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

[Sebastian Moeller]

Hi David,


> On Sep 29, 2023, at 00:19, David Lang via Rpm <rpm at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> 
> 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.

	[SM] In the EU we have this as a continuous lobbying effort by big incumbent ISPs (a move to have the large content providers (CAPs) shoulder their "fair" share of the cost of modernizing the networks*), why this flys with at least some EU politicians is that the intended payees of this scheme are all located outside the EU and hence will have little support by the EU citizenry... (The latter is IMHO not fully undeserved either, the days of "do no evil" are long behind us and big tech often forgets that we are all in this together, but I digress). In the EU one of these days such an effort might actually succeed, as much as I dislike this.




*) This argument about fairness is indeed made by the same ISPs that already charge their eye-ball customers for the same capacity they say they need to built with particpatoin of the CAPs


> 
> David Lang_______________________________________________
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