Comcast: Destroying What Makes a Competitive Internet Possible

An anonymous reader writes "Vox has another in-depth report on the perilous state of net neutrality regulation, and how Comcast is attempting to undermine it. Quoting: 'In the bill-and-keep internet, companies at each "end" of a connection bill their own customers — whether that customer is a big web company like Google, or a an average household. Neither end pays the other for interconnection. ... ISP's typically do this by hiring a third party to provide "transit," the service of carrying data from one network to another. Transit providers often swap traffic with one another without money changing hands. ... The terminating monopoly problem occurs when a company at the end of a network not only charges its own customers for their connection, but charges companies in the middle of the network an extra premium to be able to reach its customers. In a bill-and-keep regime, the money always flows in the other direction — from customers to ISPs to transit companies. ... But when an ISP's market share gets large enough, the calculus changes. Comcast has 80 times as many subscribers as Vermont has households. So when Comcast demands payment to deliver content to its own customers, Netflix and its transit suppliers can't afford to laugh it off. The potential costs to Netflix's bottom line are too large.'"

Comments

You asked for it

[SuperKendall]

You all clamored for a tightly-corperate-coupled government to control the internet.

Then it happened, the FCC decided it could do what it wanted.

So now instead of back-end interconnects being negotiated between an ISP and a content provider as had been the case, the government by fiat has declared the "winner" - the ISP.

What has happened is what was inevitable. If you don't like it, think more next time before you ask a government controlled by the highest bidder to control whatever you are wishing was more free.

Or just in general don't expect things that are more controlled to be more free, because obvious.

Re:Netflix is a terrible test case

[roman_mir]

Right, because the government did such a fantastic job setting up AT&T that way (PDF, pp 56-58), except it destroyed all competition in that sector for almost hundred years, preventing prices from falling and choices from being created, technology from moving forward, people from having freedoms as well, by the way, not that somebody like you would care.

According to this data from the Brookings institute, more businesses are shutting down than are being created and this is interesting, given the latest fake employment numbers by the government, which boasted that 288,000 jobs were created completely failing to mention that 234,000 of them were not actually created but assumed, because government assumed that new businesses started hiring last month, that's the so called 'birth-death' model. ASSUMED that 81% of the jobs were created, not counted them. That's in the month that saw near 1,000,000 people leaving the labour force, so now the labour participation rate in USA is lowest since 1978. This is on top of the 44+ BILLION USD / month trade deficit.

So now tell me, do you think that new businesses will be created in the USA with more regulations or will there be fewer businesses created (if any)? Do you think that more regulations will cause lower prices given what we know about government created monopolies, such as AT&T, which did by the way have the common carrier title? That was the POINT of creating that gigantic barrier to entry into the telecommunications business, creating that title to prevent competition from entering the field and from lowering prices.

Given what is going on with the USA economy, trade deficits, labour participation rates, basic inflation (money printing), I am wondering how can you not see that anything that you can come up with that government could do in order, supposedly to reduce your costs will only take the costs higher?

It's an interesting dichotomy, you are not looking beyond your nose and you are clearly oblivious to everything, history, economics, politics.