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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."
An upstart? Trying to destroy Gore's legacy?
I suppose the internet is unprotected while Gore's off riding moon worms...
Yes, but who decides what's "high priority" going from the consumer to the cloud? I pay for a 6mbit line every month, and I expect to be able to use it the way I see fit. What makes your 6mbit line so special that your traffic gets precedence over mine? We're paying the same amount, shouldn't we get the same service, no matter WHAT we're transferring?
This has to be the most ridiculous article in the history of slashdot.
"Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title: 'Inventor of the Internet' in news articles."
That's right, just another guy. Who just happened to be the Program Manager and principle architect for the initial design and construction of ARPAnet.
When YOU do that to YOUR traffic, this is fine.
When SOMEONE is doing that to SOMEONE ELSE'S traffic, it is not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Look at the over 4,000 channels of content (much of it in hi-def) legitimately distributed via miro.
Kevin Smith on Prince
I am all of it. Like it or not, data costs money. I don't want to continuously support people who download more stuff than me. The people that download the most (in terms of bytes) are the people that steal movies and music. I buy my movies, and I buy music; and use the internet for sharing of information and gaming. The problem will only get worse when HD movies get on P2P networks. So, good luck to these guys.
throttling for QoS is one thing. How about when Comcast blocks them in favor of its own video streaming service?
Seriously - what's wrong with wanting e-mail, IM, VoIP or other packets to be ranked as higher priority? So this device the guy is fronting can detect encrypted P2P traffic - is that what is now equal to "gagging the Internet?"
Of course, Evil Corporations(TM) can use this for Bad Things(TM), Bush administration must be somehow involved, this will cause the Earth to spin off its axis, etc. But with Comcast et. al. already throttling P2P, what is it that this guy is doing that's so evil? As long as they aren't blocking P2P entirely, I'd rather get my e-mail in a timely fashion that speed up my ISO downloads which aren't time sensitive.
"95% of all Slashdot
It's a basic system design principle to give interactive or real-time processes priority over non-interactive processes. Anything else is nonsense from any sort of usability perspective.
Old people are old. Whether they helped create the system we work with today or not. First, p2p isn't the ridiculous bandwidth hog we all though it was (compared to legit streaming video). Second, p2p was designed as a means around previous circumvention measures. Future circumvention measures will have to change things pretty radically before they will be able to effectively throttle only p2p traffic.
DPI? encrypt. Throttle anything encrypted? Piss off lots of banking and e-mail customers. throttle based on header info? Spoof the headers.
I'm not arguing that it is pointless. just very hard and liable to have a greater negative net effect for non-infringing users than we would anticipate. Nevertheless that does not stop companies from doing things that will eventually be deemed not in their self interest.
See, that I would be fine with. What worries me is the precedent it sets, and the day when specific site access is based on a cable "channel set" model.
"Browse these common subnets/domains at blazing fast gigabit speeds!*"
* Maximum throughput may vary based on peak hours. All other destinations limited to 5KiB u/d.
Course, just creating the technology to be able to do so isn't bad in my book. I'll start bitching and moaning (for serial) when someone wants to USE such techs in this manner. If they DID stick to legitimate control traffic being the only traffic shaped this way I'd be fine with it.
If someone was a jerk though they'd start the layout of such a plan exactly that way, then add "small transfers versus larger" requests next.
The rest could easily follow though.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Didn't the recent Bell stats ( http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/06/27/007209.shtml ) show that p2p isn't actually the problem? so why should it be throttled in favour of 'higher 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.
Seems to be getting hit by filtering. So they are attacking legal forms of high volume, low priority traffic.
There was an article a few days ago about a man with an $85,000 phone bill, something VOIP could cure if we could trust it to work consistently.
If the ISPS can "lower" priority on some packets can't they just raise the priority of VOIP and html requests. Eventually P2P would mimic them (and in the meantime it would blend with other traffic so it shouldn't take a significant loss.
