with the reasoning I presented above but it's still an argument.
The problem with this argument is that you end up in a scenario where an ISP makes an inadequately provisioned peering path (either through an IXP fabric or transit) to Netflix that just runs at saturation.
Customers still get plenty of bandwidth to everything else and Netflix effectively ends up capped. This happened with a major cable ISP and Netflix already.
You’ll quickly find out that “bandwidth the customers paid for” doesn’t mean nearly as much as you think it does because you can have excess in the last mile and terrible AS-to-AS connectivity.
There is no excuse for inadequately provisioning the backend. They know what their customers want to consume. It isn't 99% text anymore.
If I download 1TB from 1000 servers should the ISP have any claim to charge them a toll? If I download 1TB from a single server do they now get to impose a toll?
The money that funds everything on the Internet comes from the end users who pay to access. The ISPs and all middlemen take from that pool of cash. If I've been sold a service to an open network I need to be delivered that service. The minutia of backhaul access is irrelevant. Their business doesn't exist without people and businesses paying for access.
What this arrangement does is limit revenue growth which is why the financial schemers want to double dip with their extortionate tolling on entities that already pay. They see what the cable operators get away with on their closed video distribution networks negotiating for access and want to replicate the same on the Internet.
There is no toll involved here, this is a limited 100gbps interconnect.
If an ISP over-provisions these too far, they are wasting money and will not be competitive.
>There is no excuse for inadequately provisioning the backend.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. When this happened was when Netflix exploded in popularity. If I’m running an ISP in Kansas and a service explodes in popularity that is hosted exclusively out of England and my transit provider has saturated peering with the undersea route, it’s not obvious who is responsible for picking up the bill there.
Transit isn’t full line rate to anywhere on earth and suggesting otherwise will get you laughed out of any room with network engineers.
It's only limited because ISPs hate investing. Yes in 2000 almost nobody was watching video on the internet but the same applies with roads- traffic increases so you have to build more capacity.
To continue your road analogy: if traffic to one specific destination increases by a ton, it makes far more sense to "batch" that traffic by building trains instead. This frees up the roads for all the people going to less individually popular destinations.
The network equivalent to this would be having local caching servers. Netflix customers can stream from the cache and only a fraction of their traffic will contribute to upstream congestion, leaving plenty of bandwidth for people just browsing the web or watching content on less popular services.
Due to the modern streaming tech stack, such a cache can't really be automatic and provider-neutral, so of course Netflix needs to work with the ISP to set that up. If Netflix and the other providers thought about sustainability even a little bit, they'd develop standards for efficient delivery, including caching, and the ISPs could simply buy a universal "cache box" and be done with it.
> Due to the modern streaming tech stack, such a cache can't really be automatic and provider-neutral, so of course Netflix needs to work with the ISP to set that up. If Netflix and the other providers thought about sustainability even a little bit, they'd develop standards for efficient delivery, including caching, and the ISPs could simply buy a universal "cache box" and be done with it.
I am sorry but there is absolutely no reason why Netflix should be paying a toll under any circumstance here. It is one thing to request Netflix to provide the netflix appliance to be installed at ISP location free of cost which I agree with but it is entirely unacceptable for an ISP to tell someone like Netflix that they needs pay a toll.
Remember what we are fighting against: there is no technical limitation here. People were on Verizon Fiber with bad experience on Netflix which got better when they tried to access Netflix over their puny work VPN. We are talking with ISPs who are strictly malicious in order to boost their own streaming over competition. I can't imagine why anyone would argue FOR their Internet Service Provider to act as a gatekeeper
You missed the point. It’s a 3 party relationship where both Netflix and the cable company didn’t want to pay to increase capacity to the intermediary transit provider.
And they are paid for the common carrier service. If they want to be able to slow down some sites - basically it is an editorial action by making some content less available or even de-facto non-available - they should lose the common carrier status with all the consequences of it.
They're paid but what you pay is based on oversubscription, everyone not using their connection at the same time, as building a network to support that would be much more costly.
