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New Network Neutrality Squad — Users Protecting the Net
Lauren Weinstein writes in to announce the new "Network Neutrality Squad" — NNSquad. Joining PFIR Co-Founders Peter G. Neumann and Weinstein in this announcement are Vinton G. Cerf, Keith Dawson (Slashdot.org), David J. Farber (Carnegie Mellon University), Bob Frankston, Phil Karn (Qualcomm), David P. Reed, Paul Saffo, and Bruce Schneier (BT Counterpane). The Network Neutrality Squad ("NNSquad") is an open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet's users to help keep the Internet's operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable
restrictions. The project's focus includes detection, analysis, and incident reporting of any anticompetitive, discriminatory, or other
restrictive actions on the part of Internet service Providers (ISPs)
or affiliated entities, such as the blocking or disruptive manipulation of applications, protocols, transmissions, or bandwidth; or other similar behaviors not specifically requested by their customers.
...awful name. I can't help but think of Geek Squad, and that doesn't make me happy.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
They certainly have some big names on the list. I hope that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and they're more effective at getting politicians to listen than they were when standing apart.
No. Different tiers of internet service are like having a first-class and business-class seating section. You pay for X downstream and Y upstream.
Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.
There's always the possibility that ISPs could voluntarily (after receiving a few visits from the NN Mafia, er Squad) adopt network neutrality principles.
It's not about how fast your general Internet service is... that already works the way you want.
It's about how fast the sites you're getting your content from are, based on how much they pay your ISP. Want to buy TV shows and movies from iTunes? Better hope they paid off your ISP, and if customers in general want good service, Apple would have to pay all of the ISPs. Want YouTube? Better hope they paid up. BitTorrent? Games? Good luck.
Net Neutrality does not mean that the ISP doesn't discriminate against you based on how much you pay. It also doesn't mean that the ISP can't give certain types of traffic higher priority. It does mean that the ISP can't discriminate against traffic based on what site the content is coming from, and I think it doesn't suck, and is very important to understand.
I could be wrong, but it sounds more like they're looking for technical documentation and solutions to the issues rather than lobbying politicians for new laws. Also, do you really think that we even have "open market operations"? ISPs in North America have government regulated monopolies and it's killing our ability to keep pace with the rest of the world in connection speed and penetration to the majority of the population. I agree the solution is not more government regulation, but to kill these geographical monopolies.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
The formation of this group is an excellent idea.
Once they start finding and pressuring individual ISPs found guilty of "non-neutral" behavior, it will create incentive for customers to leave that ISP and go to a competitor. Sometimes there won't be a competitor, such as in many rural areas.
The logical progression is to encourage consumers to form their own local groups and move to community-owned Internet access. This new NNSquad should expand their mandate to provide resources that help and encourage communities to achieve network independence.
Network Neutrality doesn't really mean government regulation at all. It just means that all packets have as much right to the road as any others. If you try to block your competitors packets you get slapped, if you try to use anticompetitive practices you get slapped, if you act in a monopolistic manner you get slapped. However you are free to do whatever else you please beyond that. If you want to charge ridiculous amounts to all of your customers fairly you can, if you want to drop all of your peering agreements feel free, if you don't want to invest in your infrastructure and continue wringing every last dime out of your existing infrastructure go ahead... What we need to be regulated better is public rights of way and who has access to them until wireless is mature enough to handle broadband in large deployments.
How does Google find access to pipes that don't exist? There are basically 3 or 4 major players that everyone relies on and you can't just lay new pipe on rights of way that you don't own. Then there is the matter of incumbent telecoms and cable co's and their regional monopolies. If you want high speed internet you deal with 3 companies, Time Warner, Comcast or AT&T. There is nothing stopping time warner sticking up a roadblock to Google, Yahoo and MSN and say go here instead. In fact they already do that to a degree by taking over your browser settings with their client software. They have a portal that is steadily growing in size and services that is being supported by their near monopolies in what 40% of households in the US? Most of the US population isn't dense enough to attract a lot of competition because of the cost of laying cable. Ironically a lot of that cable laying is subsidized by tax payer money but is granted for sole use to one company. In a couple of years if we don't stand our ground on network neutrality we will have a cell phone esque market place for our internet services where we have to pay 10cents a search and 5 cents a dns lookup and 25cents an email and yadda....
