They are providing the service the customers paid for -- half the work in exchanging their traffic with the rest of the Internet, with the other half to be covered by the other network.
I agree, the benefit of all the packets is exactly equal.
I'm saying that because the benefits are equal, the costs should be equal too.
For example, say two national networks peer and there's much more outbound traffic from A to B than from B to A. That means that even though the benefits to both networks are equal the costs will be much higher to B because it has a larger length of travel. So thus it makes sense to equalize the costs by having A pay B.
Or say Google is going to exchange traffic with Comcast. The benefits are equal. But Google has lower costs because it puts its computers in well-connected datacenters while Comcast has to take its customers where they live. So Google should be Comcast to equalize the costs to match the benefits.
Well, the packet benefits both the sender and the recipient. It makes sense that each of them should bear about half the costs.
When Google sends a packet to a Comcast customer, we presume that packet benefits both Google and Comcast equally. So Google should pay half the cost and Comcast should pay half the cost. With no settlement, Google will pay much less than half the cost, because Google can put their servers where it's cheapest and Comcast has to take their customers where they find them. So Comcast collects a settlement from Google to cover the balance of Google's half of the cost.
Sure, folks like Google and Netflix who are trying to shift their share of the costs of their traffic onto companies like Time Warner and Comcast are unhappy about the practice. That's why they want the government to "fix" a functional free market that has been working amazingly well for decades.
Outbound traffic is much cheaper than inbound traffic. You can dump outbound traffic off at the nearest meeting point with its destination network. But you have to carry inbound traffic from wherever the source network gives it to you.
With a typical traffic imbalance, when a server on the West Coast is talking to a client on the East Coast, the client's network is carrying much more of the traffic across the country.
Think about it like the US post office and the German post office agreeing to exchange packages with each other. They might agree to not exchange any money so long as each of them carries about 50% of the packages across the ocean. But if the US post office carries 80% of the packages across the ocean, some money is going to have to change hands to keep it fair.
It's not "somehow justifying", the justification is quite clear. We presume the traffic benefits both parties equally, thus each party should be about half the cost. Content networks put their servers wherever it's cheapest to put traffic on the Internet while eyeball networks have to take their customers where they find them. Thus, without settlement, eyeball networks would pay more than half the cost of the traffic, which would be unfair. Settlement-based peering splits the costs to match the benefits.
Do you see how that position is 100% inconsistent with your original argument? By the logic of your original argument, a US company hosting a site for a US customer should be able to completely ignore UK law. But your original argument was that if they did so, they have no right to complain if that causes bad things to happen.
You wind up having to argue that every hosting provider everywhere in the world should take note of any content they may have that might be deemed unlawful or inappropriate in any jurisdiction and somehow segregate it. That's the total opposite of "each different country should be to follow its laws", that's, "everyone has to follow every country's laws".
It is absolutely NOT the responsibility of a US company to follow North Korean law just because people from North Korea access their Internet services.
You're projecting when you say that, "Only the fucking Americans think their law applies to the whole world." You're the one arguing that a US company servicing US customers should follow the law of every single country from which they could possibly find their Internet site accessed.
So you concede that your claim, " Any reputable cloud provider would disconnect any of their customers deemed to be hosting illegal content." is bunk? If not, why would you reply without defending it?
Do you really believe that if North Korea passes a law prohibiting web sites that mock their leader, CloudFlare wouldn't be a reputable company unless they disconnected any customer who had a site that mocked their leader?
The thing is, there's no such thing as an "infringing site". This is a site that the UK has decided should be blocked from people in their jurisdiction. Next Germany may decide to block access to sites that deny the Holocaust and China may decide to block sites that advocate Taiwanese independence. Then the US will want to block sites that have gambling. And on and on it goes.
I'm looking forward to pulling all my mSATA EVOs out of their RAID controllers, inserting them one at a time into a spare PC with one mSATA slot, and upgrading their firmware. The last update (which also rewrites all data) took over two hours per drive, and it looks like this next one is going to take just as long. Anybody want to spend a really boring weekend with me?
The EVO's are still the only 1TB mSATA drive, so not a lot of choices.
Actually, their profit is in the software. Their hardware isn't significantly different from everyone else's hardware. The reason most people buy their hardware is because their software makes that hardware very easy to monitor and manage. With routers, just like with phones, good software sells hardware.
