I don't understand the logic of ISP's throttling certain sites based on the traffic to those sites.
As a consumer on ISP's last mile lines, I make a series of TCP requests and I expect responses. Fill my pipes with those responses as best you can and charge me for the privilege. If you're not making enough money on that, charge me more for the bandwidth.
Market-wise, why would an ISP anything else than fill my pipe with what I'm asking for?
An ISP should make all the money it needs to make off my service subscription. It's not too far of a leap for me to imagine U.S. laws being changed that restrict ISP's to only being able to charge the end-user for their subscriptions with heavily regulated flat fees for peering arrangements and co-location services placed near the consumer.
The obvious shenanagans that are ramping up here will eventually lead to a massive consumer backlash and a regulatory hammer coming down. People are not going to forget what the open internet looked like.
The problem is that the ISP resources are shared resources. Some day we might all have 1Gbps+ fiber to our houses but today this doesn't exist. Many parts of the network you use to access the internet are common to some other set of people. So if you were to saturate your internet line, your neighbors (or possible more people) would have seriously deteriorated access. There is no way around this problem without upgrading the last mile connections everywhere, which is expensive. You're essentially paying for the most profitable and acceptable internet the ISP is willing to provide.
Maximum throughput and quality of service are not their goals. They want as many people as possible paying for service on a line they paid $X to install. And they get this by being able to throttle their user's traffic in order to allow as many people to use the same line as possible.
What you're saying is basically the same as the "unlimited" argument in terms of internet access or even cell phone plans. You don't have a personal internet connection just for you that you can use in an unlimited way. The internet line run to your neighborhood is essentially zero sum. If you take a huge chunk of the bandwidth, then other paying customers get less. Charging you more doesn't help unless you fund entirely new network lines and installation. They want everyone to have an equal size of the pie. You can't have a dozen households sharing a connection to the internet and all be streaming netflix in 4k. There simply isn't the infrastructure to support that right now, in most places. No matter how much you're willing to pay.
I can't speak to what ISP's want and I do not know what is truly going on here. But, from my vantage point I get the sense there's open warfare going on between these companies. Everyone is using their pipes on the internet and in Washington, trying to knock the others off their game. Net neutrality appears to be one side's weapon in the war. The fact that net neutrality might work in my favor may just be accidental.
I can speak to what I want. I want to be charged for service. If the ISP's aren't charging me enough to make the money they need to make off the service they provide to me, I want them to charge me more. And, if they get too greedy, then let a competitor try to come in and charge me a bit less for similar services.
What I'm saying is basically let the market do its thing. It can't do its thing if we have these ISP's unfairly using their position to snipe at competing companies' streams flowing over their pipes. It's not transparent, and they're going to double-dip anyways - charging me AND the popular websites for using their pipes.
What I'm saying is basically we can't have the market do its thing when ISP's are allowed to be more than a dumb pipe and a host for near caches.
You're correct to ask these questions. The truth is that the entire motivation behind Net Neutrality is predicated on hypothetical behavior by an ISP that nobody has ever actually observed in reality for the exact reasons you describe.
ISPs have a lot to win with keeping their monopolies as it is.
Given the amount of alarmism it actually seems to me there is heavy propaganda advocating for the status quo, for some reason, perhaps they want further regulations that can be done more easily through net neutrality. Not sure.
Once you establish that the FCC can regulate the internet, you can do all kinds of very opaque regulation that is difficult to change (e.g. other guy needs to control White House and Congress or sue the government and win).
Heavier regulations usually favor established players who can engage in regulatory capture, to shape the new rules to prevent future competition from smaller companies and firms that don't even exist yet. Often times they cloak this motivation with justifications that sound uncontroversial and difficult to object to.
I don't know specifically what the real goal is here with Net Neutrality, but that's the sort of thing that happens in other industries all the time. Often in terms of "safety" or "helping the environment."
Your comments boil down to "distrust of government/more crony capitalism" message for me.
I agree, if that is where your heart is at. U.S. government is very dysfunctional. Corporations buy up representatives, regulatory agencies are politicized and made into paper tigers or weapons to attack enemies with, etc.
I don't expect that to change in the U.S., and in fact I expect deregulation and a non-neutral net real soon. Then, we'll begin the slow slide into the nightmare scenario where ISP's can extract more rents from both websites and users. Extorting fees from websites for accessing the fast lane to the users will be the favorite way of simultaneously increasing profits and wounding competing media companies that don't control their own last mile fiefdoms.
When the quality of service dips too low and the costs rise too high, I believe the result will be a populist wave of anger sweeping over these companies. They will be broken up into smaller companies based on function, municipal ISP's will get established to handle the last mile, and there will be harsh regulations put on what ISP's can legally do with data flowing over their pipes.
My frustration with the net neutrality folks (probably similar to yours) is their insistence that we "REGULATE IT" where no specifics are given and is not really a plan, leaving things open to mischief. The devil in the details here is establishing what is reasonable and fair for an ISP to do -- and we then fairness hug the ISP's to death.
You argument would make sense if you were talking about the regulation of lemonade stands.
This point seems to be lost on all people making an econo-governance argument against NN.
Telecom tends towards a natural monopoly.
The power is with the industry, not with the consumer.
It will always be so, because of the inherent nature of the industry, and that is why the industry shows up as a text book example of industries which require legislative intervention to result in optimal outcomes for consumers.
In particular:
Telecom requires large up front investment in fixed costs. You need to lay cable, build infra, and more.
This immediately means that you cannot have a fluid competitive marketplace, as new entrants are curtailed by the costs.
Without point 1, you cannot competition.
Without competition you cannot have innovation, and differential servicing.
> The obvious shenanagans that are ramping up here will eventually lead to a massive consumer backlash and a regulatory hammer coming down
Not if ISPs maintain their monopolies, and convince government that they don't have the funds to improve service if they can't keep their "freedom" to dick over consumers by charging more for the same stuff.
Sure, there would be backlash, but as long as these regional broadband monopolies persist, it's quite difficult for the people and government to negotiate with companies.
As hard as it seems to fight today, we are in a much better position now to prevent these monopolies from gaining more power than we will be if Title II is repealed.
>If you're not making enough money on that, charge me more for the bandwidth.
There's no such thing as "enough" money, only "more" and "less". Holding last-mile delivery of Netflix's content hostage for a ransom payment gives the ISP more money. So if they can do that, they will.
A functional market with non-cronyistic regulation can go a long way towards figuring out what to charge and how much is "enough". (I know, dream on...)
As a consumer on ISP's last mile lines, I make a series of TCP requests and I expect responses. Fill my pipes with those responses as best you can and charge me for the privilege. If you're not making enough money on that, charge me more for the bandwidth.
Market-wise, why would an ISP anything else than fill my pipe with what I'm asking for?
An ISP should make all the money it needs to make off my service subscription. It's not too far of a leap for me to imagine U.S. laws being changed that restrict ISP's to only being able to charge the end-user for their subscriptions with heavily regulated flat fees for peering arrangements and co-location services placed near the consumer.
The obvious shenanagans that are ramping up here will eventually lead to a massive consumer backlash and a regulatory hammer coming down. People are not going to forget what the open internet looked like.