I don't see Netflix as being the perpetrator here.
They use a lot of bandwidth. They pay for that.
No problems there.
The cost of delivering some amount of bandwidth to a million different sites massively exceeds the cost of delivering the same total bandwidth to only ten fixed sites. There are massively more Netflix customers than data centers in Netflix' content delivery network. Thus, Netflix only has to pay for a small fraction of the bandwidth cost of delivering their content to their customers. Most of the cost is borne by consumer ISPs, and they have to recoup that cost from somewhere.
Originally posted by Quizzical Suppose that ISPs throttling data was purely on a per customer basis, not a per web site basis. So then you use Netflix a bunch, go over, and Verizon has to throttle you for the rest of the month. But they can't just throttle Netflix, which was the entire problem and what made you go over in the first place. Instead, they have to also throttle your access to mmorpg.com, which uses virtually no bandwidth and Verizon would love to have you spend hours here because it's so cheap for them. What would be the point of that, other than spite?
If i leave my heateron all night long, my electric bill is high. It's high regardless of if it's the heater running, or clothes dryer, or computer, or a critical life support machine. The electric company doesn't come in and "meter" off my heater just because they think it's drawing too many amps. I have a set limit on how many amps I can draw at any one time, and if all the residents in my neighborhood start drawing more than the utility can handle on the common backbone, they come in and upgrade the infrastructure. They don't go after the heater manufacturer and tell them to give them more money because their heater draws too much electricity.
If I decide I want to spend my bandwidth on Netflix, or Disney, or MMORPG.com - I'm the customer that's paying for access to the bandwidth, and I should be able to decide what I want to use it on, not have the ISP decide what I should or should not be able to do online. If I use a lot of bandwidth, yes, I should pay more for it - just like if I want to water my lawn, i"m going to have a higher water bill, or if I want to keep my electric heater on all night.
Maybe that would keep people from streaming torrents 24/7, or letting Netflix run in the background while they aren't watching it - the same way people turn the lights off when they leave a room, or turn off the water tap while they are brushing their teeth.
Bad analogies maybe, but very pertinent. I take a lot of issue with an ISP telling me what I can do with the access I have purchased, regardless of if it's good for other customers or the ISP itself. If that means I need to pay more for intenet, ok. These $30/mo "Unlimited" plans are scams anyway, and as long as their is fair and open competition, the market will sort out what the real cost of providing that service is.
Metering for charging and metering for throttling are two entirely separate purposes. I agree that if ISPs are going to charge on a per GB basis, it makes sense to charge for the total amount of bandwidth used, without regard for the sites involved.
But throttling is very different. Where I live, on hot days, the power company will sometimes turn my air conditioner off part of the day. But they won't turn my lights off. The former uses vastly more power than the latter, but the latter would be vastly more disruptive to me. It's far less disruptive to tell customers, Netflix is going to be slow during peak times than to say everything is going to be slow in peak times, including things that barely use any bandwidth.
The user and all related content has been deleted.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
I would actually be ok with metered internet, so long as it's priced fairly and competitively, and I can easily and readily track the usage for which I will get billed, and it's traffic-neutral.
I already pay for metered electricity, and "metered" trash service, and cell phone use. Most municipalities meter water use.
I would much prefer a straight meter than a data cap with steep overage consequences.
Problem is if internet was metered "fairly" ISPs would lose money across the board sense the average person doesn't even use enough to actually make up for the cost they pay now.
Realistically, what they'd probably do is a flat fee plus a per GB fee. For example, instead of paying $80/month, you'd pay $50/month + $1/GB or something, at least for a fixed cable connection. Mobile data plans would be much more expensive on a per GB basis, of course. But the people who want to use 300 GB/month would howl about that.
Following this example, something tells me that the ISPs would not go down from $80/month to $50/mo +$1/GB. They would most likely go $80/month + $5-10/GB. If the information that is out there is correct (i dont know), we would be paying more money for the same speed we have now, or get slowdown. I think Video games are one of the areas that will suffer the most. I dont think a random website will use more bandwith than an online game.
The bandwidth usage of the overwhelming majority of web sites is inconsequential. The same is true of online games outside of the initial download and occasionally patches for games that like really high resolution textures. The only way landline ISPs ever throttle games as opposed to other content is when the initial download is by torrent and accidentally gets classified as file sharing and throttled on that basis.
Netflix isn't, strictly speaking, the only culprit, but they are by far the biggest. More generally, high quality video streaming uses massive bandwidth, and so that's what ISPs are looking to crack down on. Virtually everything else on the Internet is basically a rounding error as compared to that.
I don't see Netflix as being the perpetrator here.
They use a lot of bandwidth. They pay for that.
No problems there.
The cost of delivering some amount of bandwidth to a million different sites massively exceeds the cost of delivering the same total bandwidth to only ten fixed sites. There are massively more Netflix customers than data centers in Netflix' content delivery network. Thus, Netflix only has to pay for a small fraction of the bandwidth cost of delivering their content to their customers. Most of the cost is borne by consumer ISPs, and they have to recoup that cost from somewhere.
I would actually be ok with metered internet, so long as it's priced fairly and competitively, and I can easily and readily track the usage for which I will get billed, and it's traffic-neutral.
I already pay for metered electricity, and "metered" trash service, and cell phone use. Most municipalities meter water use.
I would much prefer a straight meter than a data cap with steep overage consequences.
Problem is if internet was metered "fairly" ISPs would lose money across the board sense the average person doesn't even use enough to actually make up for the cost they pay now.
Realistically, what they'd probably do is a flat fee plus a per GB fee. For example, instead of paying $80/month, you'd pay $50/month + $1/GB or something, at least for a fixed cable connection. Mobile data plans would be much more expensive on a per GB basis, of course. But the people who want to use 300 GB/month would howl about that.
Which is what Comcast is doing now. They are testing packages with extra fees per GB for going over and other structures. Their site has a page that lets you view how much bandwidth you've used for the last few months to current. While they test, the previous 250GB cap has been lifted.
While they do keep track of usage from the first GB, they don't charge extra from the first GB.
For what it's worth, when estimating prices, you need to assume that under the new, pay per GB system, ISPs would pull in about as much revenue as before. I'm not saying that it won't be off by 10%, but it certainly won't instantly triple their revenue (which would leave them too vulnerable to being undercut by new competition) or cut their revenue in half (which would drive them into bankruptcy).
