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Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality
penciling_in writes "CircleID has a post by Richard Bennett, one of the panelists in the recent Innovation forum on open access and net neutrality — where Google announced their upcoming throttling detector. From the article: 'My name is Richard Bennett and I'm a network engineer. I've built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed's on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing. I'm opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we're going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain ...' This article is great insight for anyone for or against net neutrality."
Since the Google throttling detector does not yet exist, does any bright spark know how to achieve the same result using software that already exists?
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Then why does pretty much every ISP use some form of QoS today?
AFAIK services like FiOS and U-verse handle HDTV over IP by making the breakout box an IP multicast client.
He completely ignores multicast in the paragraph about HTDV being trouble for the Internet, and someone should at least explain why it's not relevant. Otherwise it kind of sinks his battleship w/r/t that argument, IMO.
Because pretty much every isp is part of a vertical monopoly and QoS provides a convenient excuse to leverage their monopoly in one market to push their product in another.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
We supposedly have Truth in Advertising laws already on the books, but super-fast, all-you-can-eat, Internet connections are still being advertised. I'd start by applying the existing law to those claims.
I'd like to be sold a truthful amount of bandwidth (DSL tends to be more honest in this area than cable), and not some inflated peak amount that I can only hit when going to the cable sponsored local bandwidth tester site. And when I have that honest amount of bandwidth available to me, I want to be the one to set the QoS levels of my traffic within that bandwidth amount - not the cable company. When I know what I have available to me, then I can best allocate how to use it.
First the cable companies started killing BT, and other filesharing apps to some lesser degree. I believe that to have been a Red Herring. When that was complained loudly about they offered to just cap usage in general, instead of limiting certain bandwidth-intensive applications.
Who does this benefit? The cable companies, of course. Think of the business they're in. They deliver video. But so do a lot of other people on the Internet. Kill everybody else's video feeds because that is the high bandwidth application for the rest of us and pretty soon you'll only be able to receive uninterrupted HD video over your broadband connection from your local cable company. They will become a monopoly in video distribution (and charge every provider for distributing their videos), and all because we insisted that they throttle all traffic equally on their vastly oversold networks.
All they're waiting for is DOCSIS 3.0 to roll out so that they can promise us even more bandwidth that we can't use since they won't even let us used our promised current bandwidth under DOCSIS 2.0. A royal screwing is on its way if your cable ISP in particular isn't clamped down on hard by the federal government by way of the FCC.
And why does it have to be the federal government and the FCC. Because the cable companies have already managed to get all local regulation preempted by the federal government to avoid more stringent local rules, so the feds are the only ones left who are allowed to do it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think the article has some valid points regarding the technical aspects of the Internet, but I don't understand why those aspects make net neutrality legislation a bad thing. My understanding of net neutrality is that people want the Internet to remain neutral. They do not want providers to charge favorable rates to their friends and extortionist rates to their competitors. They do not want small ISPs forced out of the market. They do not want websites and users to be double-charged for the same use. I don't see how any of these issues are technical. I don't see how legislation that would keep things fair also would eliminate an ISP's ability to improve the performance of jitter sensitive applications as well as jitter insensitive applications. I mean you could argue that it'd be legislated wrong, and you'd probably be right. But from a technical standpoint, assuming it's legislated correctly, why is net neutrality technically impossible? Or am I completely misunderstanding the net neutrality issue?
Probably most of us agree with that statement in principle. The problem is that the various players in this (users, content providers, and network operators) do not have their objectives aligned. Thus, the engineers for the network operator will come up with a solution (e.g. throttling) that solves the network company's problem (users using too much of the bandwidth they (over)sold), but the engineers working for the users (e.g. people writing P2P apps) will engineer for a different objective (maximum transfer rates), and will even engineer workarounds to the 'solutions' being implemented by the network.
The problem is thus that everyone is engineering in a fundamentally adversarial way, and this will continue so long as the objectives of all parties are not aligned. Ideally, legislation would help enforce this alignment: for instance, by legally mandating an objective (e.g. requiring ISPs to be transparent in their throttling and associated advertising), or funding an objective (e.g. "high-speed access for everyone"), or by just making illegal one of the adversarial actions (e.g. source-specific throttling).
