> when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure.
Why wouldn't the ISP refuse to peer with them, then? This is a genuine question, I don't understand the industry as well as you seem to.
To my understanding, net neutrality doesn't mean "every ISP has to peer with anyone who asks". It just means "you can't treat packets differently based on where they came from".
If it's really so terrible to deal with an ISP that dumps tons of Netflix traffic on to your network, then don't peer with them, problem solved, right? Seems like the reality is that ISPs *do* want to peer with Netflix's provider, they just also would like to have the right to demand additional money directly from Netflix for doing so.
Obviously as operators of the network they have the technical ability to do this - the question is whether it's good for society / economy / etc for them to be allowed to.
> Why wouldn't the ISP refuse to peer with them, then? This is a genuine question
The sibling comment has the reason, but you might be interested in the details.
In the old days, ISPs were more heterogeneous.
Say you were ISP A in New York. You had residential customers and business customers. Your business customers would host their websites etc. on your service and some of their customers use ISP B, also in New York. Meanwhile some of ISP B's business customers have customers on ISP A. So ISPs A and B peer at an exchange in New York. Neither of them charges the other because they both need connectivity to the other's customers. (The traffic was often bidirectional but that doesn't really matter here, the one receiving more traffic than they send still has to satisfy their own customers' need to link with the system sending the traffic.)
Meanwhile ISPs C and D are in California. They peer with each other, but they both still need to exchange traffic with ISPs A and B, so all four ISPs pay for transit. The transit company runs fiber across the country and connects them together, for a fee.
Then it turns out that last mile ISPs are awful. Their residential customers are stuck with them, because what choice do they have? One other odious bureaucracy, if that. But not their business customers. You can host a server out of anywhere. So new companies like AWS came in and took the bulk of the business customers. Then those companies got big and built their own transit networks so they could peer with all the local ISPs themselves. The ISPs should be all good with this because then they themselves don't have to pay for wider transit links to carry that traffic. All they have to do is carry it over the last mile to their own customers who are paying them for exactly that.
This is all still completely fine, except for one thing. The likes of AWS and Verizon are competitors. The ISPs want business customers to use their (slower, more expensive) service instead of a big cloud provider or CDN. And the ISPs run video services that compete with Netflix. Meanwhile they have a lock on their residential internet customers, many of which have zero other alternatives, or maybe one which can engage in the same behavior. So if they degrade Netflix or refuse to peer with enough capacity to carry the traffic their own customers request from Netflix, their customers can't switch to another ISP, and it allows the ISP to shake down the peer for money because there is no other way to pass traffic to the customers of that ISP.
The ISPs have a monopoly/oligopoly on last mile internet service and are leveraging it against competitors, hence:
> Because the ISP is also a television service that competes with Netflix. It’s anticompetitive behavior.
Why wouldn't the ISP refuse to peer with them, then? This is a genuine question, I don't understand the industry as well as you seem to.
To my understanding, net neutrality doesn't mean "every ISP has to peer with anyone who asks". It just means "you can't treat packets differently based on where they came from".
If it's really so terrible to deal with an ISP that dumps tons of Netflix traffic on to your network, then don't peer with them, problem solved, right? Seems like the reality is that ISPs *do* want to peer with Netflix's provider, they just also would like to have the right to demand additional money directly from Netflix for doing so.
Obviously as operators of the network they have the technical ability to do this - the question is whether it's good for society / economy / etc for them to be allowed to.