I love Netflix. Back when they paid for their bandwidth via the postal service, they paid for distribution and I paid them correspondingly. Then they switched to streaming and it was good for all, despite the immediate purchaser of distribution changing.
My point is that the cost of distribution is going to be paid one way or the other. I don't see why we should make federal rules about it. You really want a society where the national government is not in charge of communications.
The government is not in charge of communications anyway. It's just saying "treat everyone equally" and leaves it at that.
Net neutrality (or the lack thereof) isn't about paying for what you use (your argument about trucks is incorrect because of this). It's about paying based on who you are, so your ISP can discriminate based on who the data is coming from.
The original analogy was correct, it's about toll roads where cars of the same size and build pay different prices depending on their brand. "You have a BMW, so you must have more money, so pay more, even though you use the same as a Toyota."
With the truck argument I was just flushing out the analogy, which is a good one. Then, addressing the net neutrality part of the analogy and stating why I opposed the FCC's net neutrality rules: I disagree that it should be regulated at the federal level. It does not take a genius mayor or governor to say that a toll road should not be restricted to one brand of car.
>It does not take a genius mayor or governor to say that a toll road should not be restricted to one brand of car.
But it does take a genius mayor to also be fully aware of the more technical arguments thrown around by ISPs to fight regulation such as NN. We are not discussing roads. As much as the analogy helps, someone might not be there (who isn't working for ISPs) to tell the mayor or governor about it. A small town mayor might not have any idea what impacts a decision like that could have on the local area, and if they make the wrong choice, an entire town is basically held back from an open internet, and therefore communication, point of view.
As an aside, "flushing out the analogy" in this case would mean you were holding the trucks as high-bandwith users, like you've stated previously. I'm not sure if you were admitting a mistake with your comment or not, but I'd like to support the other comments arguments against this.
I wouldn't have federal ISP regulations, nor would we tolerate large scale ISP monopolies like Comcast. The Mayor is not getting hoodwinked by some out of state conglomerate, the largest ISPs around would be the size of the city or a regional body.
I also am not sure I understand the point of nitpicking the analogy. A roadway is like a cable. Sort of. A truck would be like a superposition of a large content provider, the upstream ISPs, and all the customers requesting data from that domain. The point I am trying to make is that when you try to charge this ``truck'' for its use of the cable, well its like taxing economic activity between all these entities and we should be careful when making rules about this: we may lock ourselves into the current model of ISPs without realizing it.
This does pertain to Net Neutrality because how else is NN assessed than by getting into these details?
The immediate purchaser of the distribution never changed -- its still Netflix.
Netflix sends data via a number of backbone providers that charge Netflix for traffic. The backbone providers connect to other backbone providers via peering agreements. If the amount of traffic between the peers gets out of balance, they settle up via payments. Those payments eventually get passed on to the consumer that's how it should be.
