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Net Neutrality Gives 'Free' Internet To Netflix and Google, ISP Claims (arstechnica.com)
Frontier Communications is asking employees for help in its fight against state net neutrality rules in California, claiming that the rules will give "free" Internet to major Web companies while raising costs for consumers. From a report: The Internet service provider urged employees to submit a form letter asking Governor Jerry Brown to veto the net neutrality bill that was recently approved by the state legislature. Frontier sent an email to employees and set up an online form for them to send the form letter to Brown. "I am proud to work at Frontier and help operate a network that is part of an incredibly successful Internet ecosystem that is the backbone of our economy and daily life," the form letter says. But net neutrality rules "will harm consumers and impose complex layers of costly regulation," and therefore "deter investment and delay broadband deployment in California, especially in rural areas that still lack high-speed Internet access," the letter says. The letter claims that net neutrality rules "will create significant new costs for consumers" but did not make it clear what those new costs would be.
Why are corporations all a bunch of lying-ass trash?
Netflix/google/whomever is paying for internet access, in a different way then regular consumers.
The teleco's can go fuck themselves.
I paid for it. I the customer. I already paid for it.
When you say free, you mean you want to double-charge. You want to charge them to get to me, as much as you want to charge me to get to them. But they make all their money from me. This really boils down to, you want to double-charge me.
I already paid for it.
It doesn't cost you $100/month to move the electrons. You aren't buying $100/mo worth of equipment. Be honest. It is all profit, and you like profit with minimal cost. If you could get all your profit that way, you would love it. You prefer slavery. If you could, you would do it.
You drink blood. Eventually, you end up drinking your own, along with the vast pool of mine and everyone like me. It kills you when you do it. To watch you die at your own hand I just have to be able to wait long enough to see it.
Net neutrality on a technical level is less regulation and complexity, not more.
The idea is very simple, treat all traffic equally and design your network to peer with the other guy's in such a way that it keeps costs down for both parties.
Netflix is the reason your customers are buying faster tiers of internet,.
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
I find it fascinating when a corporation "encourages" its employees to a certain political action and helpfully provide them a script. Corporations are people, money is speech, and coercing your employees's speech is a very pure expression of malignant capitalism.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They are right and it's called market power. ISP's should thank god Google and Netflix aren't charging ISP's yet for the privilege of having their service, as consumers would be happy to ditch any service that doesn't offer them.
All the whining about Net Neutrality is garbage. Running an ISP is an inexpensive task, relatively, and it scales very well. The larger you are, the cheaper each additional customer is. I am literally baffled how large megacorps like Frontier, Spectrum nee Charter, and Comcast don't have 50% profit margins at their prices.
For all I know they do have 50% profit margins, and all this garbage about rising costs is just that... garbage.
The only reason that this has lasted so long, and the incumbent idiocy has not been ousted by competition, is because they don't have competition in most of their markets. Monopoly pricing has become the norm rather than the exception in the US. In the EU, which is no easier or more difficult to provide Internet to, consumer internet costs 1/2 to 1/4 what it does in the US. As far as I can tell the primary driver between the difference in price is that the EU municipalities never created monopoly markets for Internet.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Netflix pays for their connection to the public Internet. An ISP's customers pay for their connection to the public Internet. The ISP pays backbone provider(s) for their interconnection to every other ISP. No one is getting anything for 'FREE'.
Now, that having been said: If ISPs would stop over-booking their own networks, then maybe everyone streaming stuff from Netflix at the same time wouldn't max out their networks and make their customers complain.
Also, as a sidebar: ISPs are completely disingenuous. Some company like Comcast/Xfinity has competing services, and furthermore are both content creators and content deliverers; as such anything they say on the subject should be disregarded.
Overall there are too many parasite corporations in this country and they need to be taken down a few notches.
No, they're fucking liars, and I don't often swear.
That said, that would make "unlimited bandwidth" more obviously impossible, and some people would object to having their accounts metered. Some people already do. But unlimited bandwidth is impossible. Everything has a limit. You pay for what you think you might need. But only marketers and suckers think that "unlimited access" means any more than "you can be connected whenever we're up". Read over what they actually promised you in the contract. They probably promised not to offer you more than a certain connect speed. (Look for the words "up to".)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The more I hear "We need to stop net neutrality/government oversight because it will prevent us from serving poor rural customers" the more I wonder if telcos have been withholding service from these areas strategically, so that they can promise to get them service every few years in exchange for regulatory favor or just money, then renege on their promises only to bring up the same areas a few years later when they want something else.
Perhaps they should consider raising their rates if they think things are free. That is what the fees are for. I've not heard of them, but what unlucky slobs get Frontier in their geographic area?
Help, government we are dying without corporate welfare and bailouts!!!! We need you and appreciate how much you do for us! ...15 minutes later
Whateva government you can't tell me what to do, I do what I want, you don't own me.
Ad nauseam.
Until you are blocked from going to infowars.com, Alex Jones is not an example.
I hate fat people.
By this argument, Google Fiber should be self-limiting, because at some point Google not paying and Google also not paying should result in such a huge shortfall that they go out of business. Right?
