[Raion]

So a common tech thing that divides the public and industry in the US is the question of net neutrality. 

For the uninitiated, it's the idea that ISPs cannot negotiate with upstream network companies for bandwidth usage and should be required to treat all network traffic equally. It often is framed from a position of monopoly, censorship, and freedom of choice. 

A lot of people would think as a website owner I automatically support such an endeavor. As a matter of fact, I don't. As someone who worked off and on in the ISP side of things, and in the data center side, there's a lot of issues with the concept.

I see it as forcing a company like FedEx to charge the same fees for shipping regardless of whether it's an envelope or freight. That freight loss gets passed onto consumers who don't ship freight.

Similarly, I see no problem with zero-count systems like AT&T does with HBO streaming, where they inherently favor traffic they either control or have successfully negotiated with. The reason is because as someone who doesn't use Netflix, Facebook, or most of the "commodity" internet that makes up the largest portion of traffic, I don't see it as fair for me to subsidize people who do. Nor is irixnet being so niche likely to ever be charged or negotiated with for bandwidth usage, and if we were, I would cross that bridge when I came to it. The fact is, the largest site I use regularly is Reddit, and I sometimes have an unhealthy relationship with it; I wouldn't mind an excuse to discontinue it. 

Why this all comes about is due to the aggressive BGP networks that moreorless bypass having to use major carrier backbones to the degree that bandwidth and ISPs have no direct recourse for parasitic bandwidth draw. 

It's my opinion it wouldn't result in the cableization of the internet. That's not only ridiculous, but it would immediately be attacked.

The drawbacks of net neutrality are:

It causes localized monopolies. Know how many cable providers are in my town for internet? One. The alternative is slow ADSL or an expensive T1 line. Know why that is? It's because of rules that see part of net neutrality allowing ISPs to dominate the last mile parts of the network. Not only that, but net neutrality passes costs for parasitic bandwidth usage such as Netflix onto everyone equally, rather than onto the heavy users. 

Anyways that's my .02; wouldn't mind hearing from others.

[hamei]

Know how many cable providers are in my town for internet? One. The alternative is slow ADSL or an expensive T1 line.

By accident, I found a way around this. While travelling around I had to use my phone as a 'hotspot'. It was mediocre to poor but sort-of worked even in some pretty remote places. The BC ferry terminals turn out to have pretty good cell service

My new really old building in Skank turned out to not have even adsl ... so I found a huawei "hot spot" that uses a 4g sim card and gives you wireless and an ethernet connection. It's kind of a weird router / wireless accesspoint that connects to the intertubes via 4g cell service.

It works great. Cost about $40 total (I saw they sell the same unit in England for 200 lbs)

So if you've got okay cell phone service you are set. Even youboob works fine.

[Trippynet]

I am very much in favour of net neutrality, and I think your analogy is incorrect.

Net Neutrality is all about treating content equally, it has nothing to do with bandwidth restrictions as a whole. Imagine with FedEx if you could ship items much cheaper from one company than from another next door because "FedEx have struck a deal with Company A", or because FedEx is a shareholder of company A. Take it to extremes and imagine if FedEx stated charging premiums for stuff you order that isn't shipped from affiliate companies, or if they deliberately ensure shipping takes a week instead of 2 days for stuff from none-preferred suppliers. And imagine if FedEx is the only shipping agent available in your state, so you can't choose to have stuff shipped with someone else.

Back to net neutrality, a simple way to avoid the costs being lumbered onto other people (and what happens in many other countries with neutrality rules) is that you instead (as a consumer) pay different amounts for bandwidth and/or data allowance packages. Don't use Netflix and other streaming services? You can pay less for your broadband so long as you don't mind a slower connection and/or a 20GB/month limit. Stream and/or download a lot? You'll need a faster package with more data allowance and this will cost more as a result. Hence, heavy users pay more than light users.

Here in the UK, I pay more for a high-speed fibre connection with unlimited bandwidth and I'm OK with that, in just the same way that I'd expect to pay more if I shipped 100 heavy boxes compared with 100 letters. However, it's the weight/amount I ship rather than which company it is to/from that should be the important point. Similarly, I expect my ISP to allow me to use the bandwidth and allowance I've paid from regardless of whether I'm downloading from Netflix, Irixnet, Facebook or whatever. What I don't want is my ISP saying "Well, you may have paid for a 100Mb link with unlimited bandwidth, but we're only going to let you download from Irixnet at 2Mb/s because we haven't signed a bandwidth deal with them".

