On Mon, 1 Dec 2014, at 15:21, Tim Starling wrote:
On 01/12/14 06:10, Todd Allen wrote:
"Second, well, of course all providers are happy to use Wikipedia (Zero) as a door opener to get the customer used to different treatment of data (which is a clear violation of net neutrality)."
Exactly this. Net neutrality means that the pipes are totally dumb, not favoring -any- service over any other in any way. Not Netflix, not Youtube, not Amazon, and not Wikimedia.
Anything that says "Data from this source will be (treated|priced) differently than data from another source" is a violation of net neutrality. Period. That does not mean the definition is inadequate. The definition is there to ensure the pipe -stays dumb-, and that preferential treatment is never accepted.
But the pipes are fundamentally not dumb -- there is a complex arrangement of transit prices and peering, and the companies that built transoceanic links want to recoup their investment. What you are saying is that you want the ISPs to provide the necessary cross-subsidies so that the pipes will appear to be dumb, to the end user.
The question for any regulated cross-subsidy should be: what is its social benefit? If certain telcos are allowed to choose, it will be cheaper to access Wikipedia than cheezburger.com. Is that appropriate? What social benefits will it provide if we regulate to ensure that they are the same price?
Vertical integration between content providers and ISPs is probably harmful to competition. The obvious way to deal with that is to split those companies. But even in a competitive marketplace, from a cost perspective, it totally makes sense that certain content providers will continue to be cheaper and/or faster, just because of geography.
Wikipedia is naturally slow and expensive for many ISPs, because we don't use a big CDN.
Why don't we? Is it one of the "expensive for us, cheap for users" things?
If ISPs sold services on a cost-plus basis, you would expect websites delivered via CDN to be cheaper than websites that are located at a single site, geographically distant from their users.
-- Tim Starling
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