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Level 3 Wants To Make Peering a Net Neutrality Issue
New submitter thule writes "A story at Gigaom talks about how Level 3 is trying to pull peering into the net neutrality issue. Regulating peering could hamper how the Internet is interconnected, potentially turning it into a bureaucratic mess. Should peering be regulated?"
Reader raque points out that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is banging the net neutrality drum, too:
"Some major ISPs, like Cablevision, already practice strong net neutrality and for their broadband subscribers, the quality of Netflix and other streaming services is outstanding. But on other big ISPs, due to a lack of sufficient interconnectivity, Netflix performance has been constrained, subjecting consumers who pay a lot of money for high-speed Internet to high buffering rates, long wait times and poor video quality. ... Once Netflix agrees to pay the ISP interconnection fees, however, sufficient capacity is made available and high quality service for consumers is restored. If this kind of leverage is effective against Netflix, which is pretty large, imagine the plight of smaller services today and in the future. Roughly the same arbitrary tax is demanded from the intermediaries such as Cogent and Level 3, who supply millions of websites with connectivity, leading to a poor consumer experience."
Net neutrality.
It's not like any local government entity grants them monopo... Oh wait!
Between network use and network abuse. A network owner should be allowed to do what they want with their network. Leave it up to the market to decide if they want to use that network or not.
Users who pay for high bandwidth connections should change away from providers who's poor peering arrangements degrades their experience....
I get it, but it's not like establishing this interconnectivity is free or cheap(I've seen articles from Anand and other technical websites indicating ~$10k per peer for the configuration and support). Who's going to pay for it? How is it not going to raise our fees we already pay as end users?
They have been playing the oh were not throttling were just over saturated to this peer we don't like for awhile. Sure it's not as targeted as they would like but it gets them there.
No sir I dont like it.
And if we had more than 2 choices, we would. Right now, it's a duopoly and neither incumbent is willing to rock the boat.
What really needs to be done is to separate the providers from the last mile connection. A lot of ISPs could get in to the game if they only had to get their fiber to a local substation.
Let's call a duck a duck, shall we? All this "Netflix throttling" and other shady dealings of the ISPs controlling what content customers can view, reasonably, on the connections those customers are paying for, is nothing more than service theft.
Maybe we can put this whole net neutrality debate to bed with one good class action lawsuit, on behalf of all customers of ISPs who commit this type of service theft.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If you can't control the spam like the original and former Slashdot could, then do the right thing and drop this crap (that NOBODY who visits this site wants).
Seriously, give us what we ASK for and not what you THINK we need. Don't think. We'll do that for you.
If you can't get it right, I for one will go somewhere else for my news and .. unfortunately not discussions, because no really good discussion site exists.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Since the beginning of peering, the rules have always been that if you have roughly the same amount of traffic inbound and outbound, peering has no charge. If one direction generates more traffic than the other, the source pays for the asymmetry. If you give me 200 GB per minute average, and I give you 100 KB per minute average, you have to pay me for the traffic you are giving to me to deliver to my customers.
Streaming video has this problem - it's all one way. Peering should cost video streaming sources. The RATE charged has to be reasonable, but they don't get free peering.
The scenario with Netflix and ISP's is exactly what I've been describing for years. That is, use congestion on links to beat net neutrality. I would point this out and people would still focus on filtering and shaping. Who needs to filter when an ISP can just peer with a preferred VoIP provider? The link would have plenty of extra capacity and get very good quality of service. No neutrality rules have been broken because the ISP isn't shaping or filtering. They are using the inherit capability of the Internet to route traffic. So did the net neutrality people always see this issue or do they just not understand? Was the goal, all along, to control peering and they just hid their motives?
I've been skeptical of net neutrality because as soon as it was implemented, it wouldn't be "good enough" and they'd move on to more and more control. We all should be very skeptical of the government stepping in to regulate peering.
You can do what I just did:
1.) go to pref's, and assign a '-5' modifier to your foes, then mark those spam-post authors as 'foe' and reload page.
Or:
2.) join in the discussions at SoylentNews. /. lately. The discussions are more like /. was before Dice took over, and it started as a direct result of /.Beta.
I have been spending more time there than on
The the SN community is still small(but growing), and the SN team has been extremely responsive to community feedback, unlike here.
As a side effect(of the above statement), the community has a large influence in the shaping and direction that SN takes...again, not like here.
Just some suggestions....:-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The only internet provider I have available to me is Comcast. How can I choose to let the market have its affect?
