ISPs Say US Should Force Big Tech Firms To Pay For Broadband Construction (arstechnica.com) 144
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Internet service providers in both the US and Europe are clamoring for new payments from Big Tech firms. European broadband providers are much closer to realizing the long-held goal of payments from tech companies, as the European Union government is holding an official consultation on the proposal. As the EU process unfolds, the telco lobby group USTelecom is hoping to push the US down a similar but not quite identical path. In a blog post on Friday, USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter argued that the biggest technology companies should contribute toward a fund that subsidizes the building of broadband networks. Spalter wrote that Amazon and similar Internet companies should fill what he called a "conspicuously empty seat at the collective table of global high-speed connectivity."
Given that "six companies account for half of all Internet traffic worldwide... Does it still make sense that the government and broadband providers alone fund this critical infrastructure? Is there no shared obligation from the primary financial beneficiaries of these networks -- the world's most powerful Internet companies?" Spalter wrote. "We need a modern reset that more equitably shares these financial obligations among those who benefit the most from these connections," he argued. USTelecom members include AT&T, Verizon, Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), Windstream, and other telcos. It's one of the biggest trade groups that lobbies for US-based Internet service providers.
[...] USTelecom pointed to the Biden administration's comments in its pitch to make Big Tech firms pay into a central fund like the existing Universal Service Fund (USF) managed by the Federal Communications Commission. "We concur with the US government's position that rather than the payments to broadband providers proposed in the EU, such 'publicly accountable funding mechanisms can better ensure that resources are devoted to key policy objectives, such as improving access and strengthening network security, while avoiding discriminatory measures that distort competition,'" Spalter wrote. The Biden administration's comments didn't call for tech companies to pay into a government-run fund, though. The document noted that the US "approach to financing improvements to broadband infrastructure involves private investments, a national Universal Service Fund, and significant public funding made from general appropriations," but didn't argue for any changes to who pays into the fund.
Given that "six companies account for half of all Internet traffic worldwide... Does it still make sense that the government and broadband providers alone fund this critical infrastructure? Is there no shared obligation from the primary financial beneficiaries of these networks -- the world's most powerful Internet companies?" Spalter wrote. "We need a modern reset that more equitably shares these financial obligations among those who benefit the most from these connections," he argued. USTelecom members include AT&T, Verizon, Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), Windstream, and other telcos. It's one of the biggest trade groups that lobbies for US-based Internet service providers.
[...] USTelecom pointed to the Biden administration's comments in its pitch to make Big Tech firms pay into a central fund like the existing Universal Service Fund (USF) managed by the Federal Communications Commission. "We concur with the US government's position that rather than the payments to broadband providers proposed in the EU, such 'publicly accountable funding mechanisms can better ensure that resources are devoted to key policy objectives, such as improving access and strengthening network security, while avoiding discriminatory measures that distort competition,'" Spalter wrote. The Biden administration's comments didn't call for tech companies to pay into a government-run fund, though. The document noted that the US "approach to financing improvements to broadband infrastructure involves private investments, a national Universal Service Fund, and significant public funding made from general appropriations," but didn't argue for any changes to who pays into the fund.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Mainly because such a position will be taken advantage of to become permanently entrenched like a utility. No one really wants that.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
Because the ISPs are entrenched in entitlement since they've spent decades sucking at governments' teats to pay for the expansion and upgrades of their networks rather than have to pay for it themselves like almost every other private company in existence. And none of those governments ever retained ownership of any of resources that were paid for by government subsidies (via our tax dollars). These companies are the epitome of socializing the costs and privatizing the profits. The idea of paying for something themselves isn't even a possibility in the minds of their executives.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
That's actually not the worst idea. Create a new company that provides the cables to everyone at mandated equal rates. Comcast to any small mom'n'pop ISP.
Wanna bet that suddenly the ISPs shut up about that idea pretty fucking quickly?
Re: (Score:2)
The public utility district does that here. The cables are theirs, then the customer calls up the actual ISP for the service.
https://www.grantpud.org/getfi... [grantpud.org]
Re: (Score:3)
That will never happen because it would cause AT&T and Comcast to reduce their rates, and asking for less money isn't a thing they do. Ever.
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They have already been given a massive amount of taxpayer funds to lay copper cables. And now the cables have been mostly ripped out, without returning the funds or even fully completing what was paid for.
