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so what you think about this it would be the end for small webmasters in the porn industry? at least for tube sites which has streams.
Surprised that no one here has been commenting on the pending death of Net Neutrality in the U.S. this week thanks to the Republican FCC chairman. Is this a non-issue for you guys and you’re confident your porn sites will not be impacted? Or are you like me and just worn out from the long fight and optimistic it won’t be as bad as some predict, or might get reversed under a new administration?
I see PornHub put up a banner on their site, but it seems like it may all be a wasted effort.
As a porn blogger it’s very scary to think that all my work may be for nothing if internet providers can decide which websites get sent at high speeds and which are slowed down. I’m kind of surprised PornHub is protesting this because they’re certainly part a company that can easily afford to pay the “fast lane” tolls, making them even bigger in the world of porn than they already are.
A lot of times people talk about things in the abstract and they sound scary. So let’s talk about what ISPs can actually do, technically? Basically all they can do is prioritize traffic to/from certain IP ranges when there’s congestion or allow/ban certain IP ranges through the best connections to their network (forcing everyone else to go through a pipe that may be overcrowded). That’s what this comes down to.
If you’re Netflix, I’d be worried (sorta). They can’t hide their traffic and their traffic is 1/3rd of residential bandwidth in the evenings. They will be impacted. But the flip side for them is they’d probably love to have content servers inside some of those ISP’s networks – something they’ve been barred from doing but now can do. Putting an edge server inside the ISP’s network makes things better for everyone since it means the connection to the ISP now has less traffic going through it (win-win).
Netflix also competes directly with the cable companies’ revenue stream – they sell customers entertainment at a lower price than the cable companies and they’re big enough to be noticed. That’s a big problem for Netflix.
Now think about folks like us. We buy bandwidth from our host, and your host usually has different prices for “Tier 1” networks and non-Tier 1 networks. Those tier levels exist because some networks are just better than others. And guess what, the Tier 1 networks will continue to be better, and now they can pay the ISPs to make sure they continue to outperform tier 2+ networks – that their traffic gets priority over Tier 2 and 3 networks. The networks that don’t pay, won’t continue to be Tier 1. That may increase the price of bandwidth slightly, but bandwidth is something that seems to constantly fall in price, so maybe it’ll just level out for a bit before continuing to go down in price.
Your CDN also contracts with Tier 1 network providers (hopefully). So same deal there. However, a lot of people use the CDN’s host name rather than their own (e.g. foo12124.cloudflare.com). In cases like that, how is any ISP going to figure out who’s traffic it is? To them it’s CloudFlare’s traffic. Now mind you, that’s just for assets – the HTML has to be served from your domain, so they do know about that – but that’s just one page, and it’s loading all the assets that can really slow things down in a major way.
Porn doesn’t directly compete with the revenue stream of cable companies. So if you currently pay for tier 1 bandwidth (via your host or a CDN), I can’t see the end of Net Neutrality hurting you.
And yes, they could block porn completely now, but that’s a quick way lose customers and the CEO will get fired when the shareholders figure out the impact on their stock price.
So honestly, I’m not worried, at least not about how it will impact my business. I could totally see problems with Netflix though, so as a Netflix customer I am worried.
