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Bandwidth Fines Bad, But Not Net Neutrality Issue
On April 13th I received an e-mail from FreePress.net, one of the organizations that led the fight in favor of Net Neutrality:
Just as we're suffering economically, Time Warner Cable is trying to squeeze us even further, forcing millions of customers to pay steep fees for exceeding an absurdly low monthly limit on Internet use. [...] The company's scheme would cost customers $15 per month for one gigabyte — the equivalent of one 30-minute HD television show — with a penalty fee of $2 for every additional gigabyte over the limit.
Later, FreePress.net triumphantly announced that Time Warner had reversed their position. Now, I would appear to have painted myself into a corner on this issue, because I wrote in an editorial two years ago arguing in favor of Net Neutrality:
[Net Neutrality is] not about how much a service costs, but about the ethics of double-billing for it. [...] If vastly more people start trying to stream CNN over the Internet 24/7, and fully using the services that ISPs have "only been pretending to sell," as Brad Templeton put it, then ISPs may have to charge more for users who consume too much bandwidth, encouraging people to stay at today's average levels by rationing themselves and perhaps watching 24 on their $5,000 TV sets sometimes instead of downloading it off of BitTorrent to their laptop every week because it makes them feel like a haX0r. Much as we all love our unmetered connections, it wouldn't be a violation of Net Neutrality for ISPs to charge users for bandwidth hogging, to keep everyone from going too far above today's levels.
And yet, even after writing those words, I still think there is an argument against letting ISPs impose bandwidth fines, at least under some conditions. However, I think the argument is completely separate from the argument in favor of Net Neutrality, so it's important to derive both of them independently of each other.
I would try to make both arguments by deriving the conclusions from first principles. This might seem pedantic at times, but I think it's helpful to have a precise mathematical-style "proof" of why a conclusion follows from its premises, because then you can see how changing one premise would change the conclusion.
To me the simplest argument in favor of Net Neutrality follows from three assumptions. You don't have to agree with the assumptions, but I think that all three of them are obvious because the opposite would be untenable.
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An ISP that blocks (or slows access to) certain websites is defrauding its users UNLESS either (a) the ISP has made its users aware of the filtering, or (b) it's overwhelmingly clear that the filtering protects the users or improves their experience (so more experienced users would assume it is taking place anyway). If your ISP has told you that they're selling "Internet access" but they're silently blocking some Web sites, then this is straightforward. You're paying for one thing, and the ISP is selling you something else that is inferior. In the incident that I wrote about, ISPs like Rogers.com that used AboveNet as their upstream provider, were actually blocking their subscribers from reaching certain websites, even though their customers thought they were getting unfiltered Internet access. Now if the ISP advertises that its Internet connections are filtered, as some "family friendly" providers do — so that virtually all users knew about the filtering — then this would not be a violation of Net Neutrality. And if the ISP is blocking mail from actual spam sources, then this is something that protects users and improves their experience, and so is usually not considered a violation of Net Neutrality either. But if the ISP is silently blocking access to Web sites, or blocking mail from servers that are not sending spam but simply because the ISP owner has a political disagreement with those server owners, then that would violate this principle.
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"Make its customers aware" means just that — make its customers aware — and not bury something in the Terms of Service. Imagine if the opposite principle were accepted — that websites and software vendors could do anything they wanted as long as they put the right disclaimer in the 23rd paragraph of their site's or program's "Terms of Service" that nobody reads. Scam artists' eyes everywhere would light up with dollar signs thinking of the possibilities: Create a popular program and get people to install it, while putting a clause deep in the TOS that permits them to remotely take over your computer after you've installed their software! Or for a real-world example, Yahoo! once tried to amend the GeoCities Terms of Service to give Yahoo! the copyright on any content uploaded by their users. Yahoo! reversed itself after a public backlash, but even if they hadn't, it would have been good public policy for a court to say that Yahoo!'s copyright claim on their users' content was invalid. You can, of course, strengthen your legal rights by putting the right language in your Terms of Service, but it would mean total chaos if companies could bury "gotchas" in your TOS that are wildly contrary to what users are reasonably likely to assume.
- If company A sells something to company B which company B then re-sells to the public, but company B almost certainly cannot resell the good without committing fraud as outlined above, then company A is complicit in the fraud as well. Some of AboveNet's defenders argued that they mostly sold Internet connectivity to ISPs, not to the public, and the ISPs knew that the connections were filtered. Even assuming this were true, the ISPs still would not be able to re-sell the service to the public without representing it as "regular Internet access" — nobody would pay full price for a broken or degraded connection when a competitor could offer a regular connection for the same price.
So, an ISP that blocks or degrades access to certain Web sites, when users think they are getting full unfettered Internet access, is cheating customers (or, in the case of a backbone provider, complicit in the downstream ISPs cheating their customers) in violation of the principles of Net Neutrality. QED. I would tentatively call these assumptions airtight; at least, I cannot think of any corporate behavior that violates one or more of these principles and should be allowed under good public policy.