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That's actually not the worst idea. Create a new company that provides the cables to everyone at mandated equal rates. Comcast to any small mom'n'pop ISP.
Wanna bet that suddenly the ISPs shut up about that idea pretty fucking quickly?
They sure would. In the US, they fight to stop municipalities from deploying their own broadband. If they try to force big tech to pay they may find big tech building out their own networks, either with fiber or 5G.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
That's exactly what should happen. Divestiture, like when Ma Bell was broken up. Separate the wireline business from the internet service and cable TV business.
Monopoly provider gets to own and maintain the fiber/cable lines. They are regulated as a monopoly, and allowed to charge reasonable regulated fees for wireline installation and maintenance. Customer then chooses their provider for services such as internet access, TV, phone, security, whatever. All recognized telecom service providers are able to access the monopoly's cable plant to deliver service to their end users. This would solve so many problems related to last-mile access in the US.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately for the ISPs though, it creates one big problem for them: it turns off the fire hose of money being pointed at their front door. They will spend billions in lobbying to prevent such a change, because Big ISP is booking $3B+ in earnings per quarter with the current scheme, and still trying to chisel more out of anyone else but themselves for maintenance and expansion.
They can go fuck themselves. Finance building your product with your revenue, like literally every other business on the planet.
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They provide upstream transit, and OTT services.
Quite a few countries already employ such a model, with a variety of different providers. Although the last mile line cost is the same, they compete on other things like level of service, quality of routes, modern features like ipv6, lack of cgnat, premium services like static addressing, level of support, bundled other services (eg tv, mobile etc)...
Re: (Score:2)
I also used to have a service where the telecom and ISP roles were split.. crow, anyone who grew up on dial-up used to have such a setup. Your phone company connected you to your ISP, your ISP connected you to the internet.
Re: No (Score:5, Insightful)
All the traffic the ISPs sees from the media providers is generated by the customers to the ISP.
It's all about increasing profit and nothing else.
Re: (Score:3)
Yep. We revisit this argument every few years. The ISPs are largely telcos in this case, already a set of monopolies.
Actual ISPs get a lot of hosting revenue, services, multi-homing fees, backup and reliability gear/plans, and much more.
Somebody needs a raise to report to Wall Street.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Re: (Score:2)
The EU is pushing for this because to moves the cost away from consumers. ISPs often only have the monthly fee as income. There isn't much appetite from consumers for ad supported ISPs either.
The big tech companies make a lot of money, and most of it from ads, so getting them to pay for it instead of the consumer is a consumer friendly thing to do.
Some will argue that the tech companies will just throw more ads at us or increase costs elsewhere, but worst case you only end up paying for what you would have
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
The EU is pushing for this because to moves the cost away from consumers
I'm confused, how does this move the cost away from consumers? The ISPs aren't going to charge any less if they get more money from other sources. They'll just report record profits and give their senior executives huge bonuses.
ISPs often only have the monthly fee as income. There isn't much appetite from consumers for ad supported ISPs either.
I know that I definitely pay more to my ISP per month than I provide in profit to any of the big tech companies. Comcast's revenue in 2022 was $121 billion. Facebook's revenue was $116 billion. Roughly comparable.
Ultimately, this seems like a ridiculous idea to me. All the players using the Internet get on the Internet through an Internet Service Provider, who they pay some sort of subscription fee to. Home users do and the big tech companies do. There should not be special mandated fees paid to the ISPs beyond that. If they want to have a tax scheme where they tax the big tech companies to cover infrastructure costs, I suppose they can do that, but taxes that go directly to private companies or indirectly by paying for infrastructure than then gets handed to those private companies is just wrong. If they tax the big tech companies to build out Internet infrastructure, that infrastructure should belong to the public with equal access to anyone who wants it.
Re: (Score:2)
There are functional markets for ISPs in the EU, so yes they will charge less.
Many countries have local loop unbundling, so the owner of the lines has to sell access to all ISPs at the same price. No local monopoly like the US.
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Where the EU might differ from the US however is the fact that once the EU subscribers wake up and realize they are being charged twice for the same product they'll demand their legislators stop the price hikes. The US subscribers will simply rollover and start crying about "inflation" again....
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
The EU is pushing for this because many of the companies that would have to pay up are outside of the EU.
Re: (Score:2)
It's the EU subsidiaries that would pay.
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The EU is pushing for this because to moves the cost away from consumers.
