The Cost of a Tiered Internet 246
An anonymous reader wrote in to mention a Popular Science article about the money issues involved in a tiered internet. From the article: "With a tiered Internet, such routing technology could be used preferentially to deliver either the telecoms' own services or those of companies who had paid the requisite fees. What does this mean for the rest of us? A stealth Web tax, for one thing. 'Google and Amazon and Yahoo are not going to slice those payments out of their profit margins and eat them,' says Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a nonprofit group that monitors media-related legislation. 'They're going to pass them on to the consumer. So I'll end up paying twice. I'm going to pay my $29.99 a month for access, and then I'm going to pay higher prices for consumer goods all across the economy because these Internet companies will charge more for online advertising.'" Update: 05/26 16:54 GMT by Z : The article is hosted on CNN, but is original material from Popular Science. Post updated to reflect this.
Fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, the situation already exists, so a simple ban wouldn't be enough. But in Microsoft's antitrust case, they considered splitting them up to fix just such an issue. The ISPs in the US have similar monopolies, right? So cut them up. AOL Internet and AOL Portal, or something.
No way we should pay twice for them to profit twice though. Screw that.
Re:My letter to my congressman. (Score:5, Insightful)
Poor Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA: "Christopher Yoo, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, argues that consumers should be willing to pay for faster delivery of content on the Internet, just as many FedEx customers willingly shell out extra for overnight delivery. "A regulatory approach that allows companies to pursue a strategy like FedEx's makes sense," he says.
He's looking at it incorrectly though. Absolutely I should, as a consumer of a service be able to choose different levels of service, for example, dial up, "light" high speed, or torrent-downloading-freak high speed. However, using his Fed-Ex example, since when does the shipper AND the receiver pay for the service.
Accountability for traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
Either be a common carrier, or be charged with a felony every time a kiddy porn image passes through their network. Hold them accountable for criminal digital acts including hacking, DOS attacks, defacement, etc...
Either they are a common carrier, or they aren't. None of this cake having and eating.
-Rick
Re:Fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still up for gutting AOL though.
Re:Fix it (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, just being informed doesn't help those who have limited options. And something like this would even further limit consumer options.
Not exactly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, don't get me wrong, tiered internet is still bad, because it squeezes out smaller content providers who can't pay for extra bandwidth. But opposition to a tiered internet isn't about paying less, it is about making sure that Internet isn't like cable TV or radio, or other mediums where a handful of companies or the government control the whole thing. I, as a consumer, want to get the web site that I want, and I want to get it fast, and I don't care if that web site is google or something very obscure.
Ownership Society 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
The profit potential is too great.
Whatever you thought the Internet is/was, it won't be for long because there are too many players that stand to make way too much money.
-Big ISP's kill the smaller ISP's because they'll pay a "wholesale transit tax." Competition? What competition?
-Companies providing the fiber/cable get to collect more. Someone explain to me how it's possible for there to be any competition in this segment.
-New industry segment is born out of ownership. Effectively creating a new kind of prepaid calling cards.
-Consumer pays only slightly more. The perfect example is the ass-raping Visa/MC gets away with. Consumers see only a little of the cost in some transactions sometimes. Meanwhile, merchants get to pay their bank many, many times over.
Ahh capitalism....
Solution: Show Consumers the Tax & ISP's suppo (Score:3, Insightful)
Let the market decide, but ensure that consumers have all the facts and tools to affect the decision.
Big Telecom is a harsh mistress (Score:2, Insightful)
a) Hosting companies pay their uplink for bandwidth and transfer
b) Websites pay hosting companies for bandwidth and transfer
c) ISPs pay their uplink for bandwidth and transfer
d) Surfers pay ISPs for bandwidth and transfer
This is an obvious spite move by Big Telecom. Analog telephony is dead, long live analog telephony. Don't invent services to make up for an obviated technology.
Re:Accountability for traffic (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean fucking BILLIONS of dollars have been made by people making business deals on the phone.... are you saying the phone company is somehow entitled to a percentage of real estate deals made on the telephone???