Comcast sold Verizon it's wireless spectrum cheap in exchance for Verizon to stop expanding it's FiOS service. Now both advertise each other's services on their websites.
So let's let market considerations take it's toll. In which case, I as a disgruntled customer should be able to basically drive a bulldozer over Comcast's network nodes as I have zero other recourse.
How's that sound?
I THE !@#$ COMCAST CUSTOMER AM PAYING FOR THAT DELIVERY
So !@#$ give it to me, or let me have the fun of bashing the Comcast CEO's head repeatedly with a nerf baseball bat.
And yes, I am yelling slashdot, because I'm pissed and sick and tired of it. And my congressmen are dickheads.
The only internet provider I have available to me is Comcast.
Available to you, or available where you happen to live at the moment? I know it's not a feasible option for everyone, but some people report having taken Internet access into account when choosing where to live.
And lack of regulation leads to monopoly abuse.
The Internet, as it is, can't survive. Both governments and corporations have an interest in stamping out a model based on participation and user-generated content. When those same Powers that Be control the physical infrastructure of the Internet itself, the end result is pretty obvious.
The question is, could anything replace it and do so in time? For example, could the emerging trends of 3D printing and drones result in swarms of "netdrones" enacting a true P2P network? Naturally, the latency would be horrible without a backbone, and there would be a constant war of attrition as these illegal bots were hunted down, but aside from a breakthrough in physics I don't see much alternatives.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You seem to be the one that doesn't understand what net neutrality even means. You have a bunch of companies colluding to degrade services for popular sites like Youtube or Netflix unless they pay a popularity fee. Net neutrality says that you have to treat everybody equally. When you draft a law and then realize that companies are still finding ways to not treat everybody equally you close loop-holes. Honestly, what is there to be skeptical about?
If you're in the camp where all regulation is bad then I start stockpiling weapons now, this libertarian idea that anyone can get anywhere on their own is patently absurd. Most smart businessmen understand that success is a combination of opportunity and skill. Without someone giving you an opportunity to succeed you will fail every time.
If you're no in the camp where all regulation is bad then I fail to see how this particular type of regulation can be seen as a bad thing? Keep in mind, the companies in question here have received billions of dollars of tax payer money. What are we getting in return for it? If you're a Comcast subscriber you're getting worse service for more money and I might add paying the company twice. Making sure we actually get something for our tax dollars and ensuring that a natural monopoly doesn't kill our ability to innovate sounds like a good thing to me.
So where is the skepticism coming from?
It's more like Phil's Hobby Shop paying UPS Mail Innovations to deliver a package. The seller pays UPS, and UPS comes and picks up packages. UPS then sorts them by region and delivers them to local post offices. Then UPS pays each post office to deliver the packages to the buyers.
(Sorry, a properly grammatical title would not fit in the space allotted)
Netflix & Level 3 Only Telling Half The Story, Won’t Detail What Changes They Want To Net Neutrality
In a fairly deep and interesting article over at StreamingMedia.com, Dan Rayburn argues that there is more to the story here and that neither Netflix nor Level 3 are giving us their proposed solutions. He goes through both the Netflix and the Level3 blog posts, taking them apart very carefully.
It is not a network neutrality problem, but rather a business problem. Worthwhile read.
WTF are you talking about? Level 3 is complaining because they are now being extorted by ISPs who are trying to double-dip and charge them hefty fees for peering agreements. This was not a problem when net neutrality regulations were in place, but after Verizon won their case over net neutrality, it took Comcast only five weeks to go on a rampage and start extorting fees from other providers. So this is exactly what you get when you DON'T have net neutrality and you DON'T have regulation.
It's not great for companies like Level 3 because they are the ones being extorted. The current lack of regulation is great for companies like Comcast who are threatening to throttle connections of their own users if content providers don't pay Comcast an extortion fee. Again, it only took five weeks of the regulations being removed before Comcast started pulling this shit. It may be time for you to admit that moderate and sensible regulation is not a bad thing.
There are two different markets here. In the long haul market, the sender pays. In the last mile market, the endpoint pays.
Internet providers should be classified as Utilities.
If they want to get in on content generation/distribution, create another company that pays and plays like all the rest.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'll freely agree that too much regulation is a problem. But too little is also a problem in a non-free market, and telecom in general is almost as non-free as it gets (bettered only by electric, water, sewer, etc.) Since there's not enough competition to force a given broadband provider to not gouge their customers and partners, we (as a society) either have to use regulation or settle for getting gouged.
