Slashdot Mirror
British ISPs Embracing Two-Tier Internet
Barence writes "Britain's leading ISPs are attempting to construct a two-tier internet, where websites and services that are willing to pay are thrust into the 'fast lane,' while those that don't are left fighting for scraps of bandwidth or even blocked outright. Asked directly whether ISP TalkTalk would be willing to cut off access completely to BBC iPlayer in favor of YouTube if the latter was prepared to sign a big enough cheque, TalkTalk's Andrew Heaney replied: 'We'd do a deal, and we'd look at YouTube and we'd look at BBC and we should have freedom to sign whatever deal works.' Britain's biggest ISP, BT, meanwhile says it 'absolutely could see situations in which some content or application providers might want to pay BT for a quality of service above best efforts.' PC Pro asks if it's the end of the net as we know it."
"a quality of service above best efforts."
WTF does that mean? If they can do better, then the "best efforts" wasn't actually the best effort, was it?
How can you have a level of effort above the best?
Didn't we elect them to make sure that the weak get protected so they don't get screwed over by those that could flex their muscles to browbeat them into submission?
If governments do not serve that function anymore, why the fuck do they exist at all? I can let someone (financially, physically...) strong beat me up and make me surrender quite fine without paying a few dicks to keep a bunch of chairs from flying off planet with their fat asses.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is what the drive to the lowest price possible gets you: a broadband that loses the ISP money in an attempt to get that TV and billboard price-point of £5.99 per month. How does the ISP make money and remain competitive? Answer: more bites at the cherry! Phorm, getting content providers to pay... etc...
Not only does this kill small companies' as well as individual users' chances at internet presence, but what a great way to kill off any p2p protocols by dumping them whosesale into the 'slow lane'.
I think Linux isn't better than Windows hence in the slashdot realm I'm a troll
I think absolutely, ISP's should be allowed to provide faster bandwidth for sites where companies have agreed to pay for delivering content to the consumer at faster transfer rates. Those companies are in effect subsidizing higher levels of ISP service for some content; there's nothing at all wrong with that.
The second issue raised, where potentially a company could fork over enough money to block some other service - that's really bad, but I don't see it ever happening despite scare quotes like the ones the article provides. There's simply no way customers would put up with it, and the company being blocked could easily sue the company paying for the block. So who would actually do that?
Remember that you are being frightened in order to be OK with giving over more control over an inherently open internet, to those that want to control content. It's under the guise of protecting you but the first thing you should do when someone says "I'm here to protect you from a horrible danger" is to be very suspicious and ask a lot of questions to find out if in fact there's really a credible threat.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem with a lack of net neutrality is that it takes multiple ISPs to carry the packets. So if YouTube agrees to pay for preferential treatment, they're going to have to pay every ISP in the world for it. So one ISP got their check, but the one next door didn't, so they stifle the traffic. What happens when my attempt to ping Google gets bounced out to Europe as occasionally happens?
If we don't get Net Neutrality, we will have a war between ISPs discriminating against each other's traffic, and they will beg for the government to step in to resolve disputes. Once that happens, instead of the simple single rule of Net Neutrality, we will get a patchwork of situational regulations dictated by corporations through armies of lawyers representing their best interests.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Like companies holding monopolies, the tipping point seems to be whether website owners pay ISPs to avoid getting slowed down. Here's hoping that affected sites put up an intro page on any ISPs that slow them down, explaining to the user that the site is slow not because of problems on the site's end, but rather that it's the user's ISP, the company he pays to get access to the internet, that is artificially slowing things down.
There's an Akamai server on my ISP. www.foxnews.com resolves to it, traceroute reaches it two hops off the router on the other side of my DSL bridge, and the homepage loads up blazingly fast.
On the other hand, my packets to www.cnn.com wander around a series of various tubes, until they find their way to Atlanta. www.cnn.com is noticably slower to load. traceroute shows that about twice as much latency accumulates, until it stops at CNN's router.
FOX news is paying my ISP, indirectly through Akamai, for a higher tier of service for my ISP's customers. Their competition does not, and their tier of service is noticably slower.
I try my hardest, but I can't think of a damn thing that's wrong here.
And how exactly do they do that? They do it by delaying the packets sent by those who don't pay extra.
No, they locally cache the content providers data so that you don't have the round-trip of getting it over the "real" internet. Realistically it's far too much trouble to manage networks by doing anything to the traffic itself, which implies all kinds of expensive packet inspection. It's far simpler to improve performance by local caching or by QOS for traffic to specific destinations - that the user would want improved access for anyway...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They shouldn't be allowed to sell "Internet access" then. If I'm paying for service, and I can't get to a site because my "ISP" has it blocked, then they aren't providing Internet access. They should be forced to advertise the service as a "Restricted web portal". Yeah, they might not like it, but it would be a lot closer to the truth.
