You're paying Verizon for a connection to their network, but that doesn't make it Verizon's responsibility to pay to upgrade every intermediate network on the way to every destination a Verizon customer might request data from. That is not how peering on the internet has ever worked.
I think many may be like me and literally thought we were buying access to the Internet at large. It wasn't until recently that I've had to learn how the thing actually works (for small values of learn and actual - just enough for some intranet hacking). I suspect a lot of the outrage is simply that we feel the service has been deeply misrepresented, from what qualifies as "high speed broadband" to what "Internet" access really is.
I dunno who is going to cave first, but my money's usually on the angry ignorant masses.
Wrong -- I'm paying Verizon for access to the internet -- more specifically, for access to Netflix. If I can't get Netflix, I don't pay Verizon. I either get a new ISP, or don't have internet at all.
It's rather simple. Verizon's customers are consuming traffic, and it's Verizon's job, as a consumer network, to facilitate consumption of said traffic.
There is no such thing as the "internet." What appears to be the "internet" is just a mesh of interconnected but private networks all running the same protocol. The Cisco article I linked to above shows you what you're actually buying. What you're talking about is an illusion that only exists in software.
That's funny, why does verizon call their service "high speed internet service", when the is no thing as the internet. And if you go to the landing page for high speed internet access on the verizon homepage, it becomes immediately obvious that they are selling it as a internet service.
Should we now start talking about there is no such thing as a video, just 1's and zero's, or, there is no such thing as 1's and 0's, just timed voltage oscillations. Or perhaps in verizon's case, there is no such thing as customer service, just opportunistic moneymaking leveraging monopoly and an army of lobbyists.
I mean to say that there is no such thing as what software folks think of as the "internet": the sort of idealized network that you think of when you're dealing with sockets instead of edge routers. Obviously "internet" exists as a marketing term, but it refers to what's described in the Cisco article, not to the idealization.
Do you get upset when you sign up for a United flight and one of the legs is operated by a codeshare partner? It's the same thing: there's an idealized abstraction of a "flight from New York to Burkina Faso" and the actual reality that the underlying physical service is a distributed one.
Abstraction or not, you are missing the bigger picture.
1) Level3 has offered to split the cost with the Big5 ISP's of upgrading their infrastructure.[1]
* This would increase throughput and capacity for both Level3 and the consumer networks.
2) Netflix has offered free Open Connect Appliances to all major ISP's.[2]
* This would allow consumer networks to only download a video once, then serve it up locally within their network to all their customers. In-network traffic is almost free for the ISP's.
3) Netflix has offered to change their entire distribution model into a P2P model.[3]
* This would allow consumer networks to only download a video once, then serve it up locally within their network to all customers. In-network traffic is almost free for ISP's.
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All of these options have been flat-out refused. The Big5 ISP's are purely after the money. There is no other compromise for them.
In a world where everyone watches Netflix, the traditional peering arrangements dramatically favor companies like Verizon. Unsurprisingly, they're fine with the existing peering arrangements. Companies like Level 3 are offering to "share the cost" of upgrading the networks, because under the traditional arrangements, they would have to bear the full cost of the upgrades. Everyone in this discussion is just looking out for their own bottom lines.
We heard this excuse from Blockbuster and Hollywood Video when RedBox and Netflix ate their lunch
This comment is a complete non sequitur in an otherwise good exchange. Blockbuster and Netflix weren't in dispute over who should pay for sharing an infrastructure node shared between them. Instead it's a generic "popular Internet company good, other company bad" argument.
There is this tendency to paint any dispute between established companies and new internet companies as "old-world archaic business models" holding up progress, but it's inane. There's nothing obsolete about selling bandwidth for money. Indeed, in a "modern data-driven society" building and owning the pipes is more relevant and important than ever!
> I mean to say that there is no such thing as what software folks think of as the "internet": the sort of idealized network that you think of when you're dealing with sockets instead of edge routers. Obviously "internet" exists as a marketing term
So what you're saying is, Verizon's selling a product ("internet access") that doesn't exist—and that it's not their fault that they can't provide it, since it doesn't actually exist? Maybe they shouldn't be selling it, then.
The product ("internet access") is the same thing that everyone sells under that label: access to a private network that's connected to all the other private networks that are sold under the same label. That's what the "internet" has always meant. What doesn't exist is what software folks and net neutrality proponents think of as the "internet": this idealized homogenous network where every path between any two TCP/IP sockets is equally good. But you don't get to take a well-understood label, apply your own idealized definition to it, then attack companies that are using that label consistently with its traditional definition.
> But you don't get to take a well-understood label, apply your own idealized definition to it, then attack companies that are using that label consistently with its traditional definition.