I call bullshite on you, and you have ignored the main point of his argument... the service providers have been shielded from prosecution for illegal content crossing their (your) networks by their status as common carriers.
if ISP's are going to adopt this new model and decided what content gets to whom, and at what speed, well then sir they (ISP's) are no longer "common carriers" and could and fucking well should be criminally liable for illegal content crossing their networks.
If ISP can't make money by providing the pipe to the customers, then they are not very smart.... And honestly since all the broadband providers touted all the "streaming"
Re:Accountability for traffic (Score:3, Insightful)
How do professors get away with being idiots? (Score:2, Insightful)
Christopher Yoo, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, argues that consumers should be willing to pay for faster delivery of content on the Internet, just as many FedEx customers willingly shell out extra for overnight delivery. "A regulatory approach that allows companies to pursue a strategy like FedEx's makes sense," he says.
So, just how is the internet similar to SnailMail? The only thing I can think of to explain this statement is that this guy is getting a lot of money from some ISP.
Re:Fix it (Score:2, Insightful)
2 sides to every story, this is no exception (Score:4, Insightful)
i have been keeping very close track of this story for the past 2 months now. both sides of the argument have valid points.
for example, consider the telecommunications companies' point of view. currently, they sell more access to bandwidth than they have available. which is fine for regular, burst-type internet use.
now, with internet tv, video-on-demand, and movie downloads looming on the horizon, their argument is, "the current infrastructure can't handle everyone watching streaming video or downloading movies at the same time. if your house is on fire, and all your neighbors are downloading the last episode of '24', your VoIP phone call to 911 may not go through."
so their goal is to get the gov't to allow them to run their part of the internet as a private network. where they can partition off portions of their bandwidth that's dedicated to VoIP phone calls and such, while allowing a (perhaps smaller) portion of the pipe to be available for video downloads and such.
but the potention for abuse is there. what's to stop comcast from throttling a customer's bandwidth if they're using vonage so it basically becomes unusable, then forcing that customer to use comcast's VoIP service instead?
then you have the argument of the google's, microsoft's, amazon's, etc. they know that they'll be charged money to guarantee fast delivery of their services on infrastructure of those companies they're not partnered with. for example, if comcast and yahoo partner up, comcast can guarantee yahoo's search page comes up right away, but google's might take a few seconds longer. that would be a disaster for anyone who doesn't pay the 'comcast tax' and relies on their ads being served up.
one thing the telecom companies forget is that, although they've invested billions into this country's infrastructure, joe taxpayer has had a hand in that investment too. look at your phone bill. see those taxes? universal service charge - what's that for? it's to encourage better connectivity to schools, libraries and rural areas. it's collected and distributed back to the telecoms to invest in infrastructure.
the root problem is the current infrastructure won't be able to handle all the new tv/video/movie services that are about to strike. so instead of investing in more bandwidth to handle the load in the manner we currently enjoy (net neutrality), the telecoms want to use the 'tiered' structure instead.
i'm with tim berners-lee on this - provide either service or content, but not both.
Re:My letter to my congressman. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't think the idea is viable (Score:5, Insightful)
You have the idea completely wrong. Here is the scenario as stated:
1. Google does not use AT&T for its ISP.
2. AT&T calls Google and says "We have 100,000 customers. Pay us $0.01 a packet or we will deliberately slow down or lose packets sent from you to our customers."
3. Google says "..."
This has nothing to do with service providers charging more to their own customers (who happen to be content providers). It has to do with service providers charging independent content providers a sort of "mob tax" to make sure nothing "happens" to their data on its route.
Sure if AT&T does this, AT&T's customers can move to Time Warner. Then what if Time Warner does it, too? Those are the only high-speed internet options I have. And even if there was a third-party ISP (i.e. Earthlink), they probably rent their lines from AT&T or Time Warner, and they would have the same restriction.
The only option I see is this one:
3. Google says "O Rly. Well then, we're going to take our nationwide dark fiber and roll out a low-cost high-speed nationwide ISP. When you've lost 20,000 customers, come back and apologize and we won't take your other 80,000."