This is not purely an engineering question. The networks have control of one of the limited resources in this game (the network of cables already underground; and the rights required to lay/replace cables), and this imbalance in power may require laws to prevent abuse. It's not easy to create (or enforce) the laws... and ideally the laws would be informed by the expertise of engineers (and afford ways for smarter future solutions to be implemented)... but suggesting that we should just let everyone 'engineer' the solution misses the mark. Whose engineers? Optimizing for what goal? Working under what incentives?
Put more simply: engineering is always bound by laws.
No net neutrality these past 5 years has meant ... what exactly? What is the horrible problem we've all had to endure because the government hasn't forced ISPs (against their will) to operate in "the preferred way"?
Of course, the "industry" he's talking about are the corporations that control large chunks of the infrastructure. As we've established time and time again, those corporations aren't acting in the public interest. Their only interest is in what makes their corporation the largest profit. To those interests, blocking competing services or forcing popular websites to pay more to stay online are quite reasonable things to do.
This is why net neutrality is such an important idea. Look at what has been accomplished so far with our "ad hoc" arrangement of computers connected to a crazy quilt of networks. All that you see is just the beginning - but a better future will never come to pass if the corporate interests are allowed to filter / segregate / block network traffic.
Think about it for a minute: consider AT&T. They own a substantial amount of internet infrastructure and they're also the major telephone company. When they look at Skype and discuss how to limit the loss of business to this competitor - you'd better believe they consider blocking VOIP on the backbone. Call it a benefit to the customer and put a competitor out of business; another good day in corporate headquarters.
Yes, there are technical reasons to shape traffic to optimize network flow. But the problem is that the large ISPs are using business, not technical, reasons to determine the network traffic policies. If companies like Comcast, Time Warner and Virgin Media could be trusted to base network design on technical issues, that'd be a nice utopia.
But we know these companies are instead targeting packets that they see as business competitors, so they are not making sound technical decisions. I say it's better to make it harder for a perfect network than to allow corporate interests to balkanize the internet for their greedy purposes.
Article summary: "Hello, my name is Richard Bennett, and I'm an industry insider who's been bought off by big money to say net neutrality is bad in the same way climate scientists got bought off by big money to say environmental protection is bad."
I hate printers.
One word: Multicast .
The main issue here is not weather companies double charge for bandwidth or if they charge per use or don't offer this or that service, the issue is that if you allow a situation where a company like AT&T can make a deal with Microsoft to prioritize their traffic, then it will eventually end up in a situation where you get a cartel of companies controlling that keep competing smaller ISPs and content providers out of the market by artificially degrading their connections.
Furthermore because the communications infrastructure is partially government funded, and as the radio frequencies are government controlled through the FCC , the "free market" argument doesn't hold water. There are numerous barriers to entry into the ISP market, both government imposed as well as technical ones, and thus coercive monopolies will be able to form unless actively restrained by the government.
This doesn't necessarily say much about HOW you should regulate the market, but it pretty much implies that simply leaving ISPs to screw over customers and smaller competitors is a big no-no. Completely free unregulated markets only work when there are low barriers to entry, many suppliers, no external costs or benefits, perfect customer insight into the market, completely homogeneous and equivalent services being offered, zero cost of switching supplier, and no barriers to trade. The number of markets in which that applies can be counted on fewer hands than most people have.
No, listen, really, it'll be great. What we need is for ISP to host a single system that stores content. This system then talks to the systems of other ISP's and propagates that data so that it is stored very closely to the user base... solving the Multicast timing issue... Oh, wait... that was Web 0.1 and ISP's are now dropping the protocol because Andrew Cuomo's been wackin' it to 88 kiddy fiddler newsgroups. He feels so guilt ridden about it, he wants the entire Usenet shut down. You know it's true. I'll bet if you searched his computer, he's saving all the 'evidence' just in case he ever needs to refer back to it.
Especially offensive is any sort of attempt at frustrating the dissemination of content based on political bias. The cable companies that own most of the broadband ISP's would love to model the Internet after their cable TV business. They have a news product that has done just a terrific job at political neutrality, and they would love to extend that model to Internet services.
Those of us that have been here a while, the people that used to watch the blocks move across the screen at 300 baud, can see a another of many drastic changes coming in the way the huge ISP's will handle content. There was a time when ISP's were everywhere. They were small companies with access to local dial-up node sites. Then AOL had 10 million people convinced that they were actually the whole internet. Today high speed internet has given birth to bohemoth ISPs that were huge cable/telephone/satelite companies years before. These companies may eventually package web access the same way they package movie channels. After a few years of this the smaller ISP's with open access will be back and the cycle will repeat in new and strange ways.
