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FCC Chair: It's Ok For ISPs To Discriminate Traffic
sl4shd0rk writes "Remember when the ex-cable lobbyist Tom Wheeler was appointed to the FCC chair back in May of 2013? Turns out he's currently gunning for Internet Service Providers to be able to 'favor some traffic over other traffic.' It would set a dangerous precedent, considering the Open Internet Order in 2010 forbade such action if it fell under unreasonable discrimination. The bendy interpretation of the 2010 order is apparently aimed somewhat at Netflix, as Wheeler stated: 'Netflix might say, "I'll pay in order to make sure that my subscriber might receive the best possible transmission of this movie."'"
All I see is a bunch of telecom fiefdoms expanding their influence. It was nice having an internet for a while, but TCP/IP was never built to enforce network neutrality, and you can't stop technology from breaking old protocols and extracting value from communication before that value can be delivered to the real intended recipient.
Deep Packet Inspection is Piracy. Return the favor.
Here I thought the outrageous check I write to Comcast every month was supposed to pay for them to pipe me the best possible signal from whatever website I choose. Silly me.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The revolving door of DC squirts another lobbyist/shill into a position of public power and we're left holding the bag.
But there again, most shee..rrr...Americans will only complain if something keeps them from watching the latest Idol.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
I might be okay with this if it came with a regulatory requirement that ISPs practice full disclosure of their preferences w.r.t. traffic type. That way at least consumers can "vote with their wallets" in markets with more than one provider.
Netflix already pays for their connections to the internet. Consumers already pay in kind for their connections. The middlemen are already making money hand over fist. They would just like to avoid playing in a free market so they can make even more money.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
He likely chose Netflix due to the fact that it now accounts for 50 percent of all North American Fixed Network Data, per Sandvine report Nov 11, 2013. Those are big numbers and indicate that Netflix is big enough to use in examples.
'Netflix might say, "I'll pay in order to make sure that my subscriber might receive the best possible transmission of this movie."
Verizon might also say, "We're not going to allow Netflix traffic to a subscriber in excess of 1mbit/sec, PERIOD."
Whitehouse.gov Sign the petition, and at least get your voice out there.
Who know's? It might not fall on deaf ears.
If I am Netflix, Google/YouTube, Amazon, etc. and an ISP comes to me asking for money for preferential treatment, I would just say: "Pay me $1/subscriber, or I will block your users from my site--you know, just like how you pay ESPN for their content..." I find it hard to believe these sites need ISPs more than ISPs need these sites.
"I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lobbyists â" and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not run my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president."
-- Barack Obama, Speech in Des Moines, IA
November 10, 2007
Wheeler: "Netflix might say, "I'll pay in order to make sure that my subscriber might receive the best possible transmission of this movie."
Huh, that's funny. I though I ALREADY PAID the ISP to get the best possible transmission.
Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted to buy access to ALL of the Internet? You only bought basic Internet. That simply doesn't include Netflix. But it includes Youtube now that Google ponied up some cash. You need to pay the premium rate to get Netflixs. Plus an extra surcharge for Wikipedia because they said something nasty about us once.
Three cheers for letting cable companies abuse their government-assisted monopolies! At this point, most of us get our internet from the same people who offer on-demand video services on top of regular television for a much higher price than Netflix. Options in most areas are limited to one sometimes two sources for broadband (Sources that also provide TV) or dialup, if you can still find that. Now, they're going to take advantage of their near complete control of the internet to shut out any possible competition to the outdated and undesirable cable TV overpriced bundle business model, full of stuff nobody will watch. If only there were some system of rules that was already in place meant to prevent businesses from leveraging a monopoly in one market to take control of another... If only...
Sure, but it's not OK for Email provider A to take precedence over provider B.
No sir I dont like it.
The internet already provides the viable infrastructure for on-demand video delivery, as demonstrated by the litany of devices that support Netflix playback.
The Great Recession already saw many people belt-tighten by canceling their cable TV. Subscriber numbers are in slow decline. Netflix, YouTube and Hulu are just a few content deals away from completely destroying the value proposition of cable TV for remaining subscribers. Cable companies believe their only hope of keeping that revenue from disappearing is to make sure their internet service isn't viable for video delivery. Net neutrality means they can't manage their network traffic and make netflix et al unusable for their subscribers.