By contrast, the argument against Net Neutrality — that the free market will ensure that ISPs provide effective service without the need for government regulation — relies on assumptions that might sound reasonable, but have loopholes, and the loopholes are precisely where Net Neutrality violations can slip through. An anti-Net-Neutrality editorial by Sonia Arrison, for example, argued that "consumers would never stand for blocked Web sites." However, in the case of AboveNet's filtering, downstream users did of course "stand for it," because they didn't know about it, and the natural assumption, when the user sees a website not responding, is to think that the site is down, not that their provider blocked it.
But the argument against bandwidth fines is different. While "broken" Internet access could never be sold to the public without some sort of misrepresentation, it is conceivable that people would still pay for Internet access even if the price were $15 for the first 1 GB and $2 per GB after that. However, it would still be good public policy to prohibit two variants of this scheme: (a) ISPs silently racking up charges, scummy-cell-phone-company style, against users who may not realize what charges they're incurring, and then shocking them with overage bills at the end of the month; and (b) ISPs charging draconian bandwidth fines in cases where they have a monopoly, or near-monopoly, on users' Internet access options.
Prohibiting "shock" overage bills essentially follows from principles #1 and #2 above — users should know what they're getting, and sneaking something into the fine print doesn't count. If someone is approaching their bandwidth limit, and is on track to run over (and incur a lot of charges) before the end of the month, it wouldn't be too much trouble to send them an e-mail or an automated (or live) phone call to warn the user what's going on. If the ISP objects that this would cost them too much, I'd say I'll happily pay $1 for the trouble of them placing a call to my house if it saved me $20 in surprise overages.
Prohibiting bandwidth fines in the case of monopoly situations simply follows from the principle that without competition, the bandwidth overage fees are likely to be much higher than they would be in a competitive market. It may not be the motivation of the ISP simply to make as much money as possible; perhaps they want to discourage high-bandwidth usage for other reasons. As FreePress.net theorized about the proposed Time Warner bandwidth surcharges: "This trick is designed to make customers think twice before switching off their cable TV and finding the shows they want online." But whether it's to squeeze subscribers for extra money or to stop them from streaming content from the Internet, either way, the plan could not be sustainable if users can find higher bandwidth at a lower cost from other providers. For most of its subscribers, Time Warner doesn't have a pure monopoly — in some areas, you can get only one cable Internet provider and only one DSL provider, but the two still compete with each other to provide "Internet access," and other areas have a choice between cable providers. However, in a situation with only a small number of competitors, companies can still keep prices higher than they would in a purely competitive market, because there are fewer chances for an upstart competitor to find ways to provide a more efficient service at a lower cost.
What if neither of these conditions were true? If an ISP actually did make sure that its subscribers knew about the bandwidth limits, and users got warnings if they were approaching those limits, and there were enough competing providers to ensure real competition, then in that situation it would be harder to make an argument against the bandwidth surcharges. (Admittedly, it may be something of an academic point, because there are so few situations where there are "enough competing providers" to guarantee healthy competition.)
But it's important to keep the arguments for Net Neutrality separate from the arguments against bandwidth surcharges. Bandwidth fines are bad mainly when there are few competing providers, because it will be hard for users to get a better deal somewhere else, and providers like Time Warner may have a vested interest in keeping users' bandwidth limits low to keep them glued to their TV. Violations of Net Neutrality are bad regardless of whether there are few or many competing providers, because users cannot avoid the harm if they're unlikely to discover what's happening in the first place.
Yes, a thousand times yes Can we not conflate unrelated issues at all and keep Net Neutrality to mean one thing and one thing only, agnosticism to packets content. Everything else can go and find it's own banner to campaign under, probably one that says "Free Cake" because it does seem to me a whole pile of freeloader causes are trying to get some of that sweet, sweet Network Neutrality moral certitude.
Puzzle Daze is now my job
"I bought an 'unlimited' plan that turns out to actually have limits. Now I don't want to pay because I didn't understand the contract I was signing. I think I shouldn't have to pay because I'm not a lawyer."
Imagine if the opposite principle were accepted -- that websites and software vendors could do anything they wanted as long as they put the right disclaimer in the 23rd paragraph of their site's or program's "Terms of Service" that nobody reads.
Your whole argument for Net Neutrality hinges on this. Clearly there is a huge incentive for a company to read through these lengthy documents and bring this stuff to people's attention, so that people who don't have the time to read long contracts or ToS can know about it. If people choose not to read something before signing it, they are not being "defrauded" if and when the unexpected comes to pass. There is a free market solution to this. As VeriSign does for online security, and Underwriters Laboratories for product safety, and Consumer Reports for product quality, so goes for contracts. Companies would build up their name by providing the public with useful and accurate information at the lowest possible cost.
I regularly check the ToS of the two providers in my area, because they both suck, but some times one sucks less than the other. Both have big, broad sweeping claims that they are both supporting and adhering to net neutrality principles, yet they both also flat out state they prioritize VOIP service and degrade bittorrent traffic.
To me these statements are completely contradictory. I don't recall my neighbors choice to use his internet as a phone making my choice to use mine as a TV any less valid, yet that is in effect exactly what they are stating.
Am I wrong?
