Net Neutrality Debate Crosses the Atlantic 277
smallfries writes "The network neutrality debate has raged on in the States for some time now. Now broadband providers in the UK have banded together to threaten the BBC, who plans to provide programming over 'their' networks. The BBC is being asked to cough up to pay for bandwidth charges, otherwise traffic shaping will be used to limit access to the iPlayer. 'As more consumers access and post video content on the internet - using sites such as YouTube - the ability of ISPs to cope with the amount of data being sent across their networks is coming under increasing strain, even without TV broadcasters moving on to the web. Analysts believe that ISPs will be forced to place stringent caps on consumers' internet use and raise prices to curb usage. Attempts have been made by players in the industry to form a united front against the BBC by asking the Internet Service Providers' Association to lead the campaign on the iPlayer issue. However, to date, no single voice for the industry has emerged. I thought that the monthly fee we pay already was to cover access ... but maybe it only covers the final mile and they need to be paid twice to cover the rest of the journey."
Ugh... (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not understand (Score:5, Insightful)
I already pay *my* ISP for my bandwidth.
Content providers already pay *their* ISPs for their bandwidth.
My ISP wants to charge the content providers for delivering their content?
So that means my intraweb tube becomes free for me, right?
This is what I think the problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
The ISPs never should have promised the amount of bandwidth they're offering, and charging for, if they can't actually deliver it.
Someone has to pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Internetz? (Score:5, Insightful)
whoa whoa hold on (Score:5, Insightful)
The content provider (youtube/bbc) pay for UPSTREAM bandwidth with their ISP. This covers the costs of users coming to the site and downloading data.
Then the users pay for DOWNSTREAM bandwidth with their ISP. This covers the cost of the isp downloading data from the content provider's isp.
Is someone getting money from two directions there AND wanting more ? Even if there is no overlap of payments for costs, etc, based on the above two lines it seems like everyone's getting paid for providing the bandwidth ? Or is it the question of ISPs saying "yes, you pay for bandwidth (upstream or downstream) but you are using too much of it and we'd like to charge you more for some of the services which use up too much of the bandwidth you paid for ?
Anticompetitive (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not a united front against the BBC, although I'm sure they'd like to portray it that way.
It's a united front against their users who want to pay for "unlimited access" and actually receive same.
Re:I do not understand (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:universal encryption (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Someone has to pay (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupid 'them' (Score:3, Insightful)
It's us vs 'them' people, and there are more of us than there are of 'them' so let's vote to take what 'they' have got! Because 'they' aren't us and no one will ever vote to take what you have*!
*Civil liberties and privacy excepted.
Run by the state vs run by the people (Score:3, Insightful)
Now we are in an era of "inter-BBS" where the ISPs charge you but also let you browse the others "BBS". Since ISPs offer to host websites I'm considering them as the modern BBS. Now the problem is that some users are becoming competitors to these ISPs by providing services and thus are a new breed of "BBS" and they are making money instead of the ISP having full control. But who are managing the wires outside? The ISPs. So do we give all the rights to the ISPs or do we now declare that the Internet's hardware be owned by governments so that all of the citizens pay for the services?
Like the others have said someone has to pay the bill. If the users start to make more money than the ISPs then they should make sure parts of their earnings go into the development of the Internet right? Which is partly why the ISPs are currently bitching about all this.
I strongly believe the governments should invest and build the physical foundations and rent it to the users. Henceforth the Internet would be a service made by the people for the people.
I agree that this would go against the anarchistic Internet many of us wants but for upload and download speeds and efficiency of resources this would be great. I'm of course assuming that bureaucracy will not kill the whole process.
Anyway, if you really want privacy there will always be Tor networks and the old school BBS right?
Re:universal encryption (Score:2, Insightful)
No, you just wait - they'll start blacklisting and throttling traffic that comes/goes to specific high-volume IP's, despite the content.
Re:Internetz? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now tell me, when you call someone with your phone, does the other party have to pay? No. They don't. You are calling them. Let me slow it down a bit:
You
So therefore, you pay for the phone call. Oh yes, there are special mechanisms which can ask permission to get the receiver to accept the cost, but that is a special case.
This case is exactly the same: the end user is requesting a service (making a call) and someone is answering the call. Why should they have to pay for it as well when we already are.
This issue, as it has been stated many times before, is about ISP's double dipping, not that someone has to pay for services.
Comparing this issue to the case with "Free To Air" television is a ridiculous comparison. Nothing is ever free, and free to air television uses advertising as it's revenue stream. ISP's have paying customers already as their revenue stream. Apples and Oranges. The theory goes that advertising should only creep in if a base cost is not being met. In preference to advertising, if that means that ISP costs go up to end users then so be it - and if some customers don't want to accept the extra prices they might have to accept advertising in their connection.
