back to article ISPs' post-net-neutrality world is built on 'bribes' says Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has never been one to hide his opinions. Now the father of the World Wide Web is up in arms about the state of net neutrality in the United States. In a chat with the Washington Post Sir Tim railed against the telecommunications companies' push to introduce differential pricing for internet content – such …

  1. ecofeco Silver badge

    It's not bribery

    It not bribery. That's against the law. So is gouging.

    It's "free market" forces" and "lobbying" in order to provide a "richer customer experience" for the "customers convenience."

    It's just so uncouth to say "bribery". So... unsophisticated. And nobody gouges either! What plebeian accusations!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's not bribery

      Sarcasm noted. However, calling it one thing or another doesn't change the feeling of how wrong and how much control corporations take today. The internet itself with or without net neutrality has turned into, or shortly will turn into, a purely corporate entity. It's becoming the new Wall Street. At least we can still view it from our browsers, as long as we have something in our pocket.

      P.S. Time Warner Cable Sucks BALLS !!!

    2. Tom 35

      Re: It's not bribery

      True, It's not bribery.

      It's blackmail!

  2. Mark 85

    Sir Tim

    has hit the nail squarely on the head. We in the US are about to be even more screwed and most of us know it. Which to the major ISP's and the politicos, is "business as usual".

  3. Rampant Spaniel

    There is a different between charging a company more for transit because they compete with you and simply charging for transit. If we abolish charging for transit (which may be the only way to prevent abuse) that income will then come directly from consumers pockets rather than indirectly.

    Whilst charging for transit is legitimate in principal and had been used fairly in the past I don't trust companies that also sell TV services to act fairly when considering whether to peer or sell transit to the likes of Netflix.

    A large isp like time warner effectively operates two networks. A last mile network to you home which joins a second network which is a national backbone. In theory when you buy a cable connection you are paying for your share which is the last mile network. The cost of the backbone comes from companies buying transit to hook up servers to the Internet. Isp's also peer which is basically a free exchange of data, this usually had a maximum ratio to stop it becoming too unbalanced and unfair. Where this gets messy is they also offer peering to important sites, or more accurately free transit. The big question is how ok is it to offer free transit to say amazon.com but then charge Netflix. Then how do we regulate that. I know in advertising one tv station will charge a premium to a competitor, I.e. What sky charges virgin for slots, so is it fair for one industry to charge a competition premium but not another?

    It's not a simple cable companies are evil situation, they sure are, but charging for transit is not really evil. Netflix isn't really a net neutrality issue, they aren't being asked to pay extra for priority, they are just being asked to pay for access like many companies have to do. They had exceeded the capacity of the intermediary companies links and had a choice between augmenting those links or just outright buying everything directly. The party at fault was the intermediary company which sold transit they couldn't handle. Personally I'm not sure which way to lean on this as a whole because I think the cable cos would have peered with Netflix if they hadn't been a competitor, but charging for transit is fair.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      On paper OK, but

      "Netflix isn't really a net neutrality issue, they aren't being asked to pay extra for priority, they are just being asked to pay for access like many companies have to do"

      Is this really the way it works? Let me check (I'm not in the US).

      Netflix's business model involves delivering large numbers of GB of content to end users across the nation at reasonable (but not massive) data rates, maybe a few Mbit/s per end user for a few hours.

      Netflix's content is largely static; there is new content every day, but it is a small proportion of the (?) PB of content overall.

      To my simplistic European eyes, you've described a perfect business opportunity for the Content Delivery Network people (Akamai, etc). Do they still exist? Why isn't "the market" in the USA seeing them as the answer here as they used to (maybe still do?) on this side of the pond?

      What's a CDN? Oversimplified: the CDN company has servers and masses of storage in (or readily accessible from) ISP datacentres. Content providers (e.g. the BBC) arrange with the CDNs to make the CP data available to ISP end users, rather than the CP providing the distribution technology themselves.

      This means the content provider doesn't need to worry about providing enough storage and bandwidth etc to be capable of reliably delivering all their end user demands; the CDN company receives one master copy of the data from the CP (not needing very much bandwidth at all) and it is then the CDN's responsibility to pass that data on to the end users.

      1. Rampant Spaniel

        Re: On paper OK, but

        Yes CDN's still exist and buy transit (and use free peering) from last mile networks, so they do exactly what Netflix is having to do. CDN's basically offer an off the shelf alternative to building out your own global network and delivery system, which are two separate things. If you want to build your own servers but not have to negotiate with every major ISP you use an intermediary company who has a backbone connected to major ISP's. They also will have some level of peering and as they aren't a tier 1 ISP they will also be paying for transit from Tier 1 ISP's. Basically they are brokers and aggregators who do some of the delivery for you but then subcontract the rest. The point being with both these models you still pay directly or indirectly to the last mile network as long as their customers.

