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Another Inventor of the Internet Wants To Gag It
MojoKid writes "Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title: 'Inventor of the
Internet' in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the
father of networking through data packets. And he's
turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer
file sharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices
can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and — you guessed it — can throttle them in favor of other, more 'high-priority' traffic."
And so does Cerf, and all of the other co-called inventors, and fathers. They got us into this mess.
Someone needs to sort out egalitarian access, hopefully some visionaries and NOT a large group of non-vendors, so that the process can be as inclusive as possible.
My suggestion: two channels, one for QoS-respected traffic, the other free-for-all. The QoS channel costs you, per period time. The free-for-all is all you can eat. Vary the mix you want to purchase, or offer at your free hotspot or WebbieTubeBar. You get what you pay for, no more, and less if you don't use it.
The pontiff approach ain't working.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Perhaps I'm slightly biased here, because I usually see P2P being used to transfer large data files (e.g. Linux ISOs), but it strikes me that certain types of traffic should have a priority.
Think about it: downloading something like an ISO or video is somewhat different than downloading the various bits and pieces of a web page or streaming video or making a phone call via VoIP. Network congestion or throttling for the former is not really an issue since it does not diminish service. You will get your data, even if it takes twice as long. Yet most people won't want to wait a couple of minutes for a web page to download, won't want to watch their video screech to a halt as it buffers more data, or deal with horrendous amounts of distortion due to higher compression on their VoIP call.
Now there is a problem with this technology: it could just as easily be used to block as to throttle. And that is what we should really be concerned about. Alas, if we go around freaked out about throttling low priority traffic our larger concern (blocking) will probably lack credibility in the eyes of policymakers when that time comes. And it will come.
Be smart about the battles you pick.
Oh, the virtual circuit guy. I interviewed with Telenet when they had 13 employees, so I met him in the 1970s. Telenet HQ was in a big mansion-like house. It seemed too weird to succeed, and I didn't want the job.
The virtual circuit vs. datagram battle is almost forgotten now, but it was a major issue before fiber optics provided vast cheap long-haul bandwidth. Remember, the ARPANET backbone was only 56Kb. Long-haul leased bandwidth was incredibly expensive through the 1980s.
If the backbone bandwidth is the constraint on network traffic, congestion management of a pure datagram network is very tough. I had to run such a network in the early 1980s, which is why I have all those classic RFCs and papers on network congestion. We figured out how TCP should play nice to avoid congestion collapse, and how fair queuing could give the network some defenses against overload. That was enough to make a network of reasonably-well behaved nodes not doing anything with real-time constraints behave.
In the days of congested backbones, virtual circuits were looking like the future, because they were more manageable. Bandwidth could be assigned at connection setup, and each connection throttled. Tymnet and Telenet worked that way. That approach became obsolete when local area networks became widely used; none of them were virtual circuit, so the backbone had to be at the datagram level. Then fibre optics came along and saved the backbone.
We still don't really know what to do when the backbone is the bottleneck and latency matters. "p2p" file transfer isn't the problem, though. HDTV over the Internet is the problem. There isn't enough backbone bandwidth to support the world's couch potatoes with real-time HDTV streams.
Microsoft at one point proposed a system where real-time HDTV would be multicast, while video on demand would be heavily buffered. That could work, but multicasting with bandwidth guarantees requires more centralized control than the Internet usually has today, which is probably why Microsoft and parts of the broadcast industry liked it.
The "p2p" thing is a side issue. The big issue is going to be who gets to throttle whose HDTV streams. The cable guys want really, really bad to charge extra for those streams, regardless of who originates them.
Also mod it down because the article is completely misleading - Lawrence Roberts doesn't want to gag P2P at all. He wants to help it survive in a practical manner.
The problem he wants to solve is how to make someone who's trying to bring up a quick mapquest page be able to do so without sitting there waiting and waiting, and eventually wondering whether there're five people on his subnet downloading the latest 18G celebrity midget porn video. If he solves that problem, then Comcast won't care about using more stupid methods of throttling our celebrity midget porn.