Cue the new FCC chief.
On K Street whoever funnels the most money to a politician gets the most sympathetic ear. Wheeler is proposing the same corrupt concept for ISP traffic. It likely comes natural to him as a lobbyist and I doubt he even realizes there's anything wrong with it.
That's the problem: for residential ISPs #3 is a huge cost. Since they forbid users from running servers, almost all traffic is from the rest of the world (where the servers are) to their users. That means a big imbalance of traffic at their connections to the backbones, more traffic inbound to the ISP than outbound from it. Since payment and rates are based on balance of traffic, the ISPs end up paying a lot. The ISPs aren't in a good negotiating position. Individually they're each an overwhelming chunk of the backbone provider's revenue, the backbone can afford to lose a residential ISP and not take a killer hit. The ISP, though, needs the backbone connection because in the end that's what all of their customers are paying for. If as a Comcast Internet subscriber you can't browse the Web, can't play your on-line games, can't stream video from Netflix, then what use is that Comcast Internet service to you? You'd just cancel it and save yourself the money. And the alternative, allowing users to run servers to even out the traffic balance, can't be done. The ISPs have oversubscribed their networks and otherwise taken advantage of traffic asymmetry to cut costs, and their networks now can't handle heavy upstream traffic loads.
The ISPs could, of course, adjust their prices to reflect the actual cost of connections. They don't want to do that, though, because the first one to do that would lose all their customers to the rest. Plus in many cases those ISPs enjoy a local monopoly or duopoly thanks to public-right-of-way access agreements, and if they start raising prices their customers are going to push local and state governments to either regulate the ISPs or void those agreements and remove the monopoly/duopoly. The desire to keep that's at the heart of ISP opposition to municipal Internet service, you can see how much they want to keep it. They could absorb the costs, but that cuts into their profit margins and they don't want that either. So they're kind of stuck. The only thing they can do is try and wring money out of parties that don't have any direct connection to them who can't really do anything to them.
He is deliberately muddling net neutrality with QoS. They are not the same thing. It is to the benefit of the telcos that he does this. They can try to kill net neutrality by arguing that QoS is fine (which it is), rather than arguing that blocking based on traffic type is fine (which it isn't).
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
While I tend to agree with most people posting and I'm generally in favor of net neutrality, I also like playing devil's advocate, looking at both sides.
My SSH connection uses about 0.001 Mbps. Latency on SSH is really annoying, because it means each time you type on key you have to wait for that letter or number to show up on the screen. So for SSH you use very, very little bandwidth, but it needs to be low latency.
Netflix is opposite - it uses up 1,000 times more bandwidth, and latency doesn't matter at all (though jitter does). During peak hours, when the ISP is 1 Mbps short of perfect performance in a certain area, does it make more sense to annoy the shit out of 500 customers using SSH and other interactive low bandwidth applications, or should the one customer's Netflix packets get queued, which he won't even notice. (The Netflix movie will just begin one second later).
Given the very real choice of annoying 500 customers who aren't asking for much bandwidth vs. an imperceptible difference in one customer's movie, I think the choice is obvious. Better to not annoy any customers by giving the interactive packets priority.
That's what I'd want my ISP to do even if both connections are mine. I'd much rather have an unnoticeable 1% quality reduction in the YouTube video I'm watching than have lost or slow packets in my SSH. I WANT my ISP to discriminate between low priority, high bandwidth sites (video) versus high priority interactive.
It might also be useful to get real and talk about what this actually means in practice. YouTube and Netflix are HALF of the traffic load. Without those two, the existing infrastructure would deliver everything else TWICE as fast. Philosophical discussions are interesting, but at the end of the day, would you rather get stuff done much, much faster and allow the cat video to buffer for 1.5 seconds?
Your local government has picked Charter to be the local monopolist. The solution isn't to get Verizon to lay lines, it's to allow alternative cable providers to operate. If it comes down to it, require Charter to sell access to their lines. If Charter throws a fit, see how they like running cable without government granted right-of-ways.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
You know what, sure, let's let ISPs discriminate traffic. Let's let them outright block any site that doesn't pay them enough. But in exchange, they lose their safe harbor protection.
