[tzs]

> It's time FAANG pays their share for video streaming bandwidth

They do pay their share.

In general, when party X and party Y communicate on the internet, they both pay a service provide (their ISP) for a connection to the internet backbone. That payment to their ISP fully pays for the costs of the data X and Y send to or receive from the internet (or their ISP won't stay in business for long).

What you are calling "internet freedom" is party X's ISP saying it won't allow X to communicate with Y unless Y also pays X's ISP, even though X is already paying X's ISP for the bandwidth X is using with Y.

[danjoc]

The ISP paid for the network. They have the right to do what they want with it. That's internet freedom. The government has no business telling me how to run my personal network. It has no business telling ISPs how to run theirs. On top of it all, FAANG are direct competitors eroding those ISPs' cable tv business in most cases. So it's not just a matter of the government telling the ISPs how to run their network, it's the government picking a winner.

Tell me, if FAANG has a problem with internet freedom, why don't they just build their own ISPs? Answer, that's expensive. That's why Google quit building fiber after a half dozen cities. So instead, they want "net neutrality" which is where ISPs pay for the networks, FAANG takes all the money, and ISP customers get stuck with rising prices. No thanks.

[tzs]

What you keep overlooking is that FAANG are fully paying the ISPs whose bandwidth they use.

When I choose to watch, say, an Amazon Prime video that uses 3 GB of bandwidth Amazon uses 3 GB of Amazon's ISP's bandwidth to deliver that stream to the internet backbone.

The various internet backbone providers pass that data through the backbone, according to peering agreements they have made among themselves, on financial terms they have agreed to among themselves.

The backbone delivers the data to my ISP. From there my ISP uses 3 GB of bandwidth to deliver the data to me. That 3 GB of bandwidth is bandwidth I paid for. I pay my ISP something like $100/month in exchange for 1000 GB of bandwidth to be used that month.

Amazon is not using any of my ISPs bandwidth. I am using my bandwidth, which I bought from my ISP, to receive data from Amazon.

The only bandwidth that Amazon is using when I watch a Prime video is the bandwidth of Amazon's ISP, which Amazon's ISP charges them for.

> On top of it all, FAANG are direct competitors eroding those ISPs' cable tv business in most cases.

One can run a content provision business without running an ISP, and one can run and ISP without running a content business. That some ISPs are also content providers is not really relevant to the question of how internet should be regulated.

> So it's not just a matter of the government telling the ISPs how to run their network, it's the government picking a winner.

You've got that backwards. Net neutrality stops ISPs that are also content providers from using a tying arrangement to prevent normal market forces from choosing the most efficient way to provide content.

Question: how come I've never seen the people against net neutrality trying to repeal "telephone neutrality"?

For example, suppose you pick up your phone and try to call a local pizza joint to order delivery. Do you think you phone company should be allowed to make a deal with Domino's where Domino's pays the local phone company and the local phone company won't put through calls to non-Domino's pizza joints?

Or suppose the phone company also owns a restaurant. Should they be allowed to refuse to let you call restaurants other than theirs unless those restaurants pay your phone company. Assume the restaurants' are on a different phone system than the one you use.

Both of those things are illegal on the phone system, and have been so far a long time.