President Obama urges the FCC to treat the internet as a utility

[Brian4Liberty]

Remember who would pay for those higher rates- internet users.

An analogy over who pays is somewhat like the difference between a regular restaurant and an all you can eat buffet. Do we all want or need "all you can eat"?

 

[TheCount]

You want a particular service from your ISP? sign up for it. Don't mandate it for everyone.

This is the ridiculous part. Streaming video is not the service that the ISP provides. That is the service that Netflix provides. The ISP provides the service of moving your data along its wires. If they decide not to move your data, or to move your data in a different way or at a different speed without changing your contract or notifying you in any way, then that is borderline fraud.

 

[TheCount]

How many people would immediately switch internet providers if that ever happened?

How many people have the choice of no more than two internet providers, because the providers have made private agreements not to compete with each other?

How many people have the choice of an internet provider whose parent company does not also own some flavor of media broadcast company? Time Warner owns CNN. Comcast owns NBC. Do you want either of those companies deciding which types of media/news you are allowed to consume?


If any meaningful competition existed in this market, this would not be an issue. That is not the case.

 

[TheCount]

An analogy over who pays is somewhat like the difference between a regular restaurant and an all you can eat buffet. Do we all want or need "all you can eat"?

When I want to eat more at a restaurant, I have to pay for it. The chicken farmer does not pay the restaurant to feed me more chicken.

 

[Liberty Rebellion]

Bandwidth is scarce and expensive. I work for one of the largest ISPs in the country and our national backbone spans from the west coast to the east coast and 90% of our connectivity from one backbone in one state to another is leased from mostly Level 3 and CenturyLink. We would lay our own fiber if it weren't so prohibitively expensive. This doesn't even include the fiber we lease in our core in each market. We are looking to do more dark fiber solutions and we are building out fiber rings at certain locations, but by and large we'll be leasing our fiber.

My understanding is that most of the fiber optic networks in this country were subsidized by .gov and the Tier 1 ISP's got a huge advantage in that regard.

We have upgrades upcoming on our backbone that will allow each card in our chassis to go from 40 Gigs per slot (4x10Ge) to 400 per slot (40x10GE or 4x100GE)

As far as the issues with Cogent, Verizon, and some other players we've been at the mercy of their shenanigans as well. We have had customers complaining about high-latency and packet loss upstream from our network and there's not much we can do since some of the traffic is destined for networks that are owned by the bad players (it appears these issues are resolved at this time, but we had tickets that went on for months while the upstream entities fought over who was paying for what). On traffic that is transiting the networks of these bad players we can implement certain things in BGP to try and route around them and we continue to add settlement free peers where we just go directly from our network to the peers, or through the peer to a destination network which eliminates the Verizons, Comcast, Level3's and Centurlinks as being middle men on dedicated internet access. We were saving more and more money as we turned up more and more peers until Netflix signed that deal with Level3 and traffic from Netflix started kicking up a lot.

There were talks with netflix where they would put their servers on our network in every market so we didn't even have to go out to the Internet, but that deal fell through for reasons I'm not privy to. Despite the increased costs that come with the ingress traffic from Level 3 for Netflix traffic, we don't rate-limit or degrade Netflix traffic in any way and in fact are constantly rated as the best or close to the best rated ISP for Netflix by Netflix

 

[bunklocoempire]

And this protects my individual inalienable rights how?

 

[smokemonsc]

How many people have the choice of no more than two internet providers, because the providers have made private agreements not to compete with each other?

None - they (ISPs) make monopoly guaranteed agreements with local governments banning and regulating competition. It is illegal in most cities to try to build your own ISP, let alone lay down new infrastructure to support said ISPs. This is what happens when government labels an industry as an "utility". The lack of competition is the designed result for companies like Time Warner and Comcast.

This BS called Net Neutrality is just more regulation that will result in less competition and higher prices for everyone.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Bandwidth is scarce and expensive. I work for one of the largest ISPs in the country and our national backbone spans from the west coast to the east coast and 90% of our connectivity from one backbone in one state to another is leased from mostly Level 3 and CenturyLink. We would lay our own fiber if it weren't so prohibitively expensive. This doesn't even include the fiber we lease in our core in each market. We are looking to do more dark fiber solutions and we are building out fiber rings at certain locations, but by and large we'll be leasing our fiber.

My understanding is that most of the fiber optic networks in this country were subsidized by .gov and the Tier 1 ISP's got a huge advantage in that regard.