When you look outside of the debate, you see a simple solution: Improve the delivery of the access. Expand the network to handle this new demand on bandwidth. Sure, it costs money, but it is the providers responsibility to keep up with the services they offer. If a few sites are using too much, add more to cover that.
Too simple, I know. Since most providers just want to sit back on the infrastructure they have built and just collect income, I do not see this happening. And what can customers do? Ab-so-lute-ly nothing. They have us by the balls, so to speak, because they have little to no competition.
I guarantee you that if it cost ISPs nothing to greatly improve their available bandwidth, they'd do it. Adding massively more bandwidth costs money. Where does the money for that come from? Do you greatly raise prices on everyone, whether they use massive bandwidth or not? Or do you only raise prices on the handful of people and sites that use so much bandwidth that adding capacity was necessary and leave everyone else alone? This isn't entirely synonymous with net neutrality, as there are other issues involved, but choosing net neutrality is choosing to raise prices on everyone, as opposed to raising prices only on those who use far more bandwidth.
Originally posted by Quizzical You're arguing that without net neutrality, ISPs will suddenly start doing obnoxious stuff that they could have done for years, but didn't because it would have been suicidal.
Suppose that ISPs throttling data was purely on a per customer basis, not a per web site basis. So then you use Netflix a bunch, go over, and Verizon has to throttle you for the rest of the month. But they can't just throttle Netflix, which was the entire problem and what made you go over in the first place. Instead, they have to also throttle your access to mmorpg.com, which uses virtually no bandwidth and Verizon would love to have you spend hours here because it's so cheap for them. What would be the point of that, other than spite?
They've been doing this for years. My local cable company offers 3-4 different "Internet Speeds", based on how much you want to pay. They have been "throttling" speeds for maybe a decade. First we ALL got about 5MB/sec. Then we ALL got up to 10MB/sec. Now, we can choose between 10MB, 35MB, 50MB, and 75MB (I think for businesses). Every customer us wired for 75MB, but they will "throttle" speeds to the paid for speed. It costs the companies very little for the difference, yet they charge $10/month PER CUSTOMER or more for each jump in bandwidth.
I'm not saying that this is good or bad. I'm saying that this (speed throttling) happens now, today.
Mobile access I have no clue about, as I do not use it
That actually has nothing to do with net neutrality. It would be completely legal to keep doing that, even under a strict system of net neutrality.
Why not use flat internet? Some hipster reason why not? I once downloaded a 500GB during a month and the price didn't go up even for a cent. Couple that with 20mbps and...yeah.
Plus, most of online servers can't handle 50mbps as is and you are already slowed down to their cap(usually at around 20, 25 max). Sure, I do expect netflix and such to have the state of the art servers which allow up to 120mps, but this is simply not realistic for 90% of net. I am kinda surprised that quiz hasn't mention this yet.
Tbh, I fail to see what the fuss is about. You pay less, you get less. One simply can not expect that Dacia will perform equally to BMW. Of course, the added cost is sometimes(around 20-25% of time, depends on the branch) pointless and comes off as what I call "the fool's tax". The perfect example being cable tv. Do you really need all those packets? Sure it is still cheap, but if you compare it to Base price, it can and will quickly come to up to 200% of that price. Plenty of this around...
Without any sort of metering or throttling at all, a handful of people will use enormous amounts of bandwidth and make the entire Internet slow for everyone else. If you're paying a fixed rate, it's not hard to find uses for arbitrarily large amounts of bandwidth. Uniformly doubling the bandwidth available elsewhere would do nothing to change this. Nor would multiplying it by a factor of ten.
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Cable TV is actually a very different situation. TV channels are broadcast to everyone, not streamed to individual users. This is possible for TV but not Internet because there are only a handful of channels--hundreds, as opposed to billions of web pages. Having more or fewer customers or having a given customer get a larger or smaller proportion of available channels does virtually nothing to change the costs to the cable TV company. The point of upgrading the network there is in how many channels you can simultaneously broadcast to everyone, and at how high of quality.
Originally posted by Jemcrystal "Net neutrality" sounds like a very righteous cause; tho I'm still not sure what it means? More to the point, it sounds impossible to control. If the government or some remote judge cared to oppose "throttling" what could they actually do to stop it?
The government could stop it with very simple regulation. Ideally a simple regulation would work just as effectively as the regulations that forbid using pesticide as food ingredient.
No regulation is 100% foolproof and it wouldn't likely stop all of it, but it would be effective enough to stop the most significant problems.
When evaluating a government regulation, one should start by ignoring what the intended consequences are and instead focus only on the actual, real-world consequences. The latter usually doesn't match the former, and often isn't even remotely close to it.
Net neutrality would mandate that a relatively larger fraction of Internet bandwidth must be available to a handful of things that use massive bandwidth (basically, high quality video streaming) and a relatively smaller fraction available to everything else. It may or may not lead to building out more capacity; if it does, then that would mean higher costs for everyone. By taking away a key tool of ISPs to keep most of the Internet operating smoothly, namely, throttling a few things using massive bandwidth in order to make room for everything else to work unimpeded, it would probably lead to more temporary disruptions of a wide variety of Internet services.
I don't see Netflix as being the perpetrator here.
They use a lot of bandwidth. They pay for that.
No problems there.
The cost of delivering some amount of bandwidth to a million different sites massively exceeds the cost of delivering the same total bandwidth to only ten fixed sites. There are massively more Netflix customers than data centers in Netflix' content delivery network. Thus, Netflix only has to pay for a small fraction of the bandwidth cost of delivering their content to their customers. Most of the cost is borne by consumer ISPs, and they have to recoup that cost from somewhere.
Who does Netflix pay?
I'm not sure who Netflix' content delivery network pays for bandwidth directly; my guess would be that it's a variety of tier 2 Internet providers. They also have agreements with at least some consumer ISPs to pay the ISP some money in exchange for the ISP not throttling Netflix, or at least not throttling Netflix as much as they'd like to.
Net neutrality would mandate that a relatively larger fraction of Internet bandwidth must be available to a handful of things that use massive bandwidth (basically, high quality video streaming) and a relatively smaller fraction available to everything else. It may or may not lead to building out more capacity; if it does, then that would mean higher costs for everyone. By taking away a key tool of ISPs to keep most of the Internet operating smoothly, namely, throttling a few things using massive bandwidth in order to make room for everything else to work unimpeded, it would probably lead to more temporary disruptions of a wide variety of Internet services.
