The Telcos' Secret Anti-Net Neutrality Strategy

NoMoreHelio writes "The political blog ThinkProgress lays out big telecom's plan to attack net neutality. The blog obtained a secret PowerPoint presentation from a telecommunications industry front group (PPT) that outlines the industry strategy for defending against regulatory attempts by the FCC. The industry plans to partner with two conservative 'astroturfing' groups, best known for their work seeding the Tea Party movement. Today's revelation from ThinkProgress comes as Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) joined various telecom-funded front groups to unveil an anti-net neutrality bill."

Comments

Re:What is to stop how ISP's peer?

[mjwx]

I shouldnt respond to the troll but...

Then you must be arguing that that first 200 GB costs equal to or more than 200 GB. Typically, it would cost more under your pricing scheme.

Sigh, why do Americans always get hung up over specific costs and or values in an analogy. Of course these aren't exact measurements, they are example values pulled out of my rectum to demonstrate of a point, this isn't a specific business plan for crying out loud.

In Australia the price per GB changes, in the lower plans you pay a higher cost per GB as you're not just paying for bandwidth but for routing equipment, systems administrators, accountants and book keepers, Cat5 cable, leasing of a line, servers and computers in use by the ISP, all of these overheads come out of what you pay for the service. These costs are pretty much fixed and do not change much based on usage. So if you move up to a higher plan and pay more you pay less per GB as the overheads are spread out over more bandwidth.

The rest of your post is an illiterate, uninformed, profanity laden rant it would do me a disservice to quote but...

Are you suggesting that paying for what you use proportionally is an unfair system, further more that in light of the fact that ISP's have to buy bandwidth from other providers when traffic leaves their network that this system would not be most beneficial to both parties. On my ISP, traffic that is sent across their network is free, from iinet to 3FL game servers is 100% free because it costs iinet nothing thus doesn't count towards my quota. When I send it to non 3FL servers it costs the ISP money, this makes the PAYG system fair for both parties.

I don't think you quite understand how this works. When I use more water, gas or electricity I pay more because I use more and it costs the utility more money to keep me supplied. When the garbage man collects my half bin it costs them the same no matter how full it is. Which of these two models applies to the ISP industry given that service provision is not a fixed cost?

Aside from this you missed the whole point, if your ISP is going to metre you it should be done on whole traffic, not specific traffic types.