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
As long as they don't factor in where the bytes are coming from when it comes to calculating usage then it shouldn't be a Neutrality issue. If some provider like Time Warner had an agreement that overages from Hulu were OK but overages from Youtube weren't then we'd be looking at a Neutrality issue.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
If company A sells something to company B which company B then re-sells to the public, but company B almost certainly cannot resell the good without committing fraud as outlined above, then company A is complicit in the fraud as well. Some of AboveNet's defenders argued that they mostly sold Internet connectivity to ISPs, not to the public, and the ISPs knew that the connections were filtered. Even assuming this were true, the ISPs still would not be able to re-sell the service to the public without representing it as "regular Internet access" â" nobody would pay full price for a broken or degraded connection when a competitor could offer a regular connection for the same price.
Surely thats simply a case of 'if people aren't going to buy your product, why aren't you sourcing a replacement supplier?'
If you are willingly buying the degraded product from your supplier, and the supplier is not hiding the fact that it is degraded in some way, then I don't see why the supplier should be complicit in the fraud that you willingly went on to conduct.
The argument as presented in the summary just seems absurd in that regard.
Who the hell in his/her right mind pays for an internet service even remotely related to Time Warner!? This is the internets Satan we're talking about, and not the cool guitar playing kind, but the lawyer without conscience kind.
I am the lawn!
The whole point of Net Neutrality is that an ISP can not treat packets differently based on their type or destination. Here are some examples of why Neutrality is a good idea:
What is to stop TW from blocking or slowing packets related to Vonage's service in order to push their own? What would stop TW from creating their own search engine and blocking Google, Yahoo, and MSN?
The whole point is that TW can create its own version of any service currently provided by the web and choke off their competition or charge extra for access to their competition. When there is only one game in town, that's monopoly abuse. That would be like your power company selling toasters with a special plug and charging extra or blocking users from buying a competing toaster.
As for usage caps. I really hate it, but I can't really find a good argument against this one. Unfortunately, Internet service is like a utility, or should be, and every utility is based on usage. This is why competition is good. Once a utility has competition, they are forced to compete and lose their monopoly status.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Could someone please boil this down to a non-sensical car analogy?
Thanks.
It is not company A's fault if company B re-sells their filtered service without telling their customers. Company A cannot be held liable for omissions of Company B. The phrase "almost certainly" is subjective bollocks. Company B is perfectly able to advertise the service as it is and still sell it, if we assuming the filtering is in the user's interest. Company A no doubt believes the filtering is in the user's interest. Therefore, Company A cannot predict that Company B would lie about it.
Hooray for us! Once again ahead of the curve!
Seriously Cogeco Cable (Rogers Communication) just started doing this.
They were kind enough to send out a notification of buggery this time. They didn't do that when they implemented caps, only posted to an obscure website.
However note that the going rate for bandwidth is about 6 times market value. Teksavvy on their limited account has a cap of 200mb, and 0.25$ above that, and you can also pre-buy 100GB for 10$ if you like so 0.10 a GB. Cogeco is currently charging 1.25$ per GB.
Also note the only way to check your bandwidth is to log on your Cogeco account, which most people probably do not use or have set up. However to their credit, it used to be a separate even more obscure website before that, and before that you had to call tech support and wait an hour for a person to actually tell you. So they are getting better... sort of. They are only kinda evil in a non-competitive incompetent sort of way. Well sort of reverse competitive with Bell anyway to keep prices high and services low anyway. I hear Bell is set to implement the same policy soon. Same GB prices as well, go figure.
Like Bell they are always quiet about the whole shaping/throttling issue, through granted most users wouldn't know the difference anyway.
Bandwidth limits are ok, provided the ISP provides
a) historical bandwidth usage - say the last 12 months
b) hourly updated usage
c) tiered usage pricing
An ISP shouldn't be allowed to say "you've used 50GB of bandwidth this month" out of the blue, then cancel my connection. I need an opportunity to
1) be notified of my usage patterns
2) be provided with a personalized web site providing hourly household bandwidth tracking
3) 3 months notice of "eviction", just like water, electric, gas, and housing mandates
So the ISP should provide at least 4 monthly tiered plans:
10GB ($15), 20GB ($30), 50GB($60), unlimited($100)
A weekly "bandwidth allowance" capability would be nice too.
If a cable carrier imposes incredibly low caps and high overage fees, and that deters customers from embracing competing options like Netflix streaming or DirecTV VOD over broadband lines, I don't know on which planet that's not a network neutrality issue....
Biggest problem with "market-based" solutions to the issue: Most people don't care about most of the Internet.
I doubt there is much "demand" for having access to the entirety of the Internet. So most people won't care if 95% of it isn't blocked, so long as they can still get to foxnews.com or npr.org.
So suddenly that 95% of the Internet is useless as a vessel for meaningful communication. The number of outlets for people to get their information becomes minute and controlled by large corporations.
Given the demonstrably strong connections between governments and these large corporate entities, I would like to retain the ability to access the other 95%. And I want to preserve that right for the people that don't yet know they need it.