It wouldn't do any good, because of the weasel words in the advertisements. You see, they don't say you'll get N Mbits/second, they say, "...up to N Mbits/second." And, what they say is true, because your equipment is capable of handling that much bandwidth and your cable connection can carry it if it's provided. Of course, what they don't tell you is that they don't have enough bandwidth available to give every customer a connection like that, so the fact that your equipment could handle it is irrelevant. It's just like a car manufacturer telling you that their newest line can go from 0->150 mph in X seconds, but not reminding you that the legal limit is 65. What they say is true, even though they don't tell you all the truth.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
"I know that's not true. The Internet has some real problems today, such as address exhaustion, the transition to IPv6, support for mobile devices and popular video content, and the financing of capacity increases. Network neutrality isn't one of them."
The effen telcos already got paid 200 billion dollars to do something about getting fiber to the premises and blew it on anything but that. Where's the "political engineering" solution to look into that to determine where the "QOS" broke down at ISP intergalatic central? Where are the ISP and telco fatcats sitting in front of congressional hearings explaining what happened to all that freekin money? Where did it go, real facts, real names, real figures.
And why in the hell does the bulk of the public air wave spectrum only go to the same billion dollar corporations, year after decade after generation, instead of being turned loose for everyone-you know, that "public" guy- to use and develop on? Why the hell do we even *need* ISPs anymore for that matter? This is the 21 st century, there are tons of alternative ways to move data other than running them through ISP and telco profitable choke points, and all I am seeing is them scheming on how to turn the internet into another bastardized combination of the effen telco "plans" and cable TV "plans". Really, what for?
Where's the meshnetworking using long range free wireless and a robust 100% equal client / server model that we could be using instead of being forced through the middle man of isps and telcos for every damn single packet? And what mastermind thought it was a good idea to let them wiggle into the content business? That's a big part of the so called problem there, they want to be the tubes plus be the tube contents, and triple charge everyone, get paid both ends of the connection and a middle man handling fee for..I don't know, but that is what they are on the record wanting, and industry drools like this doofus are providing their excuses. Not content with hijacking all the physical wired reality, for 100 years now, they get to hijack all the useful wireless spectrum, and no, WIFI DOESN'T CUT IT. That's at the big fat joke level in the spectrum for any distance.
Look, the fact is that the telcos are engaged in criminal conspiracy to censor the Internet. Of course tiered rates for bandwidth usage will always be there. Thats been the way of the world since Broadband began. Anti-Net Neutrality is about WHAT you can access, not how fast you can access it, people who advocate against net neutrality are advocating FOR Internet censorship.
QoS doesn't work well because it can only be implemented in a few ways:
1: By discarding any QoS information in the packet as it crosses your perimeter, and replacing it based on a guess done by deep packet inspection. Not only is this modifying data that wasn't meant to be modified, and thus legally no different from the dubious practice of rewriting HTML pages to show your own ads, but it also opens the question of whether you can claim to be a common carrier as long as you open every envelope to look at the first few lines of every letter. Never mind the extra latency and routing costs.
2: By accepting already existing QoS values at face value. While this might have worked 30 years ago, it will not work where there are commercial interests. Every spammer and spitter will prioritize his own packets as high as they can go, no matter what the consequences are to other traffic.
3: A combination of 1 and 2, where deep packet inspection assigns QoS priorities on packets that don't already have them. This is the worst of both worlds, and only an idiot would do such a thing, so this is what's generally happening out in the real world.
ISPs have been operating "the preferred way" out of convention, in keeping with the norms of the Internet, for some time now. But they have only recently signaled their intent to deviate from historical principles in order to pursue additional sources of revenue.
Their intended path optimizes the Internet in their own favor, and works against the Internet as a whole. They're saying, "Yes, we like the Internet. But you're going to like our take on the Internet even better, want it or not." They're bundling "their way" over what should be a common carrier type situation.
So, it is like asking, "No net neutrality for telephone calls over the past 5 years has meant... what exactly?" Nothing, because the telephone companies have kept with the status quo, and not introduced 'features' that degrade the overall value of the network. Were they to announce an intent to do this, you'd see telephone neutrality legislation bounced around.
"But we don't need telephone neutrality legislation! If you legislate the telephone system, then it will kill innovation!" See? We're blaming the wrong folks here. It isn't the customers or the legislators. It is the carrier rocking the boat, and then crying foul when people try to address their money making schemes.