        I do think you misunderstand the financial issue here. You state they don't need to worry about the amount of bandwidth, they do, they pay for it. It's not like they just pay to upload a 1GB file and that's it. They then pay for the number of times it's downloaded which goes to pay the ISP's for the last mile access. Essentially this is what happened. Netflix used an intermediary company to 'remove' their data, this companies links to several ISP's became saturated. The intermediary didn't want to pay for more links, the last mile ISP refused to give it for free so individual connection speeds slowed down.

        >The ISP's already charge each and every customer for that bandwidth.

        I already explained above, they charge at both ends of each network, they run a last mile network which is paid for by the people accessing it and they run a backbone paid for by companies accessing it. Please read my post before assuming I am wrong.

        >But then the ISP(s) started getting greedy. And now they still want their customers to pay them, but they also want the companies that their customers are using to pay them too.

        Absolutely false. Charging for transit from companies connecting servers to the internet has been around for decades. It is not something new, the backbones have been funded by transit fees since commercial backbones were released. The cost of operating the networks is shared between customers at both ends based upon usage levels. If you want to pay for a server in your building you pay a one off connection fee and a monthly fee based on the capacity of the pipe you get or 95th percentile billing for people stuck in 1980.

        >But then the ISP quietly starts slowing down the data flow for Netflix

        Again, completely false. Time Warner etc certainly could have slowed down connections using routing rules \ QOS rules but they did not, they didn't need to. The company Netflix paid (Level 3 were the main one iirc) for its connection to the internet had links to the last mile networks. These links were based on a commercial agreement, either a peered link where you agree to a free transfer of data assuming the ratio one way to the other doesnt exceed X:1 (X is usually between 3 and 5), or transit where they buy a link for $x a month for Y mbps. All that happened was Level 3 sold routes to Netflix at a certain rate, the egress points for their network became congested and this resulted in individual streams having to drop to a lower rate as they were sharing the same finite connection. Level 3 could have expanded their agreement with the last mile isp's and simply paid more. Level 3 were actually charging Netflix more per mbps than TimeWarner wanted for a direct connection.

        > Netflix in the end, is forced to approach the big, greedy ISP(s) and offer them money in exchange for what should have been equal treatment by the ISP in the first place since their mutual customer has paid both of them.

        Again, you completely misunderstand what happened. Netflix wasn't targeted. If they offered a service that used 1/100th of the bandwidth they wouldn't have had any issues, but given the volume of data they generate they have found themselves needing to directly buy transit rather than indirectly as they previously did. The 'evil' company in this case is level 3, they sold something they couldn't deliver.

        I'm not saying net neutrality isn't important, I believe strongly in it, but this isn't a net neutrality issue. Netflix's traffic wasn't artificially limited. They weren't forced to do anything any other company doesn't have to do, they just ran into a limit quicker due to the volume of data they produce. Sadly it is misinformation and not taking the time to understand this situation which hurts net neutrality. Net neutrality isn't about companies paying nothing for transit, it is about prioritizing data based on who you pay.

        >That's why Netflix offer a peering arrangement for free

        Netflix also offered to generously provide caching servers to large ISP's. If they accepted this arrangement or free peering who pays for the backbone? Caching servers would have been quite sensible but I don't think netflix was prepared to provide them in the numbers required as it wouldn't be one per network, to lessen the load on the backbone it would be one per neighborhood. A consumers monthly charge doesn't reflect the cost of operating a cable network and a backbone. If ISP's offer totally free transit and then pass on that extra cost to the subscribers your monthly bill is going to go up. I'm not sure that is a win for us as consumers. Then anyone with a server gets to connect to the internet as much as they want for free and pass on the cost to us even if we don't use their service.

        As I said above, Net Neutrality is about not prioritizing data, not it being free. Companies expect to pay for bandwidth, go and check out large server providers like Softlayer, they pay for their connections to ISP's (without complaint) and their customers pay for it. Bandwidth is fairly cheap, usually cheaper than the power costs or amortization of the hardware unless you are doing something data heavy like sending out millions of 2-4mbps streams. What is at stake is can an ISP charge extra to give priority to data already on its network? That is what we want to avoid.

        1. wabbit02

          Re: On paper OK, but

          "Again, completely false. Time Warner etc certainly could have slowed down connections using routing rules \ QOS rules but they did not, they didn't need to. The company Netflix paid (Level 3 were the main one iirc) for its connection to the internet had links to the last mile networks"

          I believe it was L3 and Limelight. From what I recall the Netflix switched ~100% of its traffic to limelight at 15:00 for a few hours a day.

          "> Netflix in the end, is forced to approach the big, greedy ISP(s) and offer them money in exchange for what should have been equal treatment by the ISP in the first place since their mutual customer has paid both of them."

