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Net Neutrality Is Complicated: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales (indiatimes.com)
In an interview, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales backed the principle of Net neutrality, but added that enabling poor people to access the Internet is equally important. Wales also defended Wikipedia Zero, a project that aims to provide select services free of cost on mobile devices in developing markets. He said :Wikipedia Zero follows a very strict set of principles such as no money is ever exchanged and so on. Net neutrality is such a complicated topic, it is something that I am extremely passionate about and I think is incredibly important. And at the same time I think getting access to knowledge for poorest people of world is also very important. Sometimes those two things can be in tension and we have to be really careful about it. I think fundamental thing is that we maintain and open and free Internet.
[citation needed]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, what obligates them to "upgrade the pipe" is that the Netflix traffic represents users who are paying customers. Now, they might decide, "Fuck those Netflix users, we're not upgrading shit" but then those paying customers can decide, "Let's see what kind of deal I can get from Comcast".
Because a critical part of any Net Neutrality discussion is competition, and the implicit threat that broadband should be a public utility anyway.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Talk about a double talking weasel. Net neutrality(why don't we call it net neutering instead?) is great when it applies to somebody else, but fuck you if you want me to play by the same rules.
Fuck you guy, just fuck you.
No, we're not talking about unrelated issues here. We're talking about Net Neutrality directly preventing helping out the needy in some small way. Let's not do that. Yes, I also like my entertainment to be inexpensive, don't get me wrong, but it's hardly the highest ideal.
Frankly, "Net Neutrality" was always ignoring the specific real problem in pursuit of some purist goal. The real problem is cable companies with local monopolies fucking their customers. Even if we pretend that very specific problem is very important, we can focus on that. Offering free Wikipedia to third-world nation in no way harms our goal of keeping our internet bill down.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The fundamental problem here is that one group's wants and desires (the end-users') are being suppressed. This came about because nearly all local governments granted a monopoly to a single cable service provider. They were well intentioned - often making 99.9% coverage and bandwidth limits a condition of that monopoly. But at the same time they discounted or didn't believe in the market influence of competition, so didn't give much consideration to the harm that granting a monopoly - even a regulated monopoly - does.
Once the cable companies had the monopoly, they could basically ignore end-users' desires, thus depriving them of their voice in the ISP market. On top of that, they are now empowered because they are the only means of internet access to those customers. All the power of those customers' dollars, none of the drawbacks of having to listen to what those customers want! And they chose to leverage that power by trying to extort additional money from websites to deliver content that their customers had already paid them for.
Net neutrality is a band-aid to try to fix this problem. By prohibiting different pricing based on content source, it prevents this type of extortion. But like the original monopoly regulatory kludge, it kills off another aspect of the market - differential pricing based on the cost to actually deliver that content. If Netflix is streaming content to the ISP, that's a lot of bandwidth and so costs the ISP a lot of money. If Netflix installs content servers at the ISP, that eliminates the bandwidth consumption and so costs the ISP less money. But net neutrality essentially prohibits the ISP from passing that cost savings on to the customer. The ISP has to charge the same price for all content, regardless of source and the bandwidth cost to obtain data from that source. It's just one regulatory fix which mostly but not entirely works, trying to fix another regulatory fix which mostly but not entirely works.
The ultimate solution is to restore market power to the end-user. Let them vote with their dollars. This has the advantage of pitting dynamic human minds against any tricks the ISPs try to come up with to increase prices or degrade service. Right now we're trying to fight the ISPs' tricks using static laws, which take decades to implement in response to their previous tricks, giving them plenty of time to figure out new tricks.
Abolish the cable monopolies. Convert the monopoly into a tightly regulated service contact for the physical cable or fiber which runs to the homes, and only the physical cables. No content service allowed. The cable maintenance company then makes money by leasing bandwidth along that fiber to different ISPs at a fixed (regulated) rate. The ISPs then have to compete with each other based on quality of service and price. If an ISP tries to pull a Comcast and deliberately degrades Netflix, they will hemorrhage customers as they flee to a different ISP who isn't degrading Netflix. And they'll do it in a matter of weeks or months, not the years or decades it took to get Net Neutrality implemented. This is how we regulate utilities, and oddly enough this is how "socialist" Europe does it.
The current Silicon Valley fetish of thinking that access to the internet is somehow going to lift the world out of poverty strikes me as the height of hubris.
What would help more than anything is to eliminate the oppressive governments that are starving their own people or ensuring access to clean water or modern health centers. They see high technology as the answer to every problem. It's the exact same nonsense as the "put computers in every school / give every child a laptop or iPad / kids need to learn to code" nonsense. Sure, it's important for kids to have access to and be exposed to technology, but it's silly to make that the focus when the real effort simply needs to be on getting the basics taught well. It's the same with fighting poverty - we need to start with the basics. First, we need to ensure people are safe, free, and have access to clean food, water, and health care.
I'll credit Bill Gate's foundation for eventually figuring this out, after wasting million here and there on pointless high-tech approaches. Sounds like Wales and others haven't gotten there yet.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Which is funny because the 4U of rack space costs them less (even considering opportunity cost) than the bandwidth it would save. The ISPs who don't want to do it are all also content providers with competing services; the majority of ISPs who don't offer a competing service do host Netflix's boxes.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Netflix could have chosen to use CDNs or to buy transit directly on the large networks it wished to supply traffic to, but instead chose to use cheaper transit providers that would abuse settlement free peering links.
Netflix pushes more bandwidth than any CDN (aside from, maybe, CloudFlare, who doesn't cache video and, therefore, wouldn't benefit Netflix) can handle. While they could have chosen to work with a CDN provider who can't support them they, instead, chose to use transit providers who can actually provide the bandwidth Netflix needs (and pays for) and let them sort out the details. And before you say (or imply) that Netflix should sort the details out themselves, that's what they're trying to do in offering their own CDN boxes; and it's what any other CDN wold do on their behalf, just like the transit providers. The difference is that the transit providers don't host their content, so they're able to keep it relatively secure (as their licenses likely require). That is, they're likely prohibited from using an external CDN as you suggest.
If I missed your point, it's because your point was wrong.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Because Netflix customers are already paying for bandwidth.
You are welcome on my lawn.