Internet fast lanes vs. tolled fast lanes: What's the difference?

[hbelkins]

OK, serious question here and I am not trolling.

So many people are worked up over the Internet "fast lane" proposal whereby some providers could pay for the privilege to have their content delivered faster.

What's the difference between this, and the specialized toll lanes whereby people can pay for the privilege of driving in less-crowded condition than the normal free lanes?

[corco]

Honestly, I don't know that there is and I think the equity issues, while different, are fairly parallel to each other.

Toll lanes are a lot more niche though, where nearly everybody uses the internet, so the effects would be greater and more noticeable. 

There's also the issue that anybody can use a toll lane- my money is as good as anybody else's money and I'm charged the same as everybody else. If I have internet through the Charter Cable Company, though, and Netflix wants privilege to have higher speeds on their broadband service, Charter will likely charge Netflix more money than they would, say, Facebook for a proportional amount of bandwidth, since access to Netflix drives away cable subscribers- so it's really not as equitable as a toll lane. A toll lane, as a public utility, accepts everybody's money for the same service (weighted towards things like axles instead of amount of bandwidth usage) regardless of who they are. That drives Netflix's subscription fees up, which makes them less appealing as an alternative to a cable company.

That might seem well and fair since the cable companies are the one providing the service, but cable companies have an obligation to serve in the public interest first (which is why we grant them easements to lay cable in public rights of way without having to acquire  or lease that property), and it gets murky as to whether or not they are doing that when they have the ability to drive popular alternative forms of medium away in order to squash their competitors. Personally, I'm fine with them being able to do that, but they should have to acquire every single public easement they have from the taxpayers at fair market value.

The bottleneck side of the issue is more or less the same where capacity goes to those who spend (and we can argue all day over whether that is acceptable or not- I'm honestly not sure)- the significant difference is that internet providers can pick and choose who spends, where in a toll lane everybody's money is as good as everybody else's.

[Alps]

It only works if the normal service isn't throttled back. In the case of HOT or toll lanes, they're generally built to supplement existing capacity and pay for themselves. An Internet fast lane, by analogy, would be acceptable if it represents an increased tier over current subscription for those who pay the premium. If my Youtube service slows significantly because I don't want to pay them, the analogy fails and that is why net neutrality is important.

[mcdonaat]

Toll fast lanes - you pay more, you drive smoother and faster. However, Joe who doesn't pay a toll can still 50 MPH in a 50. If more people are on the road ahead of Joe, he has to drive slower. If more people are on the Internet, your speeds will drop.

Internet fast lanes - your ISP pays more, you surf smoother and faster. However, Joe who doesn't have Comcast as their ISP (just to use the local company) can't get 3 Gbps when he pays 3 Gbps, but only gets 1 Gbps... even though nobody else is on the Internet.

At least that's how I see it. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Duke87]

^ basically this.

The difference is who pays for the faster speed. If you want to charge users extra for their service to be faster, no big deal. Indeed, a lot of ISPs already do this. The problem in this whole debate is we are talking about content providers being charged for how fast they can send data, with the end user being helpless to do anything about it if their content provider of choice doesn't pay up. This gives ISPs potentially immense power to play favorites and decide whose website people will and won't find convenient to visit. And it does absolutely nothing to benefit consumers, it only hurts them.

It's basically akin to a DOT saying "we don't like Target, so if you're on the road driving to Target, you have a speed limit of 15 MPH. But Wal-Mart is paying us money for better service, so if you're driving to Wal-Mart, you have no speed limit." And then tough shit if you'd rather shop at Target. If you want to drive fast, you have to go to Wal-Mart instead. You cannot do anything or pay any amount of money to improve your service to Target.

[briantroutman]

I always wince at analogies drawn between the Internet and physical highways because so many aspects don't translate–like speed. There is no "slow"  or "fast" . All lanes go the same speed (the speed of electricity). It's more like your ISP is rationing how many lanes you can use at the same time.

If we're staying with the highway analogy, imagine a highway that's 100 lanes wide, and your ISP promises you that you can use 10 lanes across at the same time, whenever you want, as often as you want. A convoy of trucks could roll down the highway to your door, ten at a time. But they've made the same promise to far more than ten of your neighbors. So when the 11th neighbor tries to use his capacity, there aren't enough lanes for all of you to get ten...so you're cut back to nine lanes, then eight, and finally you're down to just one lane.

But when you're getting only one lane out of the ten you've paid for, how do you know that's truly because all 99 other lanes are filled by other equally paying customers. Or is it an artificial scarcity of capacity? If there is a scarcity, is the available capacity being distributed equally among everyone? The particularly pernicious aspect of the matter is that the largest monopoly ISPs are in the business of selling services like phone and TV service, and when AT&T finds out you're making cheap calls with Skype instead of paying for a landline you don't want–or Comcast discovers you're watching movies on Netflix instead of throwing away hundreds a month on their lousy TV service–they want to artificially restrict your capacity...sometimes to the point that your Skype calls drop out constantly and Neflix is always buffering.