No, the EU *was* pushing for this because it is not immune from stupid lobbying. Nothing more, nothing less. But in any case the EU didn't push anything one way or the other. The EU got lobbied, started a consultation process, and the EU's own telecom regulator come out against the proposal. It is all but dead.
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Indeed. For society to work well, transporting data packets must be a commodity, no matter where they eventually go.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about "No" (Score:5, Insightful)
They're called taxes and infrastructure subsidies. The problem here, oversimplified, are twofold:
1. We already paid "Big Telco" billions for infrastructure and they pissed it away.
2. We allow all companies to not pay their fair share and thus the revenues are down.
Governing and taxation are broken.
Re: (Score:3)
Right, let's first demand the billions from 1. to be returned (as the infrastructure hasn't been delivered fully nor up to spec), then let's ask the ISPs about double dipping.
ISP should not own Comcast like comcast as well TV (Score:2)
ISP should not own content like Comcast that also have cable TV.
Comcast caps are in part to make people buy there cable tv vs getting an IPTV service.
Re: What about "No" (Score:2)
bullshit forcing everyone to be dependent upon Google for email
Don't tie your email to your ISP, that's just stupid. Otherwise whenever you move you lose your email address. Email never should have been tied to ISPs to begin with.
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Don't tie your email to your ISP, that's just stupid.
Thanks for the absurdly outdated advice. That hasn't been a problem for ages, thanks in no small part to early webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail and the realization that it's better to let your users keep their email than holding it hostage in an attempt to keep them from changing providers. While most ISPs still offer email, the vast majority will let you keep your address after you cancel service. Though I can't imagine anyone under 40 even being aware that their ISP provides email, let alone
Re:What about "No" (Score:5, Informative)
No, residential customers very rarely, except for geeks, want to run any sort of server at home
Tell me you're a boring nerd who lives in your mom's basement without saying it. LOTS of people run servers, whether NAS appliances, Minecraft servers, PLEX servers, or any number of remotely-accessible video cameras or streaming devices from their home connection. "Servers" doesn't mean a rack full of Proxmox boxes and advanced *NIX VMs in your house.
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Increasingly ISPs are moving towards CGNAT for legacy IP, and they don't really have a choice in the matter, without more rapid deployment of IPv6 it's going to become impossible to run a server at home and you'll end up just being a client.
There are also many other things which require inbound connections - like p2p, voip etc. The NAT workarounds for these things typically involve a centralised server - do you really want your CCTV feeds going through a server in china? Do you really want your devices to s
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Increasingly ISPs are moving towards CGNAT for legacy IP, and they don't really have a choice in the matter,
Of course they do. They chose *not* to deploy IPv6.
Why? What better way to squeeze more money out of those people trying run servers than to make the connection completely impossible on their end without "special considerations" being made and having a "technical limitation" backing it?
The only way that will get fixed is once the CGNAT is exhausted of it's IP space. Then they'll have to switch over to something else. That or a regulator steps in once too many connections to the NSA stop working as inte
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Contextually those are EXACTLY the "servers" that SHOULD be talked about. You should have a 'cloud' service in your home, under your nominal control, secure by design ( i know funny/sad) but yours to decide who accesses it.
OF course, security is the nub of it, and ISPs particularly are frightened of this prospect, with exploited mail servers spewing billions of unwanted email messages daily, private web servers delivering all manner of malware constantly, and, well, yes, lost revenue.
Individual control your
Re:What about "No" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty fucking sure the blocking of port 25 isn't done on a whim.
I'm pretty sure it is. Blocking port 25 incoming is totally different from blocking outgoing.
Everyone DECIDED to go with Google for email because Hotmail gave you 10MB of storage and you had to delete emails and Gmail gave you 1GB.
It's sad that the "everything must be free" race to the bottom was able to so completely destroy this industry. Almost as sad as SMTP email itself being unfit for purpose.
This is a serious disconnect with reality. 99% of users don't want to do any of that. 99.9998% of internet users never even access usenet. Are you proposing everyone have UNIX a UUCP their Usenet server?
I've tried to run an email server. It's a thing you have to do periodically, which I have no interest in doing. I don't want to be bothered keeping things patched and only realizing something's broken because of any issue that may arise (and lose emails because of that).
