Google Fiber and various other FTTH services disprove the "omg it costs a lot" theory. This is purely a money grab by a monopoly, sanctioned by the FCC because.. the people doing the money grab own the FCC. It helps to keep in mind that several of the parties involved in this grab *HAVE ALREADY BEEN PAID TO EXPAND THEIR NETWORKS BY THE PUBLIC, AND HAVE FAILED TO DO SO*. I'm not really sure how anyone could view this whole thing as fair, honest or even legal. I also fully expect the FCC to sign off on it as the receipt says "Paid by Verizon." Nick On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 9:02 AM, Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org> wrote:
On 10/05/2014 22:34, Randy Bush wrote:
imiho think vi hart has it down simply and understandable by a lay person. <http://vihart.com/net-neutrality-in-the-us-now-what/>. my friends in last mile providers disagree. i take that as a good sign.
Vi's analogy is wrong on a subtle but important point. In the analogy, the delivery company needs to get a bunch of new trucks to handle the delivery but as the customer is paying for each delivery instances, the delivery company's costs are covered by increased end-user charges.
In the net neutrality debate, the last mile service providers are in a position where they need to upgrade their access networks, but the end-user pricing is not necessarily keeping pace.
There are lot of ways to argue this point, depending on whether you're the user, the access provider or the content provider.
From a financial point of view, the content providers will say that access providers need to charge their end users in a way which reflects their usage requirements because let's face it, it's the users that are pulling the traffic - they're not sending traffic to arbitrary IP addresses just for the fun of it. The end users will say that they're only going to pay market rate for their services, and they won't care whether this covers their costs or not. The access providers will say that they're only upgrading to deal with the additional requirements of the larger content providers, particularly the CDNs and the video streaming services, and that the going market rate doesn't allow them to charge the end users more. Besides, it's a whole pile easier to chase a small number of companies for a large amount of money than it is to chase a large number of customer for a small amount of money. Even better, if you chase the the content sources for cash, you can do this without increasing customer prices which means you can stay more competitive in the sales market. So from a business perspective it makes lots of sense to deprioritise the large companies that don't pay in favour of the ones that do. Those who pay get better service for their customers; seems fair, right?
From the proverbial helicopter viewpoint, we are walking towards a situation where the short-term business actions of the individual companies involved in the industry is going to lead towards customers being hurt and this means that the likely long-term outcome is more regulation and legislative control imposed on the industry. It is another tragedy of the commons.
Nick