In what other industry can you accept payment for a service and then try to make a legitimate claim that you then don't have to provide that service or maintain the infrastructure you are selling? It's fucking nuts.
When the so called "free market" fails and you have monopolies in place that are so anti-competitive and anti-consumer, then maybe it's time to go looking for another solution.
Perhaps this is the situation when it's time to look for some sort of state or government regulation. Or maybe it's the exact opposite. Perhaps these companies are in control of tight regulatory procedures that it prevents competition. I'm not overly familiar with the current system in place in the US, but whatever the current situation is, you really need to start demanding the exact opposite.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...
Anyone who blames US Internet issues (or pretty much any other issue in the US) should just go and try to start a competing business and see what happens. I think you'd find that "free" is one of the last words you'd use to describe the industry.
In 2013 there was a petition [1] to try to bind the internet providers to net neutrality.
[1] https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/petitionen/_2013/_04/_23/Pe... (German)
> 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.
Rachel pays Time Warner for her broadband connection to get her data from anywhere on the internet, as was sold to her by Time Warner which is the current day technology that is expected of broadband network access. Time Warner built their network upon receiving many tax breaks for their prime market position.
Rachel pays Netflix for the content that comes through the network.
The system is correctly setup except one minor flaw, if Time Warner doesn't want to pay for it then a competitor can't offer the same service or get the same funding and breaks they did to compete.
The broadband companies are lethargic dinosaurs, hopefully network access will go right over their heads (even if by Zuckerberg drones), when wires aren't needed we can release them.
The ISPs appear to be confused about who it is that's paying them for a pipe. I'll offer them a hint: it's the people you send those rate increase notices to every 12 months.
I have a condo in Chicago and was delighted to learn that a company was offering our building last mile connectivity via microwave along with SLAs for not only bandwidth but latency as well (to which point I don't recall)! Sadly, the condo board didn't seem so enthralled. Unlike the suburbs, city folk have more options apparently.
The biggest problem is that last-mile is a very, very, very expensive proposition. Ask Verizon. Their former CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, learned that the hard way. Digging up streets, attaching to poles, and plopping down equipment all costs a lot of money. It also, in the case of cabinet-sized telco equipment, can really irk the neighbors.
Ultimately, if we want real competition for more than just high-end condominiums, we need to start treating physical plant connections like roads, power lines, and water pipes: a central, neutral authority builds them for the benefit of a specific geographical area and then all comers are allowed to use them. (No, HOAs, building your own coax network and then having some cut-rate third-tier ISP become the exclusive owner of those wires doesn't count. That's not competition, either.)
Specifically, Netflix's ISP has an agreement with your ISP, which says essentially "You know what? We send and receive a lot of data. How about I won't charge you for your data travelling across my network, and you don't charge me for my data on your network." But then Netflix's ISP transmits enormous amounts of bandwidth, and your ISP doesn't really get to take an equal advantage of that reciprocal deal.
It's actually about peering agreements between ISPs. Your ISP wants Netflix's ISP to foot the bill for the fact that their reciprocal agreement is statistically just one-sided.
The the ISPs don't deliver and throttle Netflix's bandwidth and it's noticeable to the customer then hopefully the customer has the option of going to another ISP.
People all of a sudden start to notice that House Of Cards plays more smoothly over their 4G cell connection than their expensive cable connection, and how does Time Warner explain that?
That's not too likely. Most folks (unless their vaguely-savvy 4G-connection-having not-afraid-to-tether friends clue them in) will decide that Netflix sucks and stop right there.
As a datapoint, look at Obamacare. Alabama rejected any and all Federal premium assistance subsidies. This means that in Alabama, regardless of your ability to pay, or employment status, you pay full price. In California, low-income folks get reduced or totally subsidized premiums. The talk in Alabama is not about the insurance is gobs cheaper for poor people in California, it's about how Obamacare has made insurance so goddamn expensive for everyone.
People are soulcrushingly incurious.
Let's say everyone in the United States had a second mailbox, and each mailbox is owned by FedEx, UPS, or DHL. To ship a package, you leave it in your box, it's picked up by your carrier, transferred to the recipient's carrier, who then delivers it to their box. Only the sender is billed, and this shipment fee includes whatever your carrier will have to pay to your recipient's carrier to complete delivery.
When these mailboxes are built, most people in the country are shipping as many boxes as they receive, and the number of packages sent by and received by customers of each carrier are roughly the same (let's say a total of 15,000 per day). So FedEx, UPS, and DHL, to avoid having to track every single package, just decide to "call it a wash" and deliver each other's boxes for free, under the assumption that nobody's really getting the upper hand.
Fast forward twenty years, and Jeff Bezos has built Amazon.com at his house. His house is a UPS house, so UPS picks up 15 million boxes from him every morning, and hands over 10 million of them to FedEx and DHL for delivery. FedEx and DHL are billing their customers for 15,000 boxes but also have to deliver Bezos' 10 million boxes.
You can imagine that they'd want to revisit their original agreement to "call it a wash" and start billing by the actual package.
So, should we start debating whether UPS should pay for roads directly in each city?
Are our roads going to start being "content aware" & extorting delivery service vendors?
...Me? Do I not pay for my internet service? Are ISP's not subsidized to build infrastructure by my tax dollars? Is my ISP running at a deficit? Yes, yes, and no, I don't believe so. I pay Netflix for the content, I pay my ISP to deliver it.
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/11/homes-with-ta...
Homeowners can comply with the FCC just as easily as the corporations. We won't make the stuff, only install it.
It's not out of reach. In many poor countries the last mile is done by small companies that string coax wires on existing utility poles (also paid for by the homeowners through the electricity installation charges) which are often just 1-2 guys. Coax cable or fibre costs less than $1 per foot in bulk.
