Senators, ISPs, and Network Neutrality

Polarism submitted a good article about net neutrality that is currently running on Ars. It's a good explanation of where the pieces of the problem are, the government issues, the industry issues, etc. Worth a read.

Comments

Why the red herring?

[XorNand]

Over and over again the anti-net neutrallity rant is based on the presumption that web site operators don't already pay for bandwidth. I don't understand why this continues? While most people don't know the nuiances of negotiating a high-dollar agreement with a carrier, there are a great many people out there who pay $10-50/mo for simple web hosting. Surely these people know that both ends of a HTTP connection are already paying. I'd like to know if this is an intentional distortion perpetuated by the telecoms, or if this is an honest misunderstanding?

Re:Why the red herring?

[morgan_greywolf]

Lets use an example. I'm looking at Toogle from the east coast. My ISP is Comcast, and (for sake of argument, I have no idea who it really is) Toogle is hosted on a west coast provider, say, Covad. My HTTP request is sent from my system to my ISP's node. The ISP's node then routes the packet to it's next hop, which might be on an AT&T network. The AT&T node then routes the packet to another node, which might be in a completely different network, and so on and so forth, until the packet reaches Covad. The response is performed in much the same way, until it reaches my system. Now, yes, both Comcast and Covad are paid for this transaction, from me in my ISP contract, and from Toogle in the hosting agreement. AT&T's complaint is that they have to carry this traffic for free across their network, and get nothing from this particular transaction.

But Comcast and Covad are paying for their upstream connections to AT&T. Do you think Comcast and Covad connect to the Internet for free? Everybody who connects pays their upstream provider. It's not like either Comcast or Covad are one of the big backbone providers.

Re:Why the red herring?

[mkw87]

Anyone back me up on this?

Our president probably would.

Re:Why the red herring?

[arivanov]

As someone who used to be a network architect in a Tier 1 global telco I can say only two words: Utter bollocks. Get a clue would ya?.

Traffic is carried between two autonomous systems on the Internet if there is a transit or peering agreement. In your example either Covad or Comcast is paying for transit from AT&T. Otherwise they will not get the routing table entries for each other. AT&T is definitely not doing it for free. If Covad and Comcast were directly connected it could have been either a peering agreement under which they exchange traffic at no cost to each other or once again a transit (one of the buying from the other).

What is happening here and what Net neutrality is all about is that in the US the public peering points used to be run by big telcos like MCI (f.e MAE East or MAE West). MCI and friends deliberately made them suck really bad around 7 years ago so that people switch to buying transit. The telcos themselves switched to private peering agreements. Thus, the tier 1 cartel creation was complete (it started to coalesce around 3-4 years prior to that). As a result in the US an ISP like the ones you mention usually has 2-3 transit connections for which it pays and very few private peerings where it exchanges traffic.

Compared to that in EU a similar ISP has 2-3 transit connections and 20-30+ peering agreements across public peering points. The private peerings can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This changes the overall traffic pattern considerably and most of the traffic is going across peering points not across a tier 1 telco like AT&T. As a collegue of mine jokingly put it a few years back: "The UK Internet backbone consists of one floor in a building in Docklands". In other words the Linx has become the backbone. As a result the transit ISPs can no longer hold their customers for ransom with QoS threats the way the Tier 1 cartel is doing it in the US.

Futher to that, the fix for the no-net-neutrality is trivial. Someone with the resources to do this who does not have the conflict of interest (the way MCI used to) should reestablish the public peering points and run them using the same model and rules as the successfull ones on this side of the pond like Linx, DGIX, etc. The resources to run this are a drop in the ocean for the likes of Google and Yahoo and it will restore the healthy network economics in less then half a year. In fact it will be cheaper than moaning and trying to graft congresskriters.

And if they do not do this the telcos will get them by their balls and their wallets will quickly follow. Frankly, I would be surprised if we do not see Google Peering or Yahoo Peering by the end of the year

The law of unintended consequences at work

[MikeRT]

The key to stopping these problems would be to impose rigorous common carrier status regulations on general bandwidth providers. Allow everything from political speech to hate speech to pornography. The only thing that would get exempt would be IPTV so that IPTV providers could organize content packages according to their customers' tastes.