A lot of ISPS have a "heavy traffic lane" high latencies but unlimited throughput, that is probably the wrong solution why not a "low traffic lane" to support the small fast transfers (IM,VOIP,SSH).
If they can sniff the general hidden packets for patterns that show it's p2p it should be easy to find the stuff that isn't p2p.
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.
Some alternate scenarios:
Kevin Smith on Prince
If our current private internet entities fail to realize that there can be no universally determined difference between one data or another, we need to either regulate or take that power from them.
There is no 'more important data'. That term is a relativistic concept that bears no actual meaning when read by anyone but the original believer. What is more important to one person is worthless to another.
The internet is a well established virtual representation of public interaction. It has many intricate elements, all of which should be preserved in the aspect of freedom. There is no universally determinable difference of importance between one data or another; the quality is only relative.
---------
Anyway, if these companies want to place values on data, we need to exercise our ability consumers and citizens of this country to tell them WE DON'T AGREE WITH WHAT YOU SAY IS IMPORTANT.
I'd hate to see it, as it would probably be worse, but we could probably socialize the whole internet in the U.S. Take all those companies and acquire all their assets through some form of virtual eminent domain, etc.
Our failure to achieve our very popular goals of freedom in the US will most likely fail due to LOBBYING. Our desires as a majority are easily ignored. Hold your congressmen responsible. Write them and tell them what you want.
People of America: Take Control Back. Spread truth, refuse corruption, and get off the goddamn couch.
In today's world there is so very little the individual can do to change laws that favor big businesses. This is simply those individuals reacting to laws that they cannot change, by finding ways to do what they believe they should be allowed to do.
In the end, the absurd laws and the p2p about negate each other, so I'm not in favor of people trying to "fix" p2p unless they are also undertaking a fixing of the laws that are providing p2p with justification.
Examine the situation from a different perspective. In the wild west there were small towns that didn't have effective law enforcement or court, and there was a wide measure of "mob rule" / rioting when a big business started running the town, getting the laws of that town changed to their favor and owning the local judges. Sure, you can work to dissolve the mob, but that doesn't really fix the problem. If you're truly interested in fixing the problem, you have to deal with the mob and the company (and it's effects/actions) that's causing the mob to be necessary. If all you work against is the mob, you've only made things better for the minority.
We've been trying for years to fix the laws and it just keeps getting worse. Then came along p2p and suddenly all the injustices were dealt a serious blow. It's still nowhere near even, but it's taken a big enough bite out of the injustice that the "mafiaa" is looking to beat down the newly formed resistance against it. Can't say as I blame them, they've got a sweet thing going and don't want to lose it. But I'm on the losing side of the issue so I'm rooting for the underdog.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The people you pay $50/month to deliver it, do you have a better idea?
Your expectations aren't really a factor here. Regarding precedence, It's a function of the traffic and not the user it originates from.
You are getting the same service. That service routes data over the network at speeds up to 6mbit, and it's silly to expect the cable company not to do the same prioritization every savvy home user does on their own connection.
AppleTV appears to use P2P: what's an interactive process on the network?
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.
Yes, but who decides what's "high priority" going from the consumer to the cloud?
Whoever owns the router/switch/frame/NAP/whatever I'd guess.
What makes your 6mbit line so special that your traffic gets precedence over mine? We're paying the same amount, shouldn't we get the same service, no matter WHAT we're transferring?
Not if your contract with your ISP allows them to prioritize traffic. What does it say about the issue?
I pay for a 6mbit line every month, and I expect to be able to use it the way I see fit. ... We're paying the same amount, shouldn't we get the same service, no matter WHAT we're transferring?
That sounds like something a spammer might say.
The problem is, what users expect is long-baseline fairness (measured over minutes to hours) evaluated between users.
What the network provides is either nothing (UDP) or short baseline fairness (measured over round-trip-times) evaluated between flows.
Thus everyone benefits if the short flows from the light users are given priority, as they don't have to wait but it has almost a trivial effect on the big heavy users.
