"statements to the press indicate that a new provision would require payments from online service providers to broadband providers—ostensibly to fund the rollout of 5G and fiber to the home”
One could argue that the broadband provider should be the one paying for the infrastructure to …provide broadband
The practice of public companies appealing every single court ruling out of duty to their shareholders seems to have been taken to another level. Now they actively try to avoid paying to invest in their own infrastructure.
ISP's as common carriers and infrastructure providers willingly put themselves in a position that demands a level of altruism beyond your average private corporation - and that's really not asking for much. For many their primary goal is to enrich themselves to the detriment of building the best network for end users. This sort of wailing and thrashing from broadband providers really needs regulation, but competition and financials mean that it's always going to be in the interests of less scrupulous companies to make every attempt possible to enrich themselves or push costs elsewhere, even if that screws up what is quite a delicate balance of legislature, technology and public and private interests.
"So you're saying, governments want fast internet access for a productive, modern economy, but our anticompetitive practices and lack of investment have come back to bite us? Can't let shareholder dividends be affected by that, it's clearly Netflix/YouTube/whoever's fault for providing content consumers want!"
Make that statement enough times in front of enough uninformed/bought legislatures and sooner or later you'll start pushing slowly towards your goal.
Not to mention that this conveniently ignoring the fact that Netflix/YouTube and the likes provide caches colocated inside of ISP data centres as well as upstream [1] in an attempt to avoid the costs of peering. But nothing will ever be enough.
Then charge the customers more for a 5G subscription and if they don't want to pay that and are quite happy with their "slow" 4G connection, then that begs the question whether 5G is worth the investment at all.
Making content providers pay the ISPs doesn't help consumers at all. Because content providers will simply increase their prices to cover the extra fees, so consumers are either going to pay their ISP more directly through their internet subscription or indirectly through their content subscription.
This whole idea is just a way for ISPs to raise prices without actually sending their customers a higher bill. They'll simply let the content providers take the fall for it instead.
What's so incredibly expensive about the 5G rollout that wasn't the case for "3G/4G"? You replace/mount more radios, make sure you have backhaul to carry the traffic.
I have no idea what the radios cost, but one thing that's for sure is that networking gear isn't that expensive. I know a guy that runs a teeny IX where everyone gets a 100GB port, because it's not that expensive.
Once you start doing stateful packet introspection, that's when price goes through the roof.
Once the 3G network is dead we can reuse that low-freq bands for 5G with similar range. You only use the high-freq high-bandwidth radios in populated areas.
https://youtu.be/0faCad2kKeg this is Wendover Productions explanation of cell service, there's an error regarding ultra high-freq when he means ultra low-freq, other than that it's a good explanation of how RF works.
An important bit here is that 3G is 16 combinations and 5G is 1000+, this is why it's important to deprecate old tech, we need to reuse frequencies.
No network allows 100% utilization from all nodes at once, each peering arrangement only has a finite amount of bandwidth and Net Neutrality activists don't even want them to be able to do QoS.
If some peer is causing massive contention issues for your network and refuses to pay anything to help cover the costs you can
* Just have a shitty network until your customers leave you
* Go bankrupt by constantly buying millions of dollars worth of hardware to subsidise their business
* Increase prices
Consolidation will continue, and people will continue to whine that they have little or no choice in broadband provider after all the smaller providers go bust or get bought out for peanuts.
At least Netflix colocate their CDN in ISP networks but I bet most of the others do not.
> If some peer is causing massive contention issues for your network
But generally it's not "some peer" causing the problem. It's the fact that you have a million clients that all want something from that peer, and that peer is supplying it to them. And those customers are _each_ paying you to be able to get it from that peer. So you don't have a problem with "some peer" taking up N bandwidth, you have a problem with 1 million clients each taking up <N / 1 million> bandwidth; which you sold to them.
If you have a problem with your million customers using up the bandwidth you have, then cap your bandwidth at the max amount you can support and/or raise the amount of bandwidth you have available.
Content providers pay their ISP bill or they wouldn't be on the internet. End users pay their ISP bill or they wouldn't be on the internet. ISPs unable to figure out how to run a profitable business is no one's fault but their own.