I say as a society because an individual does have the option (however unpalatable it is) to simply do without internet; "take it or leave it". But that's becoming less and less of a viable solution as more and more of our day to day interactions with each other, with companies, and with government move to the internet. If improvement only happens after substantial numbers quit and quitting is infeasible, then nothing will ever improve.
Of course, I believe it is possible to have an amount of regulation which is neither too much nor too little, though it's harder to maintain that balance as the bureaucratic empires grow and harden. If you don't feel that such a sweet spot is possible, then I can see how less regulation would be preferable to more. But in that case we need to drop this districted monopoly system too, so we can actually hope for some competitors.
Yup! It is a business problem. I really don't want to see government get involved.
..intermediaries such as Cogent and Level 3
Calling companies like these "intermediaries" is disingenuous at best, they are backbone providers and there wouldn't BE an Internet without them.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
They don't want to be accountable for what's on their network (dumb pipes), yet they want control over what's flowing in said pipes. Have their cake and eat it too?
Besides, people are paying for connectivity at specified speeds, what they do with it doesn't matter if it's Youtube, Netflix, or anything else...
Why should Netflix pay? what about ABC, CBS, NBC, Youtube, Porntube, and all the others? What about web sites? Facebook?
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Netflix and Google need to go on the offensive. When Comcast asks for extortion money, shut them off and pay for advertisements for its competitors like Verizon or RCN.
My company has offices with Verizon, XO, Reliance and Cogent. All business dedicated 100mbit circuits. We CONSTANTLY have issues with traffic between our Cogent and Verizon sites. All times of the day and night. Huge packet loss. It turns into an endless battle of it's their fault not ours over and over. In one test that was extreme, we were averaged under 10kb/sec over a 24 hour period between a Cogent and a Verizon connected office with long periods of 10-30% packet loss. Neither side will take responsibility, neither will acknowledge there is even a problem, both blame the other. Both have us hook a single computer up to the eth handoff and test speed to their CO and say "Your circuit is fine, you are getting 95mbps and no packet loss".
Hey Verizon, hey Cogent, I am your customer. I am paying both of you for this for data to flow.
Then make any company violating those terms pay the penalty. What's the penalty you ask? They get fined, to the sum of 100% of their infrastructure, all of it - they are no longer in the communications business, that means any communications business. Yes, that would mean they wouldn't own anything anymore, guess they should have thought about that before they decided to get greedy.
All infrastructure is now common carrier. All towers, common carrier, all substations common carrier. oh - and any patents - public domain, same with any copyrights they may own.
What good would this do? Well here's the deal - all the big media companies that bought into AT&T and Time Warner - all of those movies, music, everything would be public domain and they would no longer make a single fucking nickle off of them.
Bring out the big guns to enforce net neutrality. It's the only way to be sure.
Level 3 and Cogent try to "peer" with Tier 1 carriers when they are really just middlemen taking tier 1 carrier potential customers and offering them a cheaper deal because they "peer" with tier 1 carriers. They are not peers. They are customers and should pay like anyone else. The top carriers have invested in equipment, fiber, facilities, and personnel to manage a much more robust network than either carrier and should be compensated accordingly.
I work for a tier 1 and I can tell you every time we bring up a peering connection with them it is saturated. Just as ISPs can cap bandwidth for home users, we have to cap the peering points with these carriers until they pay for it. Should we just set up racks and racks of routers for them for free (with no revenue) while they siphon customers from us and get paid?
It should not matter who uploads or downloads more. The cost is the same with maintenance and electricity use.
So what should happen when netflix's pipe gets close to saturation? Upgrade it. Where does the cost come from? Their customers.
So what should happen when the isp's pipe gets close to saturation? Upgrade it. Where does the cost come from? Their customers.
Networking has always worked this way. The upload and download usage that has to be the same should no longer matter, the cost is the same no matter what.
I think this should be part of net neutrality. And one more thing to add to it, anyone operating a connection to the internet that is acting as an isp, should be forced to put a percentage of their income toward network improvements including increasing the amount of bandwidth. They shouldn't be allowed to just let it sit there. They have to make their pipes to the internet faster and their customers internet connection then faster. That's fair.
So Comcast cuts off users access to Netflix until Netflix pays Comcast. What if Netflix cuts off access to Comcast users until Comcast pays them? Doesn't Comcast want to be able to offer Netflix to its users?