Think about it: the Constitution is a big ol' Nanny State document. After all, nothing says, "We don't trust you not to screw with this" like "We made it really hard for you to change this."
This is a good contribution to the debate.
The "Internet" should be neutral - no filtering, port blocking, prioritizing, etc. In other words, net neutral.
If an ISP is not providing this, it is not providing true internet access and should call its offerings something else, say "AOL".
Bandwidth and volume limits are reasonable, but should be clearly stated. Customer usage against these limits should be easily visible and customer controllable.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
If Time Warner offers its own IP-VOD services or Pay Per View, and doesnt count that traffic against your bandwidth quota, does that change your answer?
So net neutrality and bandwidth caps/metering are both bad, but separate problems. I can buy that.
However, could the argument be made that Time Warner is attempting to meter/cap bandwidth in order to encourage customers to use TW cable vs. Hulu/Youtube/BT/etc... By enacting a price barrier, isn't TW indirectly prioritizing data? Wouldn't this now sort of be considered a Net Neutrality issue?
Please, correct me if I'm wrong, there is still more blood than Steaz in my system at this point.
I know you have come to kill me.
Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man.
What we're ultimately talking about is censorship, either by content or volume. I'm having a hard time imagining neutral censorship.
Note that Time Warner already offers streaming ESPN. I'm betting that won't be counting against your 5GB.
So I still think it's effectively a net neutrality issue. The caps and overage charges are just the framework being put in place to allow them to violate net neutrality later.
And crippling my Internet connection so Time Warner's digital movies on demand are cheaper than Netflix streaming isn't a net neutrality problem? I guess if you view "net" as just TCP/IP that's true, but if you view "net" as the cable and the signals down it, then it's nonsense.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Although I am in strong support of net neutrality, the debate around it is not completely without merit. Having worked for a small local ISP I know first hand the difficulties of managing available bandwidth in an age of ever escalating average use load. Your ISP made promises of a certain amount of bandwidth at a certain price based on how much they expected the average user to use during peak times. There are costs associated with changes in these usage patterns and the issue of net neutrality is how to reduce load, increase revenue, or accept lower earnings. Net neutrality legislation would not allow ISPs to a: shift costs onto content providers who are changing average usage rates or b: target internet traffic only used by a small portion of very high usage customers to be deprioritized. At this point there aren't many options aside from increasing the cost of bandwidth, taking less revenue, charging for data transmitted instead of just bandwith, or (my preference) charging for quality of service based on amount of data transmitted. If we get net neutrality, our ISPs are going to have increased pressure to change their business strategies and may move to strategies like the one here, so in this sense, it is intimately linked to the discussion.
My take on the bandwidth surcharge situation was that the insanely low caps and bandwidth surcharges were designed to fend off online video. Think about it: If your favorite shows were available online legally (let's leave less-than-100%-legal sources out of the equation for the purposes of this argument), why would you need to buy cable TV service? So Time Warner sets the bandwidth limit low and charges for overages. If subscribers don't use online video out of fear of going over their limit, cable wins. If people continue to use online video and go over their limit (thus paying overage fees), cable wins.
Network Neutrality could still come into the equation. Apparently, Joost is shopping itself to cable companies. One of the interested companies is Time Warner. If Time Warner buys Joost and reinstates their cap/overage plan (which they've already indicated they want to do), would Joost use count towards your bandwidth limit? Or would using Time Warner's own online video service be exempt from the same limits that YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc are subject too?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If an ISP limit the amount that we can download to not impact his tv business then yes it is related to net neutrality.
I don't want my ISP contract to be influence by my ISP other business like music production, tv production, phone.
So what do you call it when TW imposes caps which make say Netflix/Hulu/Youtube content more expensive to watch than TW provided content? Yes they don't explicitly single out those services, but by imposing expensive caps the end result is the same. So then people flock to the cheaper services like TW video-on-demand (which magically aren't encumbered by said bandwidth caps because it's a separate paid TW service --- which just happens to be cheaper when you compare it against busting through your download tier.)
Exactly.
The voice and video services may be on a different band than the net service, but it's still the same pipe, and they're still competing for limited bandwidth.
Call it pipe neutrality if you want to be pedantic.
Fuck this article.
The real issue as I see it is that Time Warner is a cable company. And it is very likely that these caps have everything to do with stopping the growth of a competitor IPTV or video on demand.
If you download a lot of content from hulu and netflix and amazon VOD you are going to run smack dab in to punitive caps with this type of service.
For years the cable companies have been doing well by selling packages of channels and most people watch a very small percentage of those channels and thus it's not really a good value. And of course with video on demand you get to watch exactly what you want when you want and pay just for what you watch.
This is very much a problem for them. Bit torrent and filesharing in general have been around for some time now this is not about those. Those actually gave broadband a purpose for a lot of people and for the most part just sold a lot of broadband accounts. This is about killing a competitor that would really save people money and generally make things better. So they are in a meta sense discriminating against IPTV and VOD packets. That does not sound very neutral to me.