I don't like one aspect of his solution, however, is that it focuses on apps first and then users, when it should be the opposite: focus on users first then applications.
Test your net with Netalyzr
You may not always get what you paid for, but you will always pay for what you get (an expansion of Heinlien's TANSTAAFL principle).
Enjoy the ride, until you truly have to pay for what you get. Any New York lawyer will tell you "unlimited" anything is physically impossible and, thus, merely a marketing term. Your plan is "virtually unlimited," especially when compared to 2.4 kbps dial-up.
Increasing reliance on VoIP makes it essential to grade services and throttle in a reasonable fashion.
Invenio via vel creo
If postal services charged a flat rate, this might be a reasonable analogy.
As it is, I pay for every single piece of mail that I send. And, amazingly enough, if some piece of mail has more "priority" than another, I can pay more for it to be delivered more quickly.
We all pay the same amount of freeways too.
Yet speed limits enforce order... those guys who own sports cars that can break 100 are screwed.
America internet is a joke however and the speed limit is effectively 30mph because we are still on dirt roads.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I hope him and Al Gore enjoy blowing each other. I couldn't care less if this guy worked for ARPA or not, doesn't mean any of his opinions mean squat to me or should to anyone else. If he's who he claims to be, then ARPANET was something completely different than what the internet has become today -- and besides all that, he's just trying to peddle his 'wares and pandering to the IPSs -- so he can effing bite me. Get lost, grandpa; go tend to your lawn and leave the rest of us alone.
How can you tell if someone is using a secure SSL connection for work related purposes (Email, large file transfers, terminal services) and someone that is using SSL for bit torrent?
You can hazard a guess using traffic analysis. Bit torrent (and other P2P apps) use a different pattern of connections to normal browsing because the torrent clients also act as servers for many simultaneous external clients, and it's very difficult to conceal that, even if the content of the connections is hidden by encryption. (Of course, such analysis cannot detect the legal status of the data being transferred. Not unless the EVIL bit is set in the packet headers...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
P2P traffic throttling is just the wedge. It is intended to legitimize throttling. If the telcos get this accepted, the next step is to throttle traffic of big sites who don't pay the telcos extra for their traffic to have priority. Goodbye Vonage, etc..
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If the USPS become deluged with junk mail, to the point that the average piece of mail was "degraded" by 2-3 weeks, wouldn't you want the USPS to offer a way to prioritize your rent check to arrive in a more reasonable time? Some applications are flat out *unusable* when the link is congested, because everything has equal priority today. Other applications can tolerate this congestion more easily, so why not exploit this fact and make everything work as well as it can when things are congested?
That sounds like something a scaremonger might say.
Yeah, well, all ISPs have terms and conditions like that that you have to agree to. Pretty well all commercial software has EULAs you have to agree to granting them powers far beyond what is allowed for under the law. Take part in any charity fund raising event and you have to sign a waiver that says they are not responsible for anything that happens to you even if they are directly responsible for injuries you sustain. Same with tickets to any sporting event, concert or whatever. On the back of it something to the effect that by using this ticket you agree that they are not responsible for anything.
You and others who use the "you agreed to the terms when you signed up for the service" seem to be arguing that if a corporation deems it we must agree to it. What network neutrality legislation would do is prevent ISPs from colluding with each other to ensure no one can gain access to the Internet without first agreeing to have their traffic throttled at the whim of their ISP.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Do you want the postal service to charge different amounts for different levels of service?
I don't know about you, but to me that seems like a really good idea.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Yeah, but on freeways, you actually get told what the limit is. If the government told you that you can go as fast as you want, and then if you go over 75, a cop will show up and give you a ticket, anyway, wouldn't you complain, too?
All's fair if you predeclare, as they say - but predeclare you must.
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.
If I, as an ISP user, can determine the QoS algorithm, that's a different story. But when the providers of the service have a financial incentive to favor categories of content that they sell, QoS is not being done in my interest. It's just a way of further degrading and limiting a service that I paid for. That's manipulative and slimy. Please look at how cellular providers operate for a nice preview of that dystopia.