No, residential customers very rarely, except for geeks, want to run any sort of server at home
Your UID tells us your age, your unixism, and your despise for "stupid new apps, no one needs any other language than C". You yearn for the good ol' days. Running your own servers at home may be a hobby for you, but rest assured, it's not for MOST people out there. Most people can't even fix their own printer and you expect them to run and patch an email server? Get out.
Listening to this makes me sad. The Internet is designed to be a network of peers not a network of spectators. Opportunity costs paid out to punt responsibility for everything to a handful of sleazy giants were enormous.
Any model can be made to work. It's just a question of what you invest in. The burden and competence required to run services can easily be pushed down and made accessible to the masses. For example when kids play on their game consoles PNP machinery provides a means of accepting and forwarding incoming connections automatically without anyone having to fuck around with technology.
The problem with always following the path of least resistance is you tend to end up in whatever ditch (local optimum) that exists along the way.
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Sure, but the peers are designed to be networks. It's the internet.
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Sure, but the peers are designed to be networks. It's the internet.
And? Networks can have a single node. Of course, the network behind a typical household router these days does not usually have a single node. It has many. Thanks to the currently broken Internet we're using, where everything is behind Network Address Translation, the functionality of those devices is broken in ways that lead inevitably to the control of so-called "big tech". Consider, for example, if you want to have a video chat with your next-door neighbor. Your device does not contact their device. Inst
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Isn't arguing with NAT a bit of tilting at windmills?
IPv6 adoption is about stalled. Most consumer network devices still don't have a stack. It's dead, Jim. The window to retool to v6 came and went. I blame the incompatible design. It was like they had a magic wand to reconstruct the infrastructure, not realizing that once it required significant capital expenditure and mindshare amongst the general public, it wasn't going to fly. If it had been v4 compatible, it would already have succeeded.
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Live IPv6 usage is over 40% globally, and much higher in some countries. Actual ISP support is somewhat higher but some users have it turned off or are using legacy equipment etc. It's not so much a lack of support, but a lack of people realising why they need IPv6 and demanding it.
Without IPv6 we are destined to an even worse dystopia, where every user is behind CGNAT operated by the ISP and is only able to be a spectator of services controlled by a handful of corporations. It's back to the days of AOL and
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The actual packet volume is under 5%.
The 40% number is achieved by infrastructure and mobile carriers, not by end users changing over.
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Isn't arguing with NAT a bit of tilting at windmills?
Not really. Full IPV6 adoption may take a very long time though. What we need to watch out for is that we don't all still end up behind NAT even after IPV6 adoption. There are plenty of forces with an interest in maintaining that status quo. We have not gotten to the saturation point where this matters yet, but someday we're going to end up in a fight with entrenched interests who publicly demonize the idea of letting everyone have a full Internet connection the same way the car companies are currently try
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I think we lost the battle you're describing by the early 2000s, if not sooner. Blame botnets or greedy ISPs, it's all the same.
The good news is that the kind of hosting we'd like to do from home can be had for very little each month. Even if you just use it as a redirector to your home system.
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Isn't arguing with NAT a bit of tilting at windmills?
Global addressability is necessary to maintaining a network in which each peer on the network has the same access. In the land of CGN people can lose the capability to communicate privately amongst themselves requiring everything to be routed through publically addressable intermediaries. Cost and latency of services are also increased as keeping state is significantly more expensive than simply forwarding packets.
Even partial deployment of IPv6 is a win because it offloads traffic from CGNs.
IPv6 adoption is about stalled. Most consumer network devices still don't have a stack. It's dead, Jim.
There isn't a
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You need to read this. [apenwarr.ca]
In summary, the problems have already been dealt with. IPv6 will never see fruition as it currently stands because the solutions were already found. I work for the single largest network in the world. We had planned IPv6 implementation for over 20 years. The plans are out of date and ignored at this point. It's never going to happen because they couldn't even stick to their acquisition policies of only devices with IPv6 stacks.
Your belief that all consumer network devices have a s
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Sure, a network can be a single node, and you're quite welcome to set that up if you want. Most people don't, and it doesn't matter if they're your grandmother, a small business or a multi-national. You probably don't want to either, or you would have set yourself up that way already.
Your actual problem seems to be that you're on the wrong network. That's probably because you don't have much choice, and that's the actual problem. But the US seems to have a bad habit of taking important public services, gran
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Sure, a network can be a single node, and you're quite welcome to set that up if you want. Most people don't, and it doesn't matter if they're your grandmother, a small business or a multi-national. You probably don't want to either, or you would have set yourself up that way already.