As a website owner, would you still be OK with ISPs degrading your website and throttling your content unless you pay them money to remove the blocks/limits?

Ultimately, a system where you are restricted to one broadband provider (because of your location) and can only stream high-quality content from companies that your ISP has signed deals with hurts the consumer. It is easy to say you're OK with it, until you find that a service you use has been throttled and there's nothing you can do about it...

[Raion]

You're thinking about it from the wrong angle. Bandwidth itself is cheap, the backbone and surge is not.

Irixnet has like 4G of bandwidth served every week, and for download services it's like 20G. Additionally, I pay a datacenter provider who has uplinks with Telia, Level3 and other bandwidth providers, so I'm already paying that in as my dues.

The issue is with bandwidth saturation/peaks, also called surge by some companies. when you saturate a Link. That causes congestion and leads to cost increases. The big offenders are social media, Google, and audio/video streaming.

Because those big corporations basically abuse BGP, they get out of paying for uplinks like smaller dedicated sites like irixnet do. Nobody cares about that tiny amount of bandwidth we use, because it's not a surge bandwidth.

And no, I don't want to have to subsidize or compromise my plan by using a global bandwidth cap. In the US, most ISPs both business and residential are speed, not bandwidth, constrained. I use bandwidth, but not on major sites. Without details, I have a VPN that I network with a few colleagues for the purposes of LAN parties, sharing data shares, and that requires unlimited bandwidth. I should not have to subsidize Netflix, and as a matter of fact I don't. My bill for a 100/10 cable connection in a town of under 3,000 people is actually cheaper now than it was when I was 75/6 during the old Net Neutrality era.

You seem to misunderstand that with the new competition and such, an ISP can't really conspire to throttle user data en masse withhout major backlash. They were doing this anyways before. Comcast throttled torrent traffic, TWC banned torrent traffic, etc.

[commodorejohn]

I admit, I'm not terribly up on the nitty-gritty of Internet backbone routing, and I'd be interested to hear someone who actually works in telecom weigh in on this, but the notion that it somehow costs Provider Z more to deliver packets from point A than from point B, and that there is therefore some necessity to either limit traffic from point A or pass those costs on (either by charging more for access to point A or having people connecting to point B "subsidize" it by paying the same) seems patently ridiculous to me.

To the extent that there is any truth to this at all, it seems to be the product of ISPs blatantly overselling their capacity and then having to fudge on the fact that they can't actually deliver what they agreed to provide in exchange for a fixed amount of money. Couple this with their other shenanigans (I've lost count of how many times they've jacked up my rate without telling me, or "helpfully" upgraded me to a fancier, more expensive plan than I signed on for without asking or informing me,) and multiply it by the number of times they've spammed me about cable and streaming services they want me to pay for that I have no interest in, and it's obvious where all this is really coming from.

[jan-jaap]

I see it as forcing a company like FedEx to charge the same fees for shipping regardless of whether it's an envelope or freight. That freight loss gets passed onto consumers who don't ship freight.

No, what you're describing is an ISP charging me per megabyte. That's not what net neutrality is about.

Net neutrality means FedEx doesn't have the right to look into the envelope and charge me extra if the contents are a legal document rather than a letter to my mother.

IMHO it's none of their business what's in my envelopes (assuming it's not a violation of their rules, e.g. explosives, drugs, ...)

Similarly, I see no problem with zero-count systems like AT&T does with HBO streaming, where they inherently favor traffic they either control or have successfully negotiated with. The reason is because as someone who doesn't use Netflix, Facebook, or most of the "commodity" internet that makes up the largest portion of traffic, I don't see it as fair for me to subsidize people who do.

So the ISP is favoring content for which they're getting paid by the content providers.
The benefits for the ISP are clear: bigger profits.
The downside is that 'niche' content providers who don't cough up will get slowed down. This is a turn for the worse for consumers of non-mainstream media. Like, let's say, a forum about old SGI computers.

The drawbacks of net neutrality are:

It causes localized monopolies. Know how many cable providers are in my town for internet? One.