Being a dumb pipe is every ISP's worst fear. It means they have to deliver bandwidth, not content. It means they don't throttle based on protocol or content, just pass packets along.
It means they have to provide *gasp* an INTERNET CONNECTION! No ISP wants that, what with all the upgrades to existing equipment they'd have to make to make as much bandwidth as a customer bought available to them AT ALL TIMES.
It means smaller profits and higher customer satisfaction, which seems to be the seventh circle of hell to any large company in the US, and most other places.
Why wouldn't you use or discard the QoS information based on the source and/or destination of the packets?
If my company wants to use VOIP telephony between our branch offices and we want to pay extra for it to actually work right, but we don't want fully-private lines because it's wasteful and more expensive, then an ISP could offer us QoS on that basis. But they don't.
Comcast and Bittorrent? Deep Packet Inspection commencing by Time Warner and Comcast? And, Today on slashdot, Verizon preventing access to a chunk of usenet?
Either your trolling or live in a cave.
Bad analogy. It's more like getting you to pay for a car that can go 0-150 in X seconds, then trying to fob you off with you a bus pass.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
What do we need a new laws for? Most of the existing problems, false advertising or anti-competitive behavior, could be solved with existing laws, if the right people would bother using them. If and only if those attempts fail, will we need new laws.
If all else fails, we simply need competition, look at what Version FiOS has done.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
This is the important distinction. It's not traffic type neutrality that's the essential character of an appropriately neutral net, it's source-destination neutrality.
(A non-type-neutral net has some of its own problems, but not the same ones as a non-source-destination-neutral net, and there's a good argument that the latter is more important.)
Tweet, tweet.
If ISPs offered their true bandwidth limits, latency limits, and so on from the beginning and not false offers like "unlimited".
I have always had throttled connection - I used to throttled at 256kbps down and 56kbps up.
Then I paid more and I with the exact same connection now got 512kbps down and 128kbps up.
Then I got a better service and I with the exact same connection got 2Mbps down and 512kbps up..
They have throttled the connection all the time. The total use is irrelevant. What is is whether all users use the bandwidth at the same time or not.
The providers could simply offer what they not under the assumptions we only will use 0.1% of it, but actually use what we buy.
What is worse for the ISP:
- if you download 2 GB a day (~60 GB a month) spread out evenly (continuously ~90kbps)
- if you download only during peak hours one hour a day 0.5GB (~15GB/month) (continuously 1110 kbps)
What happens if the bandwidth is not used ? Do the ISP loose anything? It is their ability to provide to multiple people at the same time that matters; it is clearly worse for the ISP in the second case were one person downloaded only 15GB a month than in the one with 90GB.
The entire issue could be resolved by ISP's offering the valid numbers for upwards and downwards bandwidth and expected latency for the connection.
Don't blame the customers for using what they paid for.
Richard and I got into a Net Neutrality 'Discussion' in the comment section of Techdirt last year. I have a feeling he is some how benefits from the Pro Net neutrality side of the debate, although I have no proof. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070319/121200.shtml Judge for yourself. I did turn into a screaming little douche at the end though...but it was for the Love of a Free Internet.
I do have some old experience, I see some BS in the phrases he uses.
....
/., SecondLife, Wired, PBS ...) providers. Letting either IAP or ISP control everything is corporate-welfare monopolies or worse, and will never provide innovations or QoS improvements. We already pay for bandwidth access and QoS, and don't need more bullshit about what causes (lack of reinvestment) jitter/UDP bullshit.
... for the voice conversation it would be nice, but the answer is bandwidth investment and/or truth in advertising (VoIP and get crappy due to limited bandwidth (or mother nature) problems).
... the content provider/customer is paying for the bandwidth and QoS; So, how/what they use to send and receive content is of no damn business to any Cableco/TelCo/... IAP who are being paid to provide QoS access to bandwidth for the content sharing industry and their home/biz customers.
... if you cannot provide, then content/service providers and their customers can use a different IAP ... if thee is another IAP in their IAP's access area. Stupid IAP investment and poor i
The Internet's traffic system does not gives preferential treatment to short/fast communication paths unless you are stupid enough to configure your network/telecommunications backbone-architecture to the S/FPF rather then route on QoS metrics and implied content criticality. TCP is ignored by the backbone it is part of the package and cannot route, only the IP part is the destination/route information use for packet-switching, ATM cell-switching is another backbone technology and (yes) both are (can be) used at the biz-office LAN/WAN network level.