It's a huge defense. The difference between commercial and hobby/recreational activity is whether the primary motivation is making money or relaxation/recreation. Showing that the amounts of money made are very, very small strengthens the argument that it's a hobby/recreational activity rather than a commercial activity.
It's not jamming. They're not transmitting at the same time as someone else or using more power than other people. They're sending data when the channel is idle and at the normal power level, but it has the consequence of breaking connections because those connections are so insecure that anyone can break them. This has no effect on secure networks.
It's the reverse. They block outside hotspots because they are thinking about liability. Imagine if someone creates a hotspot with the same SSID as the hotel's, MITM's the login process, and steals credentials.
There's no shared secret between you and the hotel and no way to know the hotel's public key. Thus the only way the hotel can protect you from connecting to an attacker is to detect and block the attacker's signals.
Jed McCaleb left. The original development team (myself, Arthur Britto, Stefan Thomas, Vahe Hovhannisyan, etc) is still here, and Chris Larsen, the first CEO, is still CEO. Ripple Labs currently has more than 80 full time employees working to develop and promote the protocol.
Ripple does not require a centrally administered list of trusted transaction processing servers. That's just like arguing that Bitcoin requires a centrally administered list of valid transaction formats. Substantial agreement does not require central administration.
I think what you're missing is that this film is newsworthy and publishers of news have a significant interest in keeping that news available. It doesn't matter to Google who gags them, they don't want to be gagged.
Right, but the question is whether those rights include any copyright in the resulting work. She's going after third parties who have done nothing wrong, not the guy who deceived her.
There's nothing inherently irrational about this. For example, if your daughter says to you, "My grades are bad and my teacher says I need to spend more time studying", you'd believe her. But if she says, "My grades are bad and my teacher says I need to stay up later", you might not. The incentive to exaggerate or misstate evidence depends on the consequences of accepting the evidence, and thus the reliability of evidence depends on its consequences as well.
ISP customers generate very little traffic. The vast majority of the traffic "eyeball networks" like ISPs carry is generated by others. It's not the ISP, or their customer, that has control over the bandwidth usage. Companies like Google and Netflix design the products they offer and control how they use bandwidth. The end user just uses the service, generally not needing to particularly care how much bandwidth it uses. If you want rational resource consumption, the costs of the usage of the resource have to be borne by the party that can control the use of the resource.
Your benefit argument is not rational, it's just spin. Without ISPs, services like Amazon or Netflix would have nobody to serve. The assumption that traffic between service providers and end users benefits both parties roughly equally is a perfectly rational one, and it's the one Internet companies have been using to drive their peering decisions for decades.
It is perfectly rational to assume that when an AT&T customer accesses Netflix, the packets that flow between AT&T and Netflix benefit both parties equally and thus the costs to carry that traffic should be split evenly between AT&T and Netflix. AT&T cannot move their customers to make the traffic cheaper to deliver, but Netflix does place their servers precisely where it is cheapest to generate traffic. Similarly, it is a simple fact that it is cheaper to have a small number of large bandwidth endpoints than a large number of small bandwidth endpoints. Thus Netflix incurs costs on its network that are substantially lower than AT&T incurs on its network for the same traffic. This has always been the conditions that have triggered settlement-based peering.
Right. Each party pays half the costs of the traffic. When the costs don't naturally split in half, settlement-based peering is used.
Amazon, by intentional design, places servers that generate huge amounts of traffic in places where it costs them the least possible to deliver that traffic to AT&T. Meanwhile, it is much more expensive for AT&T to deliver that traffic to their customers because they can't move just to bring traffic costs down. We presume the traffic benefits AT&T and Amazon equally, so they should each pay half the cost. So Amazon owes AT&T half the difference between what it costs Amazon to carry the outbound traffic over their network and what it costs AT&T to carry the inbound traffic over their network.
This is precisely what copyright does *NOT* cover. There must be millions of equally good ways of doing the same thing, and you may protect the non-functional aspects of the one way that you creatively chose. Here, the name is purely functional -- play(soundname) is the only way to get the API to play a sound -- it is the one way to achieve a particular functional result, so it cannot be protected by copyright.
You can copyright a sentence you solely authored if it has sufficient creative expression. But you cannot enforce that copyright against someone who uses that sentence because it is the only practical way to achieve a particular functional result. If the sentence uses an API, then complying with the API is the only way to achieve the functional result desired. The purpose of APIs is to standardize the way to achieve particular results.
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They are providing the service the customers paid for -- half the work in exchanging their traffic with the rest of the Internet, with the other half to be covered by the other network.