If someone were to talk to Verizon's sales people, and watch their commercial, and read their sales copy—and then be presented with those two definitions, which do you expect they would believe Verizon is using?
You are arguing over the semantics of the word "internet" and completely missing the bigger picture.
I only pay Verizon so that I can have access to Netflix content. No access to Netflix, then I'm not a Verizon customer any longer. Verizon is a Consumer Network -- so by definition, almost all of their traffic will be ingress.
Level3 has a great blog post detailing the issues at hand. Specifically, they state the consumer networks are refusing to upgrade their networks, and this is shifting the burden to Level3. Level3 knows they are refusing, because they have discussed the matter with the "Big 5" ISP's here in the states.
Level3 has even offered to split the cost with the Big5, which as they pointed out, is a win-win for everyone involved. Yet, the Big5 still refused.
> Wrong -- I'm paying Verizon for access to the internet -- more specifically, for access to Netflix. If I can't get Netflix, I don't pay Verizon. I either get a new ISP, or don't have internet at all
You might not like the logical conclusion: the ISPs charge people for what they actually use.
There is no logical inconsistency with the notion that wired ISPs offer flat-rate unlimited service and periodically upgrade their networks to be able to provide that service. The cost of the upgrades are completely sustainable notwithstanding Netflix. Verizon has no trouble allowing its customers to watch an unlimited amount of FiOS TV.
The cause of this dispute is that the ISPs each have a monopoly over access to a large distinct block of customers and want to leverage that into a tax on content distributors, creating an unlevel playing field in favor of the ISP's own over the top services in competition with services like Netflix.
Not necessarily. If Level3 is be believed (and they are credible imho), the Big5 ISP's here in the states are just flat-out refusing to make any network upgrades. Level3 has even offered to split the costs with them, since it benefits Level3 as well.
What happened to all that "National Broadband Act" funding the Big5 ISP's got? What about annual infrastructure upgrades? These guys are not coping with the data-driven society the wold is now, and are trying to stretch their buck the furthest (I don't fault for that, it's business).
However, when they wrongly shift the blame to others, it really fires me up.
What's hilarious here, is that Level3 played the exact same game Verizon is playing now. Back in 2005 they dropped their peering entirely for several days with Cogent due to "Unbalanced Traffic Ratios" as cogent was sending L3 more traffic than L3 was sending them.
It's always historically been the case that settlement free peering required balanced traffic ratios. The difference is L3 used to have far more consumer networks buying transit from them. Before, level3 was needed to connect a bunch of different regional ISPs together who each purchased IP transit. Now, every consumer ISP of any size can orderup a nationwide backbone network (from level3 ironically, yes despite being in a peering war for ip transit, comcast's nationwide fiber network is leased from level3.)
Many of the old Ma Bells that were broken up used to be clients of level3. Through the mergers, many of them now own Tier 1 backbone networks. Verizon, ATT, and CenturyLink all are now also competing backbone providers with Level3 as well as being consumer ISPs. This leaves Level3 in the position Cogent was in when L3 depeered them.
Level3 will now gladly split the costs for unbalanced traffic ratios now that it benefits them. 10 years ago they would have tried to extract transit/paid peering from the same situation from someone else.
Perhaps the whole balanced traffic ratios requirement doesn't work in a time when every consumer ISP has their own nationwide fiber network and many also own Tier 1 IP networks. Or perhaps expect Level3 to start looking to get bought/merge by Time Warner cable or Cox to even the playing field.
1) Because they aren't a last-mile carrier, but instead a backbone provider and thus don't have chips on the table.
2) As trevelyan said, they operate around the world, and state that this situation, and mindset of last-mile carriers, is unique to the US.
3) One would think a backbone provider would share the same views as the last-mile carriers, since it would mean more money for them too. However, they state that big content providers such as Netflix are very much so not a problem, but instead it's the last-mile carrier's refusal to make necessary network infrastructure upgrades to augment capacity.
I would have no problem with that, and I think the only reason we haven't moved to that model already is that we started out with the "unlimited" model. That's how my other utilities work.
Imagine for a moment that we're talking about water service instead, and that we live in an alternate reality in which, due to accidents of history, the water network evolved much like our Internet, with peering and settlement agreements between privately owned water networks.
So, to borrow your words: you're paying your water service provider for a connection to their water network, but that doesn't make it their responsibility to pay to upgrade every intermediate water network on the way to every home what might need water -- even if water pressure drops every morning when everyone in town wants to take a shower.
Regardless of the technicalities, that doesn't seem right, does it?
Just as water service providers in that alternate reality would be responsible for making sure customers can pull enough water to shower every morning, ISPs are responsible for making sure their paying customers can pull the traffic for which they have paid.