So this fast lane nonsense is BS. It's purely a protection racket. Comcast, in this case, goes to Netflix in perfect Mafioso fashion and says: "It would be a real shame if people got fed up with the buffering and cancelled their Netflix service..."  So Netflix caves and pays Comcast millions in exchange for an assurance that they'll get preferential treatment in the allocation of capacity. And Netflix, in turn, passes those millions in cost on to you, the Netflix subscriber.

This is what "net neutrality"  refers to: Does an ISP have to deliver content from all sources equally (which is neutrality), or do they have the right to discriminate against certain types of content or certain sources (which is anti-neutrality). I fear that we may be nearing the end of net neutrality. Unfortunately, we suffer from the double whammy that 1.) when it comes to technology, most legislators have less understanding than a typical kindergartener, and 2.) they're all bought and paid for by the telcos and cable providers.

[Dr Frankenstein]

Here's my take on the problem.

Traditionnally, having an IP address makes you both a content consumer and a content provider (I actually used to have a website hosted through my home connection). Internet is closer to the phone than it is to to cable in that it's a two-way, full-duplex communication system. In fact, it used to run entirely through the phone network.

So, basically, the owner of each computer or server gets Internet access by paying an ISP to provide the connection and infrastructure to carry the data to and from them (for the first two decades of the Internet's history, this was actually a free service). You pay for your end of the line.

The speed on your end depends on how much you pay your ISP, but despite that, if you decide to invest a little into a hosting service or a server infrastructure, you had an easy shot at competing with existing, established content providers (for the rest of this post, I'll make a practical, not technical, distinction beween content providers and consumers).

The Internet's history is full of such occurences: Google (a PhD project) taking over Yahoo!'s and Altavista's spots, MySpace taking over LiveJournal's turf only to get beaten by Facebook (a university student's side project), just to name a few. The bottom line is that building a clientele or a follower base on the Internet is extremely cheap and mostly relies on good ideas and marketing, making the market and competition relatively sane. Money doesn't talk as loudly online as it does in the "real world". Wikipedia runs on donations and is significantly poorer than the rest of the top 10 websites, yet they're playing in the same field.

The proposed "fast lane" would mean that a content consumer paying extra to get a better speed would be futile if that content provider was not also paying an extra to that consumer's ISP. The consumer loses as he doesn't always get to decide how fast his connection is, even though the connection at the provider's end is fast enough.

It would also mean that the content provider would have to pay (i.e. become a customer of) every single ISP out there, just to ensure that the performance of its content delivery is optimal. The provider loses because his content's accessibility is held in ransom. Some providers also lose because they need that extra money just to be able to compete with the bigger ones (i.e. they're no longer being treated equally). They'd have to pay not only their own hosting service or ISP (or for their own ISP-like infrastructure), but also for the other end of the connection, for which the consumer is already paying!

So this is basically a lose-lose situation.

This is the equivalent of pre-paying every single toll agency simultaneously to ensure that your customers can reach you through the EZ-Pass lane, even though they somehow still have to pay a toll.

This also raises a deeper problem with the issue of internet neutrality than just "you pay more, you get better service".

Suppose that you invest a lot in an infrastructure and negotiate a bunch of licenses with producers to get a streaming website up and running. You have some revolutionary ideas that might mean bad news for your competitors Netflix, Hulu and Apple and (hopefully) big revenue for you. Your initial investment even provides enough to pay for the fast lane.

Well, it turns out that you're in a partnership with a company that a few ISPs hold a grudge against. Or that you're a vocal supporter of a politician that some ISPs wouldn't like to see in office. Or just that an ISP is in a tight partnership with one of your competitors. They refuse to do business with you. No fast lane for you. You can only provide lower-quality content to their customers. Your chances at competition are being stifled.

Worse, some ISPs have a regional monopoly. Forget free market; some of your potential customers cannot even switch to another ISP.

The idea of net neutrality is that your ISP connects you to any IP address that you want to, regardless of who's at the other end of the line. They get treated equally, regardless of whether they're owned by the same entity as your ISP or now, whether they bribe them or not, whether they're liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist or something else, whether they're Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish or atheist.

[oscar]

So this fast lane nonsense is BS. It's purely a protection racket. Comcast, in this case, goes to Netflix in perfect Mafioso fashion and says: "It would be a real shame if people got fed up with the buffering and cancelled their Netflix service..."  So Netflix caves and pays Comcast millions in exchange for an assurance that they'll get preferential treatment in the allocation of capacity. And Netflix, in turn, passes those millions in cost on to you, the Netflix subscriber.

This is what "net neutrality"  refers to: Does an ISP have to deliver content from all sources equally (which is neutrality), or do they have the right to discriminate against certain types of content or certain sources (which is anti-neutrality). I fear that we may be nearing the end of net neutrality. Unfortunately, we suffer from the double whammy that 1.) when it comes to technology, most legislators have less understanding than a typical kindergartener, and 2.) they're all bought and paid for by the telcos and cable providers.

But ISTM (I might be missing something) that some content providers, like NetFlix (a) are bandwidth hogs, (b) want more bandwidth than some of us end users want, or are willing to pay for, and (c) are whining about slow speeds in an attempt to get faster speed without paying for it.  They don't want a "net neutrality" that puts them on the same level playing field as less demanding content providers, unless speeds increase for everybody at end-users' expense, assuming that the likes of Comcast will make sure the added speed doesn't come out of their pockets.  It seems fairer to insist on their using, and paying for, a "fast lane" if they aren't satisfied with standard "slow lane" access.