If they can't provide the service they claim to provide at the prices they charge then they probably ought to look into a price increase.
Just charge customers by the gigabyte like a mobile network or a satellite network. It is misleading in the first place to advertise certain speeds on an underutilized network.
This is like running an all-you-can-eat buffet and complaining when a fat guy shows up and eats you out of business. It's a flaw in the business model they CHOSE to implement.
>Just charge customers by the gigabyte like a mobile network or a satellite network.
That's silly on multiple levels (and I'll note Starlink doesn't do any such thing either). The marginal cost of transmitting a gigabyte or terabyte for that matter is effectively zero. Some minuscule fraction of a fraction of a watt. What costs money is bandwidth, priority bandwidth when there is contention, lowest latency bandwidth, 9s of uptime, and support. What's actually needed is for ISPs to be required by law to spell out the SLA for everyone, same as an SLA you'd get with any normal commercial service, and for all shaping to be perfectly neutral to what data is being carried, and that customers themselves may do so themselves as they wish with standard tools (like using PCP fields per 802.1p in the tag control information) within the raw limits of their service agreement.
>It is misleading in the first place to advertise certain speeds on an underutilized network.
The phrase you're looking for is probably "over provisioned" not "under utilitized", and there isn't anything misleading about it per se. Most users have extremely bursty workloads, and they can indeed get what they're paying for when they want it in general. It makes lots of sense for them to split the cost with a bunch of neighbors, everyone gets what they need for less. The lack of transparency is the big issue, markets don't work without information symmetry between sellers and buyers. With real leased lines everything is spelled out, and that's what should happen for consumers too albeit naturally at a much lower level of service. So say you sign up for "1 gig service" and it'll spell out you have 1 Gbps maximum bandwidth which is promised on average 67% of the time (16 hours a day), 125 Mbps guaranteed floor bandwidth (ie., 8:1 overprovision), 1 Mbps low latency bandwidth (which you could assign to a VoIP vlan say), maybe in some cases a burst capability (can go to 2.5 Gbps for 2 seconds per minute), and response for broken connections within 72 hours. Or whatever the numbers are for any service, but all spelled out, measurable by the customer, neutral to customer content, and directly comparable between services. Customers don't need to necessarily use all that or care, but if they do they can make sure the ISP is doing as promised, and the ISP can match its costs to what it charges in a clear way.
>This is like running an all-you-can-eat buffet and complaining when a fat guy shows up and eats you out of business. It's a flaw in the business model they CHOSE to implement.
Physical analogies are often bad when applied to tech.
I dream of a consumer/residential ISP that’s that transparent about their network.
There were issues in Australia with the rollout of the NBN where the wholesale charging mechanism was basically designed to give structural kickback to back haul fiver bandwidth providers (including the national incumbent Telstra) as a way to get everyone on the negotiating table. So instead of needing bandwidth to a couple dozen places ISPs needed it to over a hundred, and we ended up with a significant fraction of the ISP market being throttled by ludicrous “contention ratios” I recall some notorious ones being over 100 to 1 but I’m on mobile so it’s a bit hard to go digging for historical links. (Whirlpool.net if you want to learn more)
The end result was a generation of frustrated young consumers did actually learn a little bit about this due to it being a widespread issue that even helped some companies differentiate their product in the market by beginning to advertise their contention ratios and it genuinely did help them get customers, but it likely would have just been “confusing” a decade early had the issue not become prominent enough that people had some idea what this thing meant when they were selecting an ISP.
> Net Neutrality activists don't even want them to be able to do QoS.
I thought net neutrality activists, myself among them, just didn't want them to discriminate based on content/source/destination? I.e. no blocking of p2p traffic or Netflix. But assigning them a more extreme position does make it much easier to argue against net neutrality, yes.
On the other hand, does that mean that, provided QoS-based content/source/destination-agnostic throttling is allowed, you are pro net neutrality?
> I thought net neutrality activists, myself among them, just didn't want them to discriminate based on content/source/destination?