I've set up plenty of networks of various kinds. I still only have consumer "internet" at home because a ridiculous premium is charged to have a real Internet connection (billed as a "business" connection). My point though, was that you said that "Sure, but the peers are designed to be networks. It's the internet.", but the Internet does not have some sort of rigid tree model with a flat topology. In other words, connections can be to other branches, but they can also be to leaves.
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The OP was going on about how the internet was designed to be peer to peer, and so we should all be able to run our own e-mail servers on our PCs. The Internet was designed to be peer to peer, where the peers are networks. It's still like that. That design is not an argument for having every PC as a peer.
Perhaps you didn't read the OPs post, or perhaps you're making the common error of logic where you assume equivalence where only implication (or the lack of it) was stated.
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Sure, but the peers are designed to be networks. It's the internet.
By peers I am referring to source and destination addresses in an Internet packet rather than "peering".
Re: What about "No" (Score:2)
It's sad that the "everything must be free" race to the bottom was able to so completely destroy this industry. Almost as sad as SMTP email itself being unfit for purpose.
How? I've been using proton for over a year now and it works really well. Even better than Gmail and certainly better than POP servers that ISPs used to run back when it was common. Even better, using your own domain is included as a basic feature, meaning if I ever don't like them, I don't have to change my email address to switch to somebody else. Decoupling email from ISPs has been nothing but a benefit for exactly this reason, and you're an idiot of you think they wouldn't be doing what Google is doing
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No, residential customers very rarely, except for geeks, want to run any sort of server at home
Look if you want a shitty sub par service, you install a shitty sub par service. Stop trying to speak for anyone else. Not all of us are interested in participating in your race to the bottom.
Just another shit-show (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to see how any of this really matters, since it's merely about the swirls and eddies and temporary re-distributions of wealth at the top of the economic pyramid. In the end it all comes from us folks lower down in the hierarchy.
The only sense in which it's in any way significant, is in the number of "frictional losses" as the money moves through more hands and longer paths. In both electrical and mechanical systems we try to minimize parasitic losses when moving energy from one place to another. By contrast, the economy seems to be founded on the principal of generating as much waste "heat" as possible as money moves from one place to another. The economy as we know it is largely predicated on parasitic losses.
Re:Just another shit-show (Score:5, Interesting)
It matters because how we resolve issues like this affects how much economic benefit consumers receive.
Yes, economic inequality matters but so too does the size of the pie. It's a fuckton better to be relatively low on the economic hierarchy in 2023 than it was in 1923 or 1823. And, as we saw with the soviet union, not all economic rules produce the same degree of economic growth.
I want a world where I get to benefit from neat new websites and services which make my life better. If you burden these new technologies with all sorts of extra fees that the ISPs will use to pad their own pockets then we're less likely to get these improvements in our lives.
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It matters because how we resolve issues like this affects how much economic benefit consumers receive.
Yes, economic inequality matters but so too does the size of the pie. It's a fuckton better to be relatively low on the economic hierarchy in 2023 than it was in 1923 or 1823. And, as we saw with the soviet union, not all economic rules produce the same degree of economic growth.
Good point - thanks.
I want a world where I get to benefit from neat new websites and services which make my life better. If you burden these new technologies with all sorts of extra fees that the ISPs will use to pad their own pockets then we're less likely to get these improvements in our lives.
Also a good point. It reminds me of my belief that ISP's and the like are essential infrastructure and ought to be nationalized. That would massively reduce the 'frictional loss' associated with their gouging and deceptive pricing.
BTW, I visited your blog and found only a blank page. Is that a demonstration of "rejecting reality", or is something amiss? I suppose the two aren't mutually exclusive...
Charge by bandwdth (Score:2)
Re:Charge by bandwdth (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Charge by bandwdth (Score:5, Insightful)
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Once telco/ISPs attach to the Big Tech teat, it's all over for net neutrality. You will never ween ISPs off that money stream and then big tech will use their foot in the door to leverage it open more and more until they own the ISPs, if not outright, then by threat of restricting the money hose.
This is such a bad road to go down, I can't even believe that anyone thinks it is a good idea.
It's almost transparently a play by Big Tech to own the pipe.
