You can't hear the fast lane/slow lane (or the hilarious fast lane and faster lane counter from the ISP's) and not see that they are indeed aiming for a tiered system can you?
Consumer ISPs already sell different speeds to different customers.
I understand that it's easy for you to believe that people who have done things you don't like in the past might do entirely different things you don't like in the future, because they do things you don't like.
But for all the ISPs sins, they have never taken even one step down this particular road.
>Consumer ISPs already sell different speeds to different customers.
That's not what the fast lane/slow lane is. Fast lane/slow lane is you pay for 50/5 BUT there is an extra charge (on Netflix for example) for you to get Netflix at full speed. Otherwise it's throttled all to hell.
Basically all that image missed was the ISP's going after the content providers instead of adding fees to their existing users.
Everyone is paying for Internet access already. Customers are ostensibly paying for a certain amount of bandwidth, Netflix is providing for a certain amount of bandwidth. ISPs now want more money because "Netflix is generating so much traffic". Your point is essentially that there is no indication they would be asking consumers for more money to use Netflix, except they are doing something even slimier which is throttling Netflix and threatening to sue Netflix for revealing whose fault it is that the customer is not getting what they pay for. Instead of charging more for a specific service they essentially make it impossible to use in their monopolized customer base and hold up their hands like they're doing nothing.
Given the ugliness of what they are doing, the only reason I agree they probably wouldn't charge for tiered service is because they probably don't yet have the balls to take that to the court of public opinion, but in their heart of hearts I'm sure they'd love to triple dip by trolling (in the under-the-bridge sense) Netflix and also charging extra to consumers. If they don't get smacked down now I fully believe they'll take it there.
The disgusting thing is they pretend like they own the Internet rather than acknowledging that Internet only works, exists, and has created their market because of peering agreements. The minute networks start trying to nickel and dime each other the whole thing unravels. God we need to get more lobbyists on the right side of this issue into Washington, and hopefully a fewer congresspeople who were born after the invention of color television.
Now you're just being deliberately obtuse. Which ISP do you work for btw? I'm going to guess Comcast.
> Akamai's entire business
Akamai's business is not charging company Y extra to not get throttled by Comcast and you know it.
> Nothing about this is having the ISP's customer pay more to the ISP based on which websites they want to go to.
And now you continue to harp on this specific angle. As I said, all that graphic missed was individual ISP's going after content providers specifically instead of (further) screwing their customers. But it is still creating a tiered experience.
> Companies pay for faster Internet connections all the time. That's Akamai's entire business
Akamai doesn't pay for faster connections to ISPs. They pay for more servers located at more places in the network, so that the average network distance from an Akamai server to a user is smaller, using the connections that already exist.
> Nothing about this is having the ISP's customer pay more to the ISP based on which websites they want to go to
No, it's about websites or web services paying more to ISPs so that customers can get to them at full speed instead of being throttled back, even though the website or web service is already paying to have their content on servers spread around the world so it is closer to customers.
they have never taken even one step down this particular road
Because they've been stopped from doing so? Isn't that what this whole fight over Net Neutrality is about?
because they do things you don't like
It's not just a random pattern of dislike. It's a specific monopolistic pattern of market control that content distributors have demonstrated over and over. How stupid would we have to be to not see where they would like to take this?
I'm normally arguing with folks on HN from my pro-capitalist perspective, but treating monopolies like the major ISPs as players in a free market is a huge mistake.
This is straight out of the rabble-rousers' playbook when questioned "hey, before you get us worked up about the next disaster our enemies will bring out, why don't you tell us why the disaster you predicted last year didn't happen?"
"Well, it's because we fought so hard against it!! Come on, how stupid do you have to be to not see this? Look at this next tragedy they are going to do, of course it was only because of our brave work stopping them that they couldn't continue." Then link to a cable comedy host agreeing with them as proof they were right.
All you have to do to make that image accurate is replace the names of popular web sites with the names of big ISPs.
This is pretty much what Netflix is faced with at the moment. They pay $X for basic internet access, and then pay an additional $Y to access Comcast, $Z to access Verizon, etc.
The ISPs are just making the service slow rather than blocking it, but it doesn't change the fundamentals.