I think what you're interested in is that _you_ don't want to pay for the cost of the service _you_ are requesting. Think about it for a while.
Re:Internetz? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with your economics is that they're not charging the BBC at all right now because they have absolutely no business relationship with them.
The situation these carriers want is no different than if you had a phone on the AT&T cell network and Verizon billed you (at whatever rate they wanted since you don't have a contract with them setting one, let's say $5000 a minute) for calling a friend on the Verizon network, after all you were "using" their network. Oh and by the way, your friend still had to pay his phone bill for the minutes he used to talk to you.
Double Dipping w/o Return (Score:1, Insightful)
As far as caps and shaping etc, look at South Korea. There are literally millions of people uploading and downloading gigabytes individually every single day to "web drives" such as fileguri, oudisk, and ed2k services like pruna. They do massive video conferencing, online banking, video on demand, streaming radio. They can do this because the infrastructure can support it. They also have dmb, which is basically h264 video streamed over terrestial or satellite to portable devices. On top of this they're also rolling out massive wifi/wimax/wibro capabilities. I can't speak for europe, but as far as the US goes, where has all the taxes, both directly taken from billing and indirectly through government subsidies gone? Where is the fiber to the curb that's been promised for years going on decades?
Frauds.
Re:Someone has to pay (Score:3, Insightful)
If it costs 200$ for unlimited, the providers should charge for however much it costs, not ask to get subsidised by the other end of the connection
Now notice that contract or no contract, the new customers get the deal...
Why should the content providers have to pay because the isps can't market or price their service?
What the isps are asking is to skip the competition between last-mile...
after all, as long as they can sell "unlimited" that's subsidised, they make money...
I really want to abolush that "unlimited myself" as long as the providers don't sell it as pure upstream (I buy one megabit, they buy one megabit upstream, period)
Re:Run by the state vs run by the people (Score:4, Insightful)
That's really the problem in its entirety. Governments are absolutely terrible at providing services to people. Private enterprise is always more efficient--the reason the internet is so fubar'd in the US is because the government granted monopolies to cable and phone companies, in order to get rural areas wired too. Now, though, there's no competition in the market, so shit like this is starting to happen everywhere. The government needs to abolish all of its contracts with the companies and ensure there are no barriers to entering the ISP market. Then everyone and their mother will start laying wire in an effort to undercut the other guy, and eventually the market will settle at a price/performance ratio that's reasonable. At the moment, we have no method of recourse with cable or telephone providers: it's not like I can switch to a competitor. If I don't like Comcast, I don't get cable, period.
What really gets me is how much money the US government has thrown at the telcoms precisely to avoid this problem. Monopolistic greed and incompetence know no bounds.
Re:Internetz? (Score:5, Insightful)
If everyone went to the bank and asked to empty their account, the bank couldn't do it.
Similarly, ISPs have entered into contracts on the basis that most people won't actually use all the bandwidth they've paid for. That assumption is (theoretically*) factored into the price the customer pays.
If customers all start using rich-media web tools (like BBC video), then the ISPs will struggle to deliver. This will mean they'll have to invest in more infrastructure, and raise prices (for apparently, the same service). They're wanting to companies like the BBC, rather than customers, who are accustomed to paying the lower rate.
Customers will ultimately have to pay, whether it's by increased ISP fees, subscriptions to rich media sites, or by watching adverts.
Re:Internetz? (Score:1, Insightful)
The almighty monetary unit (Score:3, Insightful)
EVERY ISP will "overbook" their bandwidth, and bet on users NOT using it to the fullest all the time, hence being able to get away with it.
Do you honestly believe an ISP expected you, as a "home user", to use up your full bandwidth 24/7 a couple of years ago when they started offering "cheap, unlimited broadband" ?
Hell no, they expected you, on average, to use up about as much as they priced the "cheap package" for, because (they believed) there wouldn't be that much data you could get over the internet that might possibly be interested in on a daily basis.
The problem is that nowadays, people are more likely to use up more bandwidth for longer periods of time... be it a torrent download, internet TV/radio or just old regular (but large) downloads.
So now, the people who "run" the show find they can no longer get away with their overbooking... and instead of "getting more bandwidth" themselves, are going after the people who are likely to generate that increased bandwidth demand.
Pure, simple, unadulterated greed and lack of forethought. That's what's going on. Nothing else.
Know what the flipside is ?
