[eor]

Either the author or Andreesen completely misunderstands or misrepresents the concept of network neutrality. Network neutrality doesn't mean users don't pay for the bandwidth they consume. It means they pay the same price for that bandwidth regardless of what it's used for.

[simonh]

Exactly. The telcos want to charge Youtube (and others) more money for a faster connection to me, but I already paid for my connection to be fast.

Those aren't Youtube's bits coming to me over the wire though, they are mine. I paid for them, both in money to the telco for my connection through them, and to Youtube with my attention to their ads.

[sharedliberty]

Well, but other subscribers paid as much as you but may not be using Youtube as heavily. When they do use Youtube, they want that fast connection, but in aggregate they use less capacity because they are less frequent users. Charging Youtube is one way to account for this difference in usage. Charging consumers based on aggregate usage (like mobile carriers now do) would be another way.

[exit]

so all you are saying is that some people pay for (N gigabytes per month) and actually use N, while others pay for the same plan but only use a fraction of N?

[sharedliberty]

I'm referring to typical home/business service where you pay for X downstream/Y downstream, not aggregate usage. Almost everyone will use the full bandwidth at some point (just watch just one video) but some people use it more frequently.

Granted, Andreesen was talking about mobile where pricing is N gigs/month, but even that structure might not capture true cost. It also depends when the user uses that bandwidth. During peak hours, capacity is short and end-user Quality of Service might get degraded to accommodate. Rather than complicating end-user pricing with these issues (like charging $Y for X bits at ZZ:ZZ PM), it might make sense to charge the content providers.

Netflix, for instance, during peak hours, accounts for 32.7% of all internet traffic: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/netflix-uses-32-....

Who knows what the best solution is. Maybe it's charging content providers, maybe end-users. The point is that it's not a good idea to have the government set a one-size-fits-all solution.

[rhizome]

It's not even that complicated, they just want to use the existing pay-TV business models that businesspeople have studied for decades. It's highly inconvenient for established businesspeople to have to invent new business and revenue models, so a power grab and an encircling legal framework comes as no surprise. These are the people who hire lobbyists, and current internet freedoms are anathema to (the current form of) capitalism.

[simonh]

It's not anathema to capitalism at all. Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, Dropbox and many, many more are making good money off the internet as it is. I don't understand the anti-capitalism jibe. What's the alternative? Would they be better off as state owned public services?

[rhizome]

The idea is that the current state of capitalism, as I'm using the phrase, is somewhat static in the way that many Internet businesses are attempting to use it in terms of past business models. Consider the music industry.

Why are capitalists so sensitive that criticism always registers as "anti?" Psychologists have a lot to say about absolutist thinking, calling it "either/or," "black/white," "polarized," "binary," "catastrophizing," and similar. My illustration in terms of pay-TV should have been enough of a clue of the distinction I'm making, and that that distinction was not concerned with eliminating an entire ideology.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

He is dead wrong on his comment about how there are no incentives on the supply side to reduce bandwidth consumption.

Everyone pays for transit and it is a major cost for any website operator other than something nearly pure text like hacker-news. Even the Tier 1 networks pay each-other transit fees based on ongoing negotiation.

It seems it's very difficult to maintain awareness of where your knowledge is accurate and where it isn't the more success you accumulate as a more passive desiccation maker than in the trenches problem solver.

[barretts]

i was at the talk and yes i think he misused "network neutrality." he seemed to be talking more about regulation, and government pressure on telcos to keep prices lower than what the market could bear.

[eli]

I'm not really sure I follow that argument. I get that consumers often prefer unlimited mobile data plans to paying per byte, but what does that have to do with regulation? I'm not aware of any current or proposed rule that would mandate or even encourage unmetered bandwidth and the mobile market is clearly moving away from unlimited data all on its own.