Reason To Hope Carriers Won't Win the War On Netflix

Nemo the Magnificent writes "A few days ago we talked over a post by David Raphael accusing Verizon of slowing down Netflix, by way of throttling Amazon AWS. Now Jonathan Feldman gives us reason to believe that the carriers won't win the war on Netflix, because tools for monitoring the performance of carriers will emerge nd we'll catch them if they try. I just now exercised one such tool, NetNeutralityTest.com from Speedchedker Ltd. My carrier is Verizon (FiOS), and the test showed my download speed at the moment to be 12 Mbps. It was the same to Linode in NJ but only 3 Mbps to AWS East. Hmm."

Comments

Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest?

[deconfliction]

Sure, one extremely popular destination on the internet is safe, because throngs of angry users will raise a stink. But what about all the small players who get throttled into oblivion before their innovations get a chance to have the kind of army of defensive consumers that Netflix has?

This is an information warfare[1] campaign where the Establishment is trying to make sure they stay there indefinitely, safe from all new comers.

[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4766259&cid=46193879

Re:Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest?

[Sique]

The reason being that those small players aren't interesting enough to design specific net traffic rules for them. And if they grow big enough to appear on the provider's radar, they are so wellknown, it will be noticed if they get throttled.

Re:Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest?

[Jane Q. Public]

Sure, one extremely popular destination on the internet is safe, because throngs of angry users will raise a stink.

Well, I wouldn't say that. For example, P2P was throttled because of its bandwidth consumption... and was rescued by the "user community", even though there was no large corporate interest behind it. But your point is taken: this could represent a huge barrier-to-entry for startups.

Folks, there is a simple solution to all this: pressure the government to classify ISPs as Title II Common Carriers, as they should have in the very beginning. (Corporate lobbying prevented it.)

Make them common carriers, and a huge set of problems essentially goes away overnight. Net Neutrality is built-in. Snooping (including government and corporate snooping) is prohibited. Etc. It may not be perfect, but it's just a vastly better world, all around.

Re:Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest?

[alostpacket]

if (trafficSource != VerzionOnDemand && trafficSource != Netflix) {

degradePerformance(); //slightly and randomly degrades performance

}

Seems relatively easy from a logic point of view.

Would anyone notice if they randomly started dropping UDP packets? Your average web user would see pages load just as fast. Statistical analysis would have to be very large scale and long term to notice a trend that couldn't be attributed to the normal fluctuations of speed and reliability of the internet. But home users could get a subtle difference in viewing experience for video from their ISP and a competitor.

In reality, ISPs simply need to slack on peering arrangements so their competitors are hammered during peak usage. Something Verizon has already been accused of.

This all leads me to think the real problem is the vertical monopoly/integration of ISP and content provider. If the government doesnt step in, we'll continue to see this war over and over just with ever shifting battlefields. Even with common carrier, we would likely still have ISPs pulling these tricks. regardless of whether they can charge Netflix more.

*obviously it's more complicated than the pseudo code above

Re:Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest?

[viperidaenz]

... If the video was delivered via UDP.
UDP for video calling, good idea. Nice and real-time.
For anything else, pointless. You'll need to deal with the dropped/out-of-order packets with no benefit, except maybe less RAM usage for buffering. I'd rather have quality video thanks.

Re:Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest?

[viperidaenz]

Won't stop them dropping random UDP packets to entice VoIP users to go back to fixed line though...

Fucks everyone else on AWS too

[hsmith]

Even bigger issue is, if you are hosting your infrastructure on AWS, your customers will get slower service.

In the end, I am unsure how the FCC lets this occur. I pay GOOD money to my shitbag carrier to get access to my content. If I pay for 50MBPS download, I don't give a fuck what content it is, I want 50MBPS.

Re:Fucks everyone else on AWS too

[Bengie]

And your ISP's shit-bag provider should be providing full speed on their network also, and so and and so forth. While a single server with a 1gb connection can only handle at most 10x connections at 100mb/s, but as long as that connection is not at full utilization, you should get it.

