this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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We are likely going to see more of this kind of thing.
Services like Twitch, Netflix, etc have had a long time of using the pipes for low or no cost, and contributing nothing to the network except congestion.
No one expects the roads to be maintained for free, and for businesses that use the roads, they gotta pay.
EDIT: I retract my statement, barsoap gave a pretty detailed explanation of what's going on here.
This is a bad take, and the antithesis of net neutrality.
If the customer pays for a connection, the ISP should be able to provide that. Why does it matter if it’s Twitch or Netflix traffic vs anything else?
Because then the ISPs would have to respond to changing customer preferences and spend their own money on infrastructure improvements to meet the new demand.
Or they can lobby/bribe the government to demand fees from wealthy tech companies.
Guess which one's cheaper.
Is that what is really going on here??
I mean… yes?
Video streaming is a MUCH heavier load than text based sites and even image based sites. Anecdotal, but I am aware of at least four of the street side boxes that failed early in the pandemic because the constant teleconferencing and streaming was literally orders of magnitude more concurrent traffic than at any time in the past. That has a cost. Theoretically, it is a "one time" cost but it is also a significant one.
My personal feeling is that this is the ISP's, optimally the local government's, problem. But I don't know enough about how Korean ISPs and infrastructure are handled to have a proper opinion on this. But I can definitely see a push to throttle certain sites that make up a significant majority of the overall load. It is not net neutrality but... is one site accounting for 40 or 50% of the traffic net neutrality either?
It’s as simple as this:
If my ISP charges me for X connection speed, I should be able to use what I paid for. Bandwidth caps make no sense, “internet” is not a resource that has to be generated.
What happened in the pandemic was the first real test displaying very clearly that ISPs are overselling/overprovisioning their network, and hoping we don’t notice that they haven’t actually used the money to upgrade or improve their network.
It’s easy to point the finger at the big bandwidth sources and ask for more money, but it’s wrong and it’s double-dipping. They’re using Twitch and Netflix as the scapegoat for their lack of reinvestment.
Data caps are reasonable as long as they're clearly disclosed; double-dipping isn't.
Data caps are similar to usage-based billing in other utilities like water and electricity. They're reasonable because even a typical heavy residential user does not come anywhere near saturating their link 24/7, which is reflected in the ISP's provisioning and pricing. If you want residential internet service that can handle every user saturating their link constantly, you can have much higher prices or much slower speeds. Do you want that?
Two things.
Firstly, would it make sense to have a “water-cap” and if you hit it your house can’t get water for the rest of the month?
Secondly, everyone’s cap resets at the same time. Meaning that everyone has full access and aren’t at their cap. How does that prevent saturation up to the point that
[speed]*[time]=[cap]for the heavy users? Because it will be days until a reasonable cap is reached.The way I've seen it implemented, it's a cap after which speed is reduced or there are additional charges. Are you aware of ISPs with hard caps?
Grandparent is defending the all-you-can-eat buffet owner whining about customers eating 3 plates of food 😂
"Beat me harder, daddy"
What are you talking about? I work in cloud and fiber infrastructure - the major players pay for fiber connections and close proximity to their customers.
ISPs have an obligation to their customers to provide a service at the speed their customer is paying for - regardless of what is coming down the pipe.
Btw there is a good argument with net neutrality that the ISP doesn't even have a right to know what services you are streaming. Because that shit can be sold to data brokers. Ofc this kind of argument is always better suited for the EU, but Considering freedom is a big thing for America, I assume the freedom to govern over your own data should be a right regardless.
It varies from municipality to municipality but I have lived in a couple places where I definitively know that the flow is:
And from my own home improvement work, I would be shocked if the county did not have to be looped in for any significant work to the various drops that lead to housing blocks. I vividly remember being confused as to why there needed to be a county truck and a Comcast truck out by the box when they finally acknowledged my internet was fucked (mostly because I provided them three or four weeks worth of log data).
Like I said. I don't know how South Korea handles things. So I can't have a proper opinion on this. But I understand well enough that there are a significant number of steps between "I want fiber" and "comcast/verizon lets me give them money for fiber".
And if the issue is just significant load from twitch streaming (I would say Youtube Streaming, but I doubt most Koreans watch Ludwig and he is basically the only streamer that exists on that platform): I can very much see an argument for telling Amazon that they have to chip in for the infrastructure improvements. Because fuck Comcast (or, I guess, Korean Equivalent Of Comcast?) but also... fuck Amazon.