Why is net neutrality causing monopolies? The real world seems to contradict your claim:
In the US you've got no net neutrality, but little choice for broadband, resulting in crappy and expensive service.
We (Europe) have net neutrality, fewer monopolies, and broadband is cheap(er).

If you're afraid of subsidizing Netflix users, you should be in favor of paying per megabyte. For the net it doesn't make a difference whether I'm streaming HBO, Netfix or Disney.  But an ISP charging me more for one vs the other is exactly what net neutrality forbids.

[Raion]

I am for paying a flat fee for my internet usage that doesn't involve any surge traffic. I could not by myself saturate a Link if I tried, so my traffic is of little impact, especially with how US-based route and backbones work; however, thousands getting on Netflix at 9PM streaming 4K video ( I don't know if Netflix offers UHD, but for the purposes) could very well cause a number of issues, namely because Netflix doesn't pay into the bandwidth uplinks like it should.

As for your points:

1. I pay for a bandwidth provider. I am part of the solution, not the problem, so they wouldn't throttle the site.

2. The majority of content here is low bandwidth static pages and images. Hence, we aren't anywhere near the same universe of even a smaller social network like Reddit or Minds.

3. The target are large sites that saturate links and own their own BGP. I do not own my own BGP, and neither does most of the smaller scale clearnet.

Also, net neutrality in the US isn't a privacy thing, it's entirely a question of large corporations arguing with each other and your commoditized Americans using only 10 or so big sites for all of their consumption. So it's not a question of legality, or morals or anything.

The reason net neutrality hinders competition is that the very laws enshrined increase start-up costs for equipment (because you can't charge people for more network intensive activity) and maintenance, and that all goes into the last mile problem. The backbones and bandwidth uplinks like Telia and Level3 aren't the problem. The big issue is the last mile. Which is an industry term for residential equipment.

Again. It's not necessary how many MB they use, but how many they use over a period of time. It's less about people using 50G a day over a steady consistent rate, and instead the 100+MB/s needed to pull an HD episode of Space Force or whatever crap Netflix now shows (as you can probably tell, not a fan) that can drown a small person.

In the EU, the approach is that all of the infrastructure is communal. That's essentially what the airlines were like on the US before "Deregulation" in the sense that costs and payments were heavily regulated, and there were sharing rules for airlines. That approach doesn't work in the US. In the EU, all towers are required to share carriers and customers, in the US we have competing standards and bands and most of these are proprietary, privately owned etc. Is it less effective? Maybe. But the culture here is different, and we're not keen on taking advice from Europe as you probably have surmised with how me and other people in the US react to being recommended to just adopt the EU ways.

[Lady Serena Kitty]

The only thing I like about "net neutrality" is having all packets treated the same, regardless of their origin/destination. It would mean getting rid of the nonsense Comcast has where their own streaming service has full bandwidth, but Hulu and Amazon are throttled. They don't bother throttling YouTube, which is weird. It would be really nice to watch my subscription streams without the constant buffering.

[hamei]

... you probably have surmised with how me and other people in the US react to being recommended to just adopt the EU ways.

The proper expression is "cut nose off to spite face ..."

[jan-jaap]

In the EU, the approach is that all of the infrastructure is communal.

This hasn't been true for many years. All the old state-owned telcos have been privatized.

Otherwise I can only speak for The Netherlands: The old state telco (now KPN) was forced to open it's infrastructure to 3rd parties. In reality this means a number of providers exist that use KPN infrastructure, but they generally charge a couple of bucks a month more than KPN so it isn't interesting unless you get a good bundle deal. Cable TV companies didn't have to open up. I have FTTH, and there are two providers with equipment in the residential fiber network (KPN and T-Mobile). Of course I could go with cable internet or ADSL, though the latter is rather pointless because most ADSL providers can supply fiber as well.

The bottom line: I have a choice. There is competition. I can have 750/750Mb for €40/month.

Now, I know the geography of the US makes it hard to compare. But I have friends and colleagues who live in large cities in the US and they too pay > $100/month and get less speed and more fine print than I have to put up with. Is it all because of the people in rural areas? If you're not OK subsidizing Netflix viewers, are you OK with paying for those in remote locations?

NB: as far as I know, the "Netflixes" of this world have dedicated equipment with the large® ISPs in order to reduce load on the network.