The ISP could choose to manage their bandwidth by throttling people during peak times if they've caused more than 500MB of traffic during last 24 hours, and that way hit only those who cause heavy bandwidth usage while leaving those who do normal web browsing or play online games completely unaffected, and that would be completely in line with net neutrality.
Net neutrality does not force ISPs to abandon bandwidth management, and it does not force ISPs to give relatively larger portion of bandwidth to heavy bandwidth users.
They think they're invincible so they bully the little guy. For MONEY MONEY MONEY !! FUCK OUR CUSTOMERS AND EVERYTHING ELSE AS LONG AS WE GET MONEY MONEY MONEY !!
Netflix themselves introduced a solution the the bandwidth problem. They offered ISPs FREE hardware that would not only lessen the impact by a considerable margin but speed up Netflix for everyone. Boom! Everyones happy. But not really... because Comcast and big ISPs said fuck you, we'd rather throttle our customers data until you pay up.
Which Netflix did. & in some cases *cough* Verizon *cough* it did nothing for their customers. After they paid the bribe they STILL refused to increase their customers speed. Corporate pigs are disgusting.
And really, if the ISPs are doing this now, when Net Neutrality is a thing. What would stop them once it goes away?
We are not talking about net speed, but about net speed as a result of a net traffic right? And the formation of a price. Got it!
I am not so good at this point because most of my computer knowledge is focused around Hardware and a bit less about software. Traffic? I did learn ICT(this topic falls into this right?), but it is not my vocation and is more of a lore check than anything. Therefore:
I'll let quiz continue. Seeing him I assumed this was a standard Hardware discussion of yore, but it seems it isn't. I heard that appearances are deceptive.
The basic questions involved are these:
There is only so much Internet infrastructure out there. Given that infrastructure, which data will be sent from where to where and how quickly? You can't just send everything that everyone possibly wants immediately, as the infrastructure can't handle it; rather, how do we prioritize? And who pays whom how much for this?
Do we build more infrastructure? If so, what type of infrastructure, where do we build it, and who pays for it? And once it is built, we go right back to all of the questions of the previous paragraph.
As with any political issue, there are always pros and cons to any possible proposal. While net neutrality does have its advantages, there are serious disadvantages to it, too. To ignore the disadvantages of net neutrality (higher prices for Internet access for everyone and/or reduced quality of service for low-bandwidth applications such as playing games and browsing web pages that aren't video-heavy) is to decline to seriously engage the issue at hand.
Most of the pro-net neutrality commentary basically amounts to "support net neutrality because it will give us good stuff for free". If that's all that people see, then you end up with a bunch of people having strong opinions on an issue that they know little about and have never seriously considered. I think that's detrimental on any political issue.
The key to understanding economics is not to stop at the obvious, immediate effects of a policy, but to chase down other--and often unintended--effects of the policy and to consider them as well.
Considering how much propaganda and misinformation there is out there, it would help if you would say what the whole dispute is about. Or at least if you knew what the whole dispute was about before taking sides. Which you probably don't.
In a word, this is about Netflix.
And someone drank the propaganda Kool-Aid...
Netflix is ONE of dozens of companies that have been blackmailed by ISPs for fast lane access and guess what? This has actually been going on for over a DECADE, before Netflix even started to stream movies online.
The propaganda, you bought into it.
This issue isn't new, its just now making headlines.
WHO the information is coming from should not be part of the issue. As a customer of the ISP I am paying for my connection speed, who I am connecting to and what I am receiving is already being paid for.
Its pretty damn simple really. I order something from Amazon and pay to have it shipped to me. The price I pay for that shipment is based on how fast I want it. UPS does not turn around and tell Amazon they have to pay MORE to have their boxes shipped on time because Amazon is shipping more boxes and taking up more space on their trucks...the price is set and paid already, the quantity does not factor in because its meaningless, each shipment already has its price.
In America we already pay far MORE for internet connectivity and for lower speeds on top of it, ISPs have nothing to complain about...hell, they even get government subsidies AKA TAX PAYER DOLLARS to install their infrastructure!
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Net neutrality would mandate that a relatively larger fraction of Internet bandwidth must be available to a handful of things that use massive bandwidth (basically, high quality video streaming) and a relatively smaller fraction available to everything else. It may or may not lead to building out more capacity; if it does, then that would mean higher costs for everyone. By taking away a key tool of ISPs to keep most of the Internet operating smoothly, namely, throttling a few things using massive bandwidth in order to make room for everything else to work unimpeded, it would probably lead to more temporary disruptions of a wide variety of Internet services.
The ISP could choose to manage their bandwidth by throttling people during peak times if they've caused more than 500MB of traffic during last 24 hours, and that way hit only those who cause heavy bandwidth usage while leaving those who do normal web browsing or play online games completely unaffected, and that would be completely in line with net neutrality.
Net neutrality does not force ISPs to abandon bandwidth management, and it does not force ISPs to give relatively larger portion of bandwidth to heavy bandwidth users.
Let's stop and think about the impact of your proposal on gaming. You download a new game, and the ISP says, oh hey, you're using a bunch of bandwidth, so we're going to throttle you. Then once the download is done, the ISP is still throttling you and you have to wait a day before you can play it. See the problem?
I say it's much better for ISPs to throttle your bandwidth some on the initial download, so maybe it takes two hours instead of one, but then give you excellent speed once you're actually in the game and no longer using much bandwidth.
Better yet is to look at a longer time period than 24 hours; if you had a 20 GB download yesterday, but including that download, have only used 30 GB in the last month, a typical cable modem or fiber optic ISP shouldn't be throttling you at all. You're not the problem.
But suppose that someone gets an ISP and downloads 100 GB of movies over the course of a few days, and then the ISP says, we're going to throttle you. Should the ISP make your entire Internet experience painful for the next 30 days? Wouldn't it make more sense to only throttle high bandwidth applications but still give you full performance on things that only use token amounts of bandwidth?
