> No, they can't --- the fees are different in neighboring municipalities.

So? Who cares? Why do I need to know this as a consumer? I'm sure a McDonald's in the city pays higher rents than one in the country, yet both will sell me a coke for $1 without ever making me think about that fact.

> There isn't one single all-in rate they can charge everybody who walks in the door, which is the whole problem they're complaining about.

If the current pricing for a 100mbps Internet plan is $40 + $1 (local tax) in one town and $40 + $3 (local tax) in the next town over, the ISP is welcome to just create one label for that plan at a $42 price point (with no enumerated taxes/fees shown at all) and abstract away the computation/remittance of those taxes internally. Call it $45 to really play it safe. Sucks for the people in the lower-tax town, but this solves the problem the ISPs are crying about.

Of course delivering traffic to the end customer is expensive. That's why customers are paying for that.

ISPs just want to get paid on both sides, and extract a new rent out of their (government created and paid for) monopolies.

Technically yes, but in many cases the ISPs are essentially the same company as the network provider. Xfinity is the ISP and Comcast is the network provider. Uverse is the ISP and AT&T is the network provider. Same with Fios and Verizon. Network providers do not want to be ISPs for legal benefits.

>That transit cost is already accounted for in your monthly internet bill.

While true, this doesn't address the issue I have with the current pricing model. The current internet pricing model is similar to an all-you-can-eat buffet, with a limit to the rate at which you can grab food, and how many pounds of food you can take per month. The issue is, a person who takes 5 pounds of pasta pays the same price as someone who takes 5 pounds of lobster. Under net neutrality, ISPs can't price based off food cost, and can only price based off weight. This leads to unfair pricing situations, as exampled above.

It is possible to come up with more nonsensical examples with even larger cost discrepancies. Under your idea, should sending a packet across the street cost the same price as sending a packet to Mars? The first relies on $X0,000 of infrastructure costs, while the second relies on billions.

The idea that 'pricing based off a packet's source or destination should not matter' makes sense in a world where all packets (or food in this example) are free, however, in the real world all packets have a cost associated with them.

Consider: what incentive do ISPs have to hide municipal taxes? Why would they do that? Wouldn't it behoove them to advertise these taxes to consumers so that consumers know it's not them adding this cost? There's obviously going to be very little cost simply reporting these taxes given they already have to calculate them to pay them.

The obvious answer is that, maybe this happens occasionally, but the majority of these fees aren't what you're describing: this is just a foil that ISPs are using to cover up their own greed.

> It should be the responsibility of public bodies that levy fees to make sure that people are made aware of the nature of those fees. The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.

How does this make sense, given that ISPs are lobbying to be allowed to continue concealing these supposed decisions?

This is false. The ex parte filing itself clearly states that these passed-thru fees are not taxes and that part of the burden ISPs are trying to avoid is having to break out these fees the way they already are required to break out taxes.

The truly bizarre thing is that the ISPs already have the breakdown of these fees available to them when they create the bill. They're actually doing more work to obfuscate this information by summing those amounts together.

The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.

But that's exactly what ISPs are trying to do. If you truly understood what you appear to be arguing for (accountability for elected officials), you should be in favor of requiring ISPs to break out these fees separately...because then customers would be able to see exactly what fees are making their bills so large.

The only reason ISPs don't want to do this is because they impose their own, wholly-made up "service fees" and include this in the fee amount they "pass along" to the customers. If they had to break out fees separately, it would be immediately apparent that government-imposed fees are a substantially smaller portion of the bill than ISPs (and their sycophants) claim.

Again, there's no reason to be abusive. I'm not going to respond to any further comments in this thread that don't take a more respectful tone.

As it happens, I seem to have given it deeper thought than you have:

"So your argument is that Netflix could cheat and make the world a worse place, and that Comcast should just give in to the implied extortion?"

No, my argument was that "same amount of traffic" is obviously a meaningless metric. In my example with Netflix passing back garbage data, you can call it cheating... but what if that data was useful?

