BellSouth Wants to Rig the Internet

PlayfullyClever writes "A senior telecommunications executive at BellSouth, said yesterday that Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates. Some say Small Firms Could Be Shut Out of Market Championed by BellSouth Officer. William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc." Next up, well dressed men go door to door collecting their monthly "protection money". 'It sure would be tragic if your users started getting 1500ms ping times, wouldn't it mister dot com?'

Comments

Re:out of context

[interiot]

The article is actually talking about high-bandwidth services such as streaming media and voice over IP. They don't seem to be talking about simple websites at all ...

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. From TFA, which you apparently didn't read:

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.

Vint Cerf/Google's Comments Bellsouth Plan

[netrangerrr]

Vint Cerf (Father of the Internet) sent a deposition to the US Congress on this legislation. See:

http://www.circleid.com/posts/vint_cerf_speaking_o ut_on_internet_neutrality/

Vint couldn't attend in person since he was recieving the Presidential Medal of Freedom that day for his DARPANET/Internet pioneering efforts.
This link was widely disseminated in the North American IPv6 Task Force and IPv6 Forum where I believe most members strongly support Vint's views.

Ip traffic control

[coastwalker]

On the other hand I recently heard an argument here in the UK that said that one of the arguments against forcing ISPs to cache all email traffic for later inspection by law enforcement in the "war on terror" is that the volume of spam makes it uneconomic (and the bad guys are using untraceable untappable voip anyway).

It appears that the Internet remains a magnicifently untameable beast still, despite pointy headed attempts like this to control it.

that's silly

[davidwr]

If you ARE going to prioritize traffic, prioritize according to:

1) how fast the bits have to get there
2) how tolerable a dropped/not-to-be-resent packet is

for #1, it's usually but not always:
*real-time infrastructure alarms or updates such as those that might be sent by an overloaded router or announcements of changes to routing tables.
*streaming applications like web-radio
*interactive applications like web browsing and chat
*urgent email and file transfers
*everything else

for #2, it's usually but not always
*Anything where one more dropped packet will cause the end result to go from "usuable" to "unusable" whatever that means for a given application. Example, streaming video may tolerate 1 lost packet if the previous n packets arrived safely and on time before the static becomes too annoying for the user.
*Anything sent over a reliable protocol, where delays will cause resends
*everything else

Note that some of these are "loosely defined" and hard to impliment in any meaningful way without industry standards. How will a router know what my personal tolerance for noise on a TV show is?

Can you say "Akamai?"

[Spazmania]

A traffic prioitization service already exists. It's Akamai's whole business model: They buy pipes to strategic locations with many service providers, cache servers near the customer and route requests to the best-choice server. You buy space on their servers and your data gets to the customer faster.

What Mr Smith wants to do is, well, asinine. He wants to allow the data pipes on his network to fill to 100% and then prioritize the traffic based on who pays. This suggests such a flawed understanding of the technology that as the chief technology officer, he should be fired.

See, here's the problem: For a router to make a priority-based switching decision between packets, it has to have more than one packet cached in memory waiting for free space in the outgoing pipe. But, if you havn't started transmitting the first packet by the time the second packet finishes arriving then you've already lost the speed game. Fast service means that you don't hold on to the packets. You send them out the next link as soon as you get them. Any other architecture would result in transmission speeds that are two to three times slower, even for the highest priority packets! Duh!

So if you don't want your network to suck rocks, you still have to keep the utilization below 80%, and if you keep the utilization down then except for rare bursts of traffic the prioritization function will never be used.

As a search engine, why on earth would I buy priority on your network knowing that either A) it almost never gets used or B) your network is piss slow either way? Answer: I wouldn't.

Fire Mr. Smith. He doesn't understand the technology he's charged with overseeing.

Re:Can you say "Akamai?"

[Anonymous Coward]

> For a router to make a priority-based switching decision between packets...

