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from the play-fair-or-I'll-send-you-all-to-bed dept.
chromas writes:
"Reed Hastings of Netflix writes in his blog:
The essence of net neutrality is that ISPs such as AT&T and Comcast don't restrict, influence or otherwise meddle with the choices consumers make. The traditional form of net neutrality which was recently overturned by a Verizon lawsuit is important, but insufficient.
This weak net neutrality isn't enough to protect an open, competitive Internet; a stronger form of net neutrality is required. Strong net neutrality additionally prevents ISPs from charging a toll for interconnection to services like Netflix, YouTube, or Skype, or intermediaries such as Cogent, Akamai or Level 3, to deliver the services and data requested by ISP residential subscribers. Instead, they must provide sufficient access to their network without charge.
Business Week and Forbes have articles with very slightly contrasted viewpoints."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday March 22 2014, @08:28PM
When such agreements are done, generally the content provider provides the caching server and the ISP supplies the rack space. That seems equitable enough. Both benefit so both cover part of the cost. Since the provider provides the cache, the standardization is irrelevant. In that sense, it certainly *CAN* be free. I have little doubt that both parties will save more than the solution costs them.
If the ISP refuses, they deserve to watch their uplink melt from the traffic. They should by all rights be begging content providers to provide caching servers and be grateful they don't have to rent them. It is, after all, helping to save them from their own sales people who oversold everything so extremely.
All of that aside, U.S. ISPs charge an order of magnitude more per Mbps than in many other countries. Many have already done away with 'unlimited' in practice, but typically keep those transfer limits far far away from their ads. Upstream bandwidth in the quantities they use isn't that exepnsive (even less so if they cooperate with content). They complain about the last mile bandwidth costs ass well, but they don't seem to mind it when they offer a competing video on demand service.
I agree that the FCC should probably step in. Particularly before computing billing becomes sufficiently complex that they start breaking new mathematical ground.