Discussion for article #222092
Those are just about the lamest excuses I’ve read in a long time. This clearly is just another apologist proposition by those who think income inequality is just fine. “Hey, guy, if you ain’t got the dough then you don’t get in the show!”
I suppose that Mr. Taplin believes that, since the poor live in housing that is more prone to catch on fire, then the poor should pay more in taxes, because the fire department needs to invest in more infrastructure caused by the places they live in.
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And in the not too distant future they will probably be allowed to control what we do on the Internet. If the powers-that-be don’t like the viewpoints of certain websites they will just prevent us from accessing them.
That may sound far fetch, but it isn’t beyond my imagination that if they get one thing they want pretty soon it will be another until they completely ruin the Internet.
So the key to all this is “real competition in the home broadband market of the kind we see in the mobile marketplace.” And when, pray tell, will that commence? Yeah, it’ll be just like cell-phones - we all get fantastic service at a great price because otherwise, we would just change carriers!
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Customers at home already pay more if they want faster speeds.
Website owners already pay more to one ISP each if they want a faster connection to the internet.
The ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to force website owners to pay ALL of them for a fast connection.
Verizon is already saying in court that it’s like a newspaper editor which should have total control over what its internet customer get to see.
Excellent article.
The FCC proposal, to allow a “fast lane” for specific types of paying content, rather than creating a “slow lane” ghetto for certain types of content that might not be considered desirable, is a considerable improvement to the problem of providing bandwidth in a sensible fashion.
It may well be difficult to establish and keep the baseline bandwidth requirements reasonable as the digital information revolution continues to advance and develop, but that is a political problem than can be addressed with good intent on the part of regulators.
Absent that good intent, we’re screwed anyway. Show me a viable way to make sure that todays 5Mbs requirement isn’t going to turn into yesterday’s 52.8Kbs modem standard in a few years, and I would seriously consider accepting this arrangement.
But it requires a reasonable floor in the baseline bandwidth, and that floor has to be able to rise in response to new internet developments in typical content, or we’ve give everything that Net Neutrality was supposed to guarantee.
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If the mobile marketplace is an example of “real competition”, I’m really not sure what to say.
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Regarding the idea that Comcast should be allowed to merge with Time Warner if it promises not to sue over a theoretical FCC rule that states need to allow cities to have municipal broadband:
Even if Comcast made that pledge and kept it, states could still sue.
And how does one get broadband competition? Multiple connections to my house don’t exist nor are the broadband companies likely to be able to run cable/fiber to my home “on demand” even if they wanted to.
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This is almost comical. What’s going to happen is that ISPs will ghettoize a floor level for content providers who won’t pony up protection money, (nice little business you got here, netflix. a shame if someone were to throttle your ingress point,) and make a pretty 8 lane highway for content providers who will pay, or, and this is the important part not mentioned, content the ISP controls. You can bet that if comcast decides to make a streaming video site for all the content it controls from NBC Universal, it damn well won’t charge to let it use the toll road. Will someone running a site like that for ABC get a similar deal?
Shorter Jonathan Taplin: “Hey, look over there!”
It’s not even the last mile that this really addresses, altough it does too. It’s the transit along the network of the ISP. Reed Hastings of Netflix was gobsmacked to discover that after they paid up to Comcast to get preferential treatment, suddenly everything became so much faster for all of their subscribers on Comcast. It wasn’t because of throtting at the last mile, it was the throttling at the ingress point to Comcast’s networks. I, as an end user, can pay for the biggest pipe I want, but since Comcast is throttling the data as it comes into Comcast’s network, it may not ultimately matter.
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Your baseline bandwidth is not the issue. The issue is Comcast won’t let Netflix content into their network without extracting a toll. The bandwidth is there. It always was and the proof is how quickly streaming improved for Comcast-Netflix customers after Netflix gave in to Comcast’s racket.
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Living in a market where 5mps is quite unacheivable, its hard for me to get too choked up that no one’s willing to pay to fatten the pipe to 100mps. Because face it. If the current pipes can’t deliver that amount of streaming than TCP/IP simply ISN"T the best way to deliver that content. If Netflix and the cable companies want to get in bed to deliver streaming video to the home, then let them build their own network and keep the Internet out of it.
The former telecommunications executive and CellularTelecommunications and Internet Association lobbyist, oh, that Tom Wheeler. Seriously, why is TPM even posting this tripe.
The problem with everyone’s freaking out is that paying for direct Internet access isn’t anything new. This has been going on since the beginning of the Internet, and is a practice that predates the Internet with peering agreements with telephone and telegraph networks. I’m afraid the author of this article is correct, but he did a really piss poor job of describing it because he assumed the reader would have even basic layman’s knowledge of the functionality of the Internet.
When you make a connection to a website it goes from your computer and through your ISP’s network and out. Your request almost literally hops from computer to computer until it reaches its destination and then traces an optimized path back to your computer. Each and every single hop introduces latency and therefore reduces the speed. Netflix is bound by this reality. However, Netflix is operating a service that is profoundly sensitive to latency where even a few milliseconds of additional latency results in a lot of degradation of video quality for its customers. Netflix paid for internet access to Comcast for this reason, and like I said before it isn’t new. Google, for instance, pays for several internet accounts and has for years. A traceroute from my Comcast-connected computer to youtube.com results in a path that never leaves Comcast’s network before reaching youtube.com. Doing so from my AT&T wireless connection produces similar results. Where was the uproar when Google purchased Comcast internet access several years ago for the same exact reason as Netflix did?