The technical term is semantics "round-trip time effect." Critical content delivery requires TCP/IP not time and a protocol like UDP is important for real-time/streaming content VoIP/VTC/.... UDP Packets (no need to manage) dropped/corrupt cannot be recovered, but TCP/IP has a process for packet dropped/corrupt recovery. UDP is a good fast protocol on LANs and for multimedia/broadcast (can case jitter/distortion), but UDP is not appropriate for email/downloads of large/critical files across the internet, because the complete email/file would then require another complete send/download. The less your RTT is not always best for TCP/IP (assured content delivery is critical) traffic, the faster UDP speeds, the more traffic you can deliver is great for VoIP, streaming MP* files
IOW: Bandwidth and QoS is best kept net-neutral, and CableCo (or whichever IAP) needs to invest in their infrastructure and innovation not screw their customers with bullshit/legislation. Oh, some folks (like me), consider infrastructure "IAP" access (CableCo/TelCo) providers different from the "ISP" content/services (Google, Yahoo, MSN,
VoIP functions best when it receives a stream of uninterrupted packets, but reality is VoIP was meant to function acceptable for voice communications and when there is adequate bandwidth provided VoIP provides an acceptable phone conversation. VoIP (the protocol) does not (as best I know) give a shit about consistent gaps
File transfer (FTP) applications simply care about the time between the request for the file and the time the last bit is received and if the file is corrupted then you/application make other FTP request for a clean+usable file. In between, it doesn't matter if the packets are timed by a metronome or if they arrive in a specific sequence of clumps when using TFTP. Jitter is the engineering/common term for variations in delay when data is corrupted/unrecoverable causing voice/video/content... distortion.
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) (Cell switching) does manage both bandwidth and QoS, far better than packet switching and is great for VoIP/VTC....
The Internet is neutral with respect to applications and to location
The internet is not neutral with respect to QoS bandwidth
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Consider telecommunications infrastructure "IAP" access (CableCo/TelCo) providers different from the "ISP" content/services (Google, Yahoo, MSN, /., SecondLife, Wired, PBS ...) providers.
QoS Bandwidth delivered by IAPs, in the past, was found to be very questionable by the QoS Bandwidth ISP customers that wanted to confirm that they (ISPs) were indeed receiving the QoS bandwidth for which they contracted and paid. The typical home/biz user is in the business of trusting their IAP and not verifying QoS and bandwidth, which would be to complicated (for small biz and private users) and cost them too much.
Letting either IAP or ISP control everything will never provide innovations or QoS improvements. We already pay for QoS bandwidth access, and don't need more bullshit about what causes jitter/UDP bullshit. Almost all Internet bandwidth problems are caused by a lack of reinvestment into infrastructure by the IAPs.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I don't have the time to respond to all of your comments, but your limitation of net neutrality to a concept which is "supposed to treat everyone's comparable traffic that same and not to charge extra for preferred delivery of packets" is not only incorrect, but also concurs with the idea that Comcast violated issues of net neutrality.
From Wikipedia (very well cited, check it yourself):
"A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams."
Under this idea of what a neutral network is constructed of, it is the restriction of the "modes of communication allowed" which has violated network neutrality. Even under your own (incorrect) definition, by slowing Bittorent packets, Comcast is charging customers that pay monthly MORE to download the same amount of data over Bittorrent, as they take more time to download. For example:
Customer A downloads music_file.mp3 (3 megs) over HTML. It takes 1 minute, and he is paying $10/month. This means they, in effect, paid ~.0002 cents to download the song (43,200 minutes in 30 days).
Customer B downloads music_file.mp3 (3 megs) over BitTorrent. Because Comcast is slowing this method, it takes 2 minutes to download. They have effectively paid *twice as much* to download the same content.
Just to quickly note, the only purpose for deep packet inspection is *being used for* is to throttle specific types of communications. I don't have a personal vendetta against the technology (though the privacy implications are touchy), but its current use most certainly does violate net neutrality.
For now I'll give you that Verizon can manipulate data stored on its server, simply because I am out of time to construct an argument.