For the love of God, get rid of all of the bullshit regulation at every level that allows governments to meddle in the prices of bandwidth packages and the ability of property owners to negotiate with the telecoms. Take away EVERY barrier that keeps new players from entering the market, or that even increases the cost of entering.

And I ask one more time. Does anyone want this Congress, with its meth-addled ADHD-afflicted child-level attention span for details and consequences to regulate complex technical issues when most of it are MBAs and lawyers? I wouldn't, and I despise Verizon. I switched to Vonage and would stay with Vonage even if cost more than Verizon or AT&T because it's not AT&T or Verizon, but I sure as hell don't trust this bunch of coin-operated cronies to regulate the Internet.

Re:Lack of basic understanding

[uniqueCondition]

Offered at a loss

DSL/cable isn't being offered at a loss. This is simply untrue! Go check out the financial statements of your local exchange carrier (LEC) http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml

Lots of them make huge coin and are paying out big dividends.

Forget the huge windfall later, most assume that data will eventually be commoditized in the way voice was (i.e., things will get worse).

Re:Same story, second verse, same as the first

[MobyDisk]

This is another case of misunderstanding network neutrality. Your example has nothing to do with it.

1) If you want a low-latency connection for gaming, nothing today stops you from doing that today. Contact your local telecom and ISPs and ask them what latencies they offer and at what price. There's nothing wrong with doing that, it happens today all the time.

For example, I work for a telemedicine company and our clients are hospitals who use low-latency high-bandwidth pipes, and they pay extra for that. They prioritize the audio/video traffic over the HTTP requests.

2) This would be a net neutrality issue if Microsoft paid Comcast to prioritize XBOX Live traffic over Playstation traffic. Or if Comcast bandwidth capped World of Warcraft traffic unless Blizzard or their customers paid them extra.

Re:Move on to MoveOn

[Billosaur]

Why does every tech article, without fail, have more political jibes in it than tech comments? I just started reading the comments under this story, and this is only the first one I saw. I'm sure it won't be the last.

Unfortunately, the Internet has become a political battleground now, and the whole Net Neutrality issue has polarized opinions among techies and non-techies alike. Most people with a technical bent see Net Neutrality as necessary, to keep everyone on an even footing. The non-technical can't understand the fuss, because they lack the knowledge of how the technical side of the Internet works and how it's paid for. Let's face, how many people look closely at their phone bill and wonder just what it all means? All they know is, the phone keeps working if I pay the bill.

Now, you won't find a more opinionated person than your average Slashdot user. We squabble over Linux vs. Microsoft, Oracle vs. MySQL, Google vs. Yahoo!, etc. Even those fights are now becoming more political, because they involve legal challenges, laws, foreign governments, and the like. I think it's safe to say that now that the political wind is blowing so strong through IT, Slashdotters wound be hard pressed to saty out of the fight. So don't expect the political diatribes to die down in the foreseeable future. It's the price we're paying for our new technological culture.

Re:Same story, second verse, same as the first

[MightyMartian]

There are two big lies coming out of the telco giants these days:

1. Big web sites should pay because they're such a load on us.
Big web sites, like Google, are, in fact, the reason that any ISP large or small even has residential and small business services. Without these portal and the like, it would be like selling a pipe that doesn't connect to a water supply.

2. We have to do this to assure the majority of our customers aren't unduly effected by a few big downloaders.
Traffic shaping has been around for years. The small ISP I worked for regularly throttled down P2P traffic, using nothing more than a couple of Linux boxes. This argument is a non-starter.

What it boils down to is that Congress is once again whoring itself to telecom giants who, rather than evolving their business models to fit the Internet, are using their money and their knowledge of just how willingly politicians will prostitute themselves. These guys are simply electronic mobsters, using IP traffic as their weapon of choice to push their weight around. It's despicable, but expected. What's sad is that Congress is so gleeful in selling out the average Internet user. There truly is no shame, no sense of civic responsbility or any ability to understand the incredible information tool which is now threatened by ugly old behemoths.