Before I got broadband service, I had a dedicated phone line to be on dial-up (only 3 KB/sec even on 56k modems -- crappy phone lines here) for long time. EarthLink (ELN) said unlimited for $19.95/$21.95, but its TOS/AUP never said anything about every 24 hours straight there is a disconnection. I asked in public on their newsgroups/forums, why the disconnections. People talked about this and were annoyed. Even one support guy, said I should get a life. Umm, I am not always at the keyboard. I have to download and upload big files too (remember, 3 KB/sec)! Then, other members and I noticed later on that ELN added this to mention it. Recently, I noticed they disconnect dialup users who are on 12 hours straight. Sheesh.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
These discussions always seem to ignore one part of the equation. Specifically net neutrality stops GOOD QoS too. I worked at a small ISP. Over-selling capacity is strictly necessary in most cases where staying in business is a priority*. Most of the time no one notices. During certain peak hours however, everyone noticed. We received many complaints about voip and game quality.
Our solution was to implement packet inspection and QoS. What we did was identify VOIP packets, and give them a very high priority. Same with game packets. A few others too, like syns and acks are very cheap, so we gave them high priority too (because it does matter and will enhance the end user experience)**. We also identified video from youtube, cnn, etc (all places where there are BUFFERING players). With those video sites we lowered priority after the first .5MB since buffering is intended to make jitter irrelevant. We did NOT slow video down, we just made introduced latency sometimes so gamers and voipers got a better experience.
After doing that, our customers complained much less frequently, and many thanked us for getting more bandwidth.
Essentially, bandwidth should be measured on 2 axis, Throughput and Latency. Some apps dont need much bandwidth when they have low latency (voip), others don't suffer from latency as long as throughput is good (torrents). Most cries I see for net-neutrality ignore this. I find it sad because I would not mind my isp guaranteeing low latency for voip and games and high throughput for downloads (if i would be a pal and let them add a 100ms delay here and there).
I know that a lot of the issue hinges around the above being used to double charge, and other evil tactics, however legislating away the good because of potential for evil seems plain silly. Perhaps some sort of middle ground could one day be reached, in which destination filtering/prioritizing is strictly off limits, but content type filtering can be allowed as long as overall throughput remains at the rate sold. (not necessarily a good solution, just a talking point).
*This refers to places where the infrastructure is not well built up, and metro-e is not available.
** DNS at highest priority is surprisingly important. The day we did this speed related call dropped a large percent, and stayed dropped.
To live till you die is to live long enough. -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
There is no going back; corporations and governments have hijacked our ability to adequately use our networks and our computers as we wish to.
We must now create a new internet; one that surpasses and excludes the abilities of demagogues to penetrate. A freenet of free people and ideals where the dreams of humanity can flourish. Internet users the world over now call upon all able-bodied coders to start the great work.
Fine, but as soon as you start talking about cable TV companies (e.g. Time Warner, Comcast), bandwidth caps are failures to be packet content agnostic.
Their own content streams into your house, over the same wire, 24x7 in a multi-channel torrent of gigabytes that totally dwarfs your cap. If those packets are all you want, no extra charge. But try to replace some of those packets with packets from hulu: you can't. Do the next best thing: add packets from hulu: you get charged extra.
I would agree with you, if we were really just talking about ISPs. But the submitter mentioned Time Warner, and they are not just an ISP. A bandwidth cap, which when implemented by "just an ISP" is not a violation of network neutrality, becomes a violation of network neutrality if that same company is selling you uncapped content.
A: Company A sells to Company B
B: Company B screws its customers.
While ~A implies ~B, A does not imply B. Company A could sell to Company B and Company B could consume the product itself.
A is not complicit. Bad premise.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
This argument ignores the fact that the bandwidth caps do not apply to the ISP's own content. They're charging you $2/GB above 15 to watch content from a competitor, but if you want to watch their content there's no cap or extra fee. If I watch 100 GB of Hulu's content, that's going to cost me what... $150 or more? If I watch 100GB of the ISP's content, how much will that cost me? Since you could watch their TV 24/7 and they wouldn't care, I'll bet it's considerably cheaper.
I'd be fine with this cap if it applied to their content as well, but since it doesn't this is borderline double-dipping, clearly anti-competitive and a way to control what content consumers choose to watch.
So what do you call it when TW imposes caps which make say Netflix/Hulu/Youtube content more expensive to watch than TW provided content?
Er, sound business practice? It's much cheaper for TW to provide regular cable service because it is a multicast service. What that means is, when 1000 people want to watch HD show X, which requires 2gb total to send to their users, TW only has to send that 2gb once. Total bandwidth used over the course of a 1 hour show: 2gb.
VOD falls somewhere in the middle, but is closer to regular cable in cost. Why? Because even though for 1,000 users they have to send 2gb each (2,000gb if you've been paying attention), TW knows exactly what it offers on VOD, and can cache all of those movies/shows locally. This means they they are sending that 2,000gb only on the legendary "last mile", which costs them almost nill.
Now, when 1000 users want to download from Netflix/Hulu/Etc., they have to receive that 2gb 1,000 separate times, and send that 2gb out 1,000 separate times, that's 2,000gb of bandwidth burned end-to-end, compared to 2gb. Sending the data over their own lines is cheap. Receiving it via another major ISP's lines is expensive, relatively speaking. Granted, caching can aleviate some of that, but it is not even close to possible for them to cache the entire range of options, like they can with their own VOD service.
