I’ve closely known people who have worked deep within AT&T (and its offshoots) for decades. The corruption of the people that have run AT&T is as rotten as it gets.
One of my close sources who is now retired from an upper level job at AT&T was absolutely shocked after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, etc. hit while AT&T has never been properly investigated for its corrupt dealings.
The only reasonable explanation is that when you do the bidding of government overreach there’s a certain quid pro quo that’s involved. It’s like a mafia protection racket. You sell out the American publics’ civil rights to shadow government and your corporation can run wild with corruption and never get properly investigated, much less punished.
It’s worth noting here that AT&T has a business that’s been built on charging everything twice. On old landlines, they charge people to call and be called. On cellular phones, they charge people for each minute they use in calling someone, and if that someone is also on a cellular phone, they charge again for receiving the call. And if you send a text message, AT&T charges an outrageously marked up fee for sending a few bits of data… and charges the receiving party yet again. Hell, for decades they charged everyone an extra fee for Touch Tone dialing, even though it made their switching more efficient. Between these gouging tactics and the amazing way cable companies have convinced us that commercial-supported or local over-the-air broadcast stations should be PAID FOR every month, I don’t think that the American people are likely to understand what’s wrong here or even realize they’ve been bilked out of billions of dollars over the years.
And of course he is wrong about his USPS example too. That neighbor did help pay for the delivery of the piece of mail because his taxes went to the upkeep of the roads that USPS uses. This actually fortifies the Netflix argument even more.
If corporatists and their apologist lackeys started to openly factor externalities like that into their equations they might have to actually work for a living to find success. Can’t have that.
Pretty much everybody throttles Cogent, because they’re a bottom feeder ISP that wants a free ride on other people’s networks and won’t pay if they are sending more data than they’re receiving. Google “cogent peering” and you’ll find that they have peering disputes with pretty much the whole world.
But they’re very good at pointing fingers at other ISPs… what is amazing is that so many of their customers remain loyal to them despite their well-known peering issues.
You’re talking about “regulatory capture” and it is the norm, not the exception. Regulatory bodies eventually become de facto trade organizations creating quasi cartels for the purpose of collecting economic rent. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever have regulatory bodies–sometimes the benefits of regulation outweigh these deleterious effects.
Does regulation in this area benefit more than it sucks? That is a legitimate debate, but I agree with you that we should be realistic about what regulation means in the real world, not a fantasy world.
Now I understand…thanks. But FWIW, don’t become a Comcast customer if there is any possible way to avoid it. I believe they’re always in the semi-finals at least, every year, for Consumerist’s “worst company of the year” championship. There’s a reason for that.
I have no reason to doubt this, and its something that nobody’s ever noticed because, well, this is pretty uninteresting as far as the tech and business side of this goes.(there’s always a scummy provider or a customer late on his payments or a million other things on whatever type of business you run)
What I find interesting is how ISP’s are also Netflix’s competitors at some level (AT&T’s Uverse for example, Verizon’s Redbox and direct TV combo packages as well) and how they are in a sense, selling customers to Netflix.
Its interesting how Comcast would not allow Netflix to place servers in their datacenters which would resolve this peering issue and its interesting how that is also not an option for AT&T.
My point isn’t that there isn’t a real dispute (Though its not as serious as you make it seem to be, these disputes are old news as you have already mentioned), that you come back to that and attempt to reframe the conversation in that manner gets us nowhere. My point is that ISP’s are clearly leveraging their monopoly over subscribers to gain unfair advantages in the market.
This by the way, does not contradict anything you said. The facts remain the same. Netflix is looking out for their best interest, and so is AT&T. Its just business yeah, its just that, these days “Its just business” is shorthand for “We’ll screw you if you can and there’s nothing you can do about it” so that argument doesn’t take AT&T very far, anybody who repeats it doesn’t really say much either.
If its just business then why does Netflix and AT$T make such a big deal out of it? Because its just business? Yes.
Why do I make a big deal out of it? Because, just business leads us down a future that just gives the ISP more control, the customer less choices, and any new startup a bigger barrier to entry.
I don’t have to dispute anything you said to also say, and have good arguments to support it, that this is bad all around.
[quote=“badtux99, post:59, topic:26691”]
These are actual real costs that must be paid and we’re likely talking seven to eight figure numbers needed to run enough physical fiber between Cogent and AT&T at peering points to sink all the traffic that Netflix plus other Cogent customers wishes to send to AT&T . The question is who pays that price – AT&T, or Cogent? Cogent has a policy of refusing to pay for bandwidth. That’s their corporate policy. Too bad for their customers, but hey, it lets them keep their prices to their customers low. Too bad about the lousy connectivity to most of the Internet, but hey, they’re cheap, right?[/quote]
Do let’s keep in mind that we’re also talking about AT&T here, whose business in relation to this particular dispute is to sell incoming bandwidth on connections with heavily constrained upload speeds to consumers. Their consumer business is primarily based on their customers requesting and getting incoming traffic from remote networks, and congestion on their incoming paths degrades almost the only thing they actually sell to these customers.
Historically Cogent is not great, but framing this as being only a matter of Cogent attempting to get a free lunch is not a very nuanced position. Realistically, there’s plenty of fault to lay on both providers here, and most likely this situation won’t be resolved without both sides laying out money for upgrades. The haggling ends up being over who gets the less-bad end of the bargain.