NACK/ACK (old S&F/RUID terms) is not an IP responsibility. ACK/NACK for TCP packet delivery failure is only noticeable at the destination client/server computer .... The IP part is the only part used by the IAP (CableCo/TelCo) infrastructure there is no consideration of the content TCP packets, failure to deliver, and/or the order/time of delivery. The TCP origin of an email/file does not need any ACK-confirmation that a packet was received at the intended destination, but the TCP origin does require a NACK-notice (to initiate a resend specific packet) when a specific packet was not received or corrupt (no need to resend the whole email/file); So, in some ways it perhaps prevents a great deal of unnecessary Internet traffic.
Non-neutral network that does proper QOS by throttling bandwidth-heavy protocols that don't behave themselves on the network is acceptable.
Stop getting D/DOS attacks and/or badly configured networks confused with TCP/IP. Yes, TCP/IP is an overhead heavy protocol, but there are legitimate reasons, and a lack of QoS bandwidth is always the problem on the Internet for ISP content/services providers and customers.
Quit listening to IT product marketeers (AKA: vendors with and agenda)
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
(That's more than 50 per state, so if you don't patronize one, it's not their fault.) That's hardly a duopoly situation. However, independent ISPs often pay more for bandwidth than the cable and telephone monopolies. Some pay as much as $300 per megabit per second per month for their backbone connections. They are thus even more susceptible to being harmed if greedy content providers -- such as Vuze -- siphon off their bandwidth using P2P, or if bandwidth hogs overrun their networks. So, the issue is not one of duopoly, nor is it one of greed on the part of the providers. (Many of them are just scraping by.) Rather, it's greed on the part of some bandwidth hogging users (5% use 80% of the bandwidth) and on the part of content providers which use P2P to avoid paying the freight for delivering their content to users. See http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html for more on this issue.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
LOL Richard Bennett is the guy that repeatedly spammed the wikipedia Network Neutrality article with his garbage, over a long, long period. He tried to rewrite the *definition* of network neutrality about a dozen times maybe in bizarre ways, he repeatedly deleted referenced material (usually describing them as 'lies' in his subject line), rewrote stuff, and in every possible way you can imagine tried to spin reality in ways that were self-evidently harmful to the balance of the wikipedia article.
He even deliberately misquoted another engineer to say the exact opposite of what they said; to the point that they logged onto the wikipedia talk page to complain. This was even after it was pointed out they never said what he wrote them saying and that the references disagreed.
He also thought that it was a good idea to get interviewed in articles in 'The Register' and then quoted himself in the wikipedia to 'prove' his points.
Oh yeah, and he used 'sockpuppets' to continue to also push his point of view while temporarily banned.
I could go on about this sleazebag for quite a while. When you even try to list the stunts he pulled it runs to several pages.
I would also challenge some of his depth of understanding, for example, at least at one point in time he didn't seem to have the slightest clue what a contended service is, which is kinda... basic. Really, really basic.
Really, he's just a bizarre guy, with bizarre views, and personality wise he's a total asshole.
(See wikipedia RFC, which contains references to a small fraction of his 'work' in the wikipedia if you want to get a measure of the man).
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Oops: RFC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/RichardBennett
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"That's true in America maybe, but here in the UK there's no monopoly (you can switch ISPs fairly quickly and there's maybe a dozen or more to choose from) but they do usually still use QOS to reduce the amount of file sharing somewhat at peak times, but mainly to improve the VOIP and web performance.
In other words they use it more or less for what it's supposed to be for- to *make* stuff *work* rather than deliberately breaking stuff.
I think Richard Bennett thinks it's OK to break stuff if it allows the telecoms company to make money, he seems to think that they don't make enough or something, and he's quite happy for that to be at the expense of the users online experience
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"limiting of certain types of traffic or certain pages (like the alt.* section of usenet) is fine.. if the ISP is upfront about it. If they had a cheap plan that limited you like that, and an expensive plan that had no restrictions, I'd be fine with it.
I'd like to add something; they may do this IF I HAVE ANOTHER VIABLE CHOICE. If ISPs didn't operate as minor monopolies, I'd be fine with them doing whatever (if they are honest about it), as long as I can find another service who doesn't.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
> Any ISP that tried to block access to GooTube would
> have no customers within 12 months.
You seem to presume that there's a choice. About the best that most can do is to choose between DSL and cable, and if both pull tricks like this, it's no choice. Many don't even have that choice of 2 for broadband, but get DSL *OR* cable - again, no choice.
This is not a free market, in any way shape, or form.
The real goal of net neutrality is to at least make it act like a common-carrier.