Nutshell. While your ISP can't control anything beyond their edge, your ISP or any of its links should NEVER be the reason, and your ISP should make sure the same is also true for anyone they link with. The core network should never be a limitation and only the end-points should be.

Re:Fucks everyone else on AWS too

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I had a provider good enough to be called shitbag. :(

Re:Fucks everyone else on AWS too

[jklovanc]

In the end, I am unsure how the FCC lets this occur.

They tried but a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down their rules.

Two judges, with partial support from a third, said the commission has the authority to regulate broadband access but had failed to show that it has a mandate to impose the anti-discrimination rules on broadband providers.

Re:Fucks everyone else on AWS too

[Jane Q. Public]

I don't know if it's a "bigger issue". It's certainly part of the issue.

ISPs want to charge big content providers (like AWS and Netflix) for using more bandwidth.

But everybody has seemed to keep forgetting that bandwidth is already paid for by the end-users. This is just a way for the big ISPs to double-dip. That very definitely should be prevented.

And please, nobody give me guff about how people pay for "average data rates" and how Netflix saturates the infrastructure. U.S. customers already pay among the highest rates for some of the slowest service in the Western world. All because of the ISP oligopoly. U.S. cable companies have made record profits almost every year, and haven't been re-investing those profits in infrastructure in proportion.

Make them Common Carriers under Title II, and end the insanity.

Re:Fucks everyone else on AWS too

[Ex-MislTech]

You cannot expect the corrupt Telcos who stole $300 billion of US taxpayer money
to do anything remotely in the realm of honest.

Welcome to the Kleptocracy.

http://www.newnetworks.com/bro...

Faster to AWS than Linode

[Enry]

I'm on FIOS with their 50 down/25 up plan. Linode in Newark is 48Mbps, AWS East is 60Mbps. Just saying that a particular path is slow doesn't mean that it's Verizon interfering - it's more likely something else that's causing the problem.

Re:Faster to AWS than Linode

[Shakrai]

Just saying that a particular path is slow doesn't mean that it's Verizon interfering - it's more likely something else that's causing the problem.

Dude, you're forgetting the talking points of the modern internet crowd. Any and all unexplained slowdown is the result of ill intention by ones ISP. The fact that the network is a broad collection of networks that your ISP has no control over is irrelevant. Congestion at a peering site two networks removed from your ISP? That's Verizon's fault! Google doesn't give Youtube the money to upgrade their infrastructure? Verizon's fault!

Comcast still net neutral

[Anonymous Coward]

As part of the agreement made for Comcast to purchase NBC, they have to follow the FCC's net neutrality rules for 7 years regardless of what may come from court cases.

Not evidence

[Rick Zeman]

You can't make a trend from one data point, nor are all routes created equally.

I do believed that Verizon would do something sleazy like this, but this certainly isn't proof of that.

Low Standards

[tom229]

How do these articles with multiple spelling mistakes and typos keep making the front page?

Re:Net Neutrality

[jklovanc]

The FCC tried.

Two judges, with partial support from a third, said the commission has the authority to regulate broadband access but had failed to show that it has a mandate to impose the anti-discrimination rules on broadband providers.

Wait. what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The FCC wrote the Net Neutrality rules in the first place. It was the federal courts that struck them down, declaring the FCC doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality.

We're blaming the FCC now for...reasons? I realize "fuck beta" and all, but at least target your hate on a reasonable target. The FCC charged up this hill for us, and got shot down in flames.

What exactly do you expect they could be doing differently that would help?

Re:Wait. what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The FCC made the decision on how to classify internet service providers which lead to this being an option. When they tried to take back just part of their decision the courts said it they didn't have the authority due to how they classified ISPs. They still have the option of going back and reclassifying ISPs to give themselves the authority to enforce neutrality.

So yes we are blaming the FCC because they made the mess and thus far has refused to do what they have to (and the courts say need to and are legally able to) do to fix the problem for good.