You can make a strong case that someone using 30 GB of bandwidth per month shouldn't be throttled at all, even if that bandwidth is almost entirely Netflix. But once users get into high enough bandwidth usage that ISPs need to throttle something back, I think it makes more sense to let ISPs selectively throttle particular applications--and also offer consumers the option to not be throttled at all in exchange for paying much more for their Internet connection. But the latter is a different issue entirely.
Considering how much propaganda and misinformation there is out there, it would help if you would say what the whole dispute is about. Or at least if you knew what the whole dispute was about before taking sides. Which you probably don't.
In a word, this is about Netflix.
And someone drank the propaganda Kool-Aid...
Netflix is ONE of dozens of companies that have been blackmailed by ISPs for fast lane access and guess what? This has actually been going on for over a DECADE, before Netflix even started to stream movies online.
Which sites were throttled by which ISPs? And how many of those throttled sites used vastly more bandwidth per user than nearly everything else on the Internet? If the answer is "all of them", then that's my point exactly.
As with any political issue, there are always pros and cons to any possible proposal. While net neutrality does have its advantages, there are serious disadvantages to it, too. To ignore the disadvantages of net neutrality (higher prices for Internet access for everyone and/or reduced quality of service for low-bandwidth applications such as playing games and browsing web pages that aren't video-heavy) is to decline to seriously engage the issue at hand.
Sure. There are disadvantages to net neutrality. Similarly i.e. minimum wage, mandatory pension tax or universal health care systems also have huge disadvantages.
It's advantages are bigger than their disadvantages.
And it is not about 'free stuff' or 'fairness'. I think it is just simply better. Of course not better for everyone, but no system if better for everyone.
I think lack of competition is the root cause of all of this.
If your ISP choices are limited to dial-up, 2MBs DSL, 10Mbs cellular (with steep data limits), or 50MBs cable... there really isn't that much competition.
For a utility, they are allowed to be a "monopoly" because they are regulated to provide fair prices, availability, and level of service. In return to agreeing to abide by these regulations, they get a guaranteed rate of return/profit margin.
Cellular has competition (in most markets). I think the prices we see for cellular are pretty close to the actual price it takes to provide the service.
DSL is semi-regulated, since it's a service provided over telephone lines, and telco's are regulated as a utility, DSL provided over copper cable is regulated. A lot of phone companies are pushing to go fiber optic and VOIP very quickly, because fiber and VOIP aren't covered under the same regulations...
If you regulate ISPs as a utility, and classify Internet access as a basic service, and restrict ISPs to a set profit margin/rate of return, I think the discussion of Net Neutrality takes an entirely different bend. If ISP's charged per Gb, they would be financially incentivized to provide as much bandwidth as possible to each home, and users would be financially incentivized to conserve their bandwidth more than they do now.
But with the viewpoint of unlimited profit in a market with limited availability and effective monopolies - even if ISPs haven't abused it, there is nothing to prevent it, and we are seeing some very real effects that are heading down the path towards real significant abuse of power. ISPs charge flat rates for falsely advertised products, and then get upset when people actually try to use what they thought they had paid for. It's not in the financial best interest of ISPs to provide better access, it's in their interest to squeeze as many people as they can until it becomes untenable for the user - because only then would it actually affect their profit.
Is it a first world problem? Yes. But in America at least, I would say we are at the standard of living where I would classify basic internet access as a basic service that should be available to all citizens, the same as electric and telephone.
Originally posted by Quizzical Originally posted by JJ82Originally posted by QuizzicalConsidering how much propaganda and misinformation there is out there, it would help if you would say what the whole dispute is about. Or at least if you knew what the whole dispute was about before taking sides. Which you probably don't.In a word, this is about Netflix.
And someone drank the propaganda Kool-Aid...Netflix is ONE of dozens of companies that have been blackmailed by ISPs for fast lane access and guess what? This has actually been going on for over a DECADE, before Netflix even started to stream movies online.Which sites were throttled by which ISPs? And how many of those throttled sites used vastly more bandwidth per user than nearly everything else on the Internet? If the answer is "all of them", then that's my point exactly.
This is the entire point of net neutrality. Different sites provide different services.
Without neutrality, your letting the ISPs dictate which services you can access.
In the most pertinent and recent case, it's particularly telling because the particular service being blocked competes directly with services provided by most major ISPs (video distribution). ISPs may be blocking it because of a bandwidth issue (which is what they are claiming), or maybe they are blocking it because it's cutting into the profit margin of their own video distribution.
The suspicious part is that ISPs that are doing the throttling are the ones that have significant profit from video distribution (i.e. the cable companies) at stake. We haven't really seen DSL, satellite, or cellular (the latter two would really be eligible candidates for limited bandwidth) blocking any services, or at least blatantly blocking them.
So, bandwidth is a valid concern - before Netflix we saw a lot of discussion about this with regard to torrents. But now with Netflix we are seeing something a bit more innocuous and potentially sinister.
Net neutrality affects us all. End users, companies trying to supply content, and the middleman ISPs. The problem is this is being pushed by the ISPs because they see the $'s in their eyes by being able to charge you even more on TOP of your full pipe monthly bill in $. It is so appealing to them to then also charge you based on the content your wanting to access within the use of your pipe you have already paid for, for obvious reasons. Its all the greedy ISPs that will get the benefit while the content providers and the end users get stiffed.
There are so many things to consider. If you give this power to the ISPs then you have a big issue just in the fact that most locations there is already a lack of ISP options. I live in a fairly big city and I have 4 total options and really only two are viable. Cable, AT&T-Uverse, Dish, and dial up. Dial-up and Dish are out the door because of obvious reasons. One is too darned slow the other if a rainy day then your in trouble. This leaves me with only two ISPs to choose from. If this bill passes and both put on blocks then who do I turn to? Noone I am stuck using their service and paying whatever their fees are, or not using the internet. Imagine someone in the boonies with JUST a single choice? We all know the first things ISPs will go and hit on are the major streaming companies first. Its only a logical next step. So say I am a Netflix user and ISPs charge Netflix for the streaming bandwidth who is that going to affect? The Netflix users who will see their subscription rates rise. If they don't charge Netflix then they will charge me as the end user and my 50 dollar a month cable bill will go up 5 bucks a month because I am accessing Netflix. Either way it will affect the end users that use the services.