So anyone who launches a DoS or other "attack" over that ISP? They're partially liable. After all, they could have slowed or stopped that attack.
Anyone pirates anything? Liable. If they're blocking sites for their own purpose, they can obviously block illegal downloads as well, right?
Somebody posts a threat on Facebook? Cyber-bullying? LIABLE. Fraud? LIABLE.
Basically, if it's illegal and done through an Internet connection provided by that ISP, that ISP is a co-defendant in any civil or criminal suit.
Of course, the only way for an ISP to operate in such a legal environment would be to block everything by default, and only whitelist acceptable sites. Which of course cannot include anything with user-generated content - no Facebook, no Wikipedia, no Ebay. Of the 23 sites in my bookmarks bar, the only one that probably wouldn't get blocked is Wolfram Alpha.
So sure! Let ISPs start filtering traffic - as long as they take responsibility for anything that they allow through.
Yes, but that works to the ISP/Cable/Phone companies' advantage. Driving up the price of Netflix reduces the competition force.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Dr. Adam Smith, 1776
"Lobbying" and "monopoly" are not "capitalism". Even Smith recognized that a capitalist economy must have a reasonable body of antitrust laws to keep everybody "playing within the rules".
Adam Smith believed in "an invisible hand", ie, the marketplace, that has the ability to regain sanity after a period of insanity, through the force of the combined participation of each and every participant (whether it be consumer / banker / manufacturer / miner / farmer).
On the other hand, Washington D.C. (no matter it be Democrats or Republicans) believes in their own version of "invisible hand".
The invisible hand those politiscums believe in is "BIG BROTHERHOOD", or in other words, an entity which OVERSEES everything that is happening, no matter it happened in the public sphere or otherwise.
That is why we have all the illegal spying on the American citizens by none other than the American government.
I am an American citizen, and have been an American citizen for almost four decades, and I am sad to say that the country which I signed up on, back then, was very different from the country which I am looking at, today.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Is Barack Obama (the guy who appointed Wheeler) now a member of the Tea Party?
there is a place for QoS,
Yes, and it's not in this discussion.
But it's all pretty pointless unless the various backbone providers agree to honor the markings coming into their network
QoS is not and never was meant to be preserved or honored after it leaves your network. If you want your markings preserved, you need to set up some type of tunnel to your remote endpoint.
How does a service on ISP A get better service guaranteed for traffic going to a customer on ISP B?
Both customers pay their respective ISP's for a dedicated bandwidth internet connection. Or if both endpoints are yours, you purchase a point to point circuit instead of an internet service.
'Netflix might say, "I'll pay in order to make sure that my subscriber might receive the best possible transmission of this movie."'"
Isn't that exactly what net neutrality people are worried about? Because it's hardly a big jump from that to "pay us or your subscriber will get the worst possible transmission of a movie".
My position has always been "I am the ISP's customer. I am not the thing they sell to Netflix." If it's more expensive for the ISP to deliver me video than emails, that should be a negotiation between my ISP and me. It shouldn't be a negotiation betwen my ISP and Netflix, that I end up paying for anyway. Or even worse, that negotiation goes bad, and Netflix just sucks for me with no way for me to improve it... and my ISP tells me "but Hulu works fine... you should just switch to Hulu... trust us."
This fast lane/slow lane analogy makes this sound more reasonable than it is. Netflix, or anyone else, can't pay to have their traffic go faster. They can only pay to have someone else's traffic go slower. ISPs are talking about taking bids to selectively slow traffic. How, exactly, is this different from a denial of service attack?
GP may be the type that looks at this all as "inevitable" and will just keep lobbing criticisms of policies while never stating what an alterative would be...that happens alot around these parts.
The problem is that there are monopolies and they collude against you, right? Well why are there monopolies? Its because your local government grants them. The solution then is to get involved in your local government, not grant powers to the federal government which will erect barriers to entry on top of what your local government has already erected.
This is one of the problems with the current generation. They think the solution to everything is the federal government, where they are just one voice in a hundred million. You know what happens when you are one voice in a hundred million? Nobody hears you. They will pander to you and then stick it up your ass.
"His name was James Damore."