Most ISPs already advertise packages on the basis of bandwidth but penalize customers who actually use it, so there's plenty of reason to distrust them in making any decisions on which content should be favored. Hint: if they're making a buck on it, it will have higher priority. If it's costing them money, lower. Nothing to do with what you want or need. Big ISPs don't give a shit about your interests.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
It sucks whenever that horrible word rears it's ugly head. "THROTTLE." Ugh! It hurts the most just after the "R". I agree that the internet should be free, but let's face it: It's not.
From my understanding, various entities actually own and maintain different parts/sections of the Internet. So when you pay your ISP for internet access, you should only be entitled to whine about the parts of the internet they actually control. It amazes me to think how many people seem to believe they have a true "end to end" connection through their ISP to every computer in the world! The sense of entitlement they exude is almost nauseating. If the route your connection is taking to "GothicKitty42" (a legitimate business associate in Denmark) is being throttled as it passes through Briton, feel free to take control and re-route your own path through the internet. Oh wait... You're too busy watching that DVD you just burned. You certainly can't be bothered to monitor your own QoS when you're paying as much as you do for that broadband connection!
And here's where I actually have to take issue with Bit Torrent type clients. While they don't overload a centralized server, they actually make less efficient use of the network as a whole since everything usually finds its way through the same old trunks of copper and fiber time and time again. All those little packets swimming around like a puddle of sperm looking for an egg... It's a redundancy nightmare of exponentiating proportions.
I'd love to see how some of these people would react if tomorrow they woke up with a peer to peer mesh network instead of their current arrangement. I bet they'd cuss to no end whenever they saw traffic freeloading through their node. They'd probably be racing to the computer store and buying software to shake off those pesky packets so they could get the most out of their internet connection.
But that's just my opinion.
Blessed with all the brains that God gave a duck's ass, and twice the charisma.
Having worked for an ISP, I can tell you. The problem isn't prioritizing traffic. It's capacity and scaling.
If you are a small ISP with a OC-3 and you have 1000 lines, that means if all lines are active, each one would only have an average speed of 6Kbps.
That's not very good. The problem is, in the UK, an OC-3 from BT costs £20,000+.
People buy broadband for cheap (£8-£15/month), and expect spectacular results. It just can't happen.
All networks seem to be oriented towards the idea that 90% of the DSL lines will be idle most of the time. With the advent of BBC's iPlayer and more streaming video, this network model falls flat on its face.
they already do... first class mail, media mail, magazines, etc. are shipped using different priorities based on their content.
If they're going to provide dirt roads, they shouldn't advertise the Autobahn.
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
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.
Do you want a postal service to decide how quickly to deliver letters based on their content?
I don't know about you, but that's absolutely horrifying.
Actually virtually all letters you send are a single application of 'first class mail'.
Read up on the postal service, you might be surpised that in addition to first class mail, there are several other classes. In the US there is first class, periodicals, standard mail, bulk mail, parcel post, media mail (book rate), priority mail, registered mail, express mail, postal money orders, and a variety of other services and options.
Different 'applications' have different rates, delivery time gaurantees, etc.
Right now, ISPs are starting to do the same thing.
Interestingly, by not charging a differential rate, but still sorting by application they are creating a problem for themselves, if they prioritize voip and de-prioritize p2p, the p2p people are going to try and have their p2p masquerade as voip. And we already see this happening...this is the game of cat-mouse we are currently dealing with, and its only going to get worse. And if bitcomet or whatever figures out a way of dodging the latest ISP throttle by having their traffic look like voip and gets the highest download speeds the p2p crowd will jump all over it to the detriment of everyone involved.
QoS can't work if the ISPs apply it, but don't charge for it. Misbehaved applications/users/developers will try to get their traffic into a higher QoS class and use its performance advantage as a competitive advantage.