Then you have the added complexity of the throttling itself. Anyone who is even halfway knowledgeable in computing knows that you are then going to have to add devices to the network to then do this throttling. This in turn can then add another point that could have a problem in the future. So on top of adding to the service your adding devices that can contribute to future issues. Who knows this malfunctioning device could be at the time your logged onto your favorite game and all of a sudden can't get on because of an outage on the ISP side.
So to recap you have 1) Everyone affected in one way or another be it hardware your going through to charges you will have to pay. 2) You have ISPs pro this because they have a way to make more money on TOP of their monthly charge. 3) You have content providers against it because they know that if it passes the end user will end up having to pay for it somehow. 4) You have issues with if all ISPs use this going forward there will be no way to avoid the fees. 5) You have cats and dogs dancing together down the streets and mass chaos reigns.
I am betting the two major things that would be affected first should this come to pass would be streaming content providers such as Netflix and Amazon and the like, and then shortly after that online game servers. Both are logical next step places for ISPs to bandwidth shape in such a way to force the end users to pay should this come to pass. Where it shouldn't affect you more than likely will be web browsing, IMing, and e-mails. So in other words the 90 year old crowd is probably the only safe non affected in the long term demographic.
I think lack of competition is the root cause of all of this.
If your ISP choices are limited to dial-up, 2MBs DSL, 10Mbs cellular (with steep data limits), or 50MBs cable... there really isn't that much competition.
For a utility, they are allowed to be a "monopoly" because they are regulated to provide fair prices, availability, and level of service. In return to agreeing to abide by these regulations, they get a guaranteed rate of return/profit margin.
Cellular has competition (in most markets). I think the prices we see for cellular are pretty close to the actual price it takes to provide the service.
DSL is semi-regulated, since it's a service provided over telephone lines, and telco's are regulated as a utility, DSL provided over copper cable is regulated. A lot of phone companies are pushing to go fiber optic and VOIP very quickly, because fiber and VOIP aren't covered under the same regulations...
If you regulate ISPs as a utility, and classify Internet access as a basic service, and restrict ISPs to a set profit margin/rate of return, I think the discussion of Net Neutrality takes an entirely different bend. If ISP's charged per Gb, they would be financially incentivized to provide as much bandwidth as possible to each home, and users would be financially incentivized to conserve their bandwidth more than they do now.
But with the viewpoint of unlimited profit in a market with limited availability and effective monopolies - even if ISPs haven't abused it, there is nothing to prevent it, and we are seeing some very real effects that are heading down the path towards real significant abuse of power. ISPs charge flat rates for falsely advertised products, and then get upset when people actually try to use what they thought they had paid for. It's not in the financial best interest of ISPs to provide better access, it's in their interest to squeeze as many people as they can until it becomes untenable for the user - because only then would it actually affect their profit.
Is it a first world problem? Yes. But in America at least, I would say we are at the standard of living where I would classify basic internet access as a basic service that should be available to all citizens, the same as electric and telephone.
I agree that more competition in more places is highly desirable. The question is how to convince more companies to build out more networks. On that, I'd submit that it will work much better if they think, "If we build a fiber optic network in this town, we'll make oodles of money" than if they think, "If we built a fiber optic network in this town, we'll never make back the cost of building it."
The real question, then, is how to get there. So, do you think that regulations that make it hard to make much of a profit will lead to more competition or less competition? Net neutrality by itself isn't a big problem here, but let's not rush off to strange ISPs in regulations.
Obviously more competition is better, but as far as high speed competition is concerned, if you have the option of both cable modem with one company and fiber optic with another, I'd say you've got enough competition to stop most ISP abuses. I wouldn't dismiss DSL as being irrelevant, either; for most purposes, having DSL is much closer to having a higher speed connection such as cable modem or fiber optic than it is to being stuck with dialup only.
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On the topic of cable companies wanting to deliver video by other, non-Internet means, I'd like to note that when I signed up for Verizon, they offered one price for Internet only, and a different, lower price for an Internet+TV combo bundle. I don't know how common that is, but it's certainly more efficient from a hardware perspective to deliver one of a handful of video signals broadcast (the cable TV approach) over their entire network than to custom deliver different video streams to everyone (the pure Internet approach).
I am betting the two major things that would be affected first should this come to pass would be streaming content providers such as Netflix and Amazon and the like, and then shortly after that online game servers. Both are logical next step places for ISPs to bandwidth shape in such a way to force the end users to pay should this come to pass. Where it shouldn't affect you more than likely will be web browsing, IMing, and e-mails. So in other words the 90 year old crowd is probably the only safe non affected in the long term demographic.
ISPs could have gone after games for many years now. They haven't. Why not? The answer is, because games don't use much bandwidth. So long as that remains the case, why would any ISP want to throttle games?
I think lack of competition is the root cause of all of this.
If your ISP choices are limited to dial-up, 2MBs DSL, 10Mbs cellular (with steep data limits), or 50MBs cable... there really isn't that much competition.
For a utility, they are allowed to be a "monopoly" because they are regulated to provide fair prices, availability, and level of service. In return to agreeing to abide by these regulations, they get a guaranteed rate of return/profit margin.
Cellular has competition (in most markets). I think the prices we see for cellular are pretty close to the actual price it takes to provide the service.
DSL is semi-regulated, since it's a service provided over telephone lines, and telco's are regulated as a utility, DSL provided over copper cable is regulated. A lot of phone companies are pushing to go fiber optic and VOIP very quickly, because fiber and VOIP aren't covered under the same regulations...
If you regulate ISPs as a utility, and classify Internet access as a basic service, and restrict ISPs to a set profit margin/rate of return, I think the discussion of Net Neutrality takes an entirely different bend. If ISP's charged per Gb, they would be financially incentivized to provide as much bandwidth as possible to each home, and users would be financially incentivized to conserve their bandwidth more than they do now.
But with the viewpoint of unlimited profit in a market with limited availability and effective monopolies - even if ISPs haven't abused it, there is nothing to prevent it, and we are seeing some very real effects that are heading down the path towards real significant abuse of power. ISPs charge flat rates for falsely advertised products, and then get upset when people actually try to use what they thought they had paid for. It's not in the financial best interest of ISPs to provide better access, it's in their interest to squeeze as many people as they can until it becomes untenable for the user - because only then would it actually affect their profit.
Is it a first world problem? Yes. But in America at least, I would say we are at the standard of living where I would classify basic internet access as a basic service that should be available to all citizens, the same as electric and telephone.