If one site accounts for 50% of all web traffic, we're faced with an inescapable decision to accept or reject that this site is the primary purpose of the internet now. If you have any arguments for why we should decide to limit it, please put them forward! On this end, it seems like the basis for anything other than the neutral position (i.e. to prioritise preserving the neutral relationship between the user and the internet access) is arbitrary.
I got the numbers: https://wachee.co/blog/internet-traffic-used-by-streaming-services/
Streaming in general is over half of internet traffic, while (in the US) Netflix alone is 30% of all traffic.
Usually I am all for any kind of data because trends tend to be indicative
But that is 2019 data. Before The Pandemic. And internet traffic is something that very much shifted as a result of people being locked in their own homes for weeks, if not months, at a time. It is a big chunk of a LOT of the tech layoffs that are currently happening globally and a large part of this particular topic.
To put it in context. xqc is (last I checked) the biggest streamer on the planet (and increasingly a deranged incel who just bitches about his ex-wife while also promoting hate and bigotry but..) and mostly went from disgraced esports nobody to the biggest streamer on twitch (and probably now kick) in 2020. Similarly, Ludwig (who seems to be a left leaning centrist) is very much on the "pokimane" track of getting big and similarly got big in 2020 and used that to become the de facto face of Youtube in 2021.
And I would go so far as to say the vast majority of the "O(100) concurrent" mid-tier streamers have similar stories. 2020 is what let them turn this into a full time job.
So do you think that shipping companies should charge fees to both sender and recipient? Because that's the physical equivalent of this situation.
I pay my ISP to deliver data to me at an agreed rate. The data being streamed from the bandwidth heavy sources has been paid for... By me. It would be wrong for my ISP to then go and charge them for the bandwidth that I'm using, much in the same way it would be wrong for a company to both charge the sender and receiver of a package just because that package is heavier than normal.
And many of the CDN agreements that bandwidth heavy content providers sign with ISPs have favourable terms specifically because those ISPs recognise that having good access to that content is exactly what their customers are paying for... At least the ones not completely blinded by greed do.
That's not how billing works on the internet: You hook up to an IXP for a flat rate depending on the port bandwidth you want, then make peering agreements with other people there. If traffic levels are about even, say, a regional ISP with a neigbouring regional ISP, they will just deal with traffic directed at each other for free.
But that only connects you to the next ISP, not to the whole internet, to get at the whole internet you peer with a tier-1 provider, people who run connections to IXPs all over the world so you can reach all. They're going to want money for that, and they're going to bill by maximum upstream bandwidth you sent out to the internet you used in that month^1^.
If you're an ISP that's generally fine, you're getting money from your customers, if you're a company with a webserver that's also fine, bandwidth isn't that expensive. If you're someone who puts petabytes on the pipes though, that includes the likes of netflix, you want to do something different: You want a box at every IXP that caches content so you can peer with those regional ISPs directly. That's also generally for free because while you're sending a lot of data, hooking up directly to you means that the ISP won't have to pay their tier-1 provider for the upstream part of the connection (there's always ack packages etc) and it's not like the total amount of traffic they're dealing with increases, it only shifts. Historically that has been akamai, the original peering slut (peers with everyone as long as they're sober), now there's a gazillion of CDNs and content providers like netflix which run their own CDNs.
The only ones complaining about that are tier1 providers which are also ISPs because they'd rather have all those CDNs pay them for using their fibre than not use their fibre and make things more efficient. They're rent seeking. And ISPs who want to triple-dip and have you pay by volume, which noone on the internet pays for.
Oh: What you pay your ISP for is a line and share of a port to the IXP, its maintenance, and your share in what they're shelling out to their tier-1 provider(s) for the stuff you upload into the wider net. Which is btw why asymmetric connections (higher download than upload bandwidth) make sense even if the underlying connection is symmetric: Provided the ISP's infrastructure is fast enough receiving more packets over their line only costs electricity, and a negligible amount thereof.
^1^ It's not "maximum" but "modulo 1% spike or something" don't ask me about the exact maths
Ah. I see. That's what's going on.
I don't want to undermine the lengthy and informed reply to this, but didn't cellular network providers in the US charge for both sending and receiving SMS messages, solicited or otherwise?
That was a little different. You weren’t paying a flat fee for “unlimited sms” at that time, you were paying a “per transaction” fee, where transaction could mean incoming or outgoing data.
Still a load of bullshit though. SMS was always cheaper to send than even a minute of voice data. Text will always be smaller than audio.
Hmm.. yes actually, those are good points...
I mean... they do? There are fees to load and unload cargo onto boats/planes/whatever. Hell, big rig trucks also have prices. This cost is just generally masked (and pushed to the consumer...) when you order something from Amazon (because this IS Amazon we are talking about)
And shipping companies will often tend to mask this. They either eat the cost (because they are using significant parts of that shipping container themselves) or ensure they are making a significant profit on all the other packages so they can give lower traffic a better deal and so forth.