Re: (Score:2)
Charge them by how much bandwidth they use,
That is already a thing. Look into peering pricing. Anything else you want that's already happening?
Re: Charge by bandwdth (Score:2)
Re: Charge by bandwdth (Score:5, Insightful)
They... already are.
Everyone pays for their internet connection - both the content provider and the content consumer. The ISPs pay each other for peering with each other, as well. There is literally nothing about the current connectivity schema between content provider to content consumer that isn't already monetized at every step. The consumer-side ISPs are just getting greedy. If they're not getting paid enough to maintain connectivity between the providers' networks and their consuming customers, they need to adjust rates they charge either side. Getting a 3rd party (read: content providers) to pay for some portion of the consumer-side networks makes zero sense.
"Hey, there, retail stores! This is the local, municipal government from the next town over, here. We noticed an 'excessive' amount of traffic from our citizens going to/from your stores and want you to pay part of the upkeep on the residential roads in our town. Yeah, we know you don't have a presence out this way, but it's all your fault our roads are more travelled than we planned for. We simply cannot cover these costs. Wait... You say you pay the taxes imposed by your local, municipal government already and you want US to charge our residents more taxes, instead? We can't do that - they'd leave us for a different town! Oh, wait. No they won't - we're the only residential neighborhood around. In fact, we CAN do that, ARE doing that, AND we still want to charge you because, we feel, it's still all your fault so we can get some extra money."
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It's far worse than that. Mainly the telco providers are upset that upgrading and maintaining infrastructure is expensive and cuts into their >90% profit margins, therefore they want someone else to pay it because costs aren't something they feel obligated to pay. Trying to force a subsidy from other companies only distantly related to them is simply the only revenue model they haven't tapped yet.
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> Charge them by how much bandwidth they use
YouTube's and Netflix's ISPs almost certainly do exactly that. Commercial ISPs usually charge in either or both of two ways: A guaranteed rate and burst rate, and/or the "lowest 95%" of actual usage. It's only residential ISPs that pull shenanigans like "up to" rates (which you'll only ever actually see at 3am on xmas or New Years day.) over provisioning, and slowdowns after you hit a (sometimes invisible) cap.
Even if you accept this notion that client ISPs
Fuck No. Fuck ISPs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay for your own fucking install and maintenance. You already try to charge homeowners thousands of dollars to run 30ft of coax into their house. You already charge *insane* rates to run a junction box into a subdivision. Fuck off and fix your own business model, it's not your customers job to pay more so you can keep your business running.
Also, as long as Comcast is paying their CEO $32m annually, they shouldn't receive a cent of expansion funds or subsidies from the government. They should also be taken to task by the courts for lying to the FCC about supply coverage areas to get more of said subsidies and future spectrum allocations.
Yes (Score:5, Informative)
But hear me out.
Back when our phone company was privatized, what they did was they split infrastructure from the "business end", i.e. they split the "cable company" from the "phone service" part. And the "cables", since we all already paid for them with our taxes, went into a tightly regulated company that now has to provide those cables to any company wanting to provide telephone (and in extension, ISP) services to anyone. And while they were at it, they did something very similar with the radio spectrum and the cell towers.
The result is that in this rather small country (about the size of South Carolina) we have (IIRC) 5 cell providers and more ISPs than I can name. Off the top of my head, I know at least 4, with a LOT of local providers that provide services for a few provinces.
The reason was simply that the biggest required investment, i.e. cable infrastructure, vanished. You could open up an ISP and rent the cables from the "cable company" at exactly the same rate as any other ISP. Moreover, at a rate that was so damn cheap that even wanting to put your own cables down was financial suicide.
I kinda doubt this is what the ISPs of the USA have in mind, though...
Re: Yes (Score:2)
Sounds like Sweden.
Re: (Score:2)
Sweden is too big. Austria and UAE are in the right ballpark for size, so I'm guessing Austria.
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You could open up an ISP and rent the cables from the "cable company" at exactly the same rate as any other ISP.
20-25 years ago, back in the days of DSL internet+phone lines, it worked this way in some parts of the United States. The incumbent telephone company, which was usually a corporate descendant of the old "Ma Bell" (AT&T up to 1984), owned the infrastructure from your house to the "phone company switching office." But anyone could rent space in the switching office to put in their own equipment and connect it (almost) directly to the phone company's equipment.