          Not true - the ISPs approached Netflix to try and sort out the situation at the same time Netflix published its speed index and publicly blamed the ISP. At the end of the day both have a responsibility to provide customer service, Netflix knowingly pushed its responsibility to the ISP.

          1. Rampant Spaniel

            Re: On paper OK, but

            It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If transit fees were abolished then monthly sub rates would go up and companies like L3 would disappear which would result in a degradation of service and an increase in costs. L3 et al are more than just aggregators, they also keep pricing down as they can drop a chunk of their traffic via free public peering and via cheaper networks like HE or Cogent (which is probably posh by modern standards) to dilute their costs. This forces tier 1 isps to keep their prices vaguely reasonable. It's worth noting that Netflix is paying less to the tier 1 isps than it did to level 3, oh those mean isps!!

            Sadly it would appear the cant think wont think crowd with no concept of the situation have locked onto this. At least its amusing to watch. It's like listening to my cat debate string theory :)

      2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: On paper OK, but

        Netflix already offer "Netflix in a Box" edge servers to ISPs for free.

        The trouble is that ISPs are generally cable companies

        Cable companies like to charge you $100/month to watch their TV with ads

        They don't like you using your cable modem to watch Netflix shows without ads for $8/month

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge

      That's why Netflix offer a peering arrangement for free, but the ISPs didn't want it.

    3. OmgTheyLetMePostInTheUK

      The ISP's already charge each and every customer for that bandwidth. Nearly all, if not all ISPs charge for certain levels of service. I will use Time Warner as an example since that is what I have here.

      2MB bandwidth $14.99 a month

      3MB bandwidth $29.99 a month

      15MB bandwidth $34.99 a month

      20MB bandwidth $44.99 a month

      30MB bandwidth $54.99 a month

      50MB bandwidth $64.99 a month

      On top of that, there is a $6 a month rental fee for the cablemodem (which you can purchase on your own and then save the $6 a month on) plus various charges for other services.

      Now for a very long time, ISP's were happy to take your money and let you use that bandwidth as long as you did not exceed some number of bytes of data usage within that month. But years ago, most relented and either went to unlimited usage, or some huge amount that most non-commercial users would never use.

      But then the ISP(s) started getting greedy. And now they still want their customers to pay them, but they also want the companies that their customers are using to pay them too. Especially if those companies are big enough to make a profit. Netflix is the best example that is out in the public. And ISP's customer pays for say 15MB bandwidth a month, and the ISP tells them that they have unlimited amounts of data for that payment. So the customer then goes and pays Netflix for their service as well. But then the ISP quietly starts slowing down the data flow for Netflix, until Netflix customers start complaining about how slow it is, and eventually start canceling their service. Netflix in the end, is forced to approach the big, greedy ISP(s) and offer them money in exchange for what should have been equal treatment by the ISP in the first place since their mutual customer has paid both of them.

      Its blackmail. And nothing short of it.

      1. wabbit02

        You have to remember that the "internet" was not designed as a video delivery network.

        Netflix is the ONLY company that keeps being bought up - why?

        1) its traffic accounts for ~34% of the peak downstream

        2) it was choosing how to serve content based on the least cost hosting /routing for itself.

        3) it partnered with delivery networks who charge the Telecom companies to serve the data (based on peering / transit)

        4) It then public "shamed" ISPs for poor speeds (bearing in mind it was not measuring the "connection" just the route that its traffic took).

        Also Netflix CDN and routing is far from static. At one point a network can be peering many GB of traffic through one route, then Netflix may take the decision to move all the traffic to a different CDN at say 3pm, and all that traffic takes a different route - meaning I have to buy a lot of capacity from my different peering and transit partners (who are all charging for this).

        What most people are really scratching their heads over is "why is Netflix complaining about being forced to pay to peer". From all reports the deals with comcast/ ATT/ verizon all offer netflix cheaper connectivity (as these companies are only really charging a port access fee) rather than a price per GB. If you look at Google they already do this (in fact are very proactive at doing so).

        Also worth considering that this makes netflix (and Google) non "net neutral" as it is - as they have preferential access to the subscriber.

        1. OmgTheyLetMePostInTheUK

          Netflix was trying all kinds of things to get around the artificial slow downs that the ISP's were doing.

          I used Netflix as an example because we know what the ISP's have done to them. How many other companies are out there under the same circumstances that have not gone public with what the ISP's have or are doing to them? I dont think we will ever know the answer, but I think we can bet that Netflix is not the only company that this has been done to.