The solution to the problem is in fact to charge different rates for different service classes. voip will be more expensive than http/pop/imap/smtp/im, which in turn will be more expensive than ftp/p2p. Voip will get through faster and at higher priority, http/pop/imap/smtp/im/irc will be a level below that, and then bulk p2p/ftp/streaming hidef video/etc will fill up the rest of pipe. Ideally rather than have the ISP choose the QoS level, applictions can choose their own.
So SSL users should be able to pick what QoS level to use -- so if they are using p2p they can choose bulk to keep costs down, or choose real-time if they are doing voice communications.
Your analogy isn't accurate; here, I'll fix it for you!
First of all, the sports cars are to be limited to 50kph on certain sections of the road whereas the other drivers would still enjoy the full 100kph speed limit in the same section.
Secondly, driving to certain locations such as a beach, movie theater, or concert would be limited to 30kph the entire trip even on the freeway no matter what car you drive.
Thirdly, the providers of the freeway would justify the speed limits on sport cars by claiming that there are just too many sport cars and they are interfering with the other drivers, even though 95% of the freeway is empty at any given time, and none of the non-sport car drivers have ever complained or been affected by the super-fast sport cars.
Fourthly, the freeway providers limit speeds because they have their own plans to introduce their own sport cars that have no speed restrictions, yet have less features, cost more and don't go as fast as the other sport cars.
Fifthly, the providers of the smaller freeways that want to provide faster speed limits at lower prices would have their traffic limited, or shaped, by the larger freeway providers.
There, that's better.
In fairness, the 600 MB ISO over HTTP is a single sustained connection. BitTorrent is a whole bunch of simultaneous connections. There are a number of reasons why the second is actually more 'expensive' than the first for the network. Even when you throttle it in terms of throughput, there's still the expense needed of opening multiple connections at once to talk to all the peers, etc.
But I'm not entirely convinced that difference in expense is the huge burden on the network they want us to believe.
I /will/ grant that there's probably enough of a difference to worry them. "What if everyone starts using it?" may be a valid fear, and I'll grant that the networks would probably become unusable due to congestion if literally every customer were BitTorrenting stuff. Through quantity of opened connections, if nothing else.
But I remain unconvinced that 'we must promise people X bps speed and unlimited bandwidth, and then choke that!' is the correct solution.
--Rachel
We all pay the same amount of freeways too.
Yet speed limits enforce order... those guys who own sports cars that can break 100 are screwed.
America internet is a joke however and the speed limit is effectively 30mph because we are still on dirt roads.
Good analogy. But I might add net neutrality is failing where the speed limit is different depending you are going to NY or Chicago, Sears or Walmart, White, Black or Hispanic. Equal access then goes out the door. While Lawrence Roberts may be a co-founder of early network technology, this does not make the idea right. It does make it easier for him to get venture capital and start a company to selectively discriminate against protocols.
We need to look at the real picture. Your ISP wants to generate revenue to "preferred" paid traffic. This is what it is about and Roberts is going to capitalize on it. I am not against his capital spirit, but the idea sucks. It is akin to packet/protocol racism.
ISPs today can and do throttle traffic, a statement like "if (overlimit()) throttle();" can be had in any cable router. But this has one huge disadvantage. It isn't as easy for the ISP to go to Google, YouTube or others and say pay me for "preferred" access or else we throttle.
Roberts efforts here are capitalistic and not honorable in the spirit of the Internet. Make no mistake, this is about money and to hell with net neutrality.
AppleTV downloads off Akamai's edge network.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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?
You are using their bandwidth under terms of service they have set out. They are exactly the people in a position to regulate how you 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?
Actually, these things already happen. The power company can shut you off for draining too much juice and threatening the grid. And the phone company doesn't mandate that you call during off-peak hours, but they do charge you less to incentivize you to do it.
If you are getting a "home Internet" package of X bandwith for $Y, it is priced based on terms of service based around shaping your usage to approximately Z fraction of X actual usage (Z being a profitable number). If you want to use 2Z, 3Z or more bandwidth - then you can expect that your ISP will either throttle something to keep you around Z bandwidth or may ask you to buy a higher-grade (business) connection.
