Speaker to Animals wrote:The Conservative wrote:https://beinglibertarian.com/net-neutra ... g-neutral/
As streaming services such as Netflix, YouTube, and Google have become more prevalent in recent years, ISPs decided to charge them more for bandwidth than smaller companies, seeing as how they now used up a much larger portion of the providers’ finite supply. Like with most things, those who cost more are usually charged more than those who don’t. For example, a compact car driving down a toll road pays less than an 18-wheeler due to the extra wear and tear caused on the road. The truck would obviously benefit from a mandate requiring that everyone pay the same tolls, where the car would be penalized from the redistributed costs. In the case for net neutrality, the 18-wheeler is the large streaming entities, and they want their bandwidth cost spread around to everyone else using the internet, regardless of how much you use. Hence why net neutrality’s most prominent advocates are Google, Netflix and Microsoft, and its opponents include Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T.
That is the stupidest argument I have seen in several days.
It just so happens to be true. What triggered this whole broohaha in the first place was consumers complaining about slow connections to netflix during peak and the ISP's asking netflix to pay them to upgrade their connections. Whether the ISP uses that money to expand their capacity or simply pockets it is an issue rooted in monopoly rights, not net neutrality. NN makes no directive about investments/hard throttling so to speak. ISP's can still throttle by providing inadequate infrastructure, they just have to throttle everyone at the same time.
Content provider ===pipeline=== end consumer
pipeline is built and owned by the ISP having $x costs. Maintenance, WACC, upgrades, overhead etc. etc. ISP charges end consumers and content providers to use its pipe.
Content providers also have $costs and pay $interchange tolls to pass their data through the ISP. costs + tolls
End consumer pays $internet bill and $content subscription to content providers. internet bill + content subscription
ISP revenue = tolls + internet bills. This funding mix must total to greater than the $x cost required to run the pipeline.
ISP can shift their funding mix from exclusively internet bills all the way to exclusively interchange tolls and vice versa. As they do this, end consumers see diverging costs because not everyone pays the same amount in content subscription. Internet bills are generally usage indiscriminate while content subscriptions and usage discriminate in relation to prices.
Let us assume the ISP chooses to increase its funding mix towards interchange tolls against content providers to fund increasing pipeline costs driven by increasing demand for pipe space. Consumers will see the price of content subscriptions increase relative to their internet bills. Consumers without content subscriptions win, while those with content subscriptions lose.
When you pass net neutrality and disallow the ISP from doing this, consumers without content subscriptions effectively subsidise those with content subscriptions. Content providers want this because the ISP cannot levy them specifically, the costs must be spread to everyone.