You cannot expect a cable company to do the same for a service like Netflix/Hulu/Etc as they do VOD. Why the hell should they, they offer their own service! A service that almost certainly has less of a selection, I might add. It would be obscenely expensive to try and cache everything Netflix et. all have, and only serves to help the video companies, not the cable companies. You (the customer) would have to pay extra for that anyway, so why would they go through the trouble and expense for nothing?
So, to sum up, here is why Netflix/Hulu/Etc cost more to use:
Regular cable: 2gb burned per 1000 users (multicast)
VOD: 2,000gb burned, but only last-mile (serving content locally)
Netflix/Hulu/Etc.: 2,000gb burned that must travel accross several ISPs, bringing sharing agreements into play
The disparity between services is a bandwidth issue. The pricing is a monopoly/lack of competition issue. Now, if TW were slowing or blocking or otherwise restricting access movie streaming services specifically, THAT would be a net-neutrality issue.
Honestly, bitching about pricing for a service you use (that's all you're doing, really) and then calling it net-neutrality is disingenuous at best, and completely dishonest at worst.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
That's idiotic, it's only the same pipe as far as getting to the home base. For regular cable and VOD service, that's as far as it has to go. For Netflix/Hulu/etc it has to cross into other people's pipes, and ISP agreements come into play.
You guys aren't thinking things through.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
That's the thing, pure greed and monopolies by themselves are not Net Neutrality issues. If they raised the bandwidth cap for Hulu users only because Hulu paid them money, that would be a Net Neutrality issue.
I really don't. Read the contract. And net neutrality isn't the same thing as providing unlimited and unrestricted service. So your bittorrents are being squeezed, there are options open to you - or just deal with it at a slower speed. The option is that if you pay for their business level service, it's never limited. Consumer grade service is always limited and restricted in one way or another, because they aren't giving you a dedicated line.
Just some companies are worse than others. But many choices exist, thankfully.
As for the issue of speed, I just don't get why people whine. After all, I can download a TV show from Japan, for instance, in about an hour even at slow speeds. It's a *tad* better than getting my friend to snail-mail me a CD with the video file on it like I used to have to do in the early 90s.
You're idiotic.
End users are having their internet service fucked over because competing services their ISP offers get special treatment.
Choosing how to prioritize traffic should N O T take into account the source or destination. Prioritizing Skype over Hulu is fine. Prioritizing Skype over Vonage is not fine. Prioritizing the ISPs own voice service over Skype or Vonage is not fine.
Just because they are on different bands doesn't mean their isn't prioritization going on. The frequency ranges dedicated to voice, net, video, etc. are adjusted and prioritized in relation to each other - the pipe is finite.
Whether prioritization comes in the form of allowing/blocking, moving things ahead/back in a queue, allocating more/less frequency space to different services, negotiating contracts with other ISPs, broadcasters, etc., it doesn't matter.
Choking out the internet and not choking out your own services is bullshit. There's a reason COX sends weekly flyers about "LAST CHANCE" bundles for their voice service. There's also a reason why my internet was shit for 3 months (huge packet loss, pings, disconnections, etc) immediately after their voice service was rolled out.
They oversold, choked out their net frequencies to make room for their voice service, and refused to admit it. Everyone had shit internet service. These are the plebes, the technically challenged. The issue was big enough for them to recognize it as more than just "it's slow...", and big enough for them to call and complain, en masse.
They had people going out to houses in my neighborhood to "test the lines" all day, every day, for over a month. Every one of them got the story that their lines were old and the building needed to be rewired.
After fighting with them (and failing) to get them to at least admit the problem, I called bullshit. I threatened to paper the neighborhood with fliers detailing the true story, and contacted various consumer reporting agencies.
I then got a call from a field tech telling me that they know of a problem in the area, Motorola was going to be installing new equipment soon, and that shit should be fixed.
He (indirectly) confirmed the information I had obtained elsewhere: that they had oversold like fucking crazy and the nodes in my neighborhood were FUCKED because of their recent voice service addition.
Shit got fixed, eventually. But it's bullshit. I got my money back for the months of useless service, but no one else in my neighborhood did. They still pimp their voice service non stop, and the networks fine, but they fight tooth and nail to keep from upgrading capacity to support what they claim it does. The first thing to get choked off is the net (and thus, all their competitors for voice and video). The next thing is HD - compress it some more, why don't you? The last thing they'll ever impact is their voice service, since it's their biggest cash cow, it competes with Vonage and Skype, and uptake will continue to grow as people continue to drop land lines.
You are saying net neutrality doesn't apply if ISPs fully disclose limitations. So by your logic if a person is in an area with one high-speed ISP or an apartment that limits them to one ISP and that one ISP decides to only sell filtered internet that charges 15 dollars a gb, it's totally acceptable. Net Neutrally is equal access to the internet. It means no filtering, no bandwidth throttling, and no charging for the gigabyte if the reasons for doing any of these is to block competing services or anything the ISP doesn't like.