Let's imagine the following:

Netflix cuts a deal with some content providers, such that they will provide (anonymized) information on facial expressions and eye tracking of (opted-in) viewers while content plays. Studios are pay for this. Netflix passes some of that money along to customers who opt in. Netflix decides to do the processing server side, because of the resources required for whatever analysis they're doing.

Now the ratios are significantly more balanced, to the benefit of Netflix (who is making more money), the Netflix customers (who are paying less money), and the determent of Comcast (who is passing more traffic). How is it right that Comcast is owed less money in that case? They probably need to build out more infrastructure than in the present case.

Settlement-free peering fits when there is roughly equal levels of value derived from the traffic. That only sometimes corresponds to roughly equal levels of traffic.

Since I wrote my comment, the above comment has been expanded and now seems to be arguing that the reason ISPs are so expensive is because they're paying costs associated with being a media conglomerate (which sounds plausible), and that this is somehow perfectly normal and consumers shouldn't be upset that the cost of their network access is higher (which makes no sense to me at all).

That's like saying that you should be able to park for free because you paid for your car, all the taxes on it, and the fee for issuing a driving license. Paying your ISP doesn't necessarily grant you unlimited access to every other network on the Internet.

There is no God-ordained fee structure here. It can be split between you, Comcast, Netflix, your landlord (many will pay for laying fibre and then for servicing it), local government... Some may be better than others but there's definitely no moral highground.

Internet infrastructure and usage is relatively recent and quickly shifting, so the social/political/economic aspects are always trying to fit into legacy arrangements. In this case it was easier to preserve the ISP-user agreement of how content is served and billed, while using pre-existing infrastructures (courts of law) to settle who actually pays the extra bills. It feels out of place, but if you strip the legal content out it's just business deals about services.

"And I think we can all accept the fact that business service costs are ultimately borne by consumers."

The above statement seems designed to cause confusion. The implication is that the total price consumers pay is determined wholly by the costs incurred in delivering the service. This may be almost true in aggregate, but isn't true at an individual level.

ISPs offer an all-you-can-eat internet service, but aren't happy with the customer-level margins for the most heavy users (including Netflix users). They could raise prices for heavy users (e.g. by applying caps in the same way as mobile providers) but have chosen instead to engage in different tactics to limit usage or get additional revenue from other sources. Throttling P2P traffic (I don't know which ISPs in the US do this) and asking CDN providers to pay for ports are two examples.

This seems to be like they're increasing the maximum speed of the local pipes ('unlimited water up to 100 litres per minutes!') without being willing to increase the size of the pipes into (and capacity within) their own distribution network.

Am I missing something, or is it just that the business model of offering unlimited high speed internet only sustainable at a higher price?

I get what you're saying about the fee being for the consumer. It's just like... OK then, well tell the consumer how much they are going to pay. You mentioned that the lobbying is to get rid of these locality's taxes, and I'm not pro-federalism so hey why not.

But all of these places have to collect the money anyways, so there is _a_ logic to how much to charge. Many places in the world, the price of internet is "type your zip code into a box and then we tell you". This seems eminently reasonable. This precludes a nationwide campaign to say exactly how much the service costs (unless ISPs just decided to eat the costs themselves!). But wouldn't it be good for people to know how much something costs?

Residential ISP's are typically Tier 3 or maybe Tier 2 providers, and have to get their bandwidth from either a Tier 2 or Tier 1 provider. These providers definitely charge for traffic to pass into the ISP's network (ingress traffic into an ISP network, egress out of the Tier 1 provider). Without paying that bill, ISP's couldn't exist... and without charging that bill, Tier 1 providers couldn't exist.

Tier 1's peer with other Tier 1's for free because it benefits them and allows them to have connections to other networks that Tier 2 and Tier 3 providers want access to. They make their money charging Tier 2's and 3's for that access.

> because they control the only network path to their customers

Tier 1 providers don't care about residential users. This argument doesn't make any sense.

