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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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!

Low Standards

[tom229]

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

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?

[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: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.