This entire article is a red herring, not on Slashdot's part, but on the part of an industry that wants badly to kill the Internet by turning it into cable-tv-on-steroids. They've found what looks like a valid technical objection to net neutrality and blown that appearance into a foregone conclusion. Then they're using that foregone conclusion to try to convince everyone that net neutrality is a bad thing that hinders innovation.
They belong in the same afterlife as the ??AA!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Unfortunately it IS that companies can't be trusted. We've adopted the meme that companies are responsible ONLY for returning stockholder value, within the framework of the law. If the law doesn't require a common-carrier style Internet - if that law permits them to turn it into cable-tv-on-steroids, extracting maximum value from content providers and shutting small content out, they may well do it. If the extra revenue from the content providers is greater than the revenue loss from the few "net neutrality extremists" that leave, they will do it. Not only will they, but by today's corporate meme they MUST do it, because it makes more money and to maintain a neutral Internet would be fiscally irresponsible. Unless LARGE numbers of people are ready and willing to give up broadband, net neutrality legislation is the only thing that will save the Internet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If the government had been making technology decisions twenty years ago, we would all be stuck on ISDN.
Twenty years ago, the goverment was making technology decisions about something called ARPAnet. Typical stupid, wasteful government program that never went anywhere, of course. Fortunately, private enterprise led the way with bold innovative paradigm-breaking optimized syngergies, which is why we can now have this kind of discussion here on the Compuserve forums!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
they should just quit offering unlimited data plans unless they can actually offer unlimited data. unlimited dialup is easy to provide for, as in a whole month a user can get at best theoretically about 12gb if they are continuously downloading at full speed.
the real problem is the marketing people are defining service options that the networks are not capable of supporting. some services are making a profit to support other services that aren't, which is fine in, for example, pre-packaged computer bundles, but because with internet service this affects everyone, this is the end result - isp's don't have the ability to provide the level of service they advertise so they must resort to throttling, which is of course done arbitrarily to certain kinds of traffic as they are the biggest bandwidth users, rather than doing it generally.
if isp's just didn't spend so much time trying to hook those high bandwidth users up and made the prices of service to them higher, then the isp's could spend more money enhancing their bandwidth capacity instead of ending up having to explain why and what traffic they are shaping to keep use within the parameters of their networks.
there is many factors related to how network applications are written, how various tcp/ip stacks schedule, how effective QoS systems are, and how widely deployed they are, but there is one guaranteed way to ensure networks aren't bogged down by bulk traffic and streaming users - always keep traffic levels below about half of capacity. the line might be rated to transport data at a certain speed but when you fill that pipe past a certain point you wind up with a great deal of turbulence which leads to latency issues.
it's a bit similar to mastering levels in audio engineering - sure, you may have 120 dB of resolution in your recording medium, but the closer you get to filling all that space the less headroom you have for periodic spikes, which has lead in the commercial music engineering to more use of dynamic range compression, which produces a much 'duller' sound with less dynamics (some even say that this compressed dynamics leads to fatigue in the listener) - this problem never happened in cinema sound engineering because someone set a standard for how many dB average power should be targetted in a mix. Similarly, if the network provision industry would set a standard of aiming at around 50-60% utilisation average and accordingly adjusted planning for bandwidth upgrades and market penetration none of this would be a problem.
beancounters see the network capacity specification and expect that they can run the network at that level without any problems. But of course beancounters also rate the potential of a resource according to a percentage of customer turnover below a certain level, meaning they can cheapskate to some degree and of course being that businesses care more about the bottom line than good service, this is the sort of issue that cannot be solved by anything other than legislation.
i believe network neutrality as a concept misses the real point at issue here, which is simply businesses squeezing more money out of their lines than it is possible in real practise to allow, and pushing this limit just short of messing up the whole network. throttling bittorrent and streaming video is all about trying to hold back the flood of bandwidth demand so they can put off the upgrades for longer.
there would not be a problem if they just didn't provide more bandwidth on the local loop than can be carried through the peering connections.
Hi Richard!
(That's more than 50 per state, so if you don't patronize one, it's not their fault.) That's hardly a duopoly situation.
It is a duopoly if you only have 2 choices for broadband, and many don't have 2 choices. If you're lucky you have a choice for cable and dsl, many can't get either, and even if you can sign up with a third party ISP they still use either the cableco's or telco's lines.