There weren't "more ISPs than [a person] cou
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20-25 years ago, back in the days of DSL internet+phone lines, it worked this way in some parts of the United States.
Actually, not "some" but "all" parts of the US--the relevant law was the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which required local loop unbundling. This state of affairs persisted until 2005, when the FCC changed the rules about which types of lines needed to be unbundled, at which point the vast majority of non-ILEC DSL providers died out pretty much overnight.
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Good friggin' lord, when people talk about something they don't have any clue of...
It's by no means free. And yes, I do have some insight in that matter. The infrastructure is kept up with the rent the various users pay, and the regulation body is watching closely who pays what and where that money goes.
Seriously, comments like that one make me sad. Yes, there's taxes being misused for various shit, but this is for a change not one of them.
Re: (Score:2)
Alternatively, the taxpayers pay for the cables so the TAXPAYERS can get infrastructure for free. It is, after all, the taxpayers that ideally end up benefiting from having more ISPs to choose from and better connection speeds/caps.
Am I missing something? (Score:5, Insightful)
Restaurants Say US Should Force Large Dinner Parties to Pay for New Ovens
Supermarkets Say US Should Force People Buying for Large Cookouts to Pay for New Freezers, Shelving, and Cash Registers
Car Manufacturers Say US Should Force Fleet Buyers to Pay for New Dealership Construction
Seriously... the cost of providing service should be covered by what you charge for the service. If you can't do that, you deserve to fail.
Don't get me started on the dishonesty using 'tips' and 'employee health insurance fees' as a substitute for printing the honest price for the meal and service (which includes all employee pay and benefits) on the menu.
Re: Am I missing something? (Score:2)
Charging for two services (Score:2)
Seriously... the cost of providing service should be covered by what you charge for the service.
The difference that these ISPs, who already charge home users for the service of connection to large tech companies and others, want to additionally charge large tech companies for the service of connection to home users.
Re: (Score:2)
They already do that.
You think Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, AWS, Netflix, etc. get the connections to their data centers for free?
They already pay. A lot.
This is just a grasping middle-man leech attempt to grasp for even more.
Two ends (Score:4, Interesting)
The telco complaint assumes there's only one originator of traffic, only one endpoint. This is, of course, false. The other one is often called "the consumer" or "the customer".
In a normal market, if there's more demand than supply (as the telcos imply here), then suppliers would make investments to increase supply, and raise prices to pay for it. What's preventing that from happening here?
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly. It's not solely Big Tech firms who are responsible for 50% of all Internet traffic, it's ISP customers requesting that traffic and they are already charging them.
ISPs just want to be able to double dip.
Re: (Score:2)
What's preventing that from happening here is that under normal circumstances, this would mean the ISPs with all the heavily asymmetric connections would be paying their peering connections and other websites through the nose just to allow their customers to access things, because they've designed their network around the idea that not only do customers contribute almost no value, but that it should be prohibitively expensive for the customers to actually contribute value to the internet if not downright im
I say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Already have (Score:4, Informative)
Tech companies pay taxes (a little). Taxes were earmarked for investing in national broadband. ISPs pissed away the money and now are complaining they are broke.
I'd play them a violin but really they don't deserve even that.
This pisses me off (Score:2)
The only people who contribute to USF are voice telephone customers. The ISPs Internet services are exempted and these clowns want information services providers to pay something they themselves (the actual telecommunications service provider) does not even pay?
Are ISP lobbying groups proposing ISPs be required to pay additional USF taxes for their Internet services? Somehow I doubt it. If they did the Google's of the world could be paying into it like everyone else when they foot the bill for their upst
Wait a minute (Score:2)
Big tech already pays (Score:4, Insightful)
Big tech already pays them. What the ISPs and telcos are asking for is another "government fee" that they can put on their bill to obfuscate their billing.
IPTV needs to have multicast. I can see NFLST bein (Score:2)
IPTV needs to have multicast. I can see NFLST being an big shit show this year with people who don't have good ISP really seeing an big down grade from the satellite service.
CUT CEO PAY (Score:2)
The broadband companies have plenty of money to pay for infrastructure; they simply need to stop overpaying their CEOs, and stop asking for handouts.
Re: (Score:3)
They don't even need to do that. The guys crying the loudest all book $3B+ in profit a quarter.
They need to use that first before they start asking anybody for (more) handouts. Fuck them.
