Technology

That's not how billing works on the internet: You hook up to an IXP for a flat rate depending on the port bandwidth you want, then make peering agreements with other people there. If traffic levels are about even, say, a regional ISP with a neigbouring regional ISP, they will just deal with traffic directed at each other for free.

But that only connects you to the next ISP, not to the whole internet, to get at the whole internet you peer with a tier-1 provider, people who run connections to IXPs all over the world so you can reach all. They're going to want money for that, and they're going to bill by maximum upstream bandwidth you sent out to the internet you used in that month^1^.

If you're an ISP that's generally fine, you're getting money from your customers, if you're a company with a webserver that's also fine, bandwidth isn't that expensive. If you're someone who puts petabytes on the pipes though, that includes the likes of netflix, you want to do something different: You want a box at every IXP that caches content so you can peer with those regional ISPs directly. That's also generally for free because while you're sending a lot of data, hooking up directly to you means that the ISP won't have to pay their tier-1 provider for the upstream part of the connection (there's always ack packages etc) and it's not like the total amount of traffic they're dealing with increases, it only shifts. Historically that has been akamai, the original peering slut (peers with everyone as long as they're sober), now there's a gazillion of CDNs and content providers like netflix which run their own CDNs.

The only ones complaining about that are tier1 providers which are also ISPs because they'd rather have all those CDNs pay them for using their fibre than not use their fibre and make things more efficient. They're rent seeking. And ISPs who want to triple-dip and have you pay by volume, which noone on the internet pays for.

Oh: What you pay your ISP for is a line and share of a port to the IXP, its maintenance, and your share in what they're shelling out to their tier-1 provider(s) for the stuff you upload into the wider net. Which is btw why asymmetric connections (higher download than upload bandwidth) make sense even if the underlying connection is symmetric: Provided the ISP's infrastructure is fast enough receiving more packets over their line only costs electricity, and a negligible amount thereof.

^1^ It's not "maximum" but "modulo 1% spike or something" don't ask me about the exact maths

I don't want to undermine the lengthy and informed reply to this, but didn't cellular network providers in the US charge for both sending and receiving SMS messages, solicited or otherwise?

Hmm.. yes actually, those are good points...

So do you think that shipping companies should charge fees to both sender and recipient? Because that’s the physical equivalent of this situation.

I mean... they do? There are fees to load and unload cargo onto boats/planes/whatever. Hell, big rig trucks also have prices. This cost is just generally masked (and pushed to the consumer...) when you order something from Amazon (because this IS Amazon we are talking about)

And shipping companies will often tend to mask this. They either eat the cost (because they are using significant parts of that shipping container themselves) or ensure they are making a significant profit on all the other packages so they can give lower traffic a better deal and so forth.

Which... is what led to the kind of shitshow where Amazon eventually ended up investing a LOT in their own internal shipping infrastructure (and the gig economy). Because UPS/USPS/FedEx realized that a very significant percentage of their packages were from a single company. And that was already one of the bigger companies on the planet by that point.

So let's continue to torture this metaphor. I am old enough to remember when you could put almost anything in a fedex envelope and they would ship it. I also am old enough to remember getting confused why they were weighing a package one time and factoring that into the cost. Because there was a general assumption that the volume of a package was strongly correlated with its weight and all that mattered was how much truck space it used. Then they learned that people ship a LOT of books (hmmm... Hey, what did Amazon start out as again?) and the flat rate packaging prices went way the hell up and there was a much bigger emphasis on weighing packages (and a lot of flat rate boxes actually do have a maximum weight in the fine print).

In theory, the price of shipping covers the repairs on the trucks and the planes and so forth. And, on average, it does. It doesn't pay for the gatorade bottles for drivers to piss in while they are driving between stops, but it does cover oil changes, repairs to suspensions, etc. Until the underlying math shifts heavily and needs to be readjusted. Now they need to repair suspensions much more frequently, do more cargo flights (oh god, that means even more chances for Tom Hanks to be stranded on an island!), buy better trucks, etc.

Which then becomes the question: Should everyone's cost of use increase to cover this? it now costs me 10% more to ship a package because fedex needs to buy new trucks this year. And, because capitalism, that is never going down and the increased profits next year will be considered a win for the new trucks. Or should the "We Have Lex Luthor at home" mother fucker stuffing trucks full of hardcover books to build his empire maybe get charged on a different tier?

And same thing with internet traffic. We are charged based on an expected "weight" of traffic. Too much traffic and hardware tends to fail more regularly or need to be upgraded. And a certain percentage of upgrades are factored in to those internet bills. But if EVERYTHING needs an upgrade, that becomes a very significant cost. Which, again, either is going to be spread out among all users or just Bex Buthor who is the main cause of it.

But you'll notice I stopped talking about USPS REAL quick during that long ramble. And that is because USPS still have flat rate packaging for dirt cheap. And it is part of the core of the organization that you could literally fill that up with tungsten (or a child) and they would deliver it, no questions asked (I think they would ask about the child these days, but it is still a story worth looking up). And that is because they are (keeping it simple) part of the US Government and are subsidized as a result. This is essential to get... essentials to people in rural and under-served communities.

Which... is what is already happening with a lot of internet infrastructure in the US. Google ain't gonna roll up and do the paperwork to lay fiber, so counties and states are doing it and hoping an ISP will use it. And a lot of us argue that internet should be treated like any other utility in that regard, but there are a lot of issues with that approach that I won't get into.

As for Korea? I genuinely have no idea how their internet (or shipping) businesses breakdown. So I have no idea if the above is at all relevant or if this is just a case of politicians being assholes or what. But... any time Amazon is involved, I tend to assume they are at least 30% at fault.

But... kudos on picking the absolute best possible metaphor to explain this. Like, genuinely. Because we all know the "internet is tubes" metaphors don't work. But, when you are thinking in terms of an ISP, the Internet kind of IS shipping packages.