I agree that more competition in more places is highly desirable. The question is how to convince more companies to build out more networks. On that, I'd submit that it will work much better if they think, "If we build a fiber optic network in this town, we'll make oodles of money" than if they think, "If we built a fiber optic network in this town, we'll never make back the cost of building it."
The real question, then, is how to get there. So, do you think that regulations that make it hard to make much of a profit will lead to more competition or less competition? Net neutrality by itself isn't a big problem here, but let's not rush off to strange ISPs in regulations.
Obviously more competition is better, but as far as high speed competition is concerned, if you have the option of both cable modem with one company and fiber optic with another, I'd say you've got enough competition to stop most ISP abuses. I wouldn't dismiss DSL as being irrelevant, either; for most purposes, having DSL is much closer to having a higher speed connection such as cable modem or fiber optic than it is to being stuck with dialup only.
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On the topic of cable companies wanting to deliver video by other, non-Internet means, I'd like to note that when I signed up for Verizon, they offered one price for Internet only, and a different, lower price for an Internet+TV combo bundle. I don't know how common that is, but it's certainly more efficient from a hardware perspective to deliver one of a handful of video signals broadcast (the cable TV approach) over their entire network than to custom deliver different video streams to everyone (the pure Internet approach).
Interesting discussion.
One minor thing to add about competition. In some areas of the country, cable TV was originally administered like public utility. That is, each cable provider had its own territory. This was to unsure that the cable venture would actually provide service to all people in that geographical area without competition. Laws were written to protect that arrangement. Let's just say that some laws are tougher to repeal than they were to pass. So, some places, including some rather highly populated areas, have existing legislation in place that artificially restricts competition. This spills over into the internet discussion because many of the existing cable providers jumped on the ISP bandwagon as a simple (and relatively cheap) means to increase their revenue by adding services to their preexisting network.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Comments
The cost of delivering some amount of bandwidth to a million different sites massively exceeds the cost of delivering the same total bandwidth to only ten fixed sites. There are massively more Netflix customers than data centers in Netflix' content delivery network. Thus, Netflix only has to pay for a small fraction of the bandwidth cost of delivering their content to their customers. Most of the cost is borne by consumer ISPs, and they have to recoup that cost from somewhere.
Metering for charging and metering for throttling are two entirely separate purposes. I agree that if ISPs are going to charge on a per GB basis, it makes sense to charge for the total amount of bandwidth used, without regard for the sites involved.
But throttling is very different. Where I live, on hot days, the power company will sometimes turn my air conditioner off part of the day. But they won't turn my lights off. The former uses vastly more power than the latter, but the latter would be vastly more disruptive to me. It's far less disruptive to tell customers, Netflix is going to be slow during peak times than to say everything is going to be slow in peak times, including things that barely use any bandwidth.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
The bandwidth usage of the overwhelming majority of web sites is inconsequential. The same is true of online games outside of the initial download and occasionally patches for games that like really high resolution textures. The only way landline ISPs ever throttle games as opposed to other content is when the initial download is by torrent and accidentally gets classified as file sharing and throttled on that basis.
Netflix isn't, strictly speaking, the only culprit, but they are by far the biggest. More generally, high quality video streaming uses massive bandwidth, and so that's what ISPs are looking to crack down on. Virtually everything else on the Internet is basically a rounding error as compared to that.
Who does Netflix pay?
While they do keep track of usage from the first GB, they don't charge extra from the first GB.
For what it's worth, when estimating prices, you need to assume that under the new, pay per GB system, ISPs would pull in about as much revenue as before. I'm not saying that it won't be off by 10%, but it certainly won't instantly triple their revenue (which would leave them too vulnerable to being undercut by new competition) or cut their revenue in half (which would drive them into bankruptcy).
I guarantee you that if it cost ISPs nothing to greatly improve their available bandwidth, they'd do it. Adding massively more bandwidth costs money. Where does the money for that come from? Do you greatly raise prices on everyone, whether they use massive bandwidth or not? Or do you only raise prices on the handful of people and sites that use so much bandwidth that adding capacity was necessary and leave everyone else alone? This isn't entirely synonymous with net neutrality, as there are other issues involved, but choosing net neutrality is choosing to raise prices on everyone, as opposed to raising prices only on those who use far more bandwidth.
That actually has nothing to do with net neutrality. It would be completely legal to keep doing that, even under a strict system of net neutrality.
Without any sort of metering or throttling at all, a handful of people will use enormous amounts of bandwidth and make the entire Internet slow for everyone else. If you're paying a fixed rate, it's not hard to find uses for arbitrarily large amounts of bandwidth. Uniformly doubling the bandwidth available elsewhere would do nothing to change this. Nor would multiplying it by a factor of ten.
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Cable TV is actually a very different situation. TV channels are broadcast to everyone, not streamed to individual users. This is possible for TV but not Internet because there are only a handful of channels--hundreds, as opposed to billions of web pages. Having more or fewer customers or having a given customer get a larger or smaller proportion of available channels does virtually nothing to change the costs to the cable TV company. The point of upgrading the network there is in how many channels you can simultaneously broadcast to everyone, and at how high of quality.
When evaluating a government regulation, one should start by ignoring what the intended consequences are and instead focus only on the actual, real-world consequences. The latter usually doesn't match the former, and often isn't even remotely close to it.
Net neutrality would mandate that a relatively larger fraction of Internet bandwidth must be available to a handful of things that use massive bandwidth (basically, high quality video streaming) and a relatively smaller fraction available to everything else. It may or may not lead to building out more capacity; if it does, then that would mean higher costs for everyone. By taking away a key tool of ISPs to keep most of the Internet operating smoothly, namely, throttling a few things using massive bandwidth in order to make room for everything else to work unimpeded, it would probably lead to more temporary disruptions of a wide variety of Internet services.
I'm not sure who Netflix' content delivery network pays for bandwidth directly; my guess would be that it's a variety of tier 2 Internet providers. They also have agreements with at least some consumer ISPs to pay the ISP some money in exchange for the ISP not throttling Netflix, or at least not throttling Netflix as much as they'd like to.