Its a cornerstone of building cost efficient networks. People pay for a certain sized pipe, what they pay also covers the rest of the ISPs networks and costs. With no oversubscription the ISP would need maybe 20-30x more infrastructure, do you think it would have an impact on what you pay?
Not sure why I have to say this, but, networks are not airplanes.
Not oversubscribing is a cost multiplier at every level. 1 million 1 Gbit customers in a city is going to need 1000 100Gbit connections out of that city and the same for transit, and that will have no impact on pricing? And everything is on average used at 1% of capacity.
If my ISP can only afford to supply me with 1TB of transfer at 1Gbit, that's fine. They can put it in the adverts, the contracts, and the pricing. For customers who want 10TB of transfer, they can offer a higher cost option.
And if they choose to gamble, advertising and entering into contracts promising "unlimited data", which they think will be more profitable across their entire customer base? Then they've got to do supply what they promised in the adverts. They chose to gamble that way, and if they lose money gambling that's their business.
You have that on mobile subscriptions usually, heavy users pay more and low usage users are not subsidizing them.
I take you are fine with paying 10x or even more for your no oversubscription Internet connection then?
Oversubscription is not gambling. The way it works after your last mile connection is that ISPs look at link usage in their network, city level distribution, city to city, transit, peering, etc, once it reaches 60-80% utilization at peak you start looking at adding more capacity. Bad ISPs (most US ISPs) will let this go too far though.
That's not the same thing. A more adequate comparison would be to say that you promised 30 people they can have a burger, but can only produce 5 burgers per minute. If everyone show up at exactly the same time, you won't be able to satisfy them all (they'll have to wait). But overall you can consider that the probability of such thing happening is small enough to take the "gamble".
It might be if traffic had sudden jumps of like 30%, but it doesn't and there is headroom available. Traffic increases slowly over time and you have plenty of time to upgrade your network.
> 10gbps transit at the rock bottom rate costs $600/mo.
So then 300Mb/s transit, which is around the services these incumbent dinosaur ISPs are offering, is $20/mo? And $20/mo is only 10-20% of their large monthly bills? You're basically proving the opposing argument here in the general case [0].
For reference, I've asked my 1Gb/s municipal provider if they have bandwidth caps, and they told me "no" and that they are not concerned with how much bandwidth I use.
[0] The specific case is that most users are streaming video from large entertainment providers, for which the ISP isn't even paying transit but rather merely the electricity and rack units of CDN edge boxes.
The point of oversubscription is maintaining a network that keeps costs low while providing a good service without congestion. They monitor their network (not your last mile connection, everything else) and once links start reaching 60-80% of capacity at peak times you start adding more capacity. Bad ISPs (like most US ISPs) let this go way too far though.
It appears that your ignorance on the topics of infrastructure and the advancement of technology over the past five decades makes having a useful conversation impossible. Not every cable in the ground was installed with today's state of the art technology. Enjoy your apparently unthrottleable internet connection.
Overbooking and oversubscription are inherently very different.
Flying is a one-time service with a specific and fixed point at which the service is provided. Its peak usage is the expected usage.
Internet access is a continuous service promise where it's nonsensical to expect the provider to predict exactly when every customer would want to use it. The peak usage is not the expected usage.
First: No, they're not. That is an unreasonable expectation divorced from the reality. What exactly do you think would happen if everyone in town switched off and on their AC-powered devices at the same time? What do you think would happen if everyone in town moves to the same street and starts using their cell phone to stream 4K videos at the same time? Do you seriously think it's reasonable to expect every system to deliver at its peak with arbitrary demand and load on it?
Second: If you're going to play the "I paid for this" game: this stuff is generally in the contract anyway. It is the level of service you paid for. The overbooking possibility? You paid for it, it was in your contract. Throttled service? That was in your contract too. You're getting what you paid for.
> If everybody watches the superbowl at the same time I'd expect the power grid not to fail.