Side note: "TalkTalk" sounds cutesy. I have another cutesy for them: "Bye-Bye", as I cancel my service.
If they start trying to gang up on the content providers, what's to stop the content providers from ganging up on them? Oh yeah you want to offer Internet... bring say the top 5 companies like Google (search, youtube, docs), Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and eBay on board and hand ISPs the ultimatum - don't charge us or put us on second tier, or we will all block your ISP from using our services. The customers will scream bloody murder and complain that what you're delivering isn't the Internet, but your call. In fact, once you've pushed them together in an alliance maybe they find that they are in a position to charge the ISPs, not the other way around. After all, many people have more than one ISP to choose from but there's only one YouTube and one Facebook.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If we allow this, it will effectively create yet another monopoly for those with the capital to be the highest bidder. I love google, but I also love knowing that they have to constantly be redefining themselves, or any college kid with a little bit of skill and luck can create competition from their dorm room. If the *next big thing* is so slow it's unusable because of the ISP's "preferential" treatment of those paying tariff's, it won't ever become the next big thing. And THAT will be yet another nail in the coffin of the downfall of mankind.
This is going to lead to situations like : "YouTube recommends ISP X for optimal viewing experience". And high traffic sites will probably end up extorting money from the ISPs. I know Facebook isn't going to pay anyone for access, for example.
And pretty soon, websites will form unions and the ensuing partitioning of the Internet will give us consumer choices "ISP X offers about 50% of the Internet at this price, while ISP Y offers 75% of the Internet for only a few cents more.". Competition between ISPs will spiral out of control.
Things are going to end up more complicated for the ISPs themselves - and if they had a shred of intelligence to them, they'd stop this moronic talk."
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
I work for a company that is heavy involved (among other things) in just that sort of deep packet inspection technology. If you don't think that large ISPs are (or will shortly be) doing traffic shaping, you're a fool.
Don't be so quick with the witty movie quotes - "best effort" can mean different things. In networking "best effort" service comes with no guarantees. Above that you have your service level agreements.
In common usage "best effort" is also something of a euphemism for "I'm not promising anything", so that fits too.
I'd think that any company that advertised "internet access" and then blocked access to BBC iPlayer in favour of Youtube (or vice versa) would run into a wall of lawsuits from dissatisfied customers - who would win as U.K law takes a dim view of companies posting false or misleading advertisements.
"Best effort" is what we had for years without a tiered Internet. Using that label for a second tier is seriously disingenuous. Before, effort was made to ensure that pipes had sufficient capacity, and that congestion was the exception, and not the rule--that is "best effort". No longer.
Relegating all second class traffic to a permanently congested and insufficient pipe can hardly be considered "best effort". There is no incentive for them to provide sufficient capacity for Internet services which compete with their own services. In fact, quite the opposite.
The reason that the Internet was such a powerful engine for innovation, is exactly because it had excess capacity, and the ability to support new applications. If all Internet traffic is now to be relegated to the scraps of bandwidth remaining from so called "managed services", it is dead for all practical purposes.
Sure, it will hobble along, but a tiered Internet can never provide the rich opportunities for innovation, or even competition with established services. That is why it is crucial that this not happen. Under a neutral Internet, there is every incentive to provide sufficient bandwidth so that it works well for everyone. Once you start carving it up, those incentives disappear, and the incumbent monopolies will prevail.
How can a small courier compete if the big guys are able to pay to have the speed limit changed for their vans? As with content delivery, the internet has allowed small companies to compete because content delivery is a level playing field, when the big boys can pay to leverage the medium itself everyone who can't afford to pay has their content devalued.
I know us customers generally mean nothing to businesses, but surely even ISPs can see that they are primarily there to allow us poor users to use their service to access to the big bad Internet. And by that, I mean _all_ of out. I'm paying my ISP for access to the sites _I_ want to access, not access to the sites that they, out of the goodness of their profits, they'll allow me to access.
Perhaps they can run this another way - 3 tiers. I pay for 8mb broadband, so I get 8mb to any site - after all, that's what _I'm_ paying them for. Or, I take their _free_ package, which is paid for by the corporations, and thus can only access (quickly) those that paid to allow me access - if I'm not paying, I can hardly complain. That way, everyone wins.
Or am I just making too much sense for these guys to comprehend?