We have upgrades upcoming on our backbone that will allow each card in our chassis to go from 40 Gigs per slot (4x10Ge) to 400 per slot (40x10GE or 4x100GE)

As far as the issues with Cogent, Verizon, and some other players we've been at the mercy of their shenanigans as well. We have had customers complaining about high-latency and packet loss upstream from our network and there's not much we can do since some of the traffic is destined for networks that are owned by the bad players (it appears these issues are resolved at this time, but we had tickets that went on for months while the upstream entities fought over who was paying for what). On traffic that is transiting the networks of these bad players we can implement certain things in BGP to try and route around them and we continue to add settlement free peers where we just go directly from our network to the peers, or through the peer to a destination network which eliminates the Verizons, Comcast, Level3's and Centurlinks as being middle men on dedicated internet access. We were saving more and more money as we turned up more and more peers until Netflix signed that deal with Level3 and traffic from Netflix started kicking up a lot.

Wow. That Al Gore invented quite a complex information super-highway, didn't he?

Needless to say it's a bit more complex than just Netflix and your particular ISP. Companies sure like to claim it's not their fault. Problem is, no one does a full end to end investigation. (At least not the customer service rep in the Philippines that tells you to reboot.)

There were talks with netflix where they would put their servers on our network in every market so we didn't even have to go out to the Internet, but that deal fell through for reasons I'm not privy to. Despite the increased costs that come with the ingress traffic from Level 3 for Netflix traffic, we don't rate-limit or degrade Netflix traffic in any way and in fact are constantly rated as the best or close to the best rated ISP for Netflix by Netflix

Hmmm. Never heard about Netflix rating ISPs. Seems like a good idea.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

And this protects my individual inalienable rights how?

They will give you free stuff and grace you with rights! Any more questions like that and it's off to the Gulag for you, comrade.

 

[Liberty Rebellion]

Wow. That Al Gore invented quite a complex information super-highway, didn't he?

Needless to say it's a bit more complex than just Netflix and your particular ISP. Companies sure likes to claim it's not their fault. Problem is, no one does a full end to end investigation. (At least not the customer service rep in the Philippines that tells you to reboot.)

I'm not saying it's not just my ISP and Netflix. The issue with congestion amongst Tier 1 ISP's and Netflix is they all used to send each other traffic in settlement free peering arrangements where the traffic is balanced. Once Netflix signed with Level 3 (or whatever Level 1 ISP it is) then they started sending more data and basically turning those SFP agreements on their head. Any ISP that charges another for Internet access charges a lot of money and I'm guessing what happened is the company hosting Netflix said payup for this bandwidth.

What I don't get is why isn't Netflix peering with other ISP in SFP arrangements. We have SFP with youtube, google, yahoo, facebook, etc etc. Netflix peering with Level 3 had to offer them something greater than doing those type of arrangements or they would be doing SFP or building a CDN within the networks of all the different ISPs.

I agree the lack of transparency for outages is dumb. I actually started an account on a techforum to help people out because I found they had a lot of legit issues. Working at the National Operations Center I had/have access to everything. I asked my boss if I could create an account and post in there to help and he said go ahead even though it was a grey area.

After I helped in some outage situations, I posted the reason for the outage and got in trouble. I think it's dumb most ISP's keep this info bottled up and I'd like to see more transparency on that end. There would be a lot of service credits issued to customers and I suspect that's the reason they don't allow RFO's to be made public

Hmmm. Never heard about Netflix rating ISPs. Seems like a good idea.

http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa

 

[The Free Hornet]

Due to government granted monopolies, the alternative ISP is 2 cans and a ball of string.

-t

You're in a panic because you want to panic. Supporting NN is asking the same government that did the "government granted monopolies" to fix the situation.

There ought to be more support for community sharing of internet (e.g., as a first amendment right - public/utility rights of way and EM spectrum should not be sold with the intent of muzzling your communication).

Here is one such group.

http://www.sfgate.com/search/?action...+User+Group"

Rather than fight the copyright cartels and panic police (oh nos hackers and naughty bits), you're giving in to paranoia.

Why doesn't the NN crowd call to end the NSA? Or guarantee true freedom to communicate through spectrum that ought to be plentiful? You expect them to regulate the exact degree of artificial scarcity so you can get your MSM channels and Netflix without getting raped on the price??? Good luck. I likely need about $10 worth of broadband per month. More doesn't do much for me. To be fair, I have my 'smart' phone too so if the internet is out, that can do most of what I need.

How much longer will people fall for TriplePlay arrangements whereby they pay three times for the same service? If people have family that demand cable or landline satisfaction (of course, there are IP solutions for that), then I have some sympathy. Everybody else here should know better. Stop funding the entities that defeated Ron Paul.