QoS is all about discriminating based on traffic source/dest/port etc
> On the other hand, does that mean that, provided QoS-based content/source/destination-agnostic throttling is allowed, you are pro net neutrality?
I'm against ISPs being able to offer tiered services that block or slow down sites based on how much you pay but I think they should otherwise be allowed to engineer traffic as they see fit
> QoS is all about discriminating based on traffic source/dest/port
"Source" as in "Netflix", not "part of network with saturated bandwidth". Though discrimination based on port is content-based discrimination, isn't it? Packets headed to port X don't burden the network any more than those to port Y, and this is an easy way to discriminate against applications that use certain ports.
> Packets headed to port X don't burden the network any more than those to port Y, and this is an easy way to discriminate against applications that use certain ports.
The rules have to refer to whatever properties most accurately classify the traffic in question.
I might want to throttle or deprioritise traffic from some specific service on a specific source host and not other services.
Regardless, ISPs should be free to make classify, prioritise or throttle traffic however they see fit if it is for the health of the network and not purely for profit.
I would not say it is "assigning them a more extreme position". Net neutrality activists regurarely use the phrase "treat all bits the same" which I do not agree with. It is a more complex topic that we should have deeper discussions about than using blanket statements like that. If a company has created a new kind of net that provides lower latency for example then of course they should be able to have a higher rate for users of this net. However, they should be required to allow any company that wants to use this special net to be able to, not lock some customers out of it. Anyone should be able to start a company and pay extra to provide users of their service better latency or whatever. This is how net neutrality laws are designed in EU and California if I remember correctly and I think it is an OK way to solve it. Haven't seen it too long in practice though so we will see.
> Vestager reportedly said at a news conference that "there are players who generate a lot of traffic that then enables their business but who have not been contributing actually to enable that traffic."
Oh, they get bandwidth for free? And consumers who connect to them also get bandwidth for free? Sign me up!
> The letter cited a May 2 Reuters article that said, "Tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Netflix may have to bear some of the cost of Europe's telecoms network”, Europe's digital chief Margrethe Vestager said on Monday, following EU telecoms operators' complaints.
Google and Facebook both own over 50,000 miles of submarine cables [1], thus comprising a major part of the backbone of the internet.
Then there are ISPs, who specialize in providing the infrastructure that connects this backbone to the end consumer, and ISPs want Google and Facebook to pay for this, too?
Telecoms trying to use their political clout to get cash from third parties is quite bold even for them. Of course Brendan Carr is involved. Is there any sort of precedent for this? I don’t remember electric utilities getting to shake down air conditioner manufacturers when their products created a need for infrastructure upgrades.
reminds me of the bad business habit of USA telecoms spending profits not to re-invest in new infrastructure but to increase salaries of board members and stock buy backs.
As I understand it, it's not even just profits. The government specifically gave them money to expand their networks, and they... just didn't. They kept the money, but didn't bother to spend it on what it was supposed to be for. And not a hand got slapped.
How exactly is this article painting the EU in a bad light?
The Commission has proposed something that MEPs have pushed back against. Is that not democracy working?
This is probably not the first stupid thing the Commission has proposed that MEPs have rejected.
If anything the worst thing about the EU is that EU citizens generally can't be bothered to engage with that level of politics; this is how UKIP managed to appear like a real political party because they required relatively little support to get elected to the EU Parliament.
> This is probably not the first stupid thing the Commission has proposed that MEPs have rejected.
But it is worrying that so often it is Parliament that curbs the EC.
The EC is by design appointed not elected. This is a point of concern on democratic representation. The assumption is that the EC is appointed as a panel of experts. If our 'experts' are so often incompetent or worse pliable to industry lobby then it begs the question of who are we appointing to the EC?
Yep, plus they can propose the same thing (stuff like this, or one of the many attempts to stop e2e encryption) many many times, and they only need for it to pass once, to make "going back" really hard.
I can only speak with any kind of knowledge about the UK system, but doesn't it work with basically the same system? There are unelected bureaucrats appointed by the government who advise them on policies and how they should be implemented. If anything because of first past the post it's a worse system because those policies are likely to become law with the party whipping system. At least the EU is more broadly represented in the parliament, or have I misunderstood?