But the problem here isn't that you can't fill your internet connection, period, but that you can't fill it with traffic from one particular endpoint. There is a bilateral aspect to the problem here that's totally ignored in your hypothetical.
Different example. Air Canada has an unlimited North America flight pass: http://www.aircanada.com/en/offers/air/wallet_na_faq/wallet_.... You can characterize this pass as buying you "unlimited travel to any destination in North America." Okay, so is it Air Canada's fault if you really want to go to Buffalo regularly, but you often have trouble booking a flight because of limited capacity at BUF? Does Air Canada have to pay for the airport upgrades? After all, it's their customers that want to go to Buffalo, and they're paying to travel to any destination in North America.
The bilateral arrangement here is between the ISP and an internet backbone - in this case, likely Level3. Level3 has stated that they are willing to split the cost of upgrading the link. Verizon is unwilling to do so. It's also useful to note that the cost of upgrading a link is tiny in the terms of these companies - on the order of $10-20k[1]. Netflix already pays to have sufficient capacity at their end of the connection; it is the ISP's responsibility to do the same, since their customers are paying to access whatever internet content they want. It is unreasonable to expect Netflix to pay for a separate, unnecessary connection. That's more like if the Buffalo airport decided they were getting too many flights from LA, so if anyone else from LA wanted to fly to Buffalo, they would have to pay for the addition of their own private terminal. It's not the way things are normally done, and it doesn't make sense.
No, the problem is that the ISP's network does not have sufficient capacity at that particular endpoint to receive the traffic pulled (and paid for) by its customers. The bottleneck at that endpoint is the ISP.
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PS. Travel is far too different to use in an analogy -- e.g., it doesn't involve delivery of continuous services to customer premises.
Your analogy paints the internet as a distribution system, with some fungible commodity (water, electricity) flowing from sources to sinks. That may be how Netflix uses the internet, but that's not how the internet is designed. It's designed to be a mesh, with nodes being peers to each other. The distributed structure of ownership isn't an accident of history. The internet was designed around that structure. Its much more like the hub and spoke airport system then a water distribution system. And as in the airport system, its not the sole responsiblity of the most popular destinations to pay to upgrade congested hub nodes.
Yes, my analogy paints the internet as a distribution system for a fungible commodity, because bits ARE a fungible commodity, just like water and electricity. A 1 is indistinguishable from every other 1, and a 0 is indistinguishable from every other 0.
In case it's not obvious, I agree that ISPs are NOT reponsible for upgrading infrastructure outside their network. What I'm saying is that ISPs are responsible for upgrading their network so it has sufficient capacity to receive the traffic pulled (and paid for) by ISP customers.
> See this circa 1999 article about peering and settlement on the internet
The purpose of the arrangement you're pointing to is so that transit providers (e.g. Level 3 or Cogent) could distinguish other transit providers from transit customers whose traffic was characteristically asymmetric. The reason transit providers care more about upload bandwidth than download bandwidth is that customer ISPs can easily offer web hosting services to balance their traffic load, so it would be fruitless to charge the ISPs more for not sending the transit provider more traffic they have to carry. Better to give the ISPs free transit than that.
But Verizon isn't the transit provider here, they're the ISP. By sending Verizon a lot more traffic than they receive, Level 3 is effectively offering Verizon a huge amount of free transit in the other direction. That's like free money. Verizon could trivially use it to out-compete AWS on bandwidth pricing and make a boatload of easy cash. But that wouldn't unbalance the playing field for competitors of Verizon's video services.
Please remember that Verizon is also a Tier 1 transit provider! They own (via Verizon Business) the old MCI/Worldcom/UUnet backbone that was one of the largest transit providers. Level3 and Verizon are both transit providers.
Verizon is not a transit provider in this context. Level 3 is not asking Verizon to take traffic in New York and deliver it to customers in California or Germany. They're giving Verizon traffic destined for local Verizon customers.
Importantly, there is no other way to reach those customers. If you need to get traffic from New York to San Francisco you can use Level 3 or Cogent or Verizon or any of a dozen others. If you need to get traffic to a particular household which is a Verizon subscriber, there is no path other than Verizon.
Hey rayiner. I just wanted to say I appreciate your posting on HN about net neutrality and topics related to this and how diligent you are about it even though it's often contrarian (but right) and going to get you downvotes. I upvote every comment you make whenever I see a story like this unfolding in exchange for being unwilling to fight the good fight myself. I don't know how you do it, but thanks.
See this circa 1999 article about peering and settlement on the internet: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/i... (Part I); http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/ac174/ac200/about... (Part 2). Note that this was published by Cisco 15 years ago, long before any of these disputes arose. We're talking about a very settled understanding of how the internet works that Netflix is trying to overturn to help its own bottom line.