bck136

Comcast and BitTorrent Become "Net-Neutral" Friends

User 155013:

“Currently, you can start a business that sells toilet paper online and uses minimal bandwidth or you can start another version of YouTube that uses massive amounts of bandwidth and you would be charged exactly the same amount for your connection.”

This isn’t true. Companies which use vast amounts of bandwidth already have to pay more for what they use. Websites such as Google or Youtube have bandwidth costs in the millions per month as is (and rightly so – I’m not arguing that the telcos shouldn’t be allowed to sell higher levels of tiered service). Companies like Comcast already are compensated for the use of their bandwidth. Are you suggesting we allow the telcos to add per MB surcharges on top of the existing $2+ million Youtube or Google pay per month to get the levels of service they need to reach all their users?

And you cannot really compare the Internet to any physical medium – your apartment and trucking analogies are comparing apples to oranges. No truck is free under existing net neutrality provisions, because all Internet users are paying a “toll” to use the roads. When Comcast sells Internet service at 15Mbps down/5Mbps up, they are leasing the consumer a 4 lane highway. Whether that consumer chooses to use that highway to capacity (50 to 100 trucks, or maybe just a lone Prius) is up to them under existing neutrality laws. Comcast can’t add a clause to the lease, which prevents the lessee from only using so much of the leased highway. When ISPs sell these service plans to the consumer, all they are doing is providing access to the Internet at whatever the stated capacity happens to be. It’s then up to the consumer how much or how little of that capacity gets used at any given time.

Should Comcast be allowed to lease you that 4 lane highway, only to turn around and tell you that you can only use one lane at a time? If they didn’t have the capacity to support it, why did they lease you a 4 lane highway in the first place? Isn’t that fraud?

“Comcast and other providers charge subscribers different rates for different upload and download speeds, why not charge based on volume of bits transferred.”

As a consumer, would you genuinely accept this pricing structure from your ISP? If companies started trying to price Internet access the same way they price text messaging by cell phone, it would be a disaster.

Also, how would this work with web-based companies who already pay millions per month for the bandwidth they need to reach all of their users? Should they then pay more on top of that, based on how much data they transfer to the millions of people who are also paying extra to receive that data? This is the part wherein the big telcos win, while everyone else loses.

The article I linked to above by Tim Berners-Lee summarized what net neutrality is really about very well with this one line:

“If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.”