Rather, it's greed on the part of some bandwidth hogging users
No it's greed on the part of access providers. Nothing made them offer unlimited access plans, but once people took them up on the offer they are crying. It's nothing more than offering more than they can provide and that's a problem of their own making.
Now, if they want to start charging some people more for using more bandwidth then I want them to pay back the billions of taxpayer dollars they got in subsidies to build out their infrastructure. They took the taxpayers' money and used it to boost their bottom line without doing what they were given the money do to.
FalconShould there be a Law?
they'd have to make to make as much bandwidth as a customer bought available to them AT ALL TIMES
You seem to be saying that if you have a 5M pipe, that you should be able to max that out 24x7.
The thing is, I don't know about you, but I can't afford to pay for that amount of bandwidth.
My ISP sells me a contended service, where I get to use about 1/50 of my max or so. I'm only actually using my pipe about that much, so I'm happy with that.
If you want to use the pipe 24x7 you just have to pay more, you need a higher quality service, and they'll take your money just fine!
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"May be we should invent a new communication channel other than the stone age technology of cables for p2p, For example - GPS uses satellite. Say, a open source Wireless p2p device etc.. and then a p2p only international gateway service provider.
Here's how media companies will kill the free internet we all know and love:
The result will look like broadcast media does today, one big corporate billboard, instead of a free press. Just a little censorship is like being just a little pregnant.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I will take my offtopic moderations just to make sure other people who post legitimate replies to his astroturfing know what they're getting into.
Once he starts replying to himself with multiple accounts, anything he had to say becomes irrelevant.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Do they have to throttle P2P to control bandwidth usage, or are they just rolling out the same kind of propaganda as American network operators? After all, Sony owns a lot of content.
The engineers have to implement technology that supports the activity that people want to do. That the market demands. Their design decisions are constrained by their bosses, who are prioritizing competing with other sources of content over any kind of service quality to their customers. You're talking about these engineers as if they're actually being charged with keeping the networks clear, rather than build out a strategy that constrains bandwidth to enhance the perception of scarcity, which is the basis of the value that the network operators are selling.
Yes, people's bandwidth demands will expand to fill whatever capacity is delivered. But networks sell that bandwidth. The problem is that WAN operators have long counted on an optimization, bandwidth oversubscription, that sells people what they could never all actually get. That era has passed. Network operators have to expand the capacity of the shared links to accommodate the capacity of the edges. When they do that, get the proportions correct to the modern demand models, they will have a hugely valuable product to sell, that will earn them a lot more money as it helps others make a lot more money, either off the delivery of content or just elsewhere in order to consume that content.
But they're so used to getting everything, and giving the least possible, that they're just doing more of that, with their new monopoly powers. They want to sell content in competition with their content delivering customers, and of course (because they always have) they want to use their competitive advantages to crush those customers who are competitors. Even if that means also stepping all over the demands of their customers who are consumers.
That's why the telcos and cablecos create the false dichotomy. They're the ones who are saying they must deploy tiered pricing and bandwidth caps, even though their own research shows that increased bandwidth is cheaper and more effective at solving the problem, while bringing extra benefits (more bandwidth overall to sell).
A content-neutral network is a primary benefit of the Internet. Keeping that value as a design goal is necessarily the job of the government, because the telcos/cablecos are ignoring the economics of the basic problem in favor of a more complex strategic goal. A goal that puts the telcos/cablecos' interests in conflict with their customers at both ends of a transmission.
I think that the current means of Network Neutrality enforcement is in fact wrong, because it focuses on the wrong layer of the overall problem. If Internet bandwidth providers were prohibited from the kind of vertical bundling that defines other monopolistic industries, like say Microsoft's, then they'd all be falling over themselves to build more bandwidth, more product to sell. If they were also required to continue the "common carriage" policies that everyone knows is essential to essential infrastructure, that combination would give us a level playing field that would include content neutrality, and a lot of the rest of what makes the Internet healthy.
But instead, the cablecos/telcos are running the legislation with their lobbyists, finding a conflict only with a few content providers rich enough to stand up, newcomers like Google. Consumers are totally absent, except that the content providers prioritize them (because they're more sensitive to market demands than are telcos/cablecos, because they're not monopolies who can ignore their customers). That's a tragedy, because of course Congress is supposed to represent those consumers first, as their population is vastly greater than the number of executives at the cablecos/telcos and content providers combined.
So in the meantime, at least Network Neutrality protects part of consumers' interests. Since economics (at least the basic, sus
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make install -not war