Right now the major players are sitting on their pipes wringing as much money as they can out of them and doing the minimum amount of upgrades necessary to maintain the status quo. That is why the telecom companies are having bandwidth issues. The rest of the world is eventually going to surpass our pipes and offer a ton of dynamic content that we can't access because the infrastructure in the US can't handle it. Just like the cell phone industry is leaps and bounds ahead of the US industry in the rest of the world. Same in the console market and hand helds. I could go on but I digress.
One of the important things to remember is that communication infrastructure requires using a limited public resource (e.g. burying cables on public property or even easements on private property, or using the limited bandwidth of wireless spectra
So, given that government involvement (and moreover, the creation of various forms of monopoly) is inevitable, the question cannot be "do we want the government involved?" but rather "what do we want government involvement to be?"
The incumbent communication companies are, basically, abusing the monopoly status that was granted to them. That monopoly status was granted with an implied (and only occasionally codified) ethos: namely that this would create widespread access to the resource for the citizenry. Things like prioritizing traffic and double-charging people for access are explicitly contrary to the intention with which the monopolies were granted. Hence, it is totally reasonable to ask that government amend the agreement with these companies, so that they actually deliver the service they were supposed to deliver.
Put otherwise: why should government keep giving monopolies to companies that are not acting in ways that benefit the citizens?
I think it's more like the airline charging the receiving hotel to take you. If they don't pay to get you off the plane, you sit there for eight hours.
Not a sentence!
I think you guys need to read up on the topic. Teired service is NOT like your first class/economy example, though it may head that way eventually.
ok heres the deal. AT&T is mad because Google is making money off selling ads to THEIR users without writing a check to AT&T. the users paid for their access, as did google, but AT&T wants to double-dip, and charge Google for access to THEIR subscribers.
so lets say AT&T and Yahoo! entered into an agreement whereby Yahoo would be the default search provider for AT&T networks. AT&T could then degrade or eliminate traffic to google, in an attempt to sway user preference. would you keep going to google if it took 35 seconds to load, while yahoo comes up at lightspeed?
Teired service comes in two flavors. one is paid for by web providors, the other by customers.
1) Google pays AT&T for perfered access to THEIR customers. google would have to pay off every ISP nation wide if that were the approach.
2) create user packages where the user would pay extra for access to sites that AT&T does not have deals with. For $19.95 you get yahoo, and email. for 29.95 you can get google (but not any of the sites linked therein), and for 59.95 you can get access to the internets 200 most popular sites. full access to the internet available for $.20 per site hit. be sure not to hit reload...
neither gives you any more than you have today, all it does is take away. I pay my bill. if that isn;t enough for them, then they either need to raise their prices, or live with it.
I heard Tim Berners-lee came down on the anti side of NN. I read his arguments and while they are valid from a network engineers perspective, he's completely missing the consumer protection aspect, which is the whole reason the rest of us are discussing NN.
I am not a commodity that AT&T can buy and sell. if AT&T wants to charge companies for access to AT&T subscribers, then they owe us subscribers a check, not the other way around.
If one user's activity degrades the quality of another's connection, then the ISP is selling a product that they don't actually have. I should be able to use all the bandwidth that I pay for.
...or something that evokes the Internet Protocol.
People need to be reminded of what the ISP's role is: The offer Layer 3 service in the form of IP. Muck around with the protocols above that and you've not only stepped outside the bounds of an ISP, but are guilty of false advertising and data falsification.
I wonder if the big telecoms realize how badly they will be entrenched in cyber-guerrilla warfare with people like you and me if they somehow pull off grasping control of the net. It would be nice and a hell of a lot of fun to have a fully morally justifiable reason to engage in offensive action against the people trying to control information. I just imagine a Thermopylae style engagement between the two sides, and it sends shivers down my spine when I think about what we are actually trying to defend.
When the world is covered with a grid of network nodes every meter, when we are online 100% of the time everywhere we go, we are going to need a network infrastructure which is flexible and smart. This vision of ubiquitous connectivity isn't going to happen if we allow the telecoms to make the rules: they will charge so much for every little service that it will be far too expensive to maintain the connectivity you mention. As for "infrastructure which is flexible and smart"--I believe that's part of what network neutrality is about. One of the issues with allowing ISPs to filter content based on type (and especially based on origin/destination) is that such a system inherently becomes inflexible. Moreover it isn't smart, because people will fight against the traffic shaping rules if they don't conform to the way people want to use the net (e.g. people will start encrypting everything or spoofing origin IP or hiding one kind of traffic inside another).