I agree, the benefit of all the packets is exactly equal.
I'm saying that because the benefits are equal, the costs should be equal too.
For example, say two national networks peer and there's much more outbound traffic from A to B than from B to A. That means that even though the benefits to both networks are equal the costs will be much higher to B because it has a larger length of travel. So thus it makes sense to equalize the costs by having A pay B.
Or say Google is going to exchange traffic with Comcast. The benefits are equal. But Google has lower costs because it puts its computers in well-connected datacenters while Comcast has to take its customers where they live. So Google should be Comcast to equalize the costs to match the benefits.
Well, the packet benefits both the sender and the recipient. It makes sense that each of them should bear about half the costs.
When Google sends a packet to a Comcast customer, we presume that packet benefits both Google and Comcast equally. So Google should pay half the cost and Comcast should pay half the cost. With no settlement, Google will pay much less than half the cost, because Google can put their servers where it's cheapest and Comcast has to take their customers where they find them. So Comcast collects a settlement from Google to cover the balance of Google's half of the cost.
Sure, folks like Google and Netflix who are trying to shift their share of the costs of their traffic onto companies like Time Warner and Comcast are unhappy about the practice. That's why they want the government to "fix" a functional free market that has been working amazingly well for decades.
Outbound traffic is much cheaper than inbound traffic. You can dump outbound traffic off at the nearest meeting point with its destination network. But you have to carry inbound traffic from wherever the source network gives it to you.
With a typical traffic imbalance, when a server on the West Coast is talking to a client on the East Coast, the client's network is carrying much more of the traffic across the country.
Think about it like the US post office and the German post office agreeing to exchange packages with each other. They might agree to not exchange any money so long as each of them carries about 50% of the packages across the ocean. But if the US post office carries 80% of the packages across the ocean, some money is going to have to change hands to keep it fair.
It's not "somehow justifying", the justification is quite clear. We presume the traffic benefits both parties equally, thus each party should be about half the cost. Content networks put their servers wherever it's cheapest to put traffic on the Internet while eyeball networks have to take their customers where they find them. Thus, without settlement, eyeball networks would pay more than half the cost of the traffic, which would be unfair. Settlement-based peering splits the costs to match the benefits.
Do you see how that position is 100% inconsistent with your original argument? By the logic of your original argument, a US company hosting a site for a US customer should be able to completely ignore UK law. But your original argument was that if they did so, they have no right to complain if that causes bad things to happen.
You wind up having to argue that every hosting provider everywhere in the world should take note of any content they may have that might be deemed unlawful or inappropriate in any jurisdiction and somehow segregate it. That's the total opposite of "each different country should be to follow its laws", that's, "everyone has to follow every country's laws".
It is absolutely NOT the responsibility of a US company to follow North Korean law just because people from North Korea access their Internet services.
You're projecting when you say that, "Only the fucking Americans think their law applies to the whole world." You're the one arguing that a US company servicing US customers should follow the law of every single country from which they could possibly find their Internet site accessed.
So you concede that your claim, " Any reputable cloud provider would disconnect any of their customers deemed to be hosting illegal content." is bunk? If not, why would you reply without defending it?
Do you really believe that if North Korea passes a law prohibiting web sites that mock their leader, CloudFlare wouldn't be a reputable company unless they disconnected any customer who had a site that mocked their leader?
The thing is, there's no such thing as an "infringing site". This is a site that the UK has decided should be blocked from people in their jurisdiction. Next Germany may decide to block access to sites that deny the Holocaust and China may decide to block sites that advocate Taiwanese independence. Then the US will want to block sites that have gambling. And on and on it goes.
I'm looking forward to pulling all my mSATA EVOs out of their RAID controllers, inserting them one at a time into a spare PC with one mSATA slot, and upgrading their firmware. The last update (which also rewrites all data) took over two hours per drive, and it looks like this next one is going to take just as long. Anybody want to spend a really boring weekend with me?
The EVO's are still the only 1TB mSATA drive, so not a lot of choices.
Actually, their profit is in the software. Their hardware isn't significantly different from everyone else's hardware. The reason most people buy their hardware is because their software makes that hardware very easy to monitor and manage. With routers, just like with phones, good software sells hardware.
It's a huge defense. The difference between commercial and hobby/recreational activity is whether the primary motivation is making money or relaxation/recreation. Showing that the amounts of money made are very, very small strengthens the argument that it's a hobby/recreational activity rather than a commercial activity.