Comcast got away with charging Netflix for ingress traffic because comcast was going to drop or throttle Netflix traffic. Why? Because suddenly the $50 a month comcast was charging wasn't enough to cover the ingress traffic generated by Netflix content into the ISP's network. The decision was to either charge Comcast customers more, or ask Netflix to subsidize that added expense. This also led Netflix to create the Open Connect boxes they offer for free to ISP's.

> None of the other customers are going to get a discount from heavy users using less

No, but they won't have their bill raised if the ISP can just charge the heavy users more instead.

> but hey look, the ISP's own video service doesn't

This is because the ISP's own video service's traffic originates in-network, therefore costs nothing additional to provide other than the existing infrastructure costs (there's no ingress traffic to pay for). Netflix (and other out-of-network services) costs more, as previously covered. Open Connect can help mitigate this, but then it's on the ISP to rack the server and pay all the other related costs for keeping it running in their data center... something they might not want to do.

Comcast's argument was Netflix was making a ton of profit from streaming content they weren't helping pay to deliver - effectively shifting the delivery cost to the ISP, which was getting stuck with suddenly a bunch of unprofitable residential customers. Asking Netflix to help pay for that ingress traffic burden doesn't seem so outlandish from a network-ops perspective. Either that, or Comcast could have raised everyone's rates... which people probably wouldn't have liked.

A parallel would be making an ecommerce business and expecting packages to be delivered to customers for free. The customer pays for their mailbox already (in taxes or directly with a PO Box), and paid for the package, so they expect it to get delivered. At some point, the delivery company is going to need to charge for the service, since there's a cost associated in making that delivery. Either the customer can pay for the delivery cost too, or the ecommerce company can pay for the delivery cost. Either way... somebody has to pay that cost.

> only get away with because of the lack of competition.

I don't disagree that we need more residential ISP competition in the US.

These taxes are a tiny minority of such fees which exist solely to open with we offer service for a small n which is a crappy undesirable level of service whereas actually charging as much as 2n for small levels of n.

Instead of disclosing them just make all extra fees for consumer facing service illegal and force a singular ala carte cost where the total cost is the sum of entries like buying cans of beans at the grocery store.

It's a known field that needs no creativity in its pricing model.

That's not what Net Neutrality is about.

Truly it's cheaper for, say, Comcast to send VOD data across its own network than it is for Netflix to pay for its own ISP service and the various peering agreements it needs to get its data into Comcast's network. So those differences in costs can be reflected in their respective prices and that's fine. [1]

Net Neutrality concerns come into play if/when Comcast is allowed to set additional arbitrary restrictions on competing services, to make its own offerings more effective. Either by deprioritizing Netflix traffic in favor of its own, interfering with packets connected to services or protocols it would rather Comcast customers not use, outright blocking competing services, charging Netflix an additional fee above and beyond what a non-competing service would pay for a similar amount of packets, or any number of other nefarious schemes that the operator of a network could concoct to degrade the experience of competing services or drive up their prices.

Net Neutrality isn't about taking away an ISP's home court advantage. It's about making sure they can't actively sabotage their competitors.

[1] Trick is: the difference in marginal cost is negligible compared to content costs. So there's no real room for Comcast to 'win' against Netflix on price-advantage alone. Further, Comcast's motivation to violate Net Neutrality isn't to advantage its own IP VOD service against Netflix, but to keep the price of all IP VOD services high, to avoid IP VOD from cannibalizing the profits they earn from broadcast VOD. (Which are priced high because US cable operators often enjoy a local monopoly.)

What is the source of the notion that, because you paid for your consumer broadband, all bits are paid for and the charge for carrying them cannot be split with the other side of the connection? Why is it so bizarre that both sides of the connection have to pay for it? Because you're used to your phone working differently?

As an analogy, you know how you used to pay for a subscription to a magazine and there were ads inside which advertisers (the other side of the connection via the magazine in this case) also paid for? The magazine split its fee in two: you paid part of it, and the advertisers paid the other part. It's the same here.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with charging both sides. You may prefer a different fee structure but a better argument than "I already paid for it!" is necessary.