kreeping the internet free?

[StealthySkeptic]

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Correction: They want to charge Netflix and YouTube more in addition for the bandwidth they already currently pay for.

This is double dipping at its finest.

Currently, you pay the bandwidth provider money for the bandwidth that you use.

The providers want to charge even more. So

What they do is come up with the artifice that because a site is more popular, therefore it should pay even more money in addition to the bandwidth cost that they already are charged for.

They do this because they are too cowardly to negotiate proper service-level contracts with other providers/carriers.

This is directly against the concept of network neutrality – which is that a "bag of bits" that you pay for will be ferried to the destination without regard to what it is. Effectively the US post office of the Internet - you send the letter of a certain size, pay for it, and it will be delivered. It doesn't matter if the letter contains photos of your family reunion or your company secrets. The real world post office does not care, and neither should the virtual equivalent of the post office care.

Network neutrality is a cornerstone of the modern Internet. Every single service depends upon it.

Imagine a world where you have to pay more for the same amount of data simply due to the content of it. That is what the Internet service providers are trying to do

My take on this is different. I pay Comcast, a teir 2 ISP, for access to the Internet. They in turn buy bandwidth from a tier 1. Along comes Netflix, and my peers start streaming huge amounts of data in the form of video. In order to accommodate the increased bandwidth demands Comcast has to increase bandwidth to the tier 1 providers. In order to pay for the increased bandwidth they either have to charge all their subscribers more, or charge Netflix for the increased bandwidth. The later allows Comcast to keep the fees they charge their customers somewhat level while increasing revenue to pay for the bigger pipe to the tier 1 providers. Yes Netflix has to increase the charges to their customers, but since they are the reason for the bigger pipe they should be the ones footing the bill.

Now one might argue slippery slope, and I would have a hard time disagreeing with that. However in the case of Netflix and Comcast I don't have a problem with allowing Comcast to charge Netflix for access to their network because that means Netflix customers pay the bill instead of Comcast customers not all of which subscribe to Netflix services.

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The problem with your reasoning is that not everybody is using the same Internet "pipe," if you will, or paying the same rate for the same amount of Internet speed. Cable companies all use different cables and deliver different speeds based on the tier of plan you select. It comes out of similar sources in a geographical area as you point out (the Tier 1) but I'll explain what I mean in a moment.

Say you pay for Comcast's XFINITY Performance Starter plan in Washington DC, which gets you 6 megabits (Mb)/second of download speed (which is 0.75 Megabytes (MB)/second- in case you're curious, a MB is eight Mb) for $49.99/month. Meanwhile, Netflix requires a minimum of 0.5 Mb/s and DVD quality video is available at the minimum recommended speed of 1.5 Mb/s.

Then say somebody is using a speedier plan at say $99.99/month and starts binging House of Cards. Unless everybody is watching House of Cards at the same time and overwhelms the Tier 1 ISP, if it holds to your usual 6 Mbps you won't get 1080p SuperHD video (minimum for that is 7 Mb/s), but you'll get pretty close. The worst that happens is that things look heavily artifacted.

Meanwhile, the guys or gals hogging the bandwidth will probably get throttled (whereby the ISP squeezes your Internet speed so that you aren't taking up as much bandwidth). Since you're just using the 6 Mbps connection and are not a part of the problem, if they started jacking up the prices on everybody it would obviously be unfair and people would start forming angry mobs and switching to FiOS- and for good reason. So obviously this rationale is illogical.

That's because in addition to more reasonable measures such as pitching bundles hard and desperately trying to increase the value of cable TV (with FiOS Quantum and the newest tier of XFINITY you can now record 12 and 15 shows at once and store 200 hours of HD shows on a DVR for instance), Comcast seems to have a more nefarious plan that will destroy net neutrality if the government doesn't step in.

What Comcast is proposing to do is to demand more money from Netflix to skip the Tier 1 middleman and jack directly into Comcast's network. This would in theory increase the speed and reliability of Netflix video. But it would pose an antitrust problem and a threat to the future of the Internet because Comcast, through it's 100% ownership of NBCUniversal, owns a stake in Hulu, a direct competitor to Netflix.

Comcast would then waive the higher prices for Hulu to do the exact same thing so it has a competitive advantage over Netflix because Netflix would be forced to pass the extra cost on either by closing more DVD distribution centers, eating its source of hard income that is subsidizing the high prices studios are asking for their content (to cover their own asses as disc sales and digital ownership of movies and TV shows begins to decline), or as a price increase to its customers. Either way this would make Hulu the more attractive choice in terms of price. (The last time Netflix tried to mess with the pricing structure with the disastrous "Qwikster" spinoff of its DVD-by-mail service, it caused a mutiny that the company is only just starting to recover from. Imagine what would happen...)

Plus Comcast owns a video on demand service that obviously is given priority either through the cable TV side or the Internet side of the business that would not be affected. So Comcast would start squeezing sites that are its direct competitors, eliminating the platform agnosticism that has allowed the Internet to not become gated like TV was when the 2009 digital transition happened.

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Sorry for the long post. (I'm a bit of an encyclopedia when it comes to the history of media technology lol).

TL;DR version: The reason why this is a major problem is because Comcast doesn't have an actual reason for trying to force its competitors to pay more money for higher guaranteed speeds other than to promote its own services.