          1. Rampant Spaniel

            ok one last try :)

            Please try and understand, there is a difference between paying (directly or indirectly) for access to a network and paying a premium for priority on a network. (FWIW I am ok with the former but not the latter)

            Net Neutrality is about last mile providers charging a premium for priority for data already on their network.It's also interesting to consider how this plays alongside QOS and network management. You naturally want to prioratise time senstive activities like VOIP, Streaming (radio and music), 'Skypeing' etc over say email or downloads. This does improve a customers experience where there is congestion. The issue is if they exclude video from that because its a competing service or if they were to allow priority for a video service that paid a premium. Note paying for transit is not a premium, it's a simple reality of providing something, anything, over the internet.

            There is a real issue with Net Neutrality and I understand its easy to misunderstand but if you do support NN then please try and take the time to understand how the system works. Misunderstanding it just allows the anti NN lot to win and the real problem is allowed to occur, which is the paying for a priority. Netflix was never asked to pay for a priority, they were advised that they needed more capacity. None of the ISP's were placing any priority on transit ingress over peering ingress. Netflix sadly seems to be trying to muddy the water.

    4. chuckufarley Silver badge

      And what about...

      ...charging twice for the same product? Once to the end users and once to content providers. That is fair? How? After all, it not like any of the Big ISP's are losing money. Just look at the bonuses they pay C level employees. They are charging twice because they can and for no other reason. By doing this, they can avoid upgrading massive segments of their networks unless paid their extortion money.

      This isn't about what you seem to think it's about. The two network argument might float if you in a boardroom or some other land populated by unicorns but from a technical point of view there is a reason we call it "The Internet" and that is because it is all one network.

      1. Rampant Spaniel

        Re: And what about...

        erm that would be an intranet,the internet is a bunch of connected networks. They have two customers, both pay. Yes they make profit but what makes you think they wont just charge end users more if you abolish transit fees? You are missing the point and you are going to end up hurting yourself.

        1. chuckufarley Silver badge

          Re: And what about...

          Perhaps you miss the point of connecting a bunch of small networks to all work together seamlessly and act like one giant network. Perhaps you miss the point of minimizing the cost, red tape, and risk of technological innovation. Perhaps you cannot imagine what will happen when the so called logic of the ISP's is a applied to educational institutions and scientific research. Perhaps you, sir, live next to a unicorn and you are a troll.

          1. Rampant Spaniel

            Re: And what about...

            nice try. So explain, you cut off this source of revenue, do you think ISP's will just make less money or that they will charge end users more? Nobody ever answers this :)

            Most educational institutions in Europe pay to connect to an educational network which then connects at peering points. Much of their traffic is internal so free peering is sufficient. They do already pay. There is so much misinformation from people on this, it's sad, if you care about the situation take the time to understand it.

        2. chuckufarley Silver badge

          Re: And what about...

          Where will the money come from? Seriously? OK then, Comcast was sitting on at least $1,700,000,000 at the end of 2013 and posted a profits of $1,900,000,000 in the first quarter of 2014. All of that from 21,690,000 customers at the end of 2013. Transit fees are almost completely profit charged because there is not sufficient regulation to prevent it. Are there anymore incomplete arguments you want to toss out into the public view?

          Stop insisting on being spoon fed your information and go educate yourself. It's not our job or our responsibility.

          1. Rampant Spaniel

            Re: And what about...

            So you expect they will just make less money? Seriously you couldn't pour water out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. Look at the amount of detailed explanations offered to you and look at what you have offered. You obviously have no experience of how the industry works or the technical aspects at play. You spout opinions dressing them up as fact and you expect to be able to change the industry. I know the industry, you obviously don't.

            Good luck with that :)

      2. wabbit02

        Re: And what about...

        Playing devils advocate: Content providers often insert/ display adverts, so they are charging the subscriber and the advertising companies (/Brand) - is this too not double dipping? The same arguments about cost to produce should they not be allowed to do so are equally valid.

        As for pay - Reid Hastings drives a Volvo I'm sure....

        WRT to network neutrality and internet fast lanes. Many assume that Net neutrality basically means that all traffic should be allowed with no impact, in actual fact the basic premise is that all traffic over the same Pipe be treated the same. With Netflix as discussed - this was the case, just that the pipe was congested so the video content was adversely affected (this is 100% net neutral) as its time sensitive. Therefore most ISP engineering depts want to treat all video (and VoIP for example) differently as it gives a better Quality of experience to the end user. Poor legislation in this area will just hurt everyone.

        1. Rampant Spaniel

          Re: And what about...

          Its also worth considering the amount of money in play here. Transit costs vary wildly based on physical location, commit level and carrier. Having 10mbps hooked up to your cabin in the woods in the middle of nowhere from a tier one provider will cost more per mbps than a 10gbps drop in a carrier hotel \ exchange etc.

          Netflix is talking about transit in well served areas and in very large amounts. These days it's not uncommon to pay between $600 and $2000 a month for a 1gbps drop and $4500 to $9000 for a 10gbps (ipv6 is actually starting to affect pricing as well). If you say a person streams at 3mbps for an average of 4 hours per day the actual cost to Netflix is around 30 cents a month, maybe a little more. This is hardly stifling innovation, it's a couple of percent of the monthly charge.