The concept I think you're talking around is very simple. I often see my students make queuing theory much harder than it really is. What you're getting at is the concept that in order to manage a queue, to put it bluntly, you have to have a queue to manage. For most of the Internet connections, their performance is unacceptable long before you have a queue large enough to make management of the queue noticeably affect the performance. Due to the dumb-network notion of IP, the vast majority of what I teach is never used by my students.

Re:They just never quit

[Shakrai]

As a BellSouth "customer", Saying that BellSouth has the best customer service of the Baby Bells isn't much of a complement. Thank god for cable internet, or we would still be waiting for DSL.

*Shrug* YMMV. Personally, I've never had a problem with Verizon or any of it's predecessors. The biggest problem with the telco customer service department is that the CSRs don't usually know what the repair people are doing.

With Time Warner I had an interference problem that was killing Roadrunner. The interference would come and go -- bad enough that channels 2 and 3 showed it -- and they could never bother to dispatch anybody when it was actually ongoing. They tried any number of things to fix my line -- ran a new drop off the street -- temporally removed the traps on my line (then forgot to reconnect them -- I have 80 channels and pay for 6 -- suckers), put signal suppressors on my cable modem, etc, etc. They could never nail down the problem. At one point they tried to blame it on my TiVo and suggested I get their DVR product instead!

To this day I think the problem was probably something as simple and mundane as a bad TV or VCR in a neighbors house that was leaking RF onto the cable lines. Perhaps if they bothered to dispatch somebody with haste they could track this down. In any case I'm not very fond of a technology that can neutralized by "interference" that can't be tracked down. At least with POTS and DSL I have my own dedicated pair of wires and don't need to worry about what's going on in my neighbors house.

Consistent Message from SBC: Manipulate the Net

[MarsGov]

Edward Whitacre, the CEO of SBC, explicitly discussed the idea of charging Google for access, or blocking Vonage's audio packets; it's a consistent corporate message. I discussed Whitacre's statement at length back on 1 Nov -- see http://www.pebbleandavalanche.com/weblog/2005/11/0 1/blog-20051101T0531.

How do they plan on doing this exactly?

[TallMatthew]

Introducing latency is easy to do with an OpenBSD box but core routers don't have sufficient buffers to hold traffic for more than a few dozen milliseconds, if that. Unless they plan to drop packets which is entirely evil. If they do plan to deploy a latency-introducing device across their network, I assume they'll have to do it at the edge, which for a network that size won't be cheap.

Jerks. Pure corporate jealousy.

it's restraint of trade, a constitutional violatio

[swschrad]

and mr. Bell South Bigwig should have a little visit from one of Washington's finest.

particularly if his little plan interferes with DHS/FBI/m-o-u-s-e plans to get in line first and look over everything else that moves by. that little project never seems to go away, and always seems to have priority over what the moneygrubbers want to do....

Good old Will Smiths information

[splatter]

BellSouth
William L. Smith
President, Interconnection Services and
Chief Technology Officer
675 West Peachtree, Suite 4515
Atlanta, GA 30375
Bill.Smith@BellSouth.com
Voice: 404-927-1900
Fax: 404-529-0014

Give him a call & let him know what you think

Re:They just never quit

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Just out of curiosity, what actualy make a business evil or unethical?

The focus on profit itself- without that, a business becomes ethical, but it also stops growing, and it's competitors that are less ethical grab market share.

Isn't there some business that actualy gets a product to someone at a reasonable value without doing somethign evil/unethical?

Absolutely- I can think of many examples. But none of these are actually *successfull* businesses- they don't grow and they stay small, living off niches in the economic system that are too unprofitable for the sucessfull businesses to bother with. If the niche becomes serviceable by an unethical big business, then the rules of capitalism state that due to economy of scale, the big business will be able to undercut the small business- and the small business will go out of business, unable to continue making a living for it's shareholders. That's what happens when Wal*Mart comes into a small community- their economies of scale mean they can offer products at a far lower price than the stores on main street can, and thus, the stores on main street go out of business.