Netflix -> X, X-> Verizon -> Customer vs.
Netflix -> Verizon -> Customer

2 stop off vs. one. That's twice as much of a hit to the internet. And would stop them from paying Verizon only in so far as they pick up larger VPN fees.

Blackberry is designed for with messaging in mind.

There exist today plenty of phones on the market that do have keyboards. Motorola droid, the Black Q10 are both examples of quite good phones with keyboards. We have sales data. Customers vote with their dollars.

. The same is true for small smart phones.

There are tons of small smartphones: Galaxy S4 Mini, HTC One mini, HTC Sense 6, Moto E, Sony Xperia Z1 Compact...

If you haven't bought a smartphone in 3.5 years you are too picky or too cheap to be worth servicing too. The last 8 years have seen massive smartphone improvements. This is what computing was like in the 1980s and early 1990s.

hey, "print 0" runs in O(1)!

But they're essentially in a monopoly position in many markets and what recourse does Netflix have if Verizon decides to amp up the charges or their cloud service start sucking donkey balls?

Verizon is directly in thousands of data centers and connects to hundreds of other cloud services. Just host in any and handoff directly to Verizon with no peering at all.

They do that for cellular. They mostly are trying to avoid that for lad since except for very heavy users extra land traffic isn't a problem. For those extra heavy users because of Netflix its the same thing.

Case 1: Level3 pays Verizon for peering, level3 charges Netflix, Netflix charges customers. Money goes customers -> Verizon
Case 2: Verizon charges the customers a surcharge for traffic.

Work with Google Fiber & municipalities to build hi-speed & wireless that bypasses the monopolies

If the municipalities were willing to fund internet for home / small business we could have a much more rational system in the United States where internet becomes a heavily subsidized if not free utility and so essentially 100% of the population uses it. The costs are bundled in taxes and upgrades to networks can be paid for with tax free municipal bonds. Yes that would be much better. But Netflix has nowhere near the pull to get those kinds of changes. The current group of crazies in power aren't funding infrastructure maintenance to things like dams or the national health system.

What you are suggesting with VPN wouldn't help Netflix. Level3 would just have peering problems with more carriers and moreover Netflix's traffic would have much longer latencies and would be using a lot more resources as it bounced around. The global VPN providers probably couldn't handle all of Netflix's traffic today even if they wanted to. Far cheaper for everyone would be to just host a copy of Netflix's infrastructure on Verizon's cloud and eliminate the handoff entirely for Verizon's customers, the entire transaction happens inside Verizon's network. But evidently just paying the peering is even cheaper than that.

It doesn't matter what the users want. It matters what the advertisers want. They want a big screen with room for ads.

This is especially true of Android, since Google gets their revenue from ads, not phones or phone software.

Over half the Bitcoin exchanges have gone bust. Entire Bitcoin "stock exchanges" disappeared with the money. Bitcoin "investments" promising substantial returns each month were, of course, Ponzi schemes.

Bitcoin is a scam magnet. Irrevocable, remote, anonymous money transfers are the scammer's dream. (Yes, there are people talking about cryptographic escrow schemes so you can buy something with Bitcoins and have some recourse if it doesn't show up. So far, that hasn't reached usability.)

That's why Bitcoin needs regulation. If you're going to hold other people's money, you have to be regulated. Deal with it.

Doubt Verizon is going to tell you the REAL cost of LTE. Doubt you have any access to real data about that either.
Fess up! You pulled those numbers out of your ass.

I have access to some of their real costs. I know some of the people who've laid down the fiber they are using and I know what that cost. I know some of the places they are hosting from. I can assume what Verizon spends on their towers is commensurate with what Sprint spends (and I do know Sprint's costs). AT&T is winning business from Verizon right now, especially in embedded because their LTE costs are lower. While it might still have a probability above 0 that Verizon has covered up their real costs and is aggressively losing business to AT&T it ain't much above 0.

The more likely scenario is Verizon is telling the truth and you are just upset because everything in the world isn't free.

Yes I know how much bandwidth costs. It costs a ton to build and a ton to maintain. It is people on slashdot who think bandwidth is free because they've never had to deal with the tremendous costs in anyway. They want it to be cheap so they like to pretend it is cheap. The same as people who don't like the complexities of housing policy so want to pretend houses can be built for $1000.

Try doing even small parts of what a Verizon does and then be critical of what tremendous service they are giving you for $50 / month.

The contract has you reverting to month to month. They can terminate.

Fine prioritizing traffic paying lots for traffic paying very little.

There are limits to density depending on signal strength. You want signal strength for penetration. Verizon, AT&T... are hitting those problems in cities.

There is an easier way to solve your rural problem. Have the rural government purchase the internet and make it a tax. In just about every suburb or x-burb something like $1000 / house would be plenty to get them fully wired up for 100mbit+ data connections. Have the local government pay for the wiring, or subsidize the wiring and the problem is solved. In terms of rural there may not be any economically viable way to connect them. Cellular data might provide an answer but its unclear if it does, because a lot of rural customers are also poor and mostly unwilling to spend for data.
  Which BTW since you like the analogy of electricity, having the governments massively subsidize the cost (effectively buying it for the population) is precisely how the country ended up getting wired. Starting with local governments, then states then federal as the areas got less and less dense.

the most data you can buy is 100 GB per month

Nonsense. You can buy 100t blocks from Verizon to allocate among phones. The most you can buy on a consumer grade plan is 100g to allocate between phones that's very very different. Once you start using that kind of large scale data they want you buying through an agent.

It's really not that hard -- it's been done in the past for other types of service.

It is that hard. Lots of services aren't economical to provide anywhere or only in very concentrated areas. There are all sorts of services one can buy in New York that aren't even available in other large cities. There are all sorts of services one can buy in cities that aren't available in suburbs... There is nothing unusual about internet. The size of the customer base / density matters, it matters a lot.

. But it's way too much to be paying $20 or $30 or more for that kind of download. Especially when, most times, the *content itself* is also very expensive.

Then mail DVDs back and forth. Netflix still offers that service. That's the way people did it up until a few years ago. That's cheaper bandwidth.

As loudly as they will cry crocodile tears at the prospect, we simply have to regulate them, and yes, cut down their profit-making potential a bit, in order to usher in an enormous boost to the rest of the economy. Content creators, advertisers, online goods retailers like Amazon and Valve, etc. are chomping at the bit to sell reasonably-priced goods to consumers that are chomping at the bit to purchase them. But the carriers are acting as a bottleneck, preventing this potential from being realized,

That's true of all sorts of corollary services for goods. If everyone had a 5000 sq foot home: gardening services, furniture companies, carpet cleaners, car dealers... would make a fortune. Its only the fact that there is a price difference between what it costs to sell 5000sq of home vs 800 sq feet that prevents all that economic gain. If there really were that much economic gain to be had then internet would be provided via. a system where the people selling the goods would be the ones paying Verizon to get access to customers and problem solved.

____

As for the comments about 5g. You are missing the point about the caps. You are also missing the actual financials. A gig of data was often around several hundred dollars to buy. The caps were essentially unlimited based on the phones not really offering services that made large data usage appealing. Even the customers on dataplans were mostly doing stuff like compressed email or compressed text webpages. The usage has entirely shifted. Today customers on a 5gig cap are likely to be not be using .1%-1% of that cap but more like 25-90% of that cap i.e. 100x as much data for the same price.

Certainly Verizon could meter data but retail customers hate metering. So what you get are metered plans with the metering obscured partially. You can't really talk about these plans as if the obscured metering was the real price.