Now, I agree ISPs should do a better job of explaining what the "real" limits are. But it is essential for all of us who want to understand both sides in this debate that while we should be guaranteed the right to unfettered access to the Internet, that does not mean that we should be guaranteed the right to that at the lowest possible price. If you don't use the Internet like grandma, it's reasonable for ISPs to expect you to not pay like grandma. You or I may not like it as consumers, but there is a reason for this, it's not just ISPs being jerks for the fun of it. Just my $.02 as someone who used to work for small Internet Service Providers....
"95% of all Slashdot
Not if your contract with your ISP allows them to prioritize traffic. What does it say about the issue?
Well, if it deprioritizes all the traffic *I* want to run so I don't get the expected service, I'd call that fraud no matter what it says in the contract. Not unless they start adding "* up to X Mbit to selected websites using selected protocols, everything else is sent to the slow lane so you won't even get close".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"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?"
Not in most cases, but use too much power and you WILL have to run another line into your house and upgrade your service. A friend had to do that when she added a batch of electric kilns she needed for pottery.
"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?"
Just what, exactly, do you think cell phone companies are trying to do with "free" night and weekend minutes?
Bottom line is that bandwidth is a limited resource just like power, water, and phones. X amount of infrastructure can handle Y amount of use. As such, we really ought to charge and pay according to use. What to run a torrent server 24/7? Fine. Pay up.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
That sounds like something JAMES BOND might say.
Oh, sorry, thats Scaramunga...
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.
I would love to see that as a comcast commercial.
Can I bum a sig?
I know that the "Al Gore Claimed to Invent the Internet" thing is used in a lighthearted way, but he never made that claim
If the government told you that you can go as fast as you want
Roads without speed limit signs (and there are a lot of them, at least here in NY) are limited to the state speed limit (55 in our case).
He didn't say or even imply otherwise. He came up with a hypothetical analogy which said " if [my emphasis] the government told you that you can go as fast as you want".
You can argue that this is or isn't a good analogy, but that's beside the point.
You'll complain that 99% of people don't get "ticketed" but that still doesn't change the fact that you were abusing the service. That 6 mbit or 10 mbit pipe isn't designed to be used at full capacity 24/7 by each subscriber, it's designed [etc]
You can argue all you like that their system isn't designed to be used like that. I'll mostly agree with you- we all know that most consumer broadband services couldn't deliver if they were used to their true "unlimited" capacity.
:)
But again, this is beside the point- you *can't* accuse people of "abusing the service" if it was sold as "unlimited". Even- no, *especially*- if the limitations were stated via some obscure, vaguely-worded small-print in the contract, or some handwaving reference to a "see elsewhere" weasel-worded "fair use" policy.
Many ISPs promoted their services as "unlimited" because it sounded better, even though this relied upon most people not using anything like the full capacity they were given. If this situation changes, it's *their* problem for overselling something they can't deliver, not the customers' for "abusing the system". I'm not going to come up with another trite analogy to illustrate that
Frankly, I've nothing against the principle that (much) heavier users should pay for what they use and not expect to be subsidised. I'm not even entirely opposed to QoS being used so long as it's applied in a relatively neutral and fair manner, and doesn't lead to "second-class citizen" Internet access. I'm only opposed to it when used as some BS excuse to coerce user behaviour, favour the ISPs' vested interests and/or cover-up and weasel out of the limitations of an oversold Internet service, as it is at present.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Now, I agree ISPs should do a better job of explaining what the "real" limits are.
Bingo! They want to be able to sell their service as "unlimited" without actually having to provide that- they want to have their cake and eat it, but that's their problem.