Re:Wait. what?

[AnontheDestroyer]

The court said the FCC DOES have the authority to enforce network neutrality, just not under its (the FCC's) current classification of ISPs. That is, the FCC has ISPs classified as "information services," rather than "common carriers." The court ruling says the FCC does have the power to enforce net neutrality against "common carriers," but does not against "information services." The court, but all reasonable interpretations I've see, is right. What needs to happen is ISPs need to be reclassified as "common carriers," or something very similar, but right now all of our politicians and the FCC head in particular are bought up by those same ISPs. There is a reason net neutrality did not last very long after the Citizen's United ruling.

Re:Net Neutrality

[deconfliction]

The FCC tried.

Two judges, with partial support from a third, said the commission has the authority to regulate broadband access but had failed to show that it has a mandate to impose the anti-discrimination rules on broadband providers.

You forgot to mention (if I'm not mistaken) how the court practically invited the FCC simply to invoke common carrier regulation as the legally proper way to achieve it's Net Neutrality anti-discrimination rules. While the "FCC tried", the FCC also _has not tried_ to reinstate Net Neutrality via its legal authority to regulate common carriers that way (vs 'information services'). The FCC, also, after a year and a lot of press, has never given me a single sentence of analysis of my 53 page Net Neutrality complaint I filed with them, via the Kansas Attorney General's Office, over GoogleFiber's (terms of service) blocking of residential servers. (after my cause inspired some protesters in Utah, Google backed down and narrowed the blockage to 'commercial servers', whatever that means. I.e. a Quake3 server is a commercial server making money for Id Software. Somehow that is OK, but god forbid any innovator in their own home makes a profit)

Re:Net Neutrality

[nurb432]

Right, the court told them how to do it in no uncertain terms, and they effectively looked the other way.

So it sort of proves our point.

Re:Beta.

[arth1]

Dice doesn't own slashdot.jp? wikipedia: "currently owned by OSDN-Japan, Inc."

Correct, Dice Holdings does not own the Japanese Slashdot and Sourceforge brands or sites. These were split out and sold by VA Linux in 2007, before the sale of the American subsidiaries to Geek.net, and thus not part of the deal. That the buyers chose to call themselves OSDN is going back to the roots - by that time, OSDN had become OSDG.
As it is, Japanese Slashdot buys advertising space on Slashdot.org for Japanese customers from Dice Holding, and translate articles into Japanese. That's about as far as the cooperation goes.

Anyhow, at this time, slashdot.jp appears to be the bigger brother, with more traffic than slasdot.org.
Perhaps they can buy out slashdot.org too. I for one would welcome our new Japanese overlords.

Re:Beta.

[BLKMGK]

Untrusted Java app? No go...

Yes, Beta sux and I too will leave if it becomes the new default!

Re:one way to win is choice

[tverbeek]

Yeah, Google Fiber will be great for accessing YouTube and Google Maps. It might not be quite so effective for accessing services that compete with Google.

Google is no different from Comcast or Verizon or AT&T. Without governmental enforcement of net neutrality, carriers cannot be trusted to provide equal service to competing services.

Re:Comcast not throttling?

[adri]

The video content isn't coming off of AWS. It's coming from the Open Connect Appliance Platform.

(I'm on the OCA team at Netflix.)

Maybe it's the Little Libertarian in me, but...

[Chordonblue]

What about: Netflix defending it's own turf? Why must the government step into everything?

Now before you mark this as 'flamebait', consider this: What does Netflix and other providers have, that ISPs generally do not? A direct line of sight. Their own apps.

Consider: What if Netflix decided to provide an 'ISP test', presented to the user when playback is poor? Or, conversely, what if Netflix just pulled a 'Time Warner' and displayed something like: 'Your ISP purposely limits the quality level of your connection to Netflix. Here's their number, and here are other ISPs in your area who do not'...

Just an idea, and something the ISPs would have difficulty justifying.