It annoys me that people invoke Chinese dissidents, MIT OpenCourseware, and Wikipedia in the context of an issue that, to date, only involves for-profit companies. I don't get how people can work up a moralistic fervor over a dispute between two giant highly profitable industries. Its not that I don't believe that the internet is a tool to deliver education to the underserved, or give voice to the politically marginalized, its that there is no indication that these aspects of the internet are at all threatened. Maybe I'm cynical, but I'm skeptical when these for-profit enterprises cloak themselves in internet utopianism to lobby for policies that have the primary or even sole effect of giving themselves a bigger slice of consumer entertainment dollars.<p>And if core values are threatened, why not have laws narrowly tailored to that danger? Why not just make it illegal for ISP's to discriminate against websites based on politics, race, etc? Surely that'd be easier to get passed, and people would be happy, if that's what this all was really about.
Arghh.<p>This simply isn't how the internet works.<p>Everyone pays for bandwidth, You all pay an ISP for x amount of bits per second, and y amount of transit. You pay more, for more. Unless you live in the US and you've been fucked by the incumbent monopoly.<p>If you're netflix, you pay a tier 1 carrier for bandwidth. as you get bigger you pay for an CDN. Bigger still, you make your own. (YMMV of course.)<p>to make it super cost effective, you negotiate your own peering agreement directly, as its cheaper than using cogent/level3 + akami and the like. (hence why google has so much dark fiber.)<p>The whole two tier internet business, has always been the case. Thats why there is both UDP and TCP. Thats why there is a priority header. Thats why there is QoS.<p>Yes people say that peering is free. They are simply wrong. To peer you need bandwith, which requires cables in the ground. Places like LONAP and LINX exist for <i>mutual</i> benefit. However at LINX private interchange traffic has been much larger than "public" interchange for <i>years</i>
We need a chairman of the FCC that is old enough that they'll retire afterwards. Nobody wants to be the one who pulls the trigger on common carrier because they all plan to work at telecom, cable companies, and radio networks after they step down.<p>Of course, there's still speaking fees.
Somewhat related, but I made a small site to help the average internet "user" understand what net neutrality is and why it's important: <a href="http://net-neutrality.io/" rel="nofollow">http://net-neutrality.io/</a><p>I'm not quite sure where to advertise it, does HN have any suggestions?
The usual and expected hatchet job from a main stream media stalwart.<p>Neglecting the fact the fact digging up the ground to place cable, which is what the customer is actually paying for is entirely different from wiring up interconnects at core exchanges, which costs virtually nothing in comparison.<p>The customer pays the last mile provider to <i>go fetch</i> with the understanding that what they pay covers everything the provider is supposed to <i>go fetch</i> with some profit added on. Then the provider goes to <i>stiff</i> the content provider for a share of their income, or else throttles the content provider which is essentially robbing the customer of a service they've already paid for.<p>Why can't the NY Times put it this plainly and simply?
Honest question: has bandwidth providing costs actually grown very much, or are ISPs just profit hungry and try to rip off everything they can? Because if it's the first one, something should actually be changed for them to compensate.