OP. See this; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU&list=UU3XTzVzaHQEd30rQbuvCtTQ
The ISP could choose to manage their bandwidth by throttling people during peak times if they've caused more than 500MB of traffic during last 24 hours, and that way hit only those who cause heavy bandwidth usage while leaving those who do normal web browsing or play online games completely unaffected, and that would be completely in line with net neutrality.
Net neutrality does not force ISPs to abandon bandwidth management, and it does not force ISPs to give relatively larger portion of bandwidth to heavy bandwidth users.
Netflix isn't the problem.
ISPs are the problem.
They think they're invincible so they bully the little guy. For MONEY MONEY MONEY !! FUCK OUR CUSTOMERS AND EVERYTHING ELSE AS LONG AS WE GET MONEY MONEY MONEY !!
Netflix themselves introduced a solution the the bandwidth problem. They offered ISPs FREE hardware that would not only lessen the impact by a considerable margin but speed up Netflix for everyone. Boom! Everyones happy. But not really... because Comcast and big ISPs said fuck you, we'd rather throttle our customers data until you pay up.
Which Netflix did. & in some cases *cough* Verizon *cough* it did nothing for their customers. After they paid the bribe they STILL refused to increase their customers speed. Corporate pigs are disgusting.
And really, if the ISPs are doing this now, when Net Neutrality is a thing. What would stop them once it goes away?
It'd be a lot worse.
The basic questions involved are these:
There is only so much Internet infrastructure out there. Given that infrastructure, which data will be sent from where to where and how quickly? You can't just send everything that everyone possibly wants immediately, as the infrastructure can't handle it; rather, how do we prioritize? And who pays whom how much for this?
Do we build more infrastructure? If so, what type of infrastructure, where do we build it, and who pays for it? And once it is built, we go right back to all of the questions of the previous paragraph.
As with any political issue, there are always pros and cons to any possible proposal. While net neutrality does have its advantages, there are serious disadvantages to it, too. To ignore the disadvantages of net neutrality (higher prices for Internet access for everyone and/or reduced quality of service for low-bandwidth applications such as playing games and browsing web pages that aren't video-heavy) is to decline to seriously engage the issue at hand.
Most of the pro-net neutrality commentary basically amounts to "support net neutrality because it will give us good stuff for free". If that's all that people see, then you end up with a bunch of people having strong opinions on an issue that they know little about and have never seriously considered. I think that's detrimental on any political issue.
The key to understanding economics is not to stop at the obvious, immediate effects of a policy, but to chase down other--and often unintended--effects of the policy and to consider them as well.
And someone drank the propaganda Kool-Aid...
Netflix is ONE of dozens of companies that have been blackmailed by ISPs for fast lane access and guess what? This has actually been going on for over a DECADE, before Netflix even started to stream movies online.
The propaganda, you bought into it.
This issue isn't new, its just now making headlines.
WHO the information is coming from should not be part of the issue. As a customer of the ISP I am paying for my connection speed, who I am connecting to and what I am receiving is already being paid for.
Its pretty damn simple really. I order something from Amazon and pay to have it shipped to me. The price I pay for that shipment is based on how fast I want it. UPS does not turn around and tell Amazon they have to pay MORE to have their boxes shipped on time because Amazon is shipping more boxes and taking up more space on their trucks...the price is set and paid already, the quantity does not factor in because its meaningless, each shipment already has its price.
In America we already pay far MORE for internet connectivity and for lower speeds on top of it, ISPs have nothing to complain about...hell, they even get government subsidies AKA TAX PAYER DOLLARS to install their infrastructure!
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Let's stop and think about the impact of your proposal on gaming. You download a new game, and the ISP says, oh hey, you're using a bunch of bandwidth, so we're going to throttle you. Then once the download is done, the ISP is still throttling you and you have to wait a day before you can play it. See the problem?
I say it's much better for ISPs to throttle your bandwidth some on the initial download, so maybe it takes two hours instead of one, but then give you excellent speed once you're actually in the game and no longer using much bandwidth.
Better yet is to look at a longer time period than 24 hours; if you had a 20 GB download yesterday, but including that download, have only used 30 GB in the last month, a typical cable modem or fiber optic ISP shouldn't be throttling you at all. You're not the problem.
But suppose that someone gets an ISP and downloads 100 GB of movies over the course of a few days, and then the ISP says, we're going to throttle you. Should the ISP make your entire Internet experience painful for the next 30 days? Wouldn't it make more sense to only throttle high bandwidth applications but still give you full performance on things that only use token amounts of bandwidth?
You can make a strong case that someone using 30 GB of bandwidth per month shouldn't be throttled at all, even if that bandwidth is almost entirely Netflix. But once users get into high enough bandwidth usage that ISPs need to throttle something back, I think it makes more sense to let ISPs selectively throttle particular applications--and also offer consumers the option to not be throttled at all in exchange for paying much more for their Internet connection. But the latter is a different issue entirely.
Which sites were throttled by which ISPs? And how many of those throttled sites used vastly more bandwidth per user than nearly everything else on the Internet? If the answer is "all of them", then that's my point exactly.
Sure. There are disadvantages to net neutrality. Similarly i.e. minimum wage, mandatory pension tax or universal health care systems also have huge disadvantages.
It's advantages are bigger than their disadvantages.
And it is not about 'free stuff' or 'fairness'. I think it is just simply better. Of course not better for everyone, but no system if better for everyone.
I think lack of competition is the root cause of all of this.
If your ISP choices are limited to dial-up, 2MBs DSL, 10Mbs cellular (with steep data limits), or 50MBs cable... there really isn't that much competition.
For a utility, they are allowed to be a "monopoly" because they are regulated to provide fair prices, availability, and level of service. In return to agreeing to abide by these regulations, they get a guaranteed rate of return/profit margin.
Cellular has competition (in most markets). I think the prices we see for cellular are pretty close to the actual price it takes to provide the service.
DSL is semi-regulated, since it's a service provided over telephone lines, and telco's are regulated as a utility, DSL provided over copper cable is regulated. A lot of phone companies are pushing to go fiber optic and VOIP very quickly, because fiber and VOIP aren't covered under the same regulations...
If you regulate ISPs as a utility, and classify Internet access as a basic service, and restrict ISPs to a set profit margin/rate of return, I think the discussion of Net Neutrality takes an entirely different bend. If ISP's charged per Gb, they would be financially incentivized to provide as much bandwidth as possible to each home, and users would be financially incentivized to conserve their bandwidth more than they do now.