You, the consumer, ACTUALLY paying for what the bandwith you use up is worth, at the ISP side... plus their cut, of course, you can't expect an ISP to run on charity, or do you ?.
In most cases, this would translate in heavily increased rates compared to those you're used to now.
Or, you know, we can always go back to the "pay for traffic" model. That would work just fine... but then again, nobody would take it.
Of course, there's always the alternative of ISPs actually getting a lot more cheap broadband, but that requires infrastructure and indvestment, and in any profit-driven economy, this is not all that good for bussiness, especially when the current model "works just fine" (for them).
Re:Someone has to pay (Score:3, Insightful)
Attn: ISPs
As a content provider, I am the very reason your customers pay for your service. Without me, there would be no internet and, thus, nothing for you to charge your customers to connect to. As it is clear that I am already a source of income for you by providing you with the very product you sell. Your customers pay you for the bandwidth they use. I pay my web host, who pays their ISP (possibly you) for the bandwidth your customers use to access the content I provide which is what you are charging for access to .
Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Insightful)
The BBC pay for their bandwidth usage. I pay for mine. At what point are the ISPs getting short-changed in this equation?
It's the typical corporate sense of entitlement. Thus far, they have been making money by selling the bandwidth available to them many times over. The BBC player increases the probability that people will actually use all the bandwidth they have paid for, meaning that the ISPs can't make money this way any more. Thus they view the BBC player as costing them money, not realising/caring that they weren't entitled to that money to begin with.
Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years back, I was the instructor for a week-long CIW Security course. The students in that particular class were mostly admins and technicians from one of the larger Norwegian ISPs.
One of the topics covered was IPv6. Naturally, I was curious to hear about their plans for implementing the next-generation IP protocol. The answer I got was "well, there isn't any demand for it at this point, so we'll wait and see." Doh!
And today, surprise surprise, still no IPv6. Still no decent resource reservation and still no multicasting. You can't even expect IPv4 IGMP to work everywhere.
I know that iPlayer is not meant to be a real-time streaming service (which is where multicasting really shines), but bandwidth consumption could still be dramatically reduced by, say, starting streams at predefined intervals and putting as many viewers as possible in each stream.
If iPlayer and similar services (and, dare I say it, P2P protocols) were all multicast-capable, this would almost be a non-issue. But they can't be, because it doesn't work, and now ISPs are trying to make it sound like content providers like the BBC are putting undue strain on the core network. Nonsense! The BBC pay their bandwidth bills like everyone else, and besides, without content the ISPs would have nothing to sell.
Re:Run by the state vs run by the people (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you provided the counter argument to this in your own comment. It's the high price of laying lines into rural areas that made the government get involved. There are certain segments of the market that costs more than others to penetrate. If not for government intervention, most of rural America won't have telecommunication services. Not everyone and their mother can start laying lines because of the high infrastructure cost. In markets that have very low entry cost, government intervention is rarely needed but in markets where there are high upfront capital cost, government intervention is needed to ensure that everyone is being served. It is definitely inefficient but so are a lot of things that fall under the category of "fairness" or have to do with "social justice".
Re:Putting the foot down. (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely
Content providers should co-operatively BAN all traffic from any ISP or carrier who intends to extort rampantly excessive fees and/or threaten to QoS traffic to/from content providers.
As a carrier, if you don't carry the content, they why would anybody purchase bandwidth (transit/whatever) from you.
Remember people: CONTENT IS KING.
Seriously, how many customers would you have (er, keep) if you could not get traffic from (for example):
- akamai
- BBC
- slashdot
- youtube
- google
- ebay
- e
t rade - cnn
How hard would it be for the people running- the top 5 search engines
- the top 5 news sites
- the top 5 video/photo sites
- the top 5 financial/share trading sites
- the top 5 e-commerce sites
to band together and implement the appropriate blockages?People would be laughing at you (yes YOU the Carrier with the overinflated sense of your own importance) for YEARS to come.
Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ugh... (Score:4, Insightful)
its the same reason why you see entertainment corps fight for more and more stringent, or should i say draconian, copyright laws.
hell, the only reason diamonds where so expensive where because of their rarity. now that we know how to make them by the ton (put carbon, one of the most available resources on this planes, into what amounts to a very large pressure cooker) the diamond dealers have started to remarked themselves with stuff like "real" or "natural"...
this is the same reason why we will not see home replicators put into use, at least not the degree shows in star trek, for a long time after it have been developed. the number of legal battles to be fought will be staggering...