          The NN debate started when mobile phone companies started to talk about charging extra for skype etc on their networks, traffic that was already being carried. They were looking at a way of protecting their voice income and also subsidizing lte build outs without having to raise consumer pricing. The fixed line industry wasn't on the radar until Netflix started running up against congestion. Note they didn't get traffic shaped, they simply hit the limits of their bandwidth providers and started to get politiky. Sadly people bought the BS. I love Netflix as a service but the game they are playing is just outright dishonest. You don't hear their story from any other company, they create over 30% of peak time traffic in the entire country, they are just being asked to pay fees that cover the port costs and some of the back end infrastructure to support that, the same as every other company with servers does directly and indirectly and hasn't complained about it for the past 40 years.

          If you want to legislate how their business model works you need to do it via a PUC which is fine, I mean it doesn't work as our water and electric companies routinely prove but thats the manner. If you push for legislation over a situation you don't understand you aren't going to get it. If you do, it won't do what you want it to.

          I get that it seems nonsensical to pay at both ends, just take a moment to consider the other view. This is not anti NN, this is simply about sharing the costs where they are incurred. Rather than placing the entire cost of the connection on one end it is shared between both. Time Warner et al are simply not just going to accept less revenue if one source is removed. They will just transfer it or use it as an argument that they need to be able to charge for QOS exceptions. The very thing you actually want to avoid. It isn't a simple situation, but all the information is out there, the history with the wireless companies etc.

          1. wabbit02

            Re: And what about...

            @Rampant Spaniel

            "The NN debate started when mobile phone companies started to talk about charging extra for skype etc on their networks"

            Voda, KPN and AT&T have a lot to answer for ;)

    5. td97402

      Seems you've already bought into the ISPs arguments...

      NetFlix was paying third parties for transit from their servers right to the very front doors of the various ISPs. They, in fact, tried to provide robust delivery capacity at their own expense directly to the various ISPs.

      The ISPs, quite simply, want to charge content providers like NetFlix for access to their property, namely their customers, you and me. I'm paying a goodly amount for high speed access to the Internet. I choose to access NetFlix. Comcast and the other ISPs have been shown to be intentionally slowing such traffic. That is until NetFlix pays the toll for access to my ISP's network.

      Quite simply the ISPs see the opportunity to be paid twice. Also, it isn't going to hurt that this will probably cause rates for services like NetFlix that compete with the ISPs own content services.

      I await the day, when they'll ask consumers to pay extra for Premium Ultra HD Video Streaming or whatever on top of the fee for basic Internet access. Now, should you also happen to be using a competing VOIP (telephone over the internet service), there's going to be another fee for ClearCall Voice Prioritizing Service or somesuch. They'll teach you to use their services for sure!!!

      1. wabbit02

        Re: Seems you've already bought into the ISPs arguments...

        @td97402

        "NetFlix was paying third parties for transit from their servers right to the very front doors of the various ISPs. They, in fact, tried to provide robust delivery capacity at their own expense directly to the various ISPs."

        Kind of, then the transit providers got smart and courted their business to extract more traffic (thus leverage their per MB deals with the ISP). All the current arraignments have done is lower cost for Netflix by peering directly (which is what other companies e.g. Google have been doing for ages). I'd also accept the argument that it reduces Netflix's flexibility.

        "Comcast and the other ISPs have been shown to be intentionally slowing such traffic. That is until NetFlix pays the toll for access to my ISP's network."

        Only bit torent. No other prioritization has ever been shown. Suspected and passed down as "Fact" but not shown. You could argue that allowing the peering capacity to get congested is also doing this but that's something Netflix could have resolved in 30 seconds (if they took a hit on their cost) by moving content to a different CDN. .

        1. Rampant Spaniel

          Re: Seems you've already bought into the ISPs arguments...

          Google also built a global backbone of their own so they could offload much of their traffic at free public peering exchanges (note not actually totally free, you have to accept data in return and pay port&rack fees fees). I find it interesting that Netflix didn't attempt this as it would have allowed them to differentiate themselves from similar offerings (redbox, amazon prime etc). They obviously have a big market lead and a great product but amazon could do them some damage with prime instant video.

    6. PassiveSmoking

      So basically, the internet isn't a big truck, it's a series of tubes. Is that what you're saying?

    7. earl grey
      Facepalm

      income will then come directly from consumers

      It already does.