Re:Accountability for traffic (Score:1, Insightful)
Let me answer your question: no, you are not allowed to see any of that profit. You are a carrier, you charge for bandwidth, you do not charge for the content you carry. I suggest you read the rest of the comments in response to your great intellectual contribution to this forum in case you pretend you really don't understand this.
Now, by what you wrote, I think you'll agree with the following. Just as you want to charge for content as a parasite that has not put any effort into creating this content, I want a part of your profit that you made on your infrastructure. I am sure you won't object if I take some of the profit of your bandwidth sales. Nope, I didn't participate in building your infrastructure, but that can't be a problem because it's based on the same reasoning that you use.
Ow...you don't agree? And you call the parent poster close-minded?
Re:Two versions of "teired internet" (Score:4, Insightful)
The ISP cannot throttle what they've already sold. This is the Big Lie of bandwidth. It's dynamic on the demand side. However, scaling back based on any criteria suddenly places the carrier into a serious category: judge.
Overall, it's a safe bet that the money is going to the ISPs. This is a power play, IMHO. "You like internet? great, today internet is slower, unless you visit my friends' sites, or pay me". Bullshit!
If this goes through, perhaps the only recourse is homegrown networks, with fat links to other homegrowns. Suddenly, the backbone is replaced with a newborn wireless system - which will take a long time to match anything around today. However, the possibility is growing.
Re:Poor Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody knows how the ISPs plan to implement this Tiered Internet from a business perspective. Some people fear ISPs like the Bells will use this to crush the threat VoIP represents to their phone networks. Some people think that it could be used as a competitive advantage for ISPs to enter content markets by giving themselves higest priority reguardless of bids on the table. Some people worry that priority creates a false scarcity and bidding war that leaves the larger players well served and squeezes out the traditionally vital role small new players have had in Internet applications; the consumer ISPs represent such a huge and critical market that companies can't risk losing them, and everyone ends up paying for privledges. Others have said that optimizing the Internet for one particular role (streaming media) deoptimizes it for all others.
Ideally, a Tiered Internet allows us to segregate data transfers that don't require some level of QoS (downloading patches, web traffic, other non-realtime data) from applications that do benefit from it (streaming movies, VoIP, other real-time contrained things). I personally worry that the consumer internet market is not diverse enough to allow a free market to compete for the most optimal solution, nor the average consumer capable of pinpointing the troubles they may find on subtle changes to the network that the ISPs have planned but not advertised.
Sound familiar? (Score:5, Insightful)
Christopher Yoo nailed it in the article (Score:4, Insightful)
Christopher Yoo got it, and his point is what's wrong with the telecomm's ideas. He's right, consumers should be able to pay for better delivery, just like when I order something shipped FedEx I can pay for regular delivery or I can pay more for overnight delivery depending on what I want. But that's not what the telecomms propose. That'd be like the telecomms saying "Consumer, you're using a lot of bandwidth. If you want to download streaming video you're going to have to pay for a higher-capacity link.". What the telecomms propose, though, is to not have the consumer pay for what they want but to have whoever the consumer's asking for stuff from pay. It's like my ordering something and paying for overnight shipping, and FedEx saying to the shipper "Right then. The customer's paid for standard shipping, but unless you pay us for overnight delivery we'll shove your package in the back and deliver it whenever we feel like it. Which may be never. Oh, and the extra just gets you standard delivery, real overnight will be yet more on top of that.". Of course the telecomms don't want to phrase it that way, because people understand FedEx and the extortion attempt's blatantly obvious.
Re:Two versions of "teired internet" (Score:4, Insightful)
The "amounts to a 'leased line'" connection in #2 is the result of the charges in #1. In either case, you get a comparatively degraded connection unless your content provider has paid a negotiated surcharge to the pipes between their service provider and you to guarantee premium access, and you can guarantee that if they are providing a service that your ISP wants to provide (or anyone else in between!), those fees are not going to be reasonable.
Re:Solution is simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
They write the rules.
Re:I don't think the idea is viable (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this going to stop them? AT&T will tell me that "in the interest of giving you the best possible service, we have chosen select providers to guarantee high-speed access directly to our customers. For web search, we have chosen MSN Search, which is provided to you at blazingly-fast internet speeds at no extra charge."