Netflix has made sure that that claim is bullshit. The only reason Netflix is a burden on an ISP's backbone is an ISP going out of it's way to make sure they aren't playing nice with Netflix.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
They had a piece about a city which built a new baseball stadium but had no team. And any time another city would say no to their current baseball team demands, the team owner would say, "We could always move there." So, this empty stadium was continually used as an excuse for giving the team owners what they wanted. This city's empty stadium was constantly being used as a bargaining chip and a scapegoat.
I think of this story every time I read, "...deter investment and delay broadband deployment...in rural areas..."
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Frontier and other ISPs are upset because they spend the minimum amount necessary on infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. They oversold their minimalist networks as much as they possibly could, and then the likes of Netflix and YouTube came along and ISP customers started all consuming massive amounts of bandwidth instead of it just being the file sharers that ate bandwidth like mad.
So now, in order to meet customer demand, ISPs have to use some of the profits they've been racking in hand over fist to go out an upgrade their networks. But, instead of just getting the job done, they'd rather spend a few million on a political propaganda campaign and buying off politicians to try and kill Net Neutrality so they can keep their grubby mitts on the most profit possible.
Now, make no mistake, either way consumers are still going to get screwed in the end, but, better they get screwed while getting an upgraded infrastructure, instead of letting the ISPs rip off Netflix and others for the crime of serving content. Because without Net Neutrality, the ISPs get to demand tolls from Netflix, and Netflix's prices go up, while the ISPs sit back and do nothing. With Net Neutrality, the ISPs will raise prices and implement data caps - but they also build infrastructure to handle the demand.
And Netflix already has all the incentive in the world to research, develop, and adopt new video codecs like AV1 to make their content smaller, because they still need to pay to have their content mirrored all around the country. And the smaller that content is, the less they have to pay.
Is the bandwidth in your home network unlimited?
We're not talking about something "impossible" or by hardware constraints, we're talking about artificial caps imposed by the providers to encourage people to move to more expensive plans.
The artificial caps have a very good reason. Because the ISPs connection to the internet is not unlimited either. There are physical and hardware limits on the ISP side. Sure, your connection to them might be 100 mbps and the hardware is more than capable of handling that. The problem is that the ISP has 10k customers and they don't have a 1,000,000 mpbs connection to the internet capable of handling all 10k customers at max throughput at the same time. There needs to be some sort of system in place to ensure fair access to all 10k customers. You could make it a free for all and give everyone 1/10k of the currently available bandwidith (which is what your home network does) but this is probably not the most optimal way to make all your customers happy. You are always going to have peak periods when everyone is trying to watch Netflix at the same time so probably the most beneficial way for ISPs to reduce their upstream bandwidth needs is to either peer with big producers like Netflix or to encourage their customers to do their non-realtime downloads during non-peak times.
but most estimates place it somewhere between $9-$20/mo for 100 mbps. This is based on their SEC filings. You'll generally pay $80-$100/mo for that service. $140 if you don't want a bandwidth cap (or if you go much over your cap).
ISPs go out of their way to hide this figure because if folks knew how cheap modern telecom is they'd be furious.
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Mostly. They've also strong-armed Netflix into paid peering arrangements instead of relying on regular transit that Netflix purchased. So if you had this example (made up):
Netflix <-> Cogent <-> Comcast <-> Subscriber
Let's say Netflix is paying for transit from Cogent. Subscriber requests content from Netflix, it traverses Comcast, then Cogent, then to Netflix, and the data is sent back to the subscriber.
Now, holy shit, Comcast sees the utilization on their Cogent link is at 100% all day, because that's the carrier that Netflix uses to get to their subscribers. Comcast has to go spend a few hundred thousand adding 100Gb ports to increase capacity between the networks.
Now, Comcast says, naah, we decided we're not going to add additional capacity there. This puts the squeeze on Netflix, subscribers start complaining. Eventually Netflix says, ok look, how much to just peer directly? We will bring fiber directly to you, bypassing Cogent. How much do you want?
And now you see how Comcast found a whole new business model. They want to be able to charge all of these guys DIRECTLY for peering instead of passing it along their existing peering links. You see, peering is done "settlement free" (assuming an equal exchange of traffic). So now instead of carrying that Netflix traffic over a settlement free peering arrangement they get PAID to deliver it!
I predicted that ending net neutrality would kill cable ISPs.
We're getting closer.
Frontier just admitted it wants to charge Google and NetFlix more to send their content through. We can pretty much assume at this point that they'll slow transmission rates of Google and NetFlix traffic if they don't get it.
And this is the death kneel for Frontier and others.
Because if Frontier is allowed to slow...(effectively stop) transmission of Google and NetFlix traffic....then Google and NetFlix can slow (effectively stop) transmissions of their traffic to Frontier.
Google has already invested in backbone and last mile data (Google Fiber). There is NOTHING that would prevent Google from opening Fiber in Frontier's largest (most profitable) markets and slowly Frontier traffic to a crawl.
In fact...Frontier is DEMANDING that Google be allowed to do this.
Frontier hasn't realized that NO ONE buys Frontier access to view Frontier content.
there was a sizable population of divorcees ordered to carry insurance by the court who bought these policies to satisfy a legal requirement. Those guys and gals were basically forced to buy actual insurance.
Of course the proper solution, one that every other civilized nation uses, is single payer. We even have the system in place. All we need to do is expand Medicare to cover everyone. I mean, it's not like I'm not already being taxed. They call them premium, but it's really just a tax I pay to a mega -corp.
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