      1. Rampant Spaniel

        Re: income will then come directly from consumers

        Entirely directly rather than directly and indirectly :) these days transit costs are mostly to do with install costs and the cost of maintaining enough capacity. Whilst you do pay per mbps the cost is actually very low. This is also guaranteed capacity, you home connection isn't guaranteed, it's a shared connection. You may have your own link to the dslam or similar but after that is a contended service. It's likely you will get your full speed most of the time but just like the phone system (pots) I'd everyone tried to use it at once it would fall over. If you needed guaranteed phone access you could pay for it but the average consumer didn't get that, nor did they pay the same price. Contended service equals lower cost.

        When you buy transit you get guaranteed access to the full capacity or a partial refund. You also get support 24 7, if there's a router dropping packets somewhere you call and a real tech reroutes it while it gets fixed. This is well worth the low fees paid for transit. You can also blend cheaper and more expensive providers to get a more cost effective mix.

        Say Skype can me out with a 3rd holographic Web calling service that used 20 mbps connections and it took off. If you didn't use it and just used your connection for say YouTube and downloading iso's how would you feel if the cost of your service went up to pay for additional backbone capacity that want related to what you use the Internet for. Transit fees just help place the cost where is accrued and are very different to charging an extra fee for priority status for traffic already on a network. NN is all about providers wanting to charge extra for data they have already been paid (with either currency or services in kind) to carry via intermediaries.

        1. Rampant Spaniel

          Re: income will then come directly from consumers

          Actually, yeah let's have free transit! I'll cancel my cable account and get a 1 gbps drop for free please!

  4. itzman
    Paris Hilton

    What costs, is capacity and content.

    What you pay for, is connectivity, and adverts.

    Charging for You tube packets so the money went back to the you tube creator minus a slice for you tube for hosting it? Sounds better to me than having everywhere littered with adverts.

    Mind you, on pay per view TV, you pay and STILL get the adverts..

    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      Re: What costs, is capacity and content.

      It's an interesting dichotomy: *I* pay my ISP to provide so many megabits of data to wherever, without specifying a destination. I expect my ISP to negotiate, supply, and maintain that bandwidth irrespective of my use of it (with due regard to terms and conditions - that's their negotiation with me).

      What seems to be happening is that major data suppliers - the youtubes and netflix of this world - whose business model relies on *me* watching the adverts that they are paid for, want me to pay to see the advertising... I'd happily pay for a service without adverts, but while the entire world is wedded to this bizarre business model it seems we're stuck.

      1. Primus Secundus Tertius

        Re: What costs, is capacity and content.

        @Neil Barnes

        It's not just Netflix et al who expect me to pay for their adverts. A British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, pumps out about 8 megabytes of crap for every news story (typically 5 kilobytes). And they expect me to pay a subscription if I want more than their free allowance! A similar story at that satirical rag The Onion (which describes itself as America's finest news source).

        1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

          Re: What costs, is capacity and content.

          That's the issue. The Telegraph is just another example... their business model requires them to bundle adverts (well, newspapers and magazines[1] have *always* been about selling those blank spaces in between the stories).

          My usage model does not require me to see those adverts... so I don't, thereby saving bandwidth and sanity. Find me something worth paying for, and I'll pay for it (I do, for a couple of sites) but until then do not assume that you have any implicit contract with me that requires me to watch the adverts.

          [1] Although I find myself fascinated with old photographic magazines - Amateur Photographer from a hundred years or so ago, simply for the references as to what was available for sale at the time.

  5. Chris Miller

    What Sir Tim implied

    The market works well so long as nobody except the government prints money. That's why there are laws against forgery.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What Sir Tim implied

      "The market works well so long as nobody except the government prints money. That's why there are laws against forgery."

      Works well for who? The 1% or the 99%? Also, banks are allowed to print money. Ask Mr Worstall next time you see him, doesn't really belong here.

  6. AustinTX

    facepalm

    Damn sock puppets.

    There is a difference between paying an ISP for faster transit, and paying an ISP to not slow your transit down. There's a difference between installing upgrades to offer an "Internet Fast Lane" at higher price, and just calling unthrottled transit a "fast lane", raising prices, and throttling everyone else. At 95% profit margins. That's evil.

    Major ISPs deliberately bottlenecked network connections from Netflix. Major ISPs ordered their intermediary to not upgrade these connections, though said intermediary was going crazy trying to get them to do so. Netflix offered to run high speed connections directly into major ISP's networks *for free* to save the ISP the cost of carrying that traffic through it's upstream providers. Major ISPs demanded instead that Netflix pay them extra to carry their traffic at all, and lied to regulators and it's customers, that Netflix was trying to force them to carry higher traffic to Netflix witout paying poor major ISP for all that data.

    Charging for transit actually is bullshit. The network does not incur a measurable cost to carry each megabyte. The cost is in simply keeping the network up and running, regardless of the traffic volume. Modern equipment is very low-power and has gargantuan capacity. The cost of providing Internet service is steadily dropping, while major ISPs continue a farcical narrative of getting everyone ready for price hikes on account that it's supposedly costing more to provide it.

