The ISPs have been pretty clear about what they want: the ability to charge for fast delivery. They already have money coming in from both ends (the home subscribers as well as the companies like Netflix and Google). But hey, these guys are making money from their "pipes"! Don't they deserve a cut of that money, because, hey, pipes!
This makes about as much sense as the power company getting more money to power a PC than a lamp, or the government demanding a bigger toll if you're crossing a bridge for a vacation.
> The ISPs have been pretty clear about what they want: the ability to charge for fast delivery.
The big conglomerates that offer both internet and content services (which are the largest broadband ISPs, but this interest isn't general to ISPs, its specific to those dominant players) have been clear that they want the ability to charge anyone for anything, even if they've already charged someone else for it, but they haven't been clear about the real reason -- though the actual places where they've chosen to do this make it very clear: what they want to do is use their market power in the broadband market charge the content firms that have already built businesses in content markets that threaten the conglomerates markets a toll to compete that serves both to limit the outside content firms' ability to profit in the market and subsidizes the conglomerates own competing services. Its pure protectionism; that's the reason that the cable companies (whose bigger business is often selling consumer video services -- cable TV + premium VOD tied to cable TV and, in many cases nascently though they are far behind the "pure internet" video services, video-over-internet subscription services) main target for tolls is Netflix.
Allow this, and the ISPs will start at the top and work their way down, until they've used their tolls to take over every profitable business relying on using the internet to connect to customers.
The big cable companies have had the technical capability to deliver video over internet subscription services for years. They haven't released them widely because if they did, it would melt the Internet. Netflix doesn't care about such things because they don't own the infrastructure and aren't responsible if their service overloads the last-mile.
> The big cable companies have had the technical capability to deliver video over internet subscription services for years. They haven't released them widely because if they did, it would melt the Internet.
The big cable companies have had video-over-cable subscription services for years, and well established customer bases for them, and charge very high prices for them compared to any video-over-internet service. They haven't offered video-over-internet services because they'd be competing with themselves, and only started offering some when people started moving to third-party services. Still, they'd prefer to levy specific tolls on third party video-over-internet services so they don't have to compete and, if they decide to compete, can have their competitors foot the bill. Its a pretty classical way of leveraging market power in one market to prevent free competition in another, and it was one of the prime things that was specifically called out as a targetted concern in every version of net neutrality / open internet regulation that the FCC has issued.
I guarantee you that video-over-internet is a strategic priority for the cable companies. Currently, Comcast is limited to selling video services to customers who are connected to their cable network (about 30% of the US). They would love to expand their addressable market for video services by 70%. They've invested a ton of money into their online video platform for this reason. They haven't released it because the customer experience would suck unless there is a precedent and methodology in place for them to ensure adequate interconnect bandwidth exists.
As someone who works in the industry, that's why this whole argument feels false to me. Sure, the cable companies own the infrastructure for their customers, but there's money to be made from selling services to other customers as well. Big companies like Comcast aren't as stupid as you think: their video distribution model will likely look a lot more like Netflix in 5 years, as will the other cable/telco video companies. They're not trying to set up the rules so that Netflix fails; they're trying to set up the rules to ensure they can sell their products in the marketplace as well. How do you ensure your products don't suck? You ensure everyone in the value chain is adequately compensated (at least until you can disintermediate them).
When Comcast enters the video-over-internet market, they will have to pay for interconnects to the other ISPs. But that's fine with them; because it's a marginal cost tied to revenue. You have to tie the fixed costs of expanding infrastructure to increased revenue somehow or the economic model falls apart. That means either charging service providers by the gigabyte or charging consumers. Charging consumers would have a chilling effect on Internet commerce (just look at aggregated mobile data usage stats) so they've opted to go after the service providers.
But what does charging for fast delivery look like? I get the distinct impression that people think the ISPs plan to throttle any site that doesn't pay up; which is a gross mischaracterization of the situation. Part of the beef with Netflix is that Netflix is building a business model that disproportionately taxes the infrastructure with long-form video content. You have one service that accounts for 30-50% of bandwidth usage. That level of traffic causes havoc on transit providers, ISPs, etc. From an engineering perspective, it's better to establish direct routes because you're removing bottlenecks.
Your last statement doesn't really help your argument since the situations you describe actually happen. The power company can't really do the first because they don't have the visibility, but they do charge more per kWh for residential power, since residential peak usage occurs in the evening. In many areas toll roads and bridges are more expensive if you don't have an EZ Pass (the EZ Pass basically flags you as a resident).
It feels condescending because people don't really need an exaggerated demonstration of what the word "slow" means. I agree that people need to be made aware that what FCC is doing is going to make things slower for regular users, but this is excessive.
I still don't think that means it's condescending, but it certainly would be egregious if a large number of popular web sites did it. As far as I know, however, they aren't doing it, not even on a short-term basis.