"I get what I want immediately" to "the system won't fail" is a nice way to shift goalposts. If everyone shows up to their flight then the flight won't crash, it'll depart just fine with the capacity it has and offer everyone else on the next available flight. You know, the same thing that happens when the power grid is turning back on. They do it one piece of the grid at a time. Which results in you getting less than what the person next door paid for. Because that's reality.
> I am also in europe. I don't get throttled service and what you say is not in my contract. What do you say to that?
When there are a ton of people crammed in the same location overloading the network, you get throttled, whether intentionality or not, whether you like it or not. There is no way on Earth that you being in Europe somehow makes you immune to reality.
The rock bottom rate for IP transit is $60/gbps. None of the infrastructure cost is included here.
And that’s with Hurricane Electric. They are a bit notorious for having probably the worst routing in the industry, but they are also the cheapest in the industry.
It’s nowhere near as simple as “large fiber pipes capable of accomodating spikes”.
There are very good reasons why hyperscalers are building their own intercontinental undersea fiber networks. So they don’t have to pay for the _extremely_ expensive intercontinental transit.
Last I checked renting a wave capable of doing 400gbps between Amsterdam and New York was close to $80k/mo. A wave is basically a dedicated wavelength of light guaranteed to you and only you.
You don’t want your ISP to oversubscribe? Become your own ISP. Get an AS number. Get your own IP space (both of these can be done on the cheap, /36 of v6 is basically free and /24 of v4 can be had for $100 a month). Get a BGP session with a transit provider. Pay them for transit.
Get IXP links so you have direct access to AWS, Google and Netflix. Save on the transit costs there! But the IXP peerings aren’t cheap and on a small scale will certainly cost more than transit.
Congratulations, you’re now paying $1000 a month for 1gbps guaranteed. It gets cheaper with scale, but scale also increases your infra costs.
Everyone would be on 10mbps if ISPs weren’t allowed to oversubscribe.
I became my own ISP as a hobby (https://bgp.tools/as/200676). This hobby costs me $200/mo, and I don’t have any real transit, just cheapo VPSes in locations convenient for me.
Wanna know what my residential ISP whom I pay €19/mo for 1gbps residential service quoted me for a BGP session at my home on a business connection? €9800 in setup fees, €2000/mo, min. 3 year commitment + transit. Of course that was a “fuck off, we just don’t want to do this” quote, but the only alternative I have here is to pull my own fiber.
From the first google result (although this was 5 years ago): “Europe gave internet service providers the right to throttle online traffic to prevent congestion as network demand spikes amid coronavirus stay-at-home and quarantine orders. Netflix and YouTube have already agreed to switch to standard-definition streaming in Europe to reduce bandwidth demand.”
> Dedicated Internet access is a thing, but it's expensive; and I'd argue that even that is oversubscribed if you go far enough up the chain.
The only way to get internet access that’s not oversubscribed is by renting (or pulling your own) layer 0. By that I mean either renting a wavelength between certain PoPs or just pulling your own fiber.
Because the price you pay doesn't account for everyone using their connection at the same time, if this was the case you would need to pay a lot more. ISPs can either increase the price you pay directly or try to get that money elsewhere. Doesn't really matter if you pay for this to your ISP or to them via Netflix.
The real problem is lack of competition and insane profits of US ISPs. Where I live its common for the local municipality to build out fiber and run their own ISP that lets other ISPs connect to their network and sell access. In that case part of my cost goes to the local ISP (which isn't profit driven) and the Internet providing ISPs can compete on price.
I don't use Netflix (true), but if almost everybody else does (also true) then I and up paying more to subsidize them.
Also there's only one reasonable option for internet in my neighborhood. Starlink or cellular would cost even more and for what? I'd still be subsidizing Netflix use.
Splitting up Netflix doesn't help; if everybody falls asleep watching a plethora of streaming services instead of one, they're still wasting bandwidth. Similarly, splitting up ISPs doesn't solve the problem either. The real solution would be to charge everybody for what they actually use. Metered data, with the price fluctuating with demand. The way the electrical system works.