Such as charging a per GB fee not because it costs the ISP significantly more per each GB you use, but because by charging per GB they get to make competing video services more expensive. Or blocking hulu.com because it cuts down on cable tv revenue. These are exactly the same things.
That facts are that most broadband ISPs have existed up until now without any filtering or bandwidth limits. They've existed and have been profitable for over 10 years. There is no justification for any of these tactics today, since bandwidth and network capacities have only got cheaper and larger. If ISPs needed to do these scummy tactics to be profitable, they would have implemented throttling and metered billing 10 years ago.
These billing tactics have nothing to do with increased costs and everything to do with video competition and profit gouging. They are a net neutrality issue. We have 10 years of history to prove ISPs are fine with current unlimited services. It makes perfect sense to require open unlimited connections in net neutrality. It preserves the internet as a medium of commerce. You will not see one ISP be hurt or any new ones decide not to get in the market because this is the way the business currently is. Net Neutrality means the internet stays like it is and doesn't change because of the stock market.
As a side note, the only reason dial-up was charging by the minute was because the number of lines were limited. So they had to encourage people not to stay connected for long periods of time. That model died as soon as modem capacity increased and never existed on broadband because everyone has their own dedicated connection. This bill per the byte model was an invention of the cellphone companies and satellite companies dealing with last mile limitations where your byte usage is basically your time usage(You only use network time while transferring data and not just for being connected). Landline ISPs do not have that problem and don't need the model.
- How much spam reaches your inbox? Will the ISP apply their usage limits to your incoming mailbox as well? I guarantee you there is some bean counter who has already thought of this and is just grinning at the prospect!
- How much do you get scanned? I'm sorry folks, but you are using a REAL IP to access the internet. And there is nothing to prevent ANYBODY from scanning that IP address. And I guarantee you that TW, ATT, Cox, whoever, is going to allow that packet through. Multiply by a few million and BLAM, you have a $20K bill!!!
- How many advertisements do you see on an average web page? How many are now FLASH? Do I get to decide which advertisement makes it and which one doesn't? Why should I have to pay my hard earned cash to see advertisements? I've seen websites that were more adverts than content. So basically, more than 50% of the cash I had to use was wasted because the website uses heavy FLASH! How is that fair?
Those are the reasons that Usage Fees are bad. And let us not forget about the cable TV suggestion I heard recently; let me pick and choose my programming without having to pay for the bloody HGTV that I never watch, and then we can start talking about usage fees. Until then, shut it! It is either an "All you can eat Buffet" of the Cable Companies can dump the forced "Buffet of crap programming I don't want or would ever want!"
And while power and water are definitely utilities. The Internet is most definitely not a utility in the classic sense. It's a communications medium. You can get unlimited phone usage, you can get unlimited cell phone usage. And you basically get unlimited TV (the cable company doesn't hold you to 5 hours a week afterall); as it should be with the Internet.
Putting a limit is no different than Net Neutrality. You are effectively limiting the amount of news, entertainment, etc I can enjoy. How is it any different than saying I can't hit this website or that? You are now forcing me to prioritize the entertainment I wish to pursue.
The truth is usually just an excuse for lack of imagination.
End users are having their internet service fucked over because competing services their ISP offers get special treatment.
That is not the case here. Though it uses similar transmition technologies, cable TV service (including VOD) is significantly cheaper to provide because of the distribution method. The difference between Cable TV/VOD service and full Internet service is equivalent to the difference between serving your own movies/music on your home LAN and accessing the wider Internet. It costs no more than the equipment and time setting up, plus the cost of the content, to serve as many movies as I want on my home LAN. This is the same as a Cable company's TV service. However, as soon as I want to hook into the Internet, I have to pony up the cash because I have to use someone else's lines, switches, and routers to do so. It's -exactly- the same for an ISP. The only difference is an ISP has a "home network" of several hundred thousand devices, instead of 4 or 5 like my personal LAN. They still have to pony up the cash when they want to access another ISP's lines, switches, and routers. That's how the internet works. It's how it was built, it's how it has always worked, and it is how it always will work.
Just because they are on different bands doesn't mean their isn't prioritization going on. The frequency ranges dedicated to voice, net, video, etc. are adjusted and prioritized in relation to each other - the pipe is finite.
The pipe is actually not finite, in the sense of putting more information through them - the amount of electrons going through has always been the same for each type of copper, modulation technology improves to send more data over the same copper. It is the equipment at each end that determines what can be shoved through the pipe. Certain pipes can make this easier or harder, but the pipe itself has little to do with it. Since it's the equipment that makes all the difference, hey guess what? Cable and Internet services use different equipment! OMG! The networks, while they share the same lines, are also completely different in type and structure.
Choosing how to prioritize traffic should N O T take into account the source or destination. Prioritizing Skype over Hulu is fine. Prioritizing Skype over Vonage is not fine. Prioritizing the ISPs own voice service over Skype or Vonage is not fine.