Pause, and think about it for a minute. Does anyone REALLY think an ISP can afford to make 99% of the Web intolerable for its users, without immediately dying a horrible death in the market? No. It won't happen.
This is just more irrational fear-mongering from those interests pushing for government control over the Internet under the guise of so-called 'Net neutrality', claiming power in order to solve a problem that doesn't exist under the guise of 'helping you'.
The reasoning fallacy behind the promotion of 'net neutrality' is something like this: The market might be perfectly capable of providing everyone decent-speed, usable Internet (it's done a reasonably good job so far), but because it doesn't apparently recognize a legal 'right' to decent service, then "oh noes, panic, it means we won't get decent service". Wrong. The market will provide decent service because that is the very service they offer.
Here's a car analogy. There are no laws dictating a car has to be able to go at least 50 miles per hour. But is there a crisis of car manufacturers trying to get away with selling very slow cars? No, not at all, in spite of such laws. How could this possibly be? Because if a car company started selling cars that could only go 30 MPH, nobody would buy them. "But, but, we need laws just in case they do! Government must regulate and control the whole thing!" ... nope. Calm down, relax, don't be taken in by such blatant hysteria-creating propaganda.
Two Speed Internet
I would have thought it would be difficult in the UK as there is more competition. If Fred Bloggs finds his ISP slows down BBC iPlayer then he can change ISP pretty easily. What's the problem?
Pause, and think about it for a minute. Does anyone REALLY think an ISP can afford to make 99% of the Web intolerable for its users, without immediately dying a horrible death in the market? No. It won't happen.
stop believing in the 'market' bullcrap. market is the foremost thing that is manipulated on this planet. there is more profit in tiering internet, and ALL isps will be doing it. there will be no problem of 'surviving' at all. it will just be 'standard industry practice', just like how things like these have been, in all other industries unless they were banned.
as a simple example, you can look at how, for some reason, music album/cds are being sold from almost the same rates as records, despite technology changed a lot, manufacturing went to china taking the production cost to dimes, and many corporations seemingly competing in the field.
where is cheaper music in the mainstream market ? where is the competition ?
nowhere. this is what you will end up with internet too, if you keep believing that 'market/competition' bullshit. its something that doesnt apply in real world. it lives in econ 101, 102 books.
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ISPs seem to be confused about who is en route to achieving monopoly powers.
In the UK, consumers have a real choice of ISPs and negligible brand loyalty to any of them. iPlayer, Facebook, Google and YouTube on the other hand border on being a staple part of lifestyle. Most people I know also use iPlayer and I'm quite certain they'd all change ISP if theirs stopped delivering it. On that subject, TFA is on shaky ground about contract lock-in because ceasing to provide a significant service is a failure to deliver/material variation which renders the contract unenforceable, and, in my (limited) understanding of contract law, it is nigh on impossible to have valid terms in standard-form contracts to waive such rights.
OK, ISPs could speed up certain companies and not others, and this could get to a point where they're not literally barring access but it's impractical for bandwidth heavy content to compete without doing so. But you're still going to have consumers who are more concerned about content and you're still going to have the 3rd party options like Akamai. The risk for consumers, as the article correctly points out, is the barriers that are created preventing new startups gaining traction.
If it wasn't enough that people are already more bothered about the content than their ISP, all of those companies have various content-sharing and other agreements already, they are clearly not averse to forming agreements on other issues. The balance of power is forming overwhelmingly in the hands of the big content providers.
ISPs should think twice. Some content providers are already showing signs of some monopoly power and by creating further barriers to competition the ISP is throwing itself towards an inevitable conclusion: the content providers charging the ISP.
That's the problem, the Internet doesn't really route around censorship or damage or anything like that, that's little more than a bunch of hand-waving hippie-speak quite frankly, it's actually a highly centralized, highly hierarchical system that doesn't route well around anything short of total disconnection (when alternate routes are available). It's not a cloud, it's more like a tree, it's rooted in the US, you're on the outer leaves and anything that happens further in can screw you over.
A 403,404 or "access denied, you have been reported" page from the Great Firewall when you try to access a website is as good as the real thing as far as the Internet is concerned. Of course a throttled connection is fine and dandy too.
This is why we need a new Internet, the infrastructure and up must be replaced. It must be highly decentralized, p2p-oriented, with a logical and physical mesh topology, and have integrity controls and a karma system built into the protocols, sort of like Bittorrent. It should not only be difficult to control, it should actively resist control. Then the Internet really will route around censorship and manipulation like damage.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
How is this different from a protection racket? "we wouldn't want anything to happen to your packets now, would you? Pay us and we'll make sure they're safe..."