@izzion said in Internet privacy is dead, redux:
And as their product and associated costs grew, they went looking for ways to cut their cost, which meant they changed service providers (several times), eventually winding up on Level 3 because they got the best deal there.
Yes, once Netflix's delivery became a significant fraction of the total Internet traffic, they moved to a direct connection to the Internet backbone through a Tier 1 ISP, Level 3.
At which point Level 3's traffic profile to its major peering providers changed, said major peering providers asked for changing the peering agreements to bring them in line with industry standards for the changed traffic profile, and Level 3 refused. At which point Level 3's business dispute with their peering providers led to ALL traffic through those peering points (Netflix and otherwise, though mostly Netflix) getting congested at certain times of day. Rather than voting with their pocketbook, Netflix took it to the public debate, and thus the "Net Neutrality" cause was born.
Wrong at many different points, some of which I'll go into further down, but the big one here is that this was not where Net Neutrality came from; it arose out of the backlash against AT&T's stated intent to block commercial traffic they didn't like. It was already a well-established thing before Netflix got involved.
And yes, that article is written from a slant that doesn't really directly support my point - it's written from the same "all interconnection should be free" slant.
The further you get from the fumes of ISP insane troll logic, the more clear it becomes that this "slant" is simply the most obvious and correct solution.
. http://www.internap.com/2014/03/07/despite-comcast-netflix-deal-settlement-free-peering-alive-well/
Care and feeding of large-scale networks does not come cheap, and everyone needs to pay their fair share in network upgrades.
And this is the Big Lie. The price of the necessary upgrades would have been on the order of tens of thousands of dollars, pocket change to a company that measures revenue in billions. Level 3 did offer to pay for the price of the upgrades, as if it mattered, but domestic ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon refused, instead trying to establish a toll bridge on their routers, trying to get paid twice for delivering the same data.
That view from the "telco die-hards" is what industry standard interconnection / peering agreements have looked like in the Internet world from day 1 (and what they have looked like in the telephone world since AT&T was broken up) -- as long as two connected networks send similar amounts of traffic in both ways, the providers agree to shrug their shoulders and not charge each other, each bearing their own cost of maintaining equipment to make the connection work. If one side sends significantly more traffic into the other's network, the net receiving network bills the net sending network for the balance (this also happens when you place a phone call).
Nope. There's a big qualitative difference between peering between backbone ISPs and delivery from backbone carriers to domestic ("last-mile") ISPs. That relationship has always been heavily asymmetric, for reasons that should be intuitively obvious to anyone familiar with the difference between the size of an HTTP request message and the size of a web page, script, image, or binary download. And they've taken active steps to ensure it stays heavily asymmetrical: you get way less upload speed than download speed on your ISP connection, and you're explicitly forbidden from running an Internet-facing server as part of the standard T&C of essentially every home ISP plan.
This was purely a case of Verizon & co attempting to act as bridge trolls, with zero justification. They created a situation where they received far more data than they sent, long before Netflix came on the scene.