    Everyone should have unlimited bandwidth, and pay according to the maximum bps capacity they want. When bottlenecks arise, the ISPs and upstream providers need to dip into their money bins for a bit of spare change and just upgrade the damn network already. No more bandwidth embargos. No more price hikes when shortages are completely artificial. No more charging people to remove obstacles rather than charging them for actual benefits and services.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Deliberately congested interconnects

      "Major ISPs ordered their intermediary to not upgrade these connections, though said intermediary was going crazy trying to get them to do so. "

      This particular point has been missed by a significant number of "reporters" and "commentards" alike.

      There are about a dozen transit/peering points which have remained overloaded for more than a couple of months.

      All of them are in North America

      All of them are with major ISPs who have effective monopolies in their service areas

      All those ISPs operate their own content delivery services.

      NONE of the interconnects belonging to those ISPs at peering points outside North America are congested.

      https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140718/06533327927/level3-proves-that-verizon-is-absolutely-to-blame-netflix-congestion-using-verizons-own-data.shtml

  7. OmgTheyLetMePostInTheUK
    Unhappy

    What the ISP's have been doing is NOT bribery! its flat out BLACKMAIL!

    Bribery is when someone that wants something that is against the law or against some rules of business, so they pay someone else to break that law or bend the rules to get that something.

    I go back to the Netflix example. I dont know which ISP was first, but one or more of the big, greedy ISP's decided that they could extort money from Netflix by intentionally slowing down their connection(s) and data flow with Netflix. The longer Netflix held out, the slower the ISP(s) made Netflix connections. Eventually, Netflix customers, who have already paid their ISP for a nice wide, broadband connection started complaining about how slow Netflix was. Some started canceling their Netflix service. And all the while, the ISP(s) were tightening the pipes, slowing down that Netflix data more and more. Netflix in the mean time was trying all kinds of ways to get around the slowdown, and some worked for brief periods of time, but every time Netflix tried something that worked, the ISP(s) figured out what Netflix had done, and then found ways to slow that connection down as well.

    Eventually, Netflix was forced to pay these big, greedy ISP(s) cold hard cash to allow its data to flow just like everyone elses data was flowing.

    And that my friends is the perfect example of BLACKMAIL! Which by the way, just happens to be illegal in almost every civilized country on this planet. But it seems that the Attorney General of the United States is too busy hiding documents from numerous government scandals to bother charging the CEO(s) of the ISP(s) that have performed this blackmail.

    1. wabbit02

      Re: What the ISP's have been doing is NOT bribery! its flat out BLACKMAIL!

      I don't believe this happened.

      Netflix pushed traffic over a congested route and the ISP refused to upgrade the peering on this route. Netflix then published that the ISP in question was not serving the "speed" that their customers had paid for (where it just the "speed" to netflix.

      So you could easily argue that netflix is guilty of blackmail and deformation.

      1. OmgTheyLetMePostInTheUK

        Re: What the ISP's have been doing is NOT bribery! its flat out BLACKMAIL!

        The data \from both Netflix and Google verify that this did happen.

        Netflix has also published he throughput speeds for a bunch of ISP's for many months before they went and paid them for the access they should have had for free, and in each case, the throughput skyrocketed the month after they had to pay the cash to the ISP.

        You cannot deny this. By now, we know the facts. Unfortunately, Eric Holder and his department has not had the time to go after the CEO's of these ISP's, due the the numerous documents they are hiding so \that we never find out the truth on a whole bunch of government scandals. But he has probably forgotten all about that by now.

        1. wabbit02

          Re: What the ISP's have been doing is NOT bribery! its flat out BLACKMAIL!

          I usually don't comment on these threads because they drive me nuts, but I can assure you the "FACTS" are propaganda from both sides. Read both the comments from the content providers and the ISPs and somewhere in the middle you will find the truth. I usually find that the ISP "view" is discounted very quickly. The only reason that I can come to around this is its a "Brand" issue. People have had a lot longer to come to distrust them than they have the "new" companies, however I am sure in several years time we will be making the same comments and sweeping statements about them as well.

          From my perspective: Netflix (as all good businesses) picked the lowest cost distribution, in doing so they (either continuously or not) did not take any responsibility for the End to End delivery of this service. Due to their popular model the share of traffic moved from "normal" to "huge", where their changes then cause large downstream effects. In doing this they placed an additional financial burden on the ISP. They then made public statements based on VERY skewed statistics.

          The Google youtube analysis is much better and Netflix have slowly (and privately) changed their rating system to be less scew'ed. Neither are perfect.

          I also think internet "fast lanes" are a bad idea, good regulation should protect all parties and allow innovation, the emotional response to this issue has forced highly polarized opinions which, unfortunately will not allow for good regulation.