Meeter it all 'sender pays' (Score:2, Redundant)
The best answer here is stop selling unlimited when its not really unlimited. Its not really unlimited there is a capacity. Make it all metered, but on the sending side. Big tech and big telco both already got what they wanted turning the internet from a network of hosts to a network of clients an servers.
Both groups suck, and I am happy to play them against each other as a consumer. I would strongly encourage IPS and telcos to charge by the byte SENT (pushed onto their network).
Big tech with its deep po
Teenagers do or say anything to get out of it. (Score:2)
"Big Tech" already pays their ISPs (Score:3)
"Big Tech" companies already pay ISPs for their connectivity. I pay an ISP for my connectivity. We're all already paying.
A "Big Tech" company that I connect to doesn't have a business relationship with my ISP just because I made that connection, nor does their ISP have a business relationship with me. If they have no business relationship, there's no avenue to demand payment.
my stupidity sense is tingling (Score:3)
They Already Do... Largely (Score:2)
The big tech places are building global networks that rival any of the telco backbones. They have points-of-presense everywhere so that they're close to the users. Last mile has been the problem and still is. It actually seems to be getting better, by far. And realistically... I don't need more bandwidth. Even rural America is getting addressed and it is happening through very intelligent means. You have the electric utilities that are using their existing right-of-way to become fiber providers. You
business plan (Score:3)
Telcos need to check their business plans, they are in the business of providing service to paying customers. Their customers are paying to access "Big Tech". "Big Tech" pays for its own internet access. If ISPs need more money to invest in their future then they can charge their already paying customers more.
In the old days of POTS phone service, when long distance calls cost a lot per minute, the Telco charged the Calling party and did Called party just had to have its own service but the Called party did not participate in the per-minute fee even though both ends were using the connection. It is the same situation now with Internet access, Big Tech is the Called party and the access is already paid for.
Grasping motherfuckers. (Score:2)
How about this? Before you start trying to reach into anyone else's pockets to build your product, why don't you reach into your own 12-figure [cnbc.com] quarterly [charter.com] earnings [usnews.com] instead? Or, if you really need government help building out your networks, why don't you stop your false advertising of "unlimited" when you are oversubscribing and capping unless people pay even more ridiculous prices than we already are? Or stop doing everything you can to prevent people from running their own private servers out of their hou
Public Benefit Public Ownership (Score:2)
The ISPs need to decide if they are in a for profit business or are offering some kind of public good.
If you are offering a for profit product you don't get to argue that other people should pay for it because they benefit. OTOH, if you want to argue that internet access is some kind of public good that warrants asking other people for funding then you shouldn't get to claim ownership of the result. It should be owned by the public as a public utility.
ISPs want to have it both ways.
ISPs should pay big tech for accessing their sites (Score:2)
Just a handful of ISPs are responsible for the majority of all internet traffic to major web properties. If the customers of the ISPs weren't so greedy, the big web properties would have significantly lower expenses. It just isn't fair to those web properties that the ISPs are letting their users access the web sites for free.
Simple answer: nationalize the cables (Score:2)
Exactly as we *should* have done with the rails, then let companies rent trackage rights and compete.
Oh, you libertarians are screaming... then why do you drive on roads built by the government, where trucking companies pay road taxes and compete?
Explain the difference.
This would be like asking car makers to fund roads (Score:2)
The idea that tech companies should pay for ISPs to build bigger pipes would be like saying to the car makers that because they are now building bigger cars, they should be the ones paying for bigger roads to accommodate those bigger cars.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Where are the idiots that complained a few months ago when european telcos wanted this?
I complained.
It was all a big conspiracy from the EU to harm US companies.
That wasn't the basis of my complaint.
And now?
And now you're making shit up.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The same whiners who always whine about anything the EU does that doesn't let American companies do whatever they want in foreign markets whined, sure. But don't feed the trolls. Most of those whiners were just whining to provide some cover for their sock puppets modding them up.
ISPs are double dipping. They're charging their customers for infrastructure improvements they don't make, and now they want to charge someone else, too. If they succeed, prices will go up, and it will come out of our pockets anyway
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
We are still complaining.
It was a shit idea when proposed in the EU. It is still a shit idea when proposed in the USA.
Re: (Score:2)
What, that's the best troll you could come up with?
Dude, you need to eat some Wheaties or something. You've gone from being a stupid troll to just a shitty troll grasping at last year's stale trolling.