On Entangling and Testing Net Neutrality

P3titPrince writes "In an NYT op-ed today, Timothy B. Lee argues that legislation specifically guaranteeing Net Neutrality would in fact be less effective than just allowing the status quo." From the article: "It's tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage. Economists have dubbed this process 'regulatory capture,' and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970's. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition." Relatedly, winnabago writes "Computerworld reports on a potential method for testing a net connection for neutrality. Somewhat similar to Traceroute, the software uses spoof packets that appear to be from a potentially throttled source and compares the transmission time to that of neutral traffic."

Comments

NN?

[robpoe]

Why has Google bought all the dark fibre that they can? Easy! When telcos start clamping down on 'Net connections, we'll all be on the GoogleNet.

Net Neutrality problems solved, at least for Google.

Re:NN?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

When telcos start clamping down on 'Net connections, we'll all be on the GoogleNet.

This will never happen. Google bought all that dark fiber so they could ferry all their massive internal dataloads from A to B without paying through the nose for it. They made a long term decision and figured it would be cheaper in the long run to have their own transcontinental (G)LAN rather than keep ponying up to the major telcos. Big companies do this.

Do you think those fibers are still dark? Right now they're probably at full capacity shifting the teraquads of dataload upon dataload upon dataload back and forth between to Google legions of analyists and their analysiers, so they can confirm that, yes indeed, people really do think those ads are search results.

Spoofing and net neutrality

[Rob T Firefly]

Somewhat similar to Traceroute, the software uses spoof packets that appear to be from a potentially throttled source and compares the transmission time to that of neutral traffic.

This brings forth a very serious issue I haven't seen brought up elsewhere.. if net neutrality does get squashed, how much of a serious crime will something like this be? If we move to a tiered Internet, how many huge companies (and their respective purchased government officials) will cry "fraud" every time someone dares to make a packet appear as though it came from a higher tier? The mind boggles.

Re:Spoofing and net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

None. In fact it will become VERY BIG if net neutrality goes bad, unstoppable and undetectable by any legal or technical means.
We will see new "portals". Not the web portals that you think of now, but point to point gateways between
parts of the globe which are tunnelled through adaptive multi route connections. The adaptive part is the key to this
and the mentioned software is a vital component. Internet proxies will spring up where traffic basically disappears into them
to emerge elsewhere. Sure you will have higher pings / slower delivery times, but the bandwidth / throughput will be immense.

Although superficially similar to TOR these new gateways are not intended to provide security or anonymity, they are designed to obfuscate the traffic from the carrier. No amount of legal mumbo jumbo is going to be able to do jack about this, it is an inevitable future if the carriers start to be selective on traffic. Unless they *physically* disconnect their networks and isolate themselves there is nothing the carriers can do about it. The days of traditional routing are probably numbered.

The internet (in the original ARPA concept) was designed to route around problems. It is by design an adaptive system. If the carriers become a problem they will be routed around. It's that simple. Net neutrality can only ever be a short term problem, until the system adapts to counter it.

Thanks to the greed of the telcos the net will evolve one step further and we will have them to thank for an even more robust and reliable network topology that can detect and adpat to threats to its connections.

Ummm... no...

[sterno]

The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

That's EXACTLY what's already happening. The telecom companies have long been doing this and the whole net neutrality discussion is being prompted by those same telecom companies wanting to loosen the rules (you know, using their lobbyists to get favorable regulation). Further, I would argue that the return on investment from lobbying is so large that any business of sufficient size will invest heavily in lobbyists. They'd be dumb not to.

Net Neutality needs to happen before we give the telecom companies any more leighway in other areas. The reason is simple. If we do not do this, then if we find that we need to impose it after the fact, they will have already invested billions in business built around the new regulatory structure. At that point, they can legitimately claim it would be expensive and onerous to do it. Today, if we put this regulation in, it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the network they already have.