But that's hardly comparable? Each kWh costs some amount of energy to generate. Do you think it costs an ISP meaningfully more to run a 10 Gbps at 90% than 70%?
Based on US ISP profits I'd say there is practically no regulation and they even split up the market so there's no competition so most consumers only have one choice.
Netflix competes with all the other streaming services no? If they increase the price too much people will stop subscribing. Or is your argument that they and other content owners should be forced to sell their content to all other streaming services?
"Arguments about Netflix using too much bandwidth on an ISPs network are exactly the kind of thing I'd expect FCC personnel to be sympathetic with"
I don't quite understand that line of reasoning. I'm paying my ISP in order to access Netflix. Netflix is not using that bandwidth, I'm using the bandwidth in order to access Netflix.
The original FCC mandate in the Communications Act of 1934 was:
For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, for the purpose of the national defense, for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communication, and for the purpose of securing a more effective execution of this policy by centralizing authority heretofore granted by law to several agencies and by granting additional authority with respect to interstate and foreign commerce in wire and radio communication, there is hereby created a commission to be known as the Federal Communications Commission, which shall be constituted as hereinafter provided, and which shall execute and enforce the provisions of this Act.
It has always been for communications by wire and radio. I'd argue fiber optics are just a fancier kind of wire from the understandings of what the intentions were back then.
That's an interesting point, although wire(ish) mediums have pretty strict limitations until you introduce a packet-switched peer-to-peer architecture, at which point you arguably get a very different situation (and different market dynamics) versus telegraph/telephone networks.
Can we all agree that if this boils down to a packet-switched vs. circuit-switched distinction as the crux of whether it can be effectively regulated under current law, that is a profoundly stupid outcome and bad public policy?
Surely Congress did not intend to concern itself with such implementation details, and if a regulatory regime conceived in a world that was all circuit-switched is now ill-suited to the economics of a world that is mostly packet-switched, it's not the court's place to invent a way to exclude packet-switched networks from laws that don't care about that distinction.
(I'm also not at all convinced that internet backbone/backhaul congestion is sufficiently different from telephone switchboard congestion from a standpoint of market dynamics.)
Telephony switched to digital in the 90s. This didn’t miraculously change their regulatory status.
The early days of the internet were defined by copious options for ISPs because telephone lines were required to be available under common carrier conditions.
The only reason this situation deteriorated is that broadband infrastructure was classified as for “information” and not “telecommunications”.
This is an argument that is made more potent by omitting the 60 years of legislative history that followed the Communications Act, which was enacted specifically and deliberately to unify regulation of the new medium of radio with that of telegraphy.
> The FCC is functionally a bureaucracy that grants licenses to discrete chunks of very scarce communications
I'm pointing out the FCC has historically done a lot more than just issuing licenses for RF, and that communications by wire have been a part of their purview since it's founding.
I do agree their roles and rules about what to do with regulating those wires have changed over all those years.
I'm not telling you that it would somehow be illegitimate for Congress to pass a law delegating to the FCC authority to ensure that ISPs provide FRAND access to different streaming platforms (or whatever) over their IP "dial tone". But Congress pretty clearly has not done so, and just because we might think it's a good idea doesn't mean the FCC can just make that authority up.
> some agency needs to be put forward as a candidate for preventing monopolistic corporations from abusing the public Internet.
Agreed. May as well be a dedicated one, as well, to avoid any confusion (although I cringe at the likely billion dollar cost of even a "Hello World" federal agency). Pity that would require an Act of Congress, or rather, it's appropriate that it requires that since we're a republic. It's a pity Congress is itself a failure which appears to have no route to functioning again.
You can scale broadband almost infinitely. You _cannot_ scale phone service or television or radio the same way. There are simple limits on physical space and on carrier allocations that require there to be a licensing body. The FCC is required to be reasonable and non-discriminatory and broadcasters are required to serve their local communities directly. The FCC can only license broadcasters and can place no limits on receivers at all. This is because these airwaves collectively belong to the people.
It was created to serve these purposes. None of these are the "opposite" of net neutrality in any way whatsoever.