I'm sure we'll both agree that it's unreasonable to expect a true "unlimited" service at the prices charged by some broadband providers. But it's also unreasonable for them to sell it as such when it isn't, and then rely on small-print and vaguely-worded "fair use" policies which they know *damn well* that most people won't see or notice.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
that will last till your upstream/downstream bandwidth saturates, and your users experience a total network lockdown instead of a slowdown. at which point, you will begin to prioritize traffic.
the alternative would be to make sure you actually had 6mbit to dish out to every user, and kept all their connections straight to the backbone, instead of using switches to consolidate traffic. at this point, the price becomes way too much, and for the overhead you'd charge your customers so that you'd make a profit, they could just buy their own dedicated lines (which is what you'd be selling anyway), or switch to a cheaper, discriminating ISP.
Soap box, Ballot box, Jury box, Ammo box. Use in that order.
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.
i like this analogy, because it also helps define why bittorrent traffic gets deprioritized.
the bittorrent protocol isn't degrading to performance because of the actual up/down bandwidth it uses, but because of all the simultaneous connections it opens up. only so many cars can go down a road at a given time, trying to shove 30 cars side by side down a 10 lane highway is going to cause problems, and 20 of those cars are going to have to get out of the way and wait in line.
Soap box, Ballot box, Jury box, Ammo box. Use in that order.
I agree that things like socket limits and so on only matter at the ISP level if they're mucking with things. (Though I have, to my dismay, encountered RTG networking tools before which actually /do/ impose such limits.) You're right that the irony of this is that the problem for the ISPs becomes greater when they start trying to muck with traffic (thus requiring per-connection rather than per-packet information), and so they want to try to muck with the traffic to fix it.
But there are still differences. If you're opening 10 streamed stateful connections versus 1, you'll still on average generate more overall traffic; if there's a momentary lag on the connection to one place, you're still generating traffic through to others.
Though this, of course, assumes a sufficient number of seeds and peers to have a BitTorrent download be notably faster than the same download over a single HTTP connection. When the BitTorrent file takes 5 hours to download, you're probably actually using far less bandwidth overall and being friendly. :)
This doesn't get into the upload issue, of course. To go back to the original 'there's no difference between downloading a 600MB ISO over HTTP versus BitTorrent' objection up-thread, when downloading the ISO over HTTP, you have very little traffic upstream. BitTorrent, you have a lot upstream, which also introduces additional overall load on the network.
So, yeah, BitTorrent can be a heavier burden than an HTTP connection. (Not in all cases, but the possibility exists.) I personally remain unconvinced that this problem is The End of the World and requires throttling people, but I will still grant that P2P connections /can/ consume more bandwidth and cause more load on the network than straight HTTP downloads.
And that there are significant differences at the network layer between a 600MB ISO downloaded over HTTP and over P2P.
--Rachel
All advertising tells you only partial truths to entice you to buy...
In this case, the small print effectively nullifies and renders false the claim that the service is "unlimited". It's misleading to the point of lying.
The people who insist that they have a full blown, pipe with no limits at all are the ones clinging to the advertising rather than the contract they likely signed.
And you think that isn't grounds for criticism of the company?
Still, at the end of the day, caveat emptor. I didn't trust the salesman to tell me what was in my cell phone contract, why would I trust an advertisement to tell me what's in my ISP contract?
As I said, in this case, the contract doesn't merely expand upon or add restrictions to the advertisement's claim, it basically nullifies it.
I don't know how you feel about misleading advertising, and consumer protection in general. I live in the UK where there are generally stronger laws about this than the US, and I'm quite happy with that. IMHO, the lengths to which a consumer (as opposed to a business) should reasonably be expected to go to to find out such things should not be excessive (e.g. on page 37 of a contract in impenetrable legalese) relative to the prominence of the claims in the advert.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You may be an IOTI (Inventor of the Internet), but you're not helping here, Sir. The Internet exists to ship bits around in a reasonably efficient, highly redundant, manner between connected computers. You may already know this. What those users desire to ship between themselves is none of your d@mn business any more than we should have roadblocks on the Interstate searching cars for pirate DVDs, or confiscating and imaging iPods at the international border.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
Although it is my "homepage" link here at /. I try to not mention it often. The word "ISP" has a variety of meanings and sometimes it is used to apply to the business that I own. I own a small web hosting company with just a few employees and we lease space in a data center in Michigan but that is digression. My point is this...