Which... is what led to the kind of shitshow where Amazon eventually ended up investing a LOT in their own internal shipping infrastructure (and the gig economy). Because UPS/USPS/FedEx realized that a very significant percentage of their packages were from a single company. And that was already one of the bigger companies on the planet by that point.
So let's continue to torture this metaphor. I am old enough to remember when you could put almost anything in a fedex envelope and they would ship it. I also am old enough to remember getting confused why they were weighing a package one time and factoring that into the cost. Because there was a general assumption that the volume of a package was strongly correlated with its weight and all that mattered was how much truck space it used. Then they learned that people ship a LOT of books (hmmm... Hey, what did Amazon start out as again?) and the flat rate packaging prices went way the hell up and there was a much bigger emphasis on weighing packages (and a lot of flat rate boxes actually do have a maximum weight in the fine print).
In theory, the price of shipping covers the repairs on the trucks and the planes and so forth. And, on average, it does. It doesn't pay for the gatorade bottles for drivers to piss in while they are driving between stops, but it does cover oil changes, repairs to suspensions, etc. Until the underlying math shifts heavily and needs to be readjusted. Now they need to repair suspensions much more frequently, do more cargo flights (oh god, that means even more chances for Tom Hanks to be stranded on an island!), buy better trucks, etc.
Which then becomes the question: Should everyone's cost of use increase to cover this? it now costs me 10% more to ship a package because fedex needs to buy new trucks this year. And, because capitalism, that is never going down and the increased profits next year will be considered a win for the new trucks. Or should the "We Have Lex Luthor at home" mother fucker stuffing trucks full of hardcover books to build his empire maybe get charged on a different tier?
And same thing with internet traffic. We are charged based on an expected "weight" of traffic. Too much traffic and hardware tends to fail more regularly or need to be upgraded. And a certain percentage of upgrades are factored in to those internet bills. But if EVERYTHING needs an upgrade, that becomes a very significant cost. Which, again, either is going to be spread out among all users or just Bex Buthor who is the main cause of it.
But you'll notice I stopped talking about USPS REAL quick during that long ramble. And that is because USPS still have flat rate packaging for dirt cheap. And it is part of the core of the organization that you could literally fill that up with tungsten (or a child) and they would deliver it, no questions asked (I think they would ask about the child these days, but it is still a story worth looking up). And that is because they are (keeping it simple) part of the US Government and are subsidized as a result. This is essential to get... essentials to people in rural and under-served communities.
Which... is what is already happening with a lot of internet infrastructure in the US. Google ain't gonna roll up and do the paperwork to lay fiber, so counties and states are doing it and hoping an ISP will use it. And a lot of us argue that internet should be treated like any other utility in that regard, but there are a lot of issues with that approach that I won't get into.
As for Korea? I genuinely have no idea how their internet (or shipping) businesses breakdown. So I have no idea if the above is at all relevant or if this is just a case of politicians being assholes or what. But... any time Amazon is involved, I tend to assume they are at least 30% at fault.
But... kudos on picking the absolute best possible metaphor to explain this. Like, genuinely. Because we all know the "internet is tubes" metaphors don't work. But, when you are thinking in terms of an ISP, the Internet kind of IS shipping packages.
Ah yes you're right, the Internet is a series of tubes and we need to pay the plumbers to maintain the tubes for leaks
I get where you're coming from, but there is significant maintenance required. Cables and equipment break or need upgrading, routes get changed, loads change over time in different areas due to population and service movement..
That's.. why they charge customers fees
I'm not talking about exchange to premises, this is between ISPs and whoever is routing between cities and countries. Customers get charged for maintenance between the ISP and their house, but there's the whole internet backbone that ISPs hook into that requires maintenance.
The online services pay their ISPs.
This is shameless double-dipping by entrenched monopolists.
They really don't, customers get charged what they need to be charged to support the network, not just the last mile to your house. Companies don't get internet connectivity for free, either, paying significantly more than consumers at every turn
Yeah i know, but if one location changes over 10x others, you know that one location is a problem and not the lack funding to infrastructure. Also south Korea was known to have better than American Internet at lower cost back in the day, it's probably a corporation profit thing forcing higher fees
I pay for download speeds and volume, seems only fair on the providing side. Also, fuck twitch. Constant unskippable ads, left the service years ago when they killed the APIs that ended third party apps.
You can use an adblocker for twitch(takes more than the average user to implement tho)