Obvious

[Kelz]

These people are just stating the obvious. Very rarely will government regulation have any good effect in the long term; it just slows down innovation and takes years to go away.

Do YOU trust your congressman to not just create a huge beauracracy, with new laws being stuck on whenever they want to "protect the children/fight terrorism".

Congress is involved, remember.

[krell]

The net-neutrality legislation might actually make the problem worse. But at least it bans flag-burning, provides federal funding for Air America, declares Feb. 13 to be "National Nathaniel Hawthorne Awareness Day", and pays for 6 years of new shoes for Sen. Harkin! That's what counts the most.

Easy...

[GillBates0]

Google is buying all the fiber because of it's well known benefits. Fiber absorbs several times their weight in water, resulting in softer, bulkier stools, which makes it easier for traffic to pass through the colon.

Anybody who's experiencing problems due to clogged Tubes is well-advised to deploy as much Fiber as possible.

Tangentially related...

[jdaly]

There has also been some confusion over authorship. Mr. Lee is not to be
confused with Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor and NetNeutrality proponent.

Re:That last bit.

[mrxak]

Market pressure will keep the MSOs honest, like in any free market. The problem is that with over-regulation being what it is already, we don't have a free market. How many cable providers are in your area? It's not enough to just throw out these net neutrality efforts, but we also need less restrictions on competition. We'd all have a lot more/cheaper bandwidth if it wasn't for franchising laws.

Bandwidth commodity trading

[fahrbot-bot]

This may be the rational against neutrality:

From: Rude Awakening
Bandwidth commodity trading--or the trading of financial instruments that allow carriers to hedge against future dips or upswings in the price of bandwidth through forward-selling and forward-buying--is indeed stalled, according to Tony Craig, executive chairman of Arbinet-thexchange. "There's no underlying physical delivery model with integrity upon which contracts can be based," Craig said. "That doesn't exist in the bandwidth world."

Ditching the neutrality model will allow the telcos to make more money based on trading bandwidth and futures. Even more scary:

From: Making bandwidth a commodity: Reality or just a good idea?
One company in the bandwidth exchange arena is Enron Communications, which is trying to recruit support for the model from service providers. Following the lead of its parent company Enron Corp., which helped transform the natural gas and electricity industry into a commodity, Enron Communications is planning to revolutionize the way bandwidth is exchanged.

While Enron may be out of the picture, an idea they wanted foster must be met with some suspicion...

Re:The question I have.

[jfengel]

For Question 1, the problem isn't so much discriminating based on the content as discriminating based on the sender. That is, if amazon.com has paid the fee and bn.com hasn't, you get faster access to amazon's web site than bn. (Especially if "slower" means "nothing at all".)

Which could lead to discrimination against content you don't like (e.g. fast access to nra.org, shutting aclu.org to a trickle), but it's site-based, not something you can fix with encryption unless you start talking about fancy stuff like onion routing. Even that doesn't really help, because they could throttle everything except packets directly to their paid providers.

What guarantees network neutrality is your ability to switch to a neutral ISP if you don't get the access you want. That only works if you have competition among ISPs, which too many people don't.

For your second question, there's also a notion of using special protocols (quality of service, QoS) to guarantee certain bandwidth between two sites on a site-by-site basis. So if you want to watch a movie in real time, and you want to guarantee that there's at least 1 Mbps available between the sites, the ISPs want to be able to charge you for that guarantee.

Most ISPs make very little in the way of guarantees to individual users. (High-level providers like the one amazon uses are a different story). Guaranteeing 1 Mbps constantly requires a lot more hardware than they have now, and most of the time that's just fine, because most Internet traffic comes in short burts. It becomes not-fine only when you have a specific requirement, like watching a movie or a VOIP conversation, or a web site that you absolutely must keep running 99.999% of the time or you'll scare away the customers.