We charge inexpensive prices but, by no means, are we nearly as cheap as the major hosting companies. They claim they sell all sorts of space and bandwidth (we can digress for hours as I point to countless examples of them not actually allowing anyone to use their purchased space or bandwidth) and the term there applies as well as it does here. They "oversell." They advertise more than they are actually able to provide if everyone actually used their alloted space/bandwidth.
Now, if I may, I'd like to NOT touch on the debate of legal vs. "illegal" P2P. And, if I may, I would also like to avoid the potentially explosive conversation about the merits of copyright and the various **AA organizations.
I have a lot to say but I'll try not to digress a great deal and limit it to on-scope comments.
We offer non-oversold space and bandwidth. We also offer a privacy agreement that is pretty forward, meaning we'll go to bat for you each and every time even if you're doing something that someone has deemed illegal. We give each of our clients the benefit of the doubt. We host some sites with adult content even though we pretty much claim we won't and don't - we judge them each by their own merits. (Yes, I have a point and I'm coming to it eventually - blame wine.)
We host sites that are politically controversial but we do so blindly. We have very liberal sites and some very very hard right wing sites that are attacked a great deal. We host anything that is legal and I've got a handy dandy liar (lawyer) on retainer whom I go to if someone comes to us with a question or complaint.
For instance, we host a few large/busy sites that LINK to various sites that contain links to content that is considered illegal under the current United States of America laws. (Specifically they host links to other sites that contain "pirated" software or music.) It is our determination that we won't be held liable nor will they. In some instances we've gone further though we're careful to invite people to ask prior to ordering.
We are marginally adept at what we do and we make a decent profit. (I'm getting to my point, damn it...)
We offer what we say we are going to provide at a cost that is higher than the industry standard and provide them with liberties that they'd not get with another company. People pay for this. They pay for the individualized attention, service, and understanding. More than anything they pay for the understanding I think.
That's part of my point.
My other point is that we provided what we said we'd provide in the manner we said we'd provide it for legal content. If we have an instance of a spammer we shut them down, immediately. If we find someone who's hosting stolen content we have a policy where we email them and rename the file temporarily. They are then invited to explain or to remove the offending file, continued issues result in a termination of the account. However... We have never, nor do we ever, actually go actively seeking illegal files. We don't, as a general rule and internal policy, ever actually look into a user's account without their express permission or to investigate a complaint or a service issue.
So, the remainder of my commentary (hopefully), is really just a drawing of ideas from the above. They, the ISPs, are under the impression that all P2P is illegal and they have motivation to make it seem so. The various industries out there have done a great job at creating fear and large businesses are aware of the risks they take to shareholder monies and strive to avoid lawsuits of any type. In order to maximize value to their shareholders they have mad
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Tell us that when your SIP phone calls keep dropping out because your file transfers have the same priority.
Pretty much every Slashdotter who claims their service should be unlimited because the commercial says so should know better especially since so many work in the IT industry. They're using the commercials as their excuse for behavior they know crosses the line of acceptable use.
You're implying that they should *know* that they're being misled by the company? Well, quite(!)
Some might say that it's the company's problem if they're intentionally fudging things behind vague and obscure policies.
Just because I invite you to a party with unlimited food and drink doesn't mean you get to move in with me, eventually, you have to go home or I'm going to throw you out.
That's a poor analogy, not least because you're comparing a social event (driven mainly by social rules and without much underlying legalism) with a business contract.
Most people understand the rules of parties, that they don't last forever, and (as you yourself implied) there's no contract, and the owner of the house/etc can throw someone out of the party!
Most people don't abuse the hospitality at parties because they don't want to be assholes. It's really not the same thing at all.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).