[Bloat] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] [Rpm] net neutrality back in the news

[David Lang]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2023, Livingood, Jason via Bloat wrote:

> Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2023 20:48:58 +0000
> From: "Livingood, Jason via Bloat" <bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Reply-To: "Livingood, Jason" <Jason_Livingood at comcast.com>
> To: dan <dandenson at gmail.com>, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com>
> Cc: Rpm <rpm at lists.bufferbloat.net>,
>     Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net>,
>     bloat <bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net>,
>     libreqos <libreqos at lists.bufferbloat.net>,
>     Jamal Hadi Salim <jhs at mojatatu.com>
> Subject: Re: [Bloat] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] [Rpm] net neutrality back in the
>     news
> 
>> dan <dandenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> "(I assume most ISPs want happy customers)."

>> made me laugh a little.  'Most' by quantity of businesses maybe, but 'most' 
>> in terms of customers being served by puts the Spectrums and Comcasts in the 
>> mix (in the US) and they don't care about happy customers they care about 
>> defacto monopolies in markets so that they don't have to care about happy 
>> customers. 
>
> In that context, happy customers stay longer (less churn) and spend more 
> (upgrades, multiple services). And unhappy customers generate costs via 
> disconnects (loss of revenue, costs to replace them with a new customer to 
> just stay at the same subscriber levels), and costs via customer contacts 
> (call center staff).

Except when you have a monopoly in an area, at which point the ability of 
customers to leave is minimal, and years of bad customer service means that 
people don't bother complaining, so the call center staffing costs are lower 
than they should be.

>> For the last mile, I'm actually less concerned with pure NN and more concerned with no-blocking or 'brand' prioritization and required/label transparency...
>
> The two thoughts your comments (thanks for the response BTW!) trigger are:

> 1 - Often regulation looks to the past - in this case maybe an era of 
> bandwidth scarcity where prioritization may have mattered. I think we're in 
> the midst of a shift into bandwidth abundance where priority does not matter. 
> What will is latency/responsiveness, content/compute localization, 
> reliability, consistency, security, etc.

> 2 - If an ISP blocked YouTube or Netflix, they'd incur huge customer care 
> (contact) costs and would see people start to immediately shift to competitors 
> (5G FWA, FTTP or DOCSIS, WISP, Starlink/LEO, etc.). It just does not seem like 
> something that could realistically happen any longer in the US.

Dave T called out earlier that the rise of bittorrent was a large part of the 
inital NN discussion here in the US. But a second large portion was a money grab 
from ISPs thinking that they could hold up large paid websites (netflix for 
example) for additional fees by threatening to make their service less useful to 
their users (viewing their users as an asset to be marketed to the websites 
rather than customers to be satisfied by providing them access to the websites)

I don't know if a new round of "it's not fair that Netflix doesn't pay us for 
the bandwidth to service them" would fall flat at this point or not.

David Lang