But with the viewpoint of unlimited profit in a market with limited availability and effective monopolies - even if ISPs haven't abused it, there is nothing to prevent it, and we are seeing some very real effects that are heading down the path towards real significant abuse of power. ISPs charge flat rates for falsely advertised products, and then get upset when people actually try to use what they thought they had paid for. It's not in the financial best interest of ISPs to provide better access, it's in their interest to squeeze as many people as they can until it becomes untenable for the user - because only then would it actually affect their profit.
Is it a first world problem? Yes. But in America at least, I would say we are at the standard of living where I would classify basic internet access as a basic service that should be available to all citizens, the same as electric and telephone.
Which sites were throttled by which ISPs? And how many of those throttled sites used vastly more bandwidth per user than nearly everything else on the Internet? If the answer is "all of them", then that's my point exactly.
This is the entire point of net neutrality. Different sites provide different services.
Without neutrality, your letting the ISPs dictate which services you can access.
In the most pertinent and recent case, it's particularly telling because the particular service being blocked competes directly with services provided by most major ISPs (video distribution). ISPs may be blocking it because of a bandwidth issue (which is what they are claiming), or maybe they are blocking it because it's cutting into the profit margin of their own video distribution.
The suspicious part is that ISPs that are doing the throttling are the ones that have significant profit from video distribution (i.e. the cable companies) at stake. We haven't really seen DSL, satellite, or cellular (the latter two would really be eligible candidates for limited bandwidth) blocking any services, or at least blatantly blocking them.
So, bandwidth is a valid concern - before Netflix we saw a lot of discussion about this with regard to torrents. But now with Netflix we are seeing something a bit more innocuous and potentially sinister.
Net neutrality affects us all. End users, companies trying to supply content, and the middleman ISPs. The problem is this is being pushed by the ISPs because they see the $'s in their eyes by being able to charge you even more on TOP of your full pipe monthly bill in $. It is so appealing to them to then also charge you based on the content your wanting to access within the use of your pipe you have already paid for, for obvious reasons. Its all the greedy ISPs that will get the benefit while the content providers and the end users get stiffed.
There are so many things to consider. If you give this power to the ISPs then you have a big issue just in the fact that most locations there is already a lack of ISP options. I live in a fairly big city and I have 4 total options and really only two are viable. Cable, AT&T-Uverse, Dish, and dial up. Dial-up and Dish are out the door because of obvious reasons. One is too darned slow the other if a rainy day then your in trouble. This leaves me with only two ISPs to choose from. If this bill passes and both put on blocks then who do I turn to? Noone I am stuck using their service and paying whatever their fees are, or not using the internet. Imagine someone in the boonies with JUST a single choice? We all know the first things ISPs will go and hit on are the major streaming companies first. Its only a logical next step. So say I am a Netflix user and ISPs charge Netflix for the streaming bandwidth who is that going to affect? The Netflix users who will see their subscription rates rise. If they don't charge Netflix then they will charge me as the end user and my 50 dollar a month cable bill will go up 5 bucks a month because I am accessing Netflix. Either way it will affect the end users that use the services.
Then you have the added complexity of the throttling itself. Anyone who is even halfway knowledgeable in computing knows that you are then going to have to add devices to the network to then do this throttling. This in turn can then add another point that could have a problem in the future. So on top of adding to the service your adding devices that can contribute to future issues. Who knows this malfunctioning device could be at the time your logged onto your favorite game and all of a sudden can't get on because of an outage on the ISP side.
So to recap you have 1) Everyone affected in one way or another be it hardware your going through to charges you will have to pay. 2) You have ISPs pro this because they have a way to make more money on TOP of their monthly charge. 3) You have content providers against it because they know that if it passes the end user will end up having to pay for it somehow. 4) You have issues with if all ISPs use this going forward there will be no way to avoid the fees. 5) You have cats and dogs dancing together down the streets and mass chaos reigns.
I am betting the two major things that would be affected first should this come to pass would be streaming content providers such as Netflix and Amazon and the like, and then shortly after that online game servers. Both are logical next step places for ISPs to bandwidth shape in such a way to force the end users to pay should this come to pass. Where it shouldn't affect you more than likely will be web browsing, IMing, and e-mails. So in other words the 90 year old crowd is probably the only safe non affected in the long term demographic.
I agree that more competition in more places is highly desirable. The question is how to convince more companies to build out more networks. On that, I'd submit that it will work much better if they think, "If we build a fiber optic network in this town, we'll make oodles of money" than if they think, "If we built a fiber optic network in this town, we'll never make back the cost of building it."
The real question, then, is how to get there. So, do you think that regulations that make it hard to make much of a profit will lead to more competition or less competition? Net neutrality by itself isn't a big problem here, but let's not rush off to strange ISPs in regulations.
Obviously more competition is better, but as far as high speed competition is concerned, if you have the option of both cable modem with one company and fiber optic with another, I'd say you've got enough competition to stop most ISP abuses. I wouldn't dismiss DSL as being irrelevant, either; for most purposes, having DSL is much closer to having a higher speed connection such as cable modem or fiber optic than it is to being stuck with dialup only.
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On the topic of cable companies wanting to deliver video by other, non-Internet means, I'd like to note that when I signed up for Verizon, they offered one price for Internet only, and a different, lower price for an Internet+TV combo bundle. I don't know how common that is, but it's certainly more efficient from a hardware perspective to deliver one of a handful of video signals broadcast (the cable TV approach) over their entire network than to custom deliver different video streams to everyone (the pure Internet approach).
ISPs could have gone after games for many years now. They haven't. Why not? The answer is, because games don't use much bandwidth. So long as that remains the case, why would any ISP want to throttle games?
Interesting discussion.
One minor thing to add about competition. In some areas of the country, cable TV was originally administered like public utility. That is, each cable provider had its own territory. This was to unsure that the cable venture would actually provide service to all people in that geographical area without competition. Laws were written to protect that arrangement. Let's just say that some laws are tougher to repeal than they were to pass. So, some places, including some rather highly populated areas, have existing legislation in place that artificially restricts competition. This spills over into the internet discussion because many of the existing cable providers jumped on the ISP bandwagon as a simple (and relatively cheap) means to increase their revenue by adding services to their preexisting network.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.