Then do I threaten to cancel my service? I still have no where else to go...
Re:My letter to my congressman. (Score:2, Insightful)
No, but they do get the franchise contracts that lock out competitors.
Cable companies offer their service as best effort.
If they intentionally drop packets, is that still a definition of "best effort" that would stand up in a breach of contract lawsuit?
Cable companies want to offer you QoS for your voip call, but Vonage wants to stop that. Why do you suppose that is?
Because Vonage believes that the cable companies want to offer you QoS for THEIR VoIP calls, while reducing the priority of calls through vonage, skype, and so on. Given the nature of capitalism, I see no compelling reason to believe that time warner has vonage's best interests at heart, especially since they sell a VoIP solution of their own to their cable customers. If you have some reason to disbelieve this position, please share.
QoS has been running on networks for years.
And this has done wonders for making networks flow smoothly based on class of service. For instance, I can use the ToS flags scp and ssh sets to prioritize ssh traffic over scp's traffic, and still have a responsive ssh session while transferring files. Unfortunately this has nothing to do with charging a particular company in order to not reduce their relative priority for the same class of service.
Personally, I think the answer isn't a law. The problem is that without one it's almost certain that consumers will almost certainly be kept in the dark about the service they are using (just as in any other field, when was the last time food companies happily implemented labelling practices?)
Best solution is for companies to refuse to pay up, and when customers from ATT, comcast, rogers, etc. show up at their site, the company should serve them a home page explaining that their ISP is reducing their service, but they can continue to use the site anyway. Second best solution would be for these companies to pay up, but as another poster suggested, to itemize a "comcast charge" on their invoice, with an explanation that this is the charge comcast requires to be paid in order to reach amazon (or whatever) and list comcast customer service's number should there be any questions.
Finally, all this aside, if you believe this is truly about "congestion", then you've bought into the telco's spin. Riddle me this: If ATT drops 50% of all of the packets from Google to their DSL networks, and 50% of the retransmits of packets that ATT dropped, and 50% of the retransmits of retransmits and so on down the line, how much additional traffic was transmitted? (1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 +
Re:This is nothing but a money grab. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that Google pays much - if anything - in "ISP fees". They don't go out to some ISP and buy a bunch of OC-whatevers. They buy their own fiber, and have non-transit peering arrangements with all of the major ISPs, and many of the smaller ones as well. Because of that, they're able to hand off packets to the destination network without having to pay an upstream "default gateway" ISP.
Now, I'm sure that moving all those packets costs them a pretty penny, but calling them "ISP fees" doesn't quite fit.
steve
Re:Christopher Yoo nailed it in the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Express delivery with higher fees only works when standard shipping is slower, which can only be guaranteed by deliberatly delaying standard shipped packages.
Also, when customers complain about nondelivery of packages, shipping companies will usually point to extra services they could have offered to reduce the risk.
Customers expect their packages to be delivered (not lost) and be delivered in reasonable time, but when standard delivery would do that every time, nobody would pay extra. So errors need to be introduced in the standard path.
Of course it would be best to contact the consumer for payment of extra service on Internet routing, but they probably think it is easier to implement the way they propose...
I'm worried (Score:3, Insightful)
Me: Hello, how may I help you?
Member: I'm having a lot of trouble accessing your Web site through my ISP, BigTelecom, Inc. What gives?
Me: Let me check into it.
[later]
BigTelecom: Hello, how may I help you?
Me: Hi, our members who are your customers are experiencing problems contacting our Web site, and the problem seems to occur at the border to your network.
BigTelecom: May I have your customer number, please?
Me: Uh, I'm not your customer, our members are.
BigTelecom: Sir, without a customer number we can't guarantee connectivity to your site. It's only $300 per month. Would you like me to transfer you to our sales department?
Me: Yeah, $300/month times the number of ISPs our members use, which is essentially all of them! Nuts!
If the telecom companies get what they want, that's the exact scenario I'll be dealing with.