An "arms race" between the infrastructure and the users is neither flexible nor efficient. It is wasteful and frustrating. The genius of the Internet was that it was a simple system that would blindly pass packets to their destination. It was this generality and equality that allowed a whole slew of new applications to evolve. The point is that we can't imagine, today, what the next "killer app" of the net is going to be... but traffic shaping inherently says "these are the services that are important"--which means anything currently unimagined will remain unimplemented forever.
Its all great running around banging the drum and asking users to 'join the war on non-neutrality' but it's all for nothing if you cannot DETECT non-neutrality in the first place.
/. where someone was writing an application to detect non-neutrality... but it went quiet very quickly. Now the way I see it is that the list contains people that have the skills, or know the people who could write an application that could aid in the DETECTION of unfair practices from the ISP's.
I recall some discussion a while ago here on
The application could be used by the volunteers, and test the various protocols to various hosts (Skype, Google, youtube, TPB) and between the users themselves with various traffic (p2p, ping, tcp/ip, udp etc...) and see if any 'delay' occurs specific to one type of traffic. If it contained an automated reporting tool (OMG Tinfoil hat!!), then the aggregators could see trends across the various providers and not rely solely on one or two users. Of course you're entering a war of cat and mouse....
Before we can go accusing ISP's on non-neutrality, we need the tools to detect unfair play in the first place... anyone know of any?
Let's drop all the bad analogies for a minute (pretend I'm new here) and actually look at the situation.
Net Neutrality is an issue I'm concerned with. However, the only information I get from the Net Neutrality camp seems to be "the-sky-is-falling" sensationalist propaganda. So while I want to support NN, my rational mind says "Hold the phone. This is just an ad-hominem rant, not a rational argument."
Say I'm a network operator. (I am, actually. I have more than one PC at home. And quite a few I'm in charge of at work. But let's also say I'm in the business of renting access to my network -- an "ISP" as we all say.) So I've got a bunch of subscribers paying me a fee for a connection my network. I've also got connections to other operators. Some of those are transit I pay for, some are peering agreements. My customers use those connections indirectly, of course.
Now let's say I'm looking at my traffic logs, and I see that a ton of traffic is going to and from YouTube. So much so that I have to buy more transit to operators connected closer to YouTube. So now I have a bigger bill. And that cost has to be covered (TANSTAAFL).
I could raise rates for my subscribers. Or I could say to YouTube, "Hey, guys, you're a hot ticket. If you give me some more money, I'll buy a faster pipe to you guys. If not, well, you're going to be stuck on an overloaded transit line."
While I do have concerns with the above scenario, it does not make me want to take to the streets with a torch and pitchfork. Can someone explain what is so evil in the above?
If you want to propose scenarios that involve abuse, censorship, wire-tapping, giant insect overlords, etc., that's fine, but please also address plain old business scenarios like the above.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.
No,
Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.
No,
Net neutrality is like using a vacuum cleaner to pick up lawn clippings, while a dwarf follows behind you with a rake.
Aren't analogies helpful? Everyone always tries to come up with analogies to deal with things, but most of the time they are misleading and even manipulative. Everyone tries to find an analogy which makes their position look best.
I would say, instead, that issues should be analyzed from first principles. If net neutrality is good or bad, just say so, and say why. Don't say it's like a chicken with eyeglasses or a frog jumping out of a pot. That doesn't help.
Have you guys heard of the term Natural Monopoly? The telcom infrastructure is a classic example. I know everyone here on slashdot likes to think less regulation solves everything, but some cases require it. There is NO free market solution to this problem because there will never be enough competition, so we need the government to step in and protect the consumer. Otherwise, the monopolies (telcos) are free to go on limiting capacity, price gouging, and (just now) implementing packet filtering if they don't start getting kickbacks.
There's a whole lot more to Net Neutrality than just privacy. To me, they are two completely separate issues. Naturally, we should be able to have some confidence that our use of the internets is private.
But Net Neutrality to me means much more that once you are on the Internet, one packet should have the same access as any other. I don't want anybody's advertisement to get higher priority than an email from my wife, and I don't want the performance of any website to be governed by the carrier. As long as someone has paid for a fast server and lots of bandwidth, the telecom should move their packets the same way it moves anybody else's.
You are welcome on my lawn.