An ISP is just as much someone as anyone else. My ISP happens to be the organisation that is the connection between me and the internet. How does that put him in a position to regulate in what way I may use the service?
Could you imagine your power provider telling you that you can't use that washing machine or AC because it gobbles up too much juice? Or demand that you should cook with gas instead of electricity because it reduces the strain on their power network? How about your phone company telling you to limit your long distance calls to the nights and other non-office hours to free up their lines for office use?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Neutrality from the ISP side has been up too frequent regardless of if it is e-mail spam filtering, Throttling of bandwidth, content restriction or other limitation as to what you can use the Internet for.
See e-mail as an example - It was thought that the ISP's should filter our mail to prevent junk mail, but we all know that does not work well. The reason is easy; your needs are unique for you. Imagine the pharmacists needing e-mail confirmation of pills and drugs he must order/want to be informed of, the doctors needing to communicate the symptoms of a decease with his pears and drugs to help it, the anti-virus developer needing samples of fresh viruses, the system administrator needing... The list goes on and on... The ISP simply cannot make general rules as to what constitute spam.
The same holds obviously true for what you will use the internet for. Should your ISP prioritize Vonage above Skype or Gizmo? Xbox games over PS3 sites and games? What about online video rentals from Netflix vs. Blockbuster, or what about online football/sport live programs above online live concerts etc, or even worse - the Xbox game above your online video rental/live online concert, or visa verse? The list goes in reality on forever - the ISP cannot possibly prioritize according our needs any more than they can generally filter spam.
As with spam there is an easy solution: Let US do the filtering! Simply give us an interface on the ISP side to prioritize what we deem important to us. Complicated? Not really at really. whereas some of us do want more complicated throttling such as prioritizing packets such as ACK, it should be easy for end users to simply visit a page such as my_preferences..com and add such as the domain of my mail provider on top of a list of priorities, the game sites I use above everything, increase the priority of all communication with my video rental provider, decrease the priority of torrents and block access to sites deemed inappropriate for my children.
Someone here on /. commented some smaller mom and dad size ISP's already do offer these kind of services to their clients! I hope this to be true, and will be looking out for this now!
Note that the Internet must stay neutral - else expect to see service problems due to live football broad casts prioritized to your neighbor above your simultaneous online concert / video rental / online game. Note 2: Your neighbors can prioritize without harming you simply by letting each and every one of us prioritize the what is sent from the ISP, while keeping network neutrality. There is a win-win for everyone except the big name ISP's that really want to prioritize their own / their partners video rental / games sites / other content above that of everyone else.
I heard this guy speak a the recent Structure08 conference.
The way his solution works isn't throttling and doesn't rely on protocol inspection, nor does it target P2P directly.
Instead, it ensures fair bandwidth between users, rather than between flows. Basically his argument is that the problem isn't P2P, it's just that P2P happens to make it hard to share bandwidth because of the huge number of connections it uses. His box makes sure bandwidth is shared fairly between users, regardless of the number of connections they are using. So if you have 10mbit, and 10 users, and all are trying to download something, each will get 1mbit, even if one user is using 10 connections and the others are using 1.
It's certainly an interesting approach to dealing with the problem.
Total bullshit. The "expense" of multiple connections is incurred by the peer OS and possibly by a stateful firewall right before it. NO ISP level gear is supposed to track connections and no routers require it for their function (routing is per packet, not per connection), unless of course you are engaged in wholesale wiretapping and packet inspection.
Therefore unless the reason is the ISPs inability to spy on all contents of all packets in all connections of all their customers, there is NO difference on ISPs routers between one user sending/receiving 1000 gazillion packets to/from a single destination or 10 packets to/from 100 gazillion destinations simultaneously.
That 6 mbit or 10 mbit pipe isn't designed to be used at full capacity 24/7 by each subscriber, it's designed to be a shared service between multiple people, splitting the cost of the full 6 mbit or 10 mbit pipe between them.
Which is why I think that ISPs should just advertise clearly how much you can use at full speed. Say 6mbit burstable and 100kbit sustained, and enforce that policy fairly, and I'll use your service over the hand-wavy "6mbit when we feel like it" that everyone sells today.