          Disclaimer - I work in this area and there would be an impact depending on the eventual Laws on my company. However my options are my own (and are hopefully slightly more informed than general).

      2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: What the ISP's have been doing is NOT bribery! its flat out BLACKMAIL!

        >I don't believe this happened.

        Right upto the point where the Netflix exec demonstrated on camera that if you accessed Netflix over a VPN, so the cable company didn't know what you were downloading, it suddenly went back to full speed.

        1. Donn Bly
          FAIL

          Re: Right upto the point where the Netflix exec demonstrated on camera

          You mean a the Nexflix exec manually routed his traffic around the congested link by bouncing it through two uncongested links - which is all he did with the VPN - then FALSELY claimed that it was the ISP slowing it down?

          What really surprises me that in a technical forum such as The Register that so many people don't have a clue how the Internet works.

          1. Charles 9

            Re: Right upto the point where the Netflix exec demonstrated on camera

            Then why doesn't someone counter the claim by showing the same trick works with an UNENCRYPTED proxy?

            1. Rampant Spaniel

              Re: Right upto the point where the Netflix exec demonstrated on camera

              They aren't using DPI, they would just use ports to identify types of traffic, so an unencrypted proxy wouldn't change anything. A proxy running on the same port Netflix sends video on would be interesting.

              1. Charles 9

                Re: Right upto the point where the Netflix exec demonstrated on camera

                "They aren't using DPI, they would just use ports to identify types of traffic, so an unencrypted proxy wouldn't change anything. A proxy running on the same port Netflix sends video on would be interesting."

                And if the ports are randomized? Or routed through nonstandard ports? Or wrapped in more traditional traffic like HTTP?

                1. Rampant Spaniel

                  Re: Right upto the point where the Netflix exec demonstrated on camera

                  Then they would need something akin to DPI to track it, which would be expensive to do with that volume of traffic, it would be cheaper to simply expand capacity. They could simply be targetting IP ranges or hostnames as well, although it's easy enough to switch with a dynamic setup like streaming. Rather than saying they are or aren't doing it, I'm simply trying to suggest ways of narrowing down the variables to find out if they are. I'm discussing the method not the outcome.

                  DPI tends to work where there is a value added element, such as providing virus scanning for a large network of hosted machines or in a targeted environment, such as with a specific target IP looking for types of traffic. To do it at a backbone level would be expensive. That isn't to say Comcast et al couldn't target netflix traffic, just that the method they would use would likely just be based on rate limiting certain ports or ip's. It would certainly be interesting to find out, but the situation is a little more complicated than simply, its faster via a proxy ergo they are rate limiting.

  8. Charles 9

    Then what about companies like Comcast that have vertical integration? They not only own the pipes but also the content to send along it (Comcast owns NBC Universal)? It's like the railroads also owning the timber land. They now have a natural (and fiduciary) interest to favor their own sources (Comcast will want to prefer NBC/Universal content, the railroad will prefer timber from their own land). Trouble is, this creates a conflict between private property rights and monopoly behavior, especially if the transit line is the one and only line available.

    1. Rampant Spaniel

      This I agree with totally. I would be interested to see how cable companies reacted to Netflix if they weren't also competitors.

  9. Bladeforce

    Thsi is so going to...

    ..slow down technology progress for the sake of subscriptions and greed

  10. Gannon (J.) Dick

    Mobile Communications makes a difference.

    The "energy" to run land lines is supplied by the Phone Exchange. That is one of the things for which you are paying to have a phone on your table. Having switched to a cordless phone - a radio link which requires power you supply - does not change the difference between a service you buy and a Public Utility service which works whether you buy it or not.

    Ever since the forced retirement of Ma Bell, players in the Communications Industry have been fighting over the last mile and the first mile without any obligation to render service to either mile.

    Turn them all back into Public Utilities - Recordkeeping and Privacy would be a good universal basis for public obligation - and you will see the the cherry picking cowboys vanish.

  11. patrick_bateman

    Basically a toll road

    The difference is we already pay through the information we provided to these services.

    The name needs to be changed to, (reno911 comes to mind);

    So we are petitioning for the net-neutrality law NOT to go through???

  12. Brett Glass

    Tim Berners-Lee is an app developer.

    He developed an early (and financially unsuccessful!) app for the Internet. (No one has made money directly from Web browsers, ever.) Thus, needless to say, he takes sides with app and content providers in their war against ISPs.

    The simple fact is that if a service costs more to provide (and faster access to data does cost more; bandwidth is expensive!), the provider ought to be able to charge more. ISPs should be able to charge more for prioritized delivery, just as FedEx charges more for overnight packages than it does for 5 day freight. There is nothing wrong with this... except from the point of view of greedy app and content providers who want something for nothing.

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