[AusNOG] CloudFlare: The Relative Cost of Bandwidth Around the World

[Matt Palmer]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:08:53AM +1000, Ben Grubb wrote:
> Net neutrality has barely rated a mention in Australia since 2008.

That's because Net Neutrality, in the terms it is discussed in the US, isn't
an issue here.  No provider here can (currently) pull the sort of
shenanigans that the big US providers can, because if they did they would
lose a lot of market share, because we have competition.  The core issue in
the debate in the US isn't the Internet, it's monopolies behaving badly. 
I'm not talking about "dominant market positions", either (a la Telstra),
but rather honest-to-goodness "we're the phone^Wcable company, we don't have
to care" exploitation of the fact that there is only one provider of
Internet services across large portions of the US.

That Telstra has a lot of customers, and is using them to grab some extra
money, isn't great, and it should be publicised.  But it ain't an issue of
net neutrality, unless Telstra (or someone else) is actually doing (or is
planning on doing) the sort of things that US carriers *are* doing.

Frankly, if Netflix wanted to really put the cat amongst the pigeons, it'd
come in with a great service and pay Telstra for "transit" (only actually
using them as a last-resort provider for routes it can't get elsewhere, to
minimise traffic costs) -- for a time.  Collect up a huge pile of Telstra
customers, then say "oh, we've realised that it isn't cost-effective to
service Telstra customers their Netflix, so we'd suggest moving to another
provider because Telstra customers are going to lose their Netflix as of
date X".  I don't *know* what would happen, but I'd suspect that, given that
people have a lot more choice in ISP than they do in movie provider, Telstra
would lose a lot more customers than Netflix would.  And, given that Netflix
would no longer be paying for Telstra "transit", it'd be a net win on the
balance sheet.

Normally I wouldn't imagine any company doing that sort of thing, but given
Netflix' recent forays into displaying "Your video is shit because $ISP is
congested" messages (something I'd long-thought they *should* do, but never
imagined they *would* do) I think there's some small chance they might
actually do something like that.  They can't do it in the US, because over
there, as much as you might *want* to change ISPs, you physically *can't*. 
Over here... not so much.

- Matt