Ideally, that's how tolled fast lanes on freeways should work, though there are sometimes restrictions on "slow lane" improvements that screw users of slow lanes to make sure they don't move as fast as the tolled fast lanes (for example, restrictions on speed limit increases for I-35 segments parallel to the TX 130 toll road). 

Sure, ISPs (at least the ones tied to cable companies like Comcast, who I have no interest in defending) have some serious conflicts of interest.  But that doesn't necessarily mean high-bandwidth-dependent content providers should get their way.

[briantroutman]

I might be missing something...

The customer is already constrained by the bandwidth tier that he's purchased from the ISP. Let's say it's 10 Mbps. It's not as if Netflix is sending him 100 Mbps and therefore stealing capacity away from ten of his neighbors. That's not what's happening here. The ISP is selectively restricting bandwidth below the 10 Mbps that they have promised and that the customer has paid for.

But the more important thing is that (I don't believe) it's been established that any bandwidth throttling that is happening (or will happen) is solely due to real shortages of capacity. To go back to the really poor roads analogy: imagine that you've paid a hefty membership fee for unlimited use of ten full lanes on a toll road, whenever you want, and you find that all but one of your lanes has been barricaded. There's no traffic your nine closed lanes–the lanes you have PAID FOR–and the toll road operator can't even give you a reasonable excuse for the closure.

A utility would never get away with this type of behavior. The first problem is that, for all intents and purposes, we don't have competition. The second, resulting problem is that regulators are unwilling to treat ISPs like the monopoly utility companies they truly are. We're dealing with governments that believe natural gas is a utility and that taxis are a utility...but the Internet? That's a toy that the grandkids use–at least in the eyes of these illiterate fossils in Washington.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that you shouldn't pay for your bandwidth and that a provider like Netflix shouldn't pay for theirs. But as a middleman, the ISP shouldn't be allowed to price discriminatively for any reason. It should be the same price per bit for everyone. Netflix, as an example, doesn't have much to lose in this situation because they have deep pockets, but what about archive.org? What about AARoads?

[Dr Frankenstein]

But ISTM (I might be missing something) that some content providers, like NetFlix (a) are bandwidth hogs, (b) want more bandwidth than some of us end users want, or are willing to pay for, and (c) are whining about slow speeds in an attempt to get faster speed without paying for it.  They don't want a "net neutrality" that puts them on the same level playing field as less demanding content providers, unless speeds increase for everybody at end-users' expense, assuming that the likes of Comcast will make sure the added speed doesn't come out of their pockets.  It seems fairer to insist on their using, and paying for, a "fast lane" if they aren't satisfied with standard "slow lane" access.

I think that the consumer is the one that should be "blamed" as the bandwidth hog here. The consumer is the one that ordered the film to begin with. Unlike cable TV, the Internet works on demand instead of in a constant "push" mode. No consumer = no bandwidth usage, or more specifically, the consumer is using the bandwith actively, and the provider is only using it passively (i.e. at the consumer's request).

Plus, you can't get more bandwidth than you're willing to pay for. If Netflix is trying to push too much data into your smaller pipe, it'll just be constantly buffering. (Try switching YouTube to 1080p on a slow connection; you'll see that it takes more than 5 minutes to load a 5-minute video).

I don't have Netflix, but if it's anything like YouTube, the consumer is the one that chooses the stream quality. There's a default option that seems to depend on your connection speed, but it never goes all the way to 1080p by itself.

[corco]

Right, absolutely- if it's financially necessary, the consumer should have the ability/obligation to pay extra for more bandwidth at their own discretion if they need it. This is the opposite of that though, and that's not right because it doesn't give the public, who has subsidized the installation of cable networks, the ability to choose what they want premium access to and what they do not. The choice is left up to the ISP, who merely wants to generate a profit.

[triplemultiplex]

I will oppose any attempt to end net neutrality with every fiber in my being.  Written by those who would profit the most from it and sponsored by old, dumbass legislators who haven't a clue how the internet works, the laws that have been floated so far would mean a stifling of innovation and provide an easy mechanism for censorship.

The internet is not a highway and the fact that some octogenarian senator from a state with no people thinks it can be treated as such is frightening.  I shudder every time I see one of these people try and stammer through a talking point about why it's a good idea to end net neutrality.  They have no clue.  Someone with money told them they should support it, so they do.

[Scott5114]

H.B.: Here's an argument that you should find appealing: I'm a small business owner. I make playing cards and sell them on the Internet through my own ecommerce website. If net neutrality goes away, suddenly, I'll be stuck in the "slow lane". My competitors at Bicycle can afford to pay off the ISPs to get traffic to their site through faster. I don't have the budget for that. So customers might buy Bicycle cards instead.  How is that fair to me? How am I supposed to compete?

I have left a public comment on the FCC proceeding to this effect. To those of you who feel strongly about the issue,  I encourage you to leave a comment as well.