Net neutrality, rah, rah, bah, humbug

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I'm for net neutrality, the way I'm for world peace, ending world hunger, and all that stuff -- in the abstract.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I'm sure Osama Bin Laden is for world peace, too -- but I doubt when I speak of world peace I envision the same thing. Or rather, if everyone could agree on a common vision of world peace, we'd have achieved it, we do not have world peace precisely because while everyone might claim to be for world peace, everyone has different views on what that means.

So of course everyone is for net neutrality -- people running around going "Oh noez, big companies are going to take away our freedoms! You're not against freedom, are you?" People running around going "Equality! Neutrality! Freedom!" etc. Of course no one is going to say they're against those things.

But... how do you expect to legistlate or regulate such things if you can't get a concrete definition?

Does net neutrality mean that ATM and frame-relay QoS services go away? (I know of some ISPs who bought frame relay circuits with lots of CIR, and of ISPs who bought frame circuits with virtually 0 CIR -- I know whose traffic has priority on the network (to those who think the net today is neutral -- HAH!))

What about equal access to colocation facilities? Who gets to go in and play with the wires? Be kind of annoying to find out some no-name company registered in another country has 'accidently' attached something to your physical connection... I know of colocations where you can't go without a union guy around, and facilities where techs would refuse to go at night without an armed escort. Someone going to pay for those things for the little guys so everyone is 'equal' and 'neutral'?

Equal opportunities to build network gear? I mean, should that start up being able to stick in custom gear into a colocation whenever they want, or do we want to have some testing first to make sure it's not going to catch fire?

Handicap access? Should we treat everyone's network connection the exact same in terms of QoS, or lack of QoS? Should we have 'equal treatment' in a technical sense, or make sure everyone has 'equal access' to services?

We could just shutdown the Internet completely -- that would be 'equal' and 'net neutral' to everyone. Sort of like Armeggedon would result in world peace after everyone is dead. Certainly satisfies the requirements... right?

Sure, it benefits folks in more affluent urban areas to suggest opening up the 'last mile' (sic), because perhaps the local governments could afford to maintain the last mile (or half mile, or wireless, etc.) Of course, if someone is living in a rural area (like, say, in the Appalachia, where mountains and valleys make wireless a bit iffy) where the 'last mile' might be more like the last five miles... Well! I suspect in those areas there are phone companies that would be thrilled to dump non-profitable infrastructure maintainenance on small rural governments.

Let's hash out some *real* policy details -- starting from the hardware, physical network deployments, physical network operations and maintenance, and working our way up. Let's see how long 'everyone' (sic) is for 'net neutrality' (sic). What is it? How will one test for it? How will one measure it? How will one enforce it?

But, be assured, I am quite for net neutrality, net freedom, and all that stuff. Like world peace. Of course, if I could implement net neutrality the way *I* want it... a lot of you might start the massive whining. For those reasons, I an quite against any legistlation for net neutrality until someone offers a real policy plan -- realistically, the network will never be perfectly neutral. The question is where can we get agreements on what will have to be compromised on (security/reliability of facilities/infrastructure vs. ability to innovate and deploy, emergency services vs. every day use, handicap access vs. 'normal' access, rural low density connectivity vs. urban high density areas vs. access costs vs. maintenance/opex, etc.)

I don't see much policy, mostly I see whining.

Bring on the test!

[Valley Redneck]

Talk about being able to punish bad actors. If this research leads to a little GUI desktop app that tells what packets your ISP is throttling and how much, bad actors will have nowhere to hide. Geeks everywhere will blog the offenders into submission, and "Cable Modems w/no throttling!" suddenly becomes a very nice selling point. Wish I could have made it to Black Hat...

Just my view

[Anon-Admin]

If Microsoft is the answer to the problem, you did not understand the problem!

%s/Microsoft/The Goverment/g

Drug war.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Doesn't make it right, but I'd like to see them jail every internet user on the planet when they all do the same thing.

Back in the '60s a lot of people thought the solution to the drug laws was civil disobedience - lots of people buying and using drugs clogging the legal system, forcing the government to throw in the towel.

You can see how well THAT worked.