Why can't Level 3 work into their agreements with ISPs that if the service from ISP's is below a certain standard, ISP's will pay Level 3 $'s to compensate for Level 3's loss of reputation.
Let me take a shot at incorporating this detail: The buyer is paying the post office's parent company for construction and maintenance of post roads.
Netflix isn't free. I'm sure they're making a tidy sum from our subscriptions.
Doesn't Comcast want to be able to offer Netflix to its users?
Of course not. They want to offer their overpriced video-on-demand/PPV service without having any pesky competition.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
But the ISP would be failing to deliver the promised bandwidth. If the ISP would always deliver the bandwidth they had promised to the customer, there wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately the ISPs will always pull the disclaimer about not guaranteeing, that the server you are accessing has spare capacity. Though this disclaimer makes sense, it isn't necessarily true in all cases, where the ISP would apply it.
If A want to send packets to B, and if A is not using all of the upstream that A has purchased from their ISP, and if B is not using all of the upstream that B has purchased from their ISP, then packets from A to B must get through with no packet loss caused by congestion. If there happen to frequently be congestion between the two ISPs preventing packets from being delivered even though neither endpoint is using all their capacity, then the ISPs are simply not delivering, the capacity they sold. And the ISPs should be required to make arrangements to upgrade capacity to match what they sold.
I only consider application of the disclaimer about the capacity of the other endpoint of the communication to be valid, if the other endpoint is actually using all of their purchased capacity. Simultaneously using that disclaimer against both endpoints of a communication smells like fraud.
There are other aspects to communication than the bandwidth. Packet loss and latency are just as important, but they are rarely advertised. The latency between two endpoints must never exceed the sum of the latency advertised to each endpoint and the latency inherent to the physical distance between the endpoints. AFAIK you can expect about 1ms/100km of roundtrip latency with the speed of light in optical fibers. In other words, if A has bought a connection with an advertised 5ms roundtrip latency, and B has bought a connection with an advertised 10ms roundtrip latency, and if the distance between A and B is 10000km, then the overall roundtrip latency must be not more than 5+100+10 milliseconds. Exceeding a roundtrip latency computed this way is not acceptable, not even due to buffering. Additional buffering would be acceptable if the sender explicitly picked a ToS specifying a desire for additional buffering, but it is not acceptable on the default ToS.
Finally packet loss should not exceed the sum of packet loss specified on the connection for each endpoint, unless either or both endpoint is exceeding their purchased capacity.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
After all, if I can find a webcam on the 'net pointed at something to peer at, I should be able to watch it. I don't care if it is of something naughty or scandalous! Nobody should be able to regulate this boy's peering.
Or are you seriously saying telecomms are charging to "move" ones and zeroes separately from the infrastructure and energy through which those ones and zeroes "move"?
Some of what telecoms charge goes toward having built the infrastructure, in the sense that telecoms finance building this infrastructure with debt in the hopes of repaying the debt with subscriber revenue. Some pays for repair to this infrastructure when a backhoe goes in the wrong place or (in my case) a squirrel chews up a subscriber's outside line. And some pays for administration of the infrastructure, such as managing policies on the core routers. Finally, some goes to the investors that assume the risks associated with the infrastructure.
I'll freely agree that too much regulation is a problem. But too little is also a problem in a non-free market, and telecom in general is almost as non-free as it gets
This is the wrong way to look at it. Instead of thinking of it in terms of "more" or "less," think of it in term of "good regulations" and "bad regulations." Then it's easier to understand situations.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That was a bunch of hooey. His whole argument seems to be that whenever Comcast, et. all, decides to degrade Netflix performance by neglecting Netflix's peering partners, then Netflix should just switch peering partners. See? It's clearly Netflix's fault.
What a bunch of bunk.
it is Comcast's own customers that are requesting the traffic
No one seems to get this. Car analogy time? Well, I have a truck analogy anyway, that's close...
Say you're doing construction and you need to increase the height of the ground. So you need some dirt. So you put up a sign that says "clean fill dirt wanted." Someone else doing construction somewhere wants to lower the height of their ground, so they need to get rid of some dirt, and they see your sign. So who pays for moving the dirt? In real life, the people who do this realize that they both benefit. One needs to remove dirt and the other needs to acquire dirt, so they split the cost of transporting the dirt equally.
