Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by azurelogic 4464 days ago
This is exactly why I agree that this whole mess is a load of crap. Net neutrality should be a given. If I'm paying for a service, then it should be up to me how I use it, and the entity that I am paying should not have the right to arbitrarily alter my traffic. I mean, if you send a letter to someone popular, that doesn't give the USPS the right to delay your letter. The same should go for ISPs.
1 comments

And what happens if everyone wants to use the same pipe ? Who pays for expanding that pipe ? Because that's the real question.

> I mean, if you send a letter to someone popular, that doesn't give the USPS the right to delay your letter. The same should go for ISPs.

Of course the question is the reverse. If someone wants a letter to be sent to virtually everyone in America, that person certainly pays by the letter. Currently that's not what's happening in ISPs, currently sending is free, provided you "deliver it to the post office" (carrier hotel). The companies make their profit by charging rent for having a mailbox and delivering mail for free to those mailboxes. They want to change that.

In your analogy, sending is not free. Both Netflix has already paid postage to deliver all of the letters (their CDN/bandwidth costs) and each recipient has already paid for their mailbox (cable modem service). In this case the ISP wants Netflix to pay extra money to to deliver their letters even though everyone has already been paid and they weigh about the same as all the grocery flyers and other junk mail already cluttering your mailbox (think youtube).
Okay, so here's the rub. If ISPs want to talk to eachother, in order to support "full" bandwidth between them you need n(n-1) connections to support a bandwidth of n mbit.

This is quadratic. You understand why this won't work ?

Let me put the TLDR here : the infrastructure needed to support the internet grows quadratic with the number of endpoints on the internet. Meaning everytime any ISP adds a customer, everyone else's internet should get more expensive, in order to reflect the real cost of interconnection. Since ISPs are not about to let that happen, they demand someone else pays for interconnect.