 

[Mr Tansill]

I guess I'm one of those libertarians that comes down on the opposite side of the fence from the majority of people posting on this site - which is expected with the libertarian crowd, since we do tend towards more issue-based positions rather than just following a party line. That said, I'm not really comprehending why so many here are against net neutrality. Just asserting that gov't = bad is insufficient in my view, and unconvincing. What is the reason that control of the internet should be given to private gatekeepers or corporations?

ISPs utilize phone lines and other infrastructure that was put into place well before the internet existed, and they require that infrastructure to operate their businesses. In that light, they seem far more like a service provider who provides a service (data) to a user. Sort of like a business called UPS who drive their delivery trucks along public (government owned) roads to bring packages and/or mail to your house. Who here would allow UPS or FEDEX to charge them a fee to deliver mail which was already paid for at the time it was sent?

So my basic argument for net neutrality is that because the ISPs have to use government (public) owned infrastructure to deliver their service, they are subject to government regulation - regulation by the people. Some claim that a portion of that infrastructure is private...cool...I'll just chop down the telephone pole using the public easement on my property, or better yet, charge a nominal fee for every bit, byte, and electron that surfs by my house since last time I checked, the ISPs in my neighborhood didn't enter into a contractual agreement with me gaining permission to use my property to conduct their business.

My gut instinct is that net neutrality will force ISPs to switch from charging various rates to charging one high rate. If ISPs have to charge the same rate there's no incentive for customers to use less bandwidth.

Here's an article on Lew Rockwell:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/robert-wenzel/net-neutrality/

My argument against the opponents of net neutrality is that the ISPs already charge based on data speed (and therefore data volume)!!! Here's a current reference: http://www.comcast.com/xfinity-internet-offers. If you want to watch streaming HBO or Netflix, well, ComCast has a solution for you...it costs $90 per month, and at 105 MBs, you should be able to have a stutter-free viewing experience. If all you care about is checking email a couple of times a day, ComCast offers a package for that as well...it costs $20 per month and will allow you unfettered use of any chat room you could ever want to visit on your Netscape 4.1 browser. Bottom line here is that the cable companies already charge based on the "speed costs more" business model. So Madison320, what we have currently is net neutrality, yet the ISPs currently charge various rates, so I'm not really grasping the implication in your statement above.

What is really going on IMO, is that ISPs are seeking more profit and see an easy, easy, easy way to get at it - just horn in on the content that is being provided at the other end of the spigot. Just a couple lines of code and you can increase your profit margin enormously. The bottom line is that the internet has become more profitable than anyone had ever imagined, and the uses for it have grown far beyond what anyone had envisioned. The ISPs, long having selected a pricing model, are now at a point where they cannot realistically change that structure drastically from what it is. They find this upsetting and are seeking new ways to increase their bottom line. Net effect on the consumer: we would pay more for faster internet, or more or the same for equal or slower internet.

If ComCast, Verizon, et al are upset that Netflix is taking up too much of their bandwidth, then they can figure out how much the average Netflix viewer consumes in a month and price an option to support that use UNDER CURRENT LAWS!!!!! In fact, upon further review, they already advertise it as being sufficient for streaming HD movies...what is the basis for this debate again???

 

[jmdrake]

How many people have the choice of no more than two internet providers, because the providers have made private agreements not to compete with each other?

How many people have the choice of an internet provider whose parent company does not also own some flavor of media broadcast company? Time Warner owns CNN. Comcast owns NBC. Do you want either of those companies deciding which types of media/news you are allowed to consume?


If any meaningful competition existed in this market, this would not be an issue. That is not the case.

If the FCC deregulated more of the spectrum there would be ample competition.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=864028

 

[tangent4ronpaul]

I'm not saying it's not just my ISP and Netflix. The issue with congestion amongst Tier 1 ISP's and Netflix is they all used to send each other traffic in settlement free peering arrangements where the traffic is balanced. Once Netflix signed with Level 3 (or whatever Level 1 ISP it is) then they started sending more data and basically turning those SFP agreements on their head. Any ISP that charges another for Internet access charges a lot of money and I'm guessing what happened is the company hosting Netflix said payup for this bandwidth.

What I don't get is why isn't Netflix peering with other ISP in SFP arrangements. We have SFP with youtube, google, yahoo, facebook, etc etc. Netflix peering with Level 3 had to offer them something greater than doing those type of arrangements or they would be doing SFP or building a CDN within the networks of all the different ISPs.

