yes, they come in over the phone line because the phone company is obligated to offer them the lines.
So if the phone company is going to inflate our costs via other services we subscribe to, then in theory a Netflix offering ISP services and avoiding the charges from the phone company to reach us, could offer a competitive service free of throttling which would be a compelling value offering.
I can’t diminish the downside of leaving, in some cases, sole source ISPs with a monopoly, but it is the lesser of two evils in my opinion over a regulated Internet. Having read the 191+pages of FCC regulation, I can also state that we wouldn’t have seen the effect of Net censorship and cronyism until it was too late if it had been left in place.
Also, as an etymological point, “blackmail” does not mean what you think it means apparently. If you are trying to be sensational, “extortion” may have been appropriate.
Over here in the EU, net neutrality is (still) the law. But even if it wasn’t, ISPs would have a much harder time extorting their customers because we tend to have an actual choice between various competing domestic ISPs, and unless they all collude (which again the regulators would probably take a dim view to), it will be difficult for, say, T-Online to raise its prices for Netflix because the Netflix users will move over to 1&1 or some other big ISP where they’re not being charged extra.
Some services might be able to reverse the blackmail game on ISPs.
ISP: “Pay us money or we’ll block YouTube.”
Alphabet: “Fine, go ahead and try.”
ISP: “…”
Alphabet: “Now, let’s talk about your payment for our services.”
Unfortunately, the local monopoly that many ISPs have means that they don’t have to worry about all their customers switching to another ISP.
That’s only DSL, which is barely broadband and often not. Also, only because those lines are under Title II regulation.
That’s makes the argument that we don’t want all ISP under Title II because we have some legacy lines under Title II and that can be used instead.
More local competition is definitely the answer. But it’s not likely to happen. Short of unbundling the ISP service from the physical line into 2 companies, where the physical one rents to any service provider.
It’s not like we have two gas lines, power lines, water lines running to houses. It’s basically a fluke that we have both cable and phone lines that can offer the same service.
Until that competition can happen, some protections would be nice. It’s not like the water company can dictate who makes your washing machine.
Luckily, that’s exactly what I’ve had here in Canuckistan on ADSL for many years. Bell tried to keep a monopoly on new fiber, but was slapped down. (The downside is dealing with multiple tech support ladders.)
Should be the same open access whether over DSL, FIOS, or Cable.
All the people talking about how NN will impact netflix seem to be missing the point to me. I think the worse danger is how it will impact small entities like BB and much smaller is the danger as I see it.
I wonder what conceivable benefit an ISP could derive from slowing down or blocking access to the likes of Boing Boing. Who are the big competitors to Boing Boing that would be paying ISPs for preferential treatment?
Except it’s not. Only the DSL over copper has open access rules for the lines. Both fiber (FIOS) and coax cable do not need to be shared. Even when the ISP was under Title II the sharing rules were not included.
So, you’re back to no alternative.
Not someone paying. Maybe they just don’t want you reading news that’s not favorable to them.
Well I’d gladly go back to DSL to break the back of Verizon and Comcast.
That would probably be counterproductive due to the Streisand effect. If you’re an ISP, what are you going to do – block or slow down all of Boing Boing on the off-chance that someone will post something unfavourable? All right, you do that and then this unfavourable-to-you observation gets shared widely on, say, Facebook. So what do you do now, block all of Facebook just so none of your users get to see the post that says you’re blocking Boing Boing? And so on.
Deliberately tweaking transmission speeds for specific services is possibly worth an ISP’s trouble if they’re dealing with the likes of Netflix. But right now there’s no evidence ISPs will bother with web sites whose aggregated daily traffic across all the ISP’s users is probably a tiny fraction of the traffic generated by your watching one episode of “Game of Thrones”, especially if these web sites are run by very widely-read and outspoken contributors, pissing off whom will likely carry a considerable PR cost.
i’m thinking along the lines of big companies paying for fast lanes while the little ones can’t. So, not blocking the little guy. Just not giving him the fast lane because he can’t pay the same. So the sheeple only see fb, google, amazon, etc.
This is worth worrying about if you plan to be the next Netflix, or a customer of the next Netflix, in which case it admittedly sucks.
No ISP can afford giving their customers a bad experience for the majority of normal web sites out there, which are not Netflix or other data-heavy services. Neither can they afford to negotiate with every single mom-and-pop web site out there to offer them the “fast lane”, nor do they want to pay for expensive extra networking hardware that can actually efficiently enforce QoS based on a huge table saying who has opted in and who hasn’t, and it doesn’t even begin to question what happens with hosted services where a bunch of otherwise unrelated sites share the same IP address.
It is reasonable to assume that the whole “fast lane” business will concentrate on a handful of popular and data-intensive services (Netflix, Hulu, …) while for the vast majority of sites nothing will really change. Which is not to say that for the Internet, statutory net neutrality isn’t a good and desirable property – it’s just that rumours of the imminent demise of the Internet as we know it, now that one single country’s administration has decided they don’t want to require net neutrality anymore, are probably wildly overblown.
Ajit Pai is a festering cancer and on December 14th he metastasized into the body politic.
This seems to miss one of the key points. There is no such thing as a fast lane. There’s only slow lanes and normal lanes. The danger is that what are normal lanes now will be relegated to slow lanes in the future.
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