FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sets course to dismantle net neutrality rules

[Zkuq]

vivster said:

Zkuq said:

Who do you think the data is going through when it's moving from American companies to their global customers? And who do you think are going to pay for the increased costs of those companies? American customers only? Of course this won't affect datacenters outside the United States, and the funny thing is, at worst (for the US), this might even result in even more datacenters being located outside the US in the future.

You might not understand the initial goal of the ISPs here. It's mostly about lowering and prioritizing bandwidth of end consumers, i.e. US citizens. They won't constrict bandwidth to the datacenters. To get more money from companies for increasing bandwidth to their premises they don't need this ruling. They can do this whenever they want, even with net neutrality in place. That's what contracts are for.

Any company who cares about international traffic will have datacenters across the world anyway. So even if US ISPs reduce bandwidth from every IP that does not originate in their network, it won't have any effect for anyone else but US citizens. Also they will have to deal with the beef from directly connected ISPs.

No, I'm pretty sure I do understand it. Even the article pretty much says net neutrality prevents ISPs from charging extra for extra speed: "Without the rules in place, ISPs could essentially force companies like Netflix to pay a toll to avoid throttling video feeds." And I would assume it's also possible to charge extra for traffic going from the US to outside the US, which leads nicely to my remark about datacenters. Of course your point about a lot of datacenters being outside the US is probably true. Anyway, if companies such as Netflix have to pay extra to avoid throttling their videos, in the end all consumers are going to pay for it in subscription prices.