Also my understanding was that the EC is appointed by the member state governments, so to some degree there is a slight aspect of democracy in that the member states governments were democratically elected. I'm not sure how exactly an individual EC representative holds their term? Can a newly elected member state government replace the existing EC member with a new one if they didn't like the one their opponents had installed?
My issue is not so much that the system lacks democracy. In principle, EC members are appointed by government who consequently was elected into power by the people.
What is worrying is that even for fairly low corruption countries, EC places have basically become 'jobs-for-the-boys' rather than appointing subject matter experts.
You look at the bios, very few have taken a job other than professional politician, some have never left the brussels circle in their proffessional lives. These people can never be Healthcare experts, or Energy experts, or Environment experts. It's nonsensical!
Valid point. Cronyism is a problem in national politics also, additionally revolving door "consultant" positions in big businesses I find problematic.
I'd love to see more direct democracy and/or some kind of merit based "national service" for government. It's quite often the case that those who seek political office are the worst people for the job (of course with exceptions to the rule).
> Why is it every time I see "EU" anywhere in the title here on HN, it's them doing something really bad.. again.
Because outrage motivates people. First, it motivates writers to write articles, so you even get to have an insight into law making without being motivated to research it yourself. Next, people who read something they don't like are motivated to post it here.
For most topics at least one of these two steps is missing. Either no one writes about it (or only very niche websites without much reach) or people read it and "yeah, okay, nice" and go on with their day.
What about forcing usage of USB-C - this one is good, it lacks debth (e.g. I would extend it to e.g. trimmers)
What about forcing Apple to open up to other payment providers and other app stores?
What about slamming Google for anti competitive behavior (e.g forcing their product comparison)?
What about slamming MS (and Google) for forcing preinstall of single browser?
Meh, google and MS still do a lot of bad stuff, and forcing a browser is miniscule compared to all the personal data of EU users that they still gather.
USB-C was somewhat better, but usb cables, be it micro, C or lightning are cheap, and light (not a lot of waste)... if they mandated user replacable batteries (the thing that usually fails first on a phone and is a pain to replace), the situation would be a lot better, from a consumer and also ecological standpoint.
Are you nullifying all the good things mentioned that EU has done because: "Meh those megacorps from shiny America are still doing shit"?
The same goes for USB-C, forcing an interopable cable is easier than forcing replaceable batteries.
* Integrated batteries occupies less space
* Integrated batteries makes waterproofing phones easier
There will be trade-offs people nor manufacturers would be willing to pay for serviceable phones. I have a Fairphone 4, and it's twice the thickness of another phone, worse battery life, camera, display (Though all are still good enough for me) but many people would not want a Fairphone.
On one side you have megacorps gathering personal data of millions of europeans daily, even very private data, and EU is bothering with choosing default browsers, a thing that can be mitigated literally by just opening IE, typing "mozilla.org" in the url bar and pressing enter.
So what if integrated batteries occupy less space, so do proprietary charge ports, and we used to have waterproof phones even with removable batteries (atleast a few samsungs could do both, back in the time). Replace the glued on back panel with a screwed in glass panel and a rubber gasket, and your 2year old phone will be given a new life in five minutes, compared to literally >100eur service job, making it usually not worth the replacement. I have no idea why your shitty camera has to do with newer phones being glued back together instead of scewed together.
And yes, i'll stand my ground with batteries, because the battery is the only part of your phone that's guaranteed to fail with time, and with phone prices nearing 1k eur, not having easily replacable batteries is just another thing companies do to screw the user. I'd also mention headphone jacks, but some hipsters "assure" me that their mini bluetooth pods or whatever are comparable or better to wired high quality headphones.
It's a proposal, in a very early stage. There are lots of steps before any proposal can become a law. It's already strongly opposed, so it's very unlikely to go anywhere. It looks like the system is working fine.
This proposal is pretty tame compared to proposals coming from the QAnon branch of the US government.
One could argue that the broadband provider should be the one paying for the infrastructure to …provide broadband