What exactly is Netflix’s alternative here? Is the government to force Comcast and other ISPs to give over direct access to their network to Netflix traffic for free? If so I want free internet access, too. Comcast and other ISPs haven’t been proven to have throttled Netflix traffic, and they haven’t ever a single time prevented access to their network. In an ideal world no company should have to purchase more than one internet account, however the reality is that just about any big internet company has several from several countries even.
Should we be concerned about something here? Yes. We should be pressing the FCC to instead place strict rules over what can be negotiated in these agreements and to make sure the agreed cost is fair, reflects what will be used, and that the agreements only concern internet access and nothing more (like Netflix’s forking over of House of Cards for instance). We should press them to make it to where the ISP cannot refuse service as well because denial of service can be used in a retaliatory move. We should press the FCC to stop screwing around and label ISPs as utilities… because they are. That is by and large the biggest thing we should be calling for because it opens the doors to so many other reforms that are necessary.
The old rules only made a fleeting mention of these agreements, and the leaked proposal gives the FCC a role in these negotiations (which they couldn’t do anything about prior), but it doesn’t go into any real detail as to how. We will see what the role is when the proposed rules are released to the public. We should keep pressing them with our concerns instead of just pointing out that Tom Wheeler is a former lobbyist. Most Congressmen in the entire history of the U.S. are former lawyers that were paid to lie for a living, too. The guy took over in November, so let’s be vocal in our concern and see how he handles himself here as it’s really his first loyalty test.
What will prevent companies like Comcast from abusing this system is real competition in the home broadband market.
Sure. But wishing it don’t make it so. I have one choice for broadband. One. Nationally, home internet is dominated by four massive conglomerates, soon to become three. Allowing municipal broadband in all states might help, but we have 30 states without municipal broadband restrictions, and they don’t have competition either. In short, FCC’s proposed rules might work well in a make-believe world of dynamic competition. Too bad we don’t live there.
(Adding pointless text here because the comment system is telling me that my formatting edit is too similar to what was there. Sorry)
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Your idea of latency is partly right. Latency comes both from the number of devices it transits through, your number of computers analogy, but also the distance of travel and also can depend on traffic throttling within the networks and quality of service rules within the networks. It’s possible, and in fact good practice, to prioritize certain traffic over other. SMTP traffic is not really latency sensitive. VOIP traffic is, so good networks will let SMTP wait to let bursts of VOIP go more smoothly. Your comment seems to suggest that what Netflix paid for was a reduced number of hops, which is almost certainly not the case. They probably actually got some relief from the 3rd item that I mentioned, which is bandwidth throttling. It’s trivially easy to tag incoming traffic by source address and set a maximum transit speed for it, and from all the metrics that I’m seeing for what happened after Netflix coughed up the money, that’s what happened. Your understanding of how traffic moves around the internet seems flawed too. The large backbone providers interconnect at a number of points to swap traffic off. MAE-East in Virginia is one, for instance. MAE-West in San Jose is another. The big providers toss data through the exchange to route onto other large networks and then float down to lower tiered providers. About 20 providers are members of MAE-East and a similar number out MAE-West and similar things happen at a few other network exchanges. Everyone who isn’t at this particular water cooler has to get their bandwidth to get to it by getting the traffic off of a provider who is on it. So your local ISP, if it isn’t a huge one, is basically piggybacking on one of the big ones. Ironically, Comcast is one of the ones who is not a tier one provider. They get to the party via Tata, a huge T1 provider out of India. AT&T is tier one, as is Verizon, as is Centurylink. Comcast has generally used its customer base to be a bully to get good peering deals from tier one providers but they never really had the right to say if you don’t pay up, we’re going to choke access from your network to our millions and millions of subscribers, making the ISPs and content providers that you sell access to really unhappy. Now they have the ability to do that. For instance, let’s say that Amazon.com uses L3 as an upstream T1 peer and Apple uses AT&T (which I have no idea if that’s true or not and some large companies have multiple peering arrangements for redundancy, but go with it,) and Comcast decides that Apple paid them a large enough kickback, they can now throttle back data coming from L3 and not from AT&T for steaming media. Think Amazon will be happy being on L3 if their access to all of Comcast, (and lets not forget TW too,) is crippled? They’ll either pay Comcast for access or change to another provider. Not to be hystrionic, but this is the kind of shit that can break the internet. Internet traffic is based on the whole idea of T1 cost free peering aggreements so that data moves from network to network. The lower end stuff, Comcast included, doesn’t really matter in the biggest picture, but allowing a T1 to get bullied by a lower level provider is big trouble. Comcast may be big, but they aren’t the internet backbone.
Netflix and the cable companies don’t want to get in bed to deliver streaming video. The cable industry would like to strangle Netflix in its crib, and run their own subscription streaming video services, but since that horse is out of that barn, the next best thing is for them to extract a fee for Netflix to play on their networks, nevermind the fact that their customer base already paid a fee to get Netflix and to get connectivity in the first place. This really reminds me a lot of the old freight rebate system that Standard Oil used to get from the railroads back in the day. Those were struck down as monopolistic and violating Sherman Antitrust.