It's not jamming. They're not transmitting at the same time as someone else or using more power than other people. They're sending data when the channel is idle and at the normal power level, but it has the consequence of breaking connections because those connections are so insecure that anyone can break them. This has no effect on secure networks.
It's the reverse. They block outside hotspots because they are thinking about liability. Imagine if someone creates a hotspot with the same SSID as the hotel's, MITM's the login process, and steals credentials.
There's no shared secret between you and the hotel and no way to know the hotel's public key. Thus the only way the hotel can protect you from connecting to an attacker is to detect and block the attacker's signals.
You might be talking about XRP, but I think most other people are talking about the payment network.
Jed McCaleb left. The original development team (myself, Arthur Britto, Stefan Thomas, Vahe Hovhannisyan, etc) is still here, and Chris Larsen, the first CEO, is still CEO. Ripple Labs currently has more than 80 full time employees working to develop and promote the protocol.
Ripple does not require a centrally administered list of trusted transaction processing servers. That's just like arguing that Bitcoin requires a centrally administered list of valid transaction formats. Substantial agreement does not require central administration.
I think what you're missing is that this film is newsworthy and publishers of news have a significant interest in keeping that news available. It doesn't matter to Google who gags them, they don't want to be gagged.
Right, but the question is whether those rights include any copyright in the resulting work. She's going after third parties who have done nothing wrong, not the guy who deceived her.
There's nothing inherently irrational about this. For example, if your daughter says to you, "My grades are bad and my teacher says I need to spend more time studying", you'd believe her. But if she says, "My grades are bad and my teacher says I need to stay up later", you might not. The incentive to exaggerate or misstate evidence depends on the consequences of accepting the evidence, and thus the reliability of evidence depends on its consequences as well.
ISP customers generate very little traffic. The vast majority of the traffic "eyeball networks" like ISPs carry is generated by others. It's not the ISP, or their customer, that has control over the bandwidth usage. Companies like Google and Netflix design the products they offer and control how they use bandwidth. The end user just uses the service, generally not needing to particularly care how much bandwidth it uses. If you want rational resource consumption, the costs of the usage of the resource have to be borne by the party that can control the use of the resource.
Your benefit argument is not rational, it's just spin. Without ISPs, services like Amazon or Netflix would have nobody to serve. The assumption that traffic between service providers and end users benefits both parties roughly equally is a perfectly rational one, and it's the one Internet companies have been using to drive their peering decisions for decades.
It is perfectly rational to assume that when an AT&T customer accesses Netflix, the packets that flow between AT&T and Netflix benefit both parties equally and thus the costs to carry that traffic should be split evenly between AT&T and Netflix. AT&T cannot move their customers to make the traffic cheaper to deliver, but Netflix does place their servers precisely where it is cheapest to generate traffic. Similarly, it is a simple fact that it is cheaper to have a small number of large bandwidth endpoints than a large number of small bandwidth endpoints. Thus Netflix incurs costs on its network that are substantially lower than AT&T incurs on its network for the same traffic. This has always been the conditions that have triggered settlement-based peering.
Right. Each party pays half the costs of the traffic. When the costs don't naturally split in half, settlement-based peering is used.
Amazon, by intentional design, places servers that generate huge amounts of traffic in places where it costs them the least possible to deliver that traffic to AT&T. Meanwhile, it is much more expensive for AT&T to deliver that traffic to their customers because they can't move just to bring traffic costs down. We presume the traffic benefits AT&T and Amazon equally, so they should each pay half the cost. So Amazon owes AT&T half the difference between what it costs Amazon to carry the outbound traffic over their network and what it costs AT&T to carry the inbound traffic over their network.
This is how the Internet has worked for decades.
Because that's the reason people build the highways. AT&T builds highways for AT&T customers and charges everyone else to use them.
This is precisely what copyright does *NOT* cover. There must be millions of equally good ways of doing the same thing, and you may protect the non-functional aspects of the one way that you creatively chose. Here, the name is purely functional -- play(soundname) is the only way to get the API to play a sound -- it is the one way to achieve a particular functional result, so it cannot be protected by copyright.
You can copyright a sentence you solely authored if it has sufficient creative expression. But you cannot enforce that copyright against someone who uses that sentence because it is the only practical way to achieve a particular functional result. If the sentence uses an API, then complying with the API is the only way to achieve the functional result desired. The purpose of APIs is to standardize the way to achieve particular results.