« first day (1 day earlier)      last day (17 days later) » 

David Schwartz
David Schwartz
11:01
@O.R.Mapper I'm just rebutting a false claim, that's all. Netflix has complete control over what content they offer, who they offer it to, and how they package it. They have much more control over the traffic than their customers do. Customers can just ask Netflix nicely to do things.
@Some_Guy Imagine someone pays a shipping service $15/month to deliver packages to them. They can still negotiate how they accept packages from other shipping services and they might want to charge some services more to accept their packages if those services impose large costs on them (for example, doing less than half of the long haul of the packages). For decades, this has been the way the Internet has worked with paid peering when one network does more work than another.
@Some_Guy By that logic, ISPs shouldn't charge their customers. After all, Netflix is paying their ISP to send traffic to me, why should my ISP charge me at all? What argument is there that Comcast can't charge Netflix that doesn't equally apply to say that Comcast can't charge me?

Clearly, Comcast has to have some set of rules for who can exchange traffic with them for free. And they have a good argument that Netflix doesn't meet those rules because Netflix has much more outbound traffic to Comcast than Comcast has to Netflix. Again, this is how the Internet has worked for decades because…
But good that we admit that net neutrality is about cost shifting in peering, not just treating all traffic the same.
 
10 hours later…
O. R. Mapper
O. R. Mapper
20:40
@DavidSchwartz: I see, but that sounds like a very literal interpretation to me.
While customers just "ask Netflix nicely to do things", the working principle of servers is such that clients/users/customers send "requests", and unless there is an actual technical obstacle, servers will automatically respond to those requests. In that respect, "requests" are mor like "commands" than what we'd intuitively understand by "requests". Within the spectrum of things Netflix allows customers to do on their servers, it's pretty much users who issue the concrete commands to execute.
Furthermore, of course you were right above that on a detail level, a "customer generally has no idea what exact data is moving under the hood and how". Yet, if what customers request is "video on demand", that detail level is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the data packets are designed like, how Netflix or whoever else packages them, etc. - video on demand content of a certain video quality is invariably going amount of significant data volumes.
And with that in mind, it also doesn't matter whether that video data is sent from one Netflix, or sent from one video-on-demand service run by the same company that owns the network in between (to make this country-unspecific), or sent from 100 different small video-on-demand services (thus maybe leaving no convenient "scapegoat" like Netflix or other large services to blame for using a lot more than anyone else). The toll on the available bandwidth, if you will, is always the same.
O. R. Mapper
O. R. Mapper
21:02
But then, the point of net neutrality is not that neither customers nor video-on-demand services can be required to pay an adequate fee for their (upstream/downstream) data volumes at their respective endpoints. The point is that once the data is somewhere between those endpoints, it should be treated the same regardless of where it comes from/where it goes to - as you say, there may also be some cost shifting necessary to achieve that.

« first day (1 day earlier)      last day (17 days later) »