The trouble is that consumer ISPs want to offer low priced "all you can eat" packages and then find that consumers take them at their word by viewing huge numbers of videos, etc.

What is needed is a dose of reality: use lots of bytes, expect to pay more.

Big Tech should pay what it costs to get its bytes to the backbone and consumers pay for what it costs to download them from the backbone.

When I talk about "backbone" I mean more than the local Internet exchange, this should include the cost of bytes between these exchange points.

Yes: prices will go up for heavy consumers, that is only fair. Lighter users will pay less.

"When I talk about "backbone" I mean more than the local Internet exchange, this should include the cost of bytes between these exchange points."

That's how it works already. I pay my ISP, who uses some of that money to pay for their interlinks with other ISPs, who use it for their links. Sometimes, they peer so that they don't have to pay one another for traffic, usually when that would have been a relatively balanced exchange anyway. If the networks my ISP is linking with start charging more, whether it's because they want to build some expensive stuff or they've realized what wonderful things money can buy you, my ISP has the choice to either pass those prices on to me or to find another way to route the traffic. That's the point of having an ISP manage their connection. Since they are already paying the network operators, it doesn't make sense to add on other charges, and trying to do so would inevitably lead to confusion and to price gouging (if my ISP can bill me for some network they used and present this as a get out of complaints card, then they no longer have any incentive to be efficient with how my traffic is routed).

Many connections are billed by usage, either by bytes transferred or by flow consumed, and this is a perfectly reasonable business model. I've had such contracts before and I have a lot of contracts like it; my electricity and water usage, for instance. Most industrial connections have billing that takes one or the other of these into account when deciding on the price, and every cloud provider certainly does and often with a very healthy multiplier on it. However, it should be the choice of the ISP whether they will give me such a contract or if they intend to offer an unlimited package, and if they find that offering everything for less than it costs to deliver the everything I use, then it is a problem they'll have to fix themselves. It should not be our responsibility or that of other users if an ISP chose an unprofitable price. It certainly shouldn't be the responsibility of companies who are almost certainly paying more as their usage goes up to the networks that the ISP has chosen voluntarily to link with.

That's today's system. Big Tech will run their own connections, or pay to have them provided, all the way to interchange points. Some of those are public interchanges like AMS-IX, but they'll also pay to run connections to provider-specific peering points (so that their traffic stays on their network for as long as possible). They don't want their traffic on congested networks, and will pay to sort this out.

Additionally, Big Tech will pay for "appliances" for bigger ISPs to place in their network, like the Netflix OpenConnect Appliance. These VPN back to the main Big Tech networks, and act to reduce traffic along the VPN link by caching just the way Big Tech does to stop everything hitting one server in one location.

The fundamental issue here is that, in a competitive market, people aren't willing to pay carriers a price carriers want. If carriers increase their prices, two things happen:

1. Some users stop paying, and do without not just the carrier services, but also Big Tech.

2. Other entities (e.g. Hyperoptic in London) build competing networks that charge less, and thus induce users to pay them instead.

The advantage of charging Big Tech from the carrier point of view is that it isolates them from those two market effects.

The fact of the matter is that ISPs cannot compete with each other on anything else than price, and it's easy to change providers, so their margins are thin. Big Tech providers are not nearly as interchangeable so they have larger margins and make a lot more money. This is similar to how truck drivers are paid very little compared to the companies who pay them.

This is similar to how truck drivers are paid very little compared to the companies who pay them.

Not really. Truck drivers are paid very little, because shareholders take precedence. Now that IR35 changes have been introduced truck drivers lost their ability to go their own way - very much last bargaining power they had. So now they can make even less money.

Build those networks but don't allow those "tech giants" to use it and see how many customers you get.

This is like Ford demanding money from Esso. "Your cars are benefiting off our Public Forecourt infrastructure! That cost us loads!!!"

Why do you legitimise this bollocks by pretending the telecoms sector isn't already paid by it's customer specifically to deliver the content of these "Tech giants"? Thought you were supposed to indicate when it's an advert not an article....

Those global networks have by the way so many much more useful uses besides recreational uses such as streaming movies and showing endless video advertisements o' Netflix & Google.

Finetuning your metafora, current situation is more like Ford demanding that "Esso" should provide unlimited free gasoline to it's cars, because Ford already built factories and ships cars over ocean (or whatever they'd claim).

I'm not sure I agree with the low margin part...

AT&T made $69bn profit in 2022, on $121bn revenue, a 57% margin.

Vodafone made €5.7bn on €45.6bn, a 12.5% margin

Verizon $21bn on $136.8bn, 15% margin

Deutsche Telecom €9.1bn on €114bn, 8% margin

I could go on.

To me? Those aren't particularly low margins. My understanding is 5% is a low margin. 10% is a healthy margin.

My sympathy for the big content companies wanes as their profits soar.

American-born firms who, strangely, pay almost no taxes anywhere. And they may have been born in the USA but, strangely, when the taxman cometh, the are very much foreigners.

Microsoft has apparently legally set its tax base in [1]offshore havens . Apple is also [2]hot on that market . Amazon [3]does wonders to ensure that it can, perfectly legally, avoid the majority of taxes it should pay. I'm sure that Oracle and all the others are in line as well. After all, it's their "duty to their shareholders", isn't it ?

I'm obviously not saying that these companies should hand over 50% of their revenue, but they definitely should not whine about having to pay for what they use.

Oh, and it should be a worldwide rule that, if your company rakes in over a billion dollars a year, you are forbidden from getting subsidies anywhere. You've got the money, you don't need to deprive citizens of the benefits of their tax money.

[1] https://itep.org/how-to-think-about-the-problem-of-corporate-offshore-cash-lessons-from-microsoft/

[2] https://itep.org/fact-sheet-apple-and-tax-avoidance/

[3] https://itep.org/amazon-avoids-more-than-5-billion-in-corporate-income-taxes-reports-6-percent-tax-rate-on-35-billion-of-us-income/

This makes sense - when you use roads you pay taxes to get them built and maintained.

But big corporations have chronic aversion to taxes and they can buy anyone trying to "cure" them.