[WillPostForFood]

Do you know how you have to pay extra to your ISP to watch Netflix or Youtube? You don't because of Net Neutrality.

That's a good scare tactic, but isn't very informative (or necessarily true). Net Neutrality only came into effect on June 12, 2015. I don't think people will recall paying extra to watch Netflix or YouTube before that date (because they weren't). And paying extra probably won't be the effect if net neutrality is rolled back, so it will undermine the argument to reinstate it.

The problem is that we need net neutrality to help balance the power against big vertically integrated Media/ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner. But it is more about the future potential abuse, so people won't care until there is some event that really affects a lot of people.

[jandrese]

Netflix did pay a ransom to Verizon and Comcast back in 2015.

You didn't see it directly, but that money came out of the same pot that would have paid for more content on Netflix.

http://time.com/80192/netflix-verizon-paid-peering-agreement...

[WillPostForFood]

Not even sure this would fall under the net neutrality umbrella. Comcast and Verizon weren't specifically discriminating or shaping Netflix traffic. Netflix was buying and over saturating the cheapest bandwidth they could. The question became who pays to upgrade to accommodate it. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the current Net Neutrality rules don't address this situation.

[jandrese]

It's kind of like a business saying that it doesn't discriminate against a minority, but when one of those people walk in the door they just never get served. It's still discrimination even if it's not overt. It's the kind of thing that Netflix could definitely argue as a Net Neutrality violation over at the FCC, especially once they got a demand to pay up.

It's not like the consumers could switch to a less dickish provider, they're often a local monopoly. You may also note that there were no repeats of this problem after 2015, even though many high bandwidth services appeared and grew in this time.

[WillPostForFood]

All Cogent traffic was being affected, not just Netflix, so the analogy doesn't hold. Everyone at the restaurant was being served, equally slowly.

You may also note that there were no repeats of this problem after 2015

Implicit in that statement is that there have been no paid peering agreements (the Netflix/Comcast solution) since 2015, which I know for fact is not true.

many high bandwidth services appeared and grew in this time.

Examples? What high bandwidth companies appeared after 2015 that have even 1% of Netflix traffic?

[cheald]

No, that money came out of the pot of money that they were previously paying to Cogent for transit through to Verizon and Comcast. Describing an extremely-typical paid peering agreement as a "ransom" is massively intellectually dishonest.

[jandrese]

They still payed Cogent for the peering, but they had to also pay Comcast and Verizon for the same peering (just on the other side), because both companies were deliberately undersizing their connections to Cogent until Netflix paid up.

It's not like Netflix moved their servers into Comcast or Verizon data centers and paid for the bandwidth (although they offered and the offer was rejected). How many other internet companies pay the end user ISPs for their peering bandwidth? Why should they? That's what the users are paying for.

[WillPostForFood]

because both companies were deliberately undersizing their connections to Cogent

I think a clarification would be helpful here. Were they "deliberately undersizing" or were they refusing to to increase capacity to accommodate the surge in additional Netflix traffic without being paid?

This is how Cogent described it, “Comcast refused to continue to augment capacity at our interconnection points as it had done for years prior.”

via: https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...

Comcast claims: "Comcast executive vice president David Cohen said Comcast was forced to react when the flow of traffic with Cogent went from roughly equally to Cogent sending five times as much data as Comcast was sending back."

via: http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/05/08/cogent-ceo-comcast-pur...

[js2]

Cogent isn't sending traffic to Comcast willy nilly. Comcast customers are requesting the traffic. It's part of Comcast's cost of doing business to size their network to meet their own customer demand. Or at least, it should be, because most of Comcast's customers have no other choice of ISP, so normal market pressure doesn't work. So yes, this is (should be) a Comcast problem, not Cogent and not Netflix.

[WillPostForFood]

this is (should be) a Comcast problem

That's an arbitrary assessment. It is a problem for both sides. Netflix was paying Cogent for bandwidth. Cogent was taking advantage of a peering agreement (peer ~ equal) that was then thrown way out of balance. Netflix switched from paying Cogent to paying Comcast - both sides had obligations to pay for bandwidth from the beginning.