I agree the lack of transparency for outages is dumb. I actually started an account on a techforum to help people out because I found they had a lot of legit issues. Working at the National Operations Center I had/have access to everything. I asked my boss if I could create an account and post in there to help and he said go ahead even though it was a grey area.

After I helped in some outage situations, I posted the reason for the outage and got in trouble. I think it's dumb most ISP's keep this info bottled up and I'd like to see more transparency on that end. There would be a lot of service credits issued to customers and I suspect that's the reason they don't allow RFO's to be made public






http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/usa

40% of internet traffic is porn. Netflix does not serve up porn.

Bandwidth used to be expensive, before the taxpayer underwrote buying tons of dark fiber. Unused bandwidth.

Some scummy mom and pop ISP's used to massively under buy bandwidth and over sell their capacity. I thought they went away with the "we will assimilate you" mega ISP take over. Guess there are still scummy players in the game. What ISP did you say you worked for again?

-t

 

[Madison320]

Bandwidth is scarce and expensive. I work for one of the largest ISPs in the country and our national backbone spans from the west coast to the east coast and 90% of our connectivity from one backbone in one state to another is leased from mostly Level 3 and CenturyLink. We would lay our own fiber if it weren't so prohibitively expensive. This doesn't even include the fiber we lease in our core in each market. We are looking to do more dark fiber solutions and we are building out fiber rings at certain locations, but by and large we'll be leasing our fiber.

Who does your ISP have to pay for bandwidth? Is it the govt? I always assumed the govt owned the main "trunk" of the internet?

 

[Madison320]

ISPs utilize phone lines and other infrastructure that was put into place well before the internet existed, and they require that infrastructure to operate their businesses. In that light, they seem far more like a service provider who provides a service (data) to a user. Sort of like a business called UPS who drive their delivery trucks along public (government owned) roads to bring packages and/or mail to your house. Who here would allow UPS or FEDEX to charge them a fee to deliver mail which was already paid for at the time it was sent?

So my basic argument for net neutrality is that because the ISPs have to use government (public) owned infrastructure to deliver their service, they are subject to government regulation - regulation by the people. Some claim that a portion of that infrastructure is private...cool...I'll just chop down the telephone pole using the public easement on my property, or better yet, charge a nominal fee for every bit, byte, and electron that surfs by my house since last time I checked, the ISPs in my neighborhood didn't enter into a contractual agreement with me gaining permission to use my property to conduct their business.

Suppose you had a highway built by the govt that went from LA to NY. The only traffic allowed on that highway were car rental companies licensed by the government. So if you want to drive on that highway you need to rent from a licensed company. The car rental companies have to pay rent to the govt based on the size of the cars and the amount of miles they travel on this highway. So the rental companies charge their customers more for renting a truck than a economy car, and more for someone going all the way from LA to NY, because the car rental companies cost is also higher. Or the car rental company might not even rent trucks because it's not a high enough profit margin. It seems to me that net neutrality is like forcing the car rental companies to charge the same amount for all customers. In this example I don't think the govt should have any say in how the car rental company runs it's business. The governments only concern should be between the car rental company and itself. The govt should try to stay neutral, and charge for its service depending on cost. The govt should not be telling the car rental companies who they can rent to or how much they should charge or that they need to be renting to more minorities, or more electric cars, etc. It seems to me you are saying that because the govt owns and controls part of the operation, that the govt should micromanage the whole process. I think even though the ISPs are using govt property you should try keep the regulation to a minimum. Maybe my example is flawed, so I may be totally wrong so keep that in mind.

 

[Lord Xar]

I am having a discussion with someone and they insist that the FCC will NOT be granted any new controls/power over the internet. So, I am curious how the FCC is getting more control (as I am hearing from those in opposition of net neutrality) -- I assume "some control" must be had to ensure, and enforce net neutrality -- but anything concrete or nuanced that i am missing?

 

[56ktarget]

LOL this is too funny to watch as Paulites contradict themselves and argue against net freedom

 

[cindy25]

if there is only one ISP or one cable provider it's a utility

 

[Lucille]

I am having a discussion with someone and they insist that the FCC will NOT be granted any new controls/power over the internet. So, I am curious how the FCC is getting more control (as I am hearing from those in opposition of net neutrality) -- I assume "some control" must be had to ensure, and enforce net neutrality -- but anything concrete or nuanced that i am missing?

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showth...or-Regulation-To-Keep-quot-Internet-Open-quot

LOL this is too funny to watch as Paulites contradict themselves and argue against net freedom

What's even funnier is, at this point in the Obama regime, you think "net neutrality" has anything to do with freedom.