Re:universal encryption (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then try getting the customer services to actually admit you're being throttled for hitting the secret limits on your unlimited account, or how long you'll be throttled for, or what you have to do avoid being throttled. "download less during peak hours" was the best they could come up with.
I've now switched to an ISP with no throttling, but an explicit total useage cap. 45GB onpeak, 300GB offpeak, 832Kb upload speed for £30pcm. No shaping, no throttling. Good customer service, transparency about everything, constant investment by entanet in centrals to keep up with demand. ADSL24 absolutely rocks compared to pipex, tiscali and orange.
Mainstream ISPs have got far too used to having a steady income from grandmas who pay £20 a month to download less than a GB.
Now people are actually starting to use the unlimited bandwidth they're supposedly paying for, the ISPs are panicking because they spent all our money on LLU to extract more profit from the existing bandwidth instead of increasing their central capacity to cover what was coming in the future. Its not contention that's the problem (I'm still on a contended service of course) it's the deliberate throttling and shaping then lying about it to cover their lack of investment that's the problem.
I'd be very happy indeed with ISPs being required to explicitly state up front what their usage caps are, the penalties for exceeding them, their exact definition of on/off peak, exactly what shaping they do and when. I'd also like significant negative changes in these conditions to be grounds to allow people to leave their contract without penalty - being stuck for 10 months with an ISP that's just completely changed their throttling to cripple your service, and you're the one who has to pay to leave is completely unfair.
The problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
See, the move to "unlimited flat-rate internet access" was in a day and age when there wasn't that much to do on the 'net. The average user would read a few emails, maybe answer them too, but that's mostly time without any actual data transfer, and read a few web pages. Web pages which too meant a lot less graphics than today. And online games meant mostly MUDs and some cutesy java games on some website. (EQ and UO and AC did exist, but they accounted for maybe 1% of the internet subscribers.)
God knows AOL had plenty of subscribers who didn't complain, at a time when (at least in Europe) their ISDN service had 2000-4000ms ping to the second node in the traceroute, and bandwidth wasn't much better either.
So basically they sold you a service on the assumption that you wouldn't use much of it.
The drive to advertise higher and higher access speeds, again was mostly driven by marketting. Backbone speeds didn't increase proportionally, or in many cases at all. Again, the assumption was that you wouldn't actually use most of it. Sure, maybe the email with pic you send mom would upload faster, but then you wouldn't do much on the net for the rest of the day. Basically it's more like burst speed, than sustainable speed for everyone.
Unfortunately, what you pay for internet access doesn't even come close to paying for 24/7 usage of the whole bandwidth they advertised, and they know it.
Even more unfortunately, now the idea of unlimited unmetered access is so entrenched in everyone's mind, that it's a bit like an ISP game of chicken. Whoever is the first to not stay the course, and announces that they're reverting to pay per minute or pay per MB, has lost. But, like with the real game of chicken, if noone gives up, everyone loses a bit later.
Trying to go after the providers of such massive data streams is, basically, the band-aid. If they can't charge the users more, then, well, maybe they can try to charge BBC more. Or maybe they can stop BBC from making their users use more bandwidth altogether. Ditto for trying to demonize the users who actually use the bandwidth advertised: unpopular as it is, it's less of a seppuku maneuver than just admitting that the old model is breaking down and they're reverting to making you pay for how much you use.
To compound the problem, here's another thing they didn't count on: your using the upload bandwidth. The traditional model has been that some site publishes the content, and pays for that bandwidth, while you only download it and at most send a few emails and the HTTP requests/ TCP/IP handshake upstream. Basically the content providers would subsidize your broadband. Every 1 MB you download would be 1 MB that some web site paid for. Then the ISPs would divide that loot according to how much each pushed on the others' network.
Unfortunately nowadays more and more traffic is P2P or VOIP, between users which all are on such unmetered unlimited access plans. When you download 1MB via P2P, that's 1 MB that noone really paid for. That's not how that pricing model was supposed to work. It was supposed to be "free" for you, only because someone else paid for it. Or better said, it was never "free", it was just that someone else paid the tab.
With P2P, that model breaks down, because noone pays the tab. The ISP is left not only with a bunch of used download bandwidth that noone pays for, but actually ends up paying to the backbone for the upload part of it.
And again, it's a bit of a game of chicken: noone wants to be the first one who just announces that they're starting charging per MB uploaded.
Admittedly, the latter isn't "solved" by trying to extort BBC, but going after such sites looks like the easiest way out anyway. Maybe they can make them pay more for the bandwidth left after P2P and VOIP.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not very sympathetic to that approach, and that's putting it mildly. Just saying that, if you were wondering what's their problem, there you go. That's what it is.