Prioritization on the packet level (known as throttling) is definitely not o.k. It's also not at all what myself, the GP, and the OP were talking about. We were all talking about payment schemes for service. Accessing the internet is a service. Whether or not it should be priced the same as Cable TV is irrelevant and unrelated to Net Neutrality. Whether or not they are each priced fairly is also not related to Net Neutrality. Lumping them together confuses them both and weakens the case for both.
Whether prioritization comes in the form of allowing/blocking, moving things ahead/back in a queue, allocating more/less frequency space to different services, negotiating contracts with other ISPs, broadcasters, etc., it doesn't matter.
Again, not what we're talking about here. And, incidentally, Cable providers don't need to negotiate contracts with other ISPs, that's Internet only. Broadcasting is paid for via advertising. Cable content is paid for once for the entire user-base - though granted it is probably based on the amount of users to be served. The internet, however, is served piecemeal, and negotiations are not for the content, they are for the ACCESS, and can be very expensive because of that.
That still doesn't make it a Net Neutrality issue. It's a pricing issue. They are NOT the same.
Choking out the internet and not choking out your own services is bullshit. There's a reason COX sends weekly flyers about "LAST CHANCE" bundles for their voice service. There's also a reason why my internet
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I think for the general case of an ISP which only shovels internets back and forth, yes he's right, this is not a net neutrality issue. If the company doesn't provide content then it doesn't matter that they are capping usage because it's across the board.
If, as many people have stated, a company like TW is capping (which affects sites like Hulu and YouTube) when they have a competing source of content (cable TV/on-demand) then it absolutely is a net neutrality issue.
So I think what it boils down to is: Does the ISP have a competing source of content (either through TV, streaming, etc.)? If so, then they are tilting the field in their favor. And my guess is that most ISP's have at least some way of providing content which would directly compete with an option available somewhere else online.
I'm an optimistic cynic: I'm optimistic that my cynicism is well founded.
and perhaps watching 24 on their $5,000 TV sets sometimes instead of downloading it off of BitTorrent to their laptop every week because it makes them feel like a haX0r
Well if KPTM Fox 42 would stop down-converting 24 to SD and stereo sound for 15 seconds at the bottom of its hour (and every bottom of the hour) to inform me of the time and temperature sponsored by the Omaha Children's Hospital (always during the show, never during the commercials) I wouldn't have to torrent a 43-minute episode to pick up the two words dropped from the broadcast on either side of those 15 seconds, cursing your station, your bug, and its sponsor.
This is not the thinking of the children you want to engender in the public.
Their equipment can apparently insert time-and-temp bugs at 1080i on the CW without down-conversion of the signal, but not at the 720p of Fox (both KXVO CW 15 and KPTM Fox 42 are owned by Pappas Telecasting). KSNB isn't carried in HD on cable here and is P&S for 24 most weeks.
I used to be able to extract the left and right channels of the AC3 audio to my iPod to listen to the soundtrack without hearing any dialogue. I can no longer do that.
Fox is also doing something to their HD stream to prevent video playback in some MPEG editing tools like MPEG Streamclip (not encryption and not broadcast flag). Thankfully other tools can still cut through it.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
ISPs are behaving in a way that prefers one service over another, and prefers their services over that of competitors, which they carry since they are a infrastructure service.
This may not be confined to the "net", but ISPs sure as hell are non-neutral with regards to services provided over the net.
Therefore, it's a fucking net neutrality issue.
Bandwidth fines are just a way to perpetuate the bullshit while claiming net neutrality. It's a fucking extension of the same collusive, monopolistic shit that the DOJ should be investigating.
Internet Explorer is bundled by default?
"BURN THEM!"
ISPs falsely advertising their service, and actually being anti-competitive with regards to other services?
"GUYS SHUT UP. This isn't about net neutrality so there's nothing wrong with it. This is TOTALLY DIFFERENT. We should stop having this discussion and we should splinter our focus between the 2 issues to make our voices less impactful."
ISPs are acting in a non-neutral way with regards to their services (provided over the net and not) and those of competing services (which are provided over the net).
Do you dispute this?
Bravo, +1 and all that.
Something people forget is that it's not just TW (or AT&T, Comcast, et al.)
I have TWC RR, and I get this:
"How to Get Access to ESPN360.com
ESPN360.com is available at no charge to fans who receive their high-speed internet connection from an ESPN360.com affiliated internet service provider. ESPN360.com is also available to fans that access the internet from U.S. college campuses and U.S. military bases.
Your current computer network falls outside of these categories. Here's how you can get access to ESPN360.com.
1. Switch to an ESPN360.com affiliated internet service provider or to contact your internet service provider and request ESPN360.com. Click here to enter your ZIP code and find out which providers in your area carry offer ESPN360.com
2. If you already get ESPN360.com at home and activated remote access, sign in using the myESPN link in the upper right hand corner. In order to activate remote access, you must sign in through your ESPN360.com affiliate Internet Service Provider.
3. For Verizon Customers Only:
Sign-in using remote access if you already get ESPN360.com"
Is there something else I am missing? I do not have its cable TV.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
assuming they all watch it simultaneously. and don't pause.
which, today, is - i wouldn't say stupid - but unreasonable.
Rich