> If some peer is causing massive contention issues for your network

But generally it's not "some peer" causing the problem. It's the fact that you have a million clients that all want something from that peer, and that peer is supplying it to them. And those customers are _each_ paying you to be able to get it from that peer. So you don't have a problem with "some peer" taking up N bandwidth, you have a problem with 1 million clients each taking up <N / 1 million> bandwidth; which you sold to them.

If you have a problem with your million customers using up the bandwidth you have, then cap your bandwidth at the max amount you can support and/or raise the amount of bandwidth you have available.

Content providers pay their ISP bill or they wouldn't be on the internet. End users pay their ISP bill or they wouldn't be on the internet. ISPs unable to figure out how to run a profitable business is no one's fault but their own.

If they can't provide the service they claim to provide at the prices they charge then they probably ought to look into a price increase.

Just charge customers by the gigabyte like a mobile network or a satellite network. It is misleading in the first place to advertise certain speeds on an underutilized network.

This is like running an all-you-can-eat buffet and complaining when a fat guy shows up and eats you out of business. It's a flaw in the business model they CHOSE to implement.

>Just charge customers by the gigabyte like a mobile network or a satellite network.

That's silly on multiple levels (and I'll note Starlink doesn't do any such thing either). The marginal cost of transmitting a gigabyte or terabyte for that matter is effectively zero. Some minuscule fraction of a fraction of a watt. What costs money is bandwidth, priority bandwidth when there is contention, lowest latency bandwidth, 9s of uptime, and support. What's actually needed is for ISPs to be required by law to spell out the SLA for everyone, same as an SLA you'd get with any normal commercial service, and for all shaping to be perfectly neutral to what data is being carried, and that customers themselves may do so themselves as they wish with standard tools (like using PCP fields per 802.1p in the tag control information) within the raw limits of their service agreement.

>It is misleading in the first place to advertise certain speeds on an underutilized network.

The phrase you're looking for is probably "over provisioned" not "under utilitized", and there isn't anything misleading about it per se. Most users have extremely bursty workloads, and they can indeed get what they're paying for when they want it in general. It makes lots of sense for them to split the cost with a bunch of neighbors, everyone gets what they need for less. The lack of transparency is the big issue, markets don't work without information symmetry between sellers and buyers. With real leased lines everything is spelled out, and that's what should happen for consumers too albeit naturally at a much lower level of service. So say you sign up for "1 gig service" and it'll spell out you have 1 Gbps maximum bandwidth which is promised on average 67% of the time (16 hours a day), 125 Mbps guaranteed floor bandwidth (ie., 8:1 overprovision), 1 Mbps low latency bandwidth (which you could assign to a VoIP vlan say), maybe in some cases a burst capability (can go to 2.5 Gbps for 2 seconds per minute), and response for broken connections within 72 hours. Or whatever the numbers are for any service, but all spelled out, measurable by the customer, neutral to customer content, and directly comparable between services. Customers don't need to necessarily use all that or care, but if they do they can make sure the ISP is doing as promised, and the ISP can match its costs to what it charges in a clear way.

>This is like running an all-you-can-eat buffet and complaining when a fat guy shows up and eats you out of business. It's a flaw in the business model they CHOSE to implement.

Physical analogies are often bad when applied to tech.

I dream of a consumer/residential ISP that’s that transparent about their network.

There were issues in Australia with the rollout of the NBN where the wholesale charging mechanism was basically designed to give structural kickback to back haul fiver bandwidth providers (including the national incumbent Telstra) as a way to get everyone on the negotiating table. So instead of needing bandwidth to a couple dozen places ISPs needed it to over a hundred, and we ended up with a significant fraction of the ISP market being throttled by ludicrous “contention ratios” I recall some notorious ones being over 100 to 1 but I’m on mobile so it’s a bit hard to go digging for historical links. (Whirlpool.net if you want to learn more)

The end result was a generation of frustrated young consumers did actually learn a little bit about this due to it being a widespread issue that even helped some companies differentiate their product in the market by beginning to advertise their contention ratios and it genuinely did help them get customers, but it likely would have just been “confusing” a decade early had the issue not become prominent enough that people had some idea what this thing meant when they were selecting an ISP.

Would you sign up for an ISP that charges per gigabyte?

Most people sign up for an energy provider that charges per kWh too, don't they?

Sure but how many energy providers sell unlimited?

> Net Neutrality activists don't even want them to be able to do QoS.

I thought net neutrality activists, myself among them, just didn't want them to discriminate based on content/source/destination? I.e. no blocking of p2p traffic or Netflix. But assigning them a more extreme position does make it much easier to argue against net neutrality, yes.

On the other hand, does that mean that, provided QoS-based content/source/destination-agnostic throttling is allowed, you are pro net neutrality?

> I thought net neutrality activists, myself among them, just didn't want them to discriminate based on content/source/destination?

QoS is all about discriminating based on traffic source/dest/port etc

> On the other hand, does that mean that, provided QoS-based content/source/destination-agnostic throttling is allowed, you are pro net neutrality?

I'm against ISPs being able to offer tiered services that block or slow down sites based on how much you pay but I think they should otherwise be allowed to engineer traffic as they see fit

> QoS is all about discriminating based on traffic source/dest/port

"Source" as in "Netflix", not "part of network with saturated bandwidth". Though discrimination based on port is content-based discrimination, isn't it? Packets headed to port X don't burden the network any more than those to port Y, and this is an easy way to discriminate against applications that use certain ports.

> Packets headed to port X don't burden the network any more than those to port Y, and this is an easy way to discriminate against applications that use certain ports.

The rules have to refer to whatever properties most accurately classify the traffic in question.

I might want to throttle or deprioritise traffic from some specific service on a specific source host and not other services.

Regardless, ISPs should be free to make classify, prioritise or throttle traffic however they see fit if it is for the health of the network and not purely for profit.

I would not say it is "assigning them a more extreme position". Net neutrality activists regurarely use the phrase "treat all bits the same" which I do not agree with. It is a more complex topic that we should have deeper discussions about than using blanket statements like that. If a company has created a new kind of net that provides lower latency for example then of course they should be able to have a higher rate for users of this net. However, they should be required to allow any company that wants to use this special net to be able to, not lock some customers out of it. Anyone should be able to start a company and pay extra to provide users of their service better latency or whatever. This is how net neutrality laws are designed in EU and California if I remember correctly and I think it is an OK way to solve it. Haven't seen it too long in practice though so we will see.