However, it might not always be that way. Say you're doing a huge project which, for whatever reason, isn't content with just averaging the height of the land, but desperately wants it much higher or lower than average, such that it needs to acquire/remove soil to all available sites within a 100 mile radius. All of those individual sites could argue that they could just as easily send/receive their soil from a much closer site, and therefore pay less when they pay their half of the costs of transportation. So the huge project might have to pay more than half, as its turned into a sort of supply/demand situation. Note that who pays has nothing to do with who sends or receives the soil, it's just a matter that one party needs the other party's cooperation far more than the other does.
The normal "no one pays" peering arrangements are the cases where each ISP needs the other as much as the other needs them. This happens when each peer has half of the internet and so, without the connection, the ISP's customers are going to call them up complaining that they can't access half of the internet. On the other hand, you can't get free internet access from your ISP just because you run a web site because you need the internet far more than the internet needs you. If just your web site is offline, no one (who isn't an idiot) is going to call up their ISP complaining that the internet is broken.
I think the problem here is related to all the news about "Netflix now accounts for 66% of all internet traffic." With statistics like that, Netflix almost is the internet. At least in some sense. It's just one of many things people do on the internet, but it's by far the largest thing.
So ISPs can cut 66% of their network traffic by ignoring just one part of what thier customers consider to be the internet. It may be the biggest piece by volume of traffic, but it's far from the biggest piece in terms of how much time people spend accessing the internet, which is probably a better metric for how users view the internet. Whether it was an hour I couldn't watch Netflix, or an hour I couldn't read Slashdot, I'm equally disappointed even though one of those costs my ISP far more to deliver than the other.
So the situation is that Netflix has a certain amount of demand, as all internet services do, but its demand is diluted over the much larger volume of traffic that is required to make it work. The result is that ISPs are less willing to pay for that traffic. They're trying to optimize customer happiness with as little cash as possible (since they get to keep the cash they don't spend) and spending money to improve netflix's performance doesn't get them the same return on investment as spending money to improve the performance of the remaining 1/3 of their network traffic, a.k.a. the rest of the internet.
You know, I started writing this hoping to support the net neutrality idea, but I think I've pretty much convinced myself that they're all right -- netflix should pay more for its traffic because the ratio of the value it provides to people vs. the amount of traffic it consumes is much lower than other web sites. As an end user, I don't gauge my happiness with the money I spend on my internet access by typing "ifconfig" and looking at the traffic totals, I gauge it acc
...we cannot do without the internet.
True, it would be a step back, but if companies & organizations keep messing with the 'net, there WILL be a point where having 'net access is not worth the trouble - trouble that WE are paying for.
Next time use the subject line for the short descriptive SUBJECT of your comment and put your comment in the COMMENT box.
A business doesn't want to lose a lot of money. This means it doesn't want to be forced into investments in its infrastructure that cause it to lose a lot of money. This means it doesn't want to offer products or services that would force it into money-losing investments. This ends up causing the pricing structure for the services to at least vaguely reflect the cost of providing each service. (It's not perfect, given some of the tying practices to which monopolies have access, but it's still a tendency.)
Because sending and receiving both happen over infrastructure that the ISP built, ISPs charge for both sending and receiving. Because it costs more to build and maintain a last mile, including the cost of a call center that deals with the public and trucks to serve individual households, last mile ISPs charge so much more per gigabyte delivered long haul ISPs charge.
Pricing of long haul transit could have standardized on sender pays, receiver pays, or both pay. The rule that the long-haul market ended up adopting is that the sender pays. A receiver pays model would have opened up new possibilities for financial denial of service attacks.
There's that too. But the first step away from 'all regulation is bad' is realizing that 'no regulation' is not good :)
You're right. Except this is not about paying for bandwith or peering. If it was, this issue would have never made the headlines.
The ISPs are using their position as middlemen to leverage and manipulate the content of the internet itself. They don't want netflix to exist. They want you to pay more money for THEIR version of netflix, and are degrading netflix service in order to do so.
The answer is regulation. Heavy handed bitchslap regulation that teaches these would be crooks a lesson and relegates them public utilities that move bits without interference.
You'll never convince people of that when you're thinking in terms of 'more' and 'less.' Giving them a new way to look at it gives them a chance to re-evaluate (plus it helps them avoid looking like a full moron by debating the most unsolvable thing ever, whether we need more or less regulation).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've already paid Comcast to deliver the dirt to me.
What is happening, is that now Comcast is complaining that I want the dirt I've already ordered and purchased.