Slashdot Mirror
Why the FCC Will Probably Ignore the Public On Network Neutrality
walterbyrd writes The rulemaking process does not function like a popular democracy. In other words, you can't expect that the comment you submit opposing a particular regulation will function like a vote. Rulemaking is more akin to a court proceeding. Changes require systematic, reliable evidence, not emotional expressions . . . In the wake of more than 3 million comments in the present open Internet proceeding-which at first blush appear overwhelmingly in favor of network neutrality-the current Commission is poised to make history in two ways: its decision on net neutrality, and its acknowledgment of public perspectives. It can continue to shrink the comments of ordinary Americans to a summary count and thank-you for their participation. Or, it can opt for a different path.
Don't even need to read the summary:
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
The FCC does not regulate torches and pitchforks.
... so where is the systematic, reliable evidence that not being neutral in the way you treat traffic is somehow better for the future of the Internet? There are two parties: money grubbing corporations looking to maximize profit by double dipping and "the people" that require net neutrality in order to be able to build their future on it. Sure, the party that donates the most money will win.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The FCC chair is a shill for Comcast and that ilk.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
... what was actually going on here. The republicans are against lots of government regulation. They just don't like it in general.
So if you put things to them in that context they're going to be biased against it.
The failure on our part was to explain properly to them that the situation only exists because government regulation makes it very hard for anyone to compete with the big ISPs. If you made that clear it would change the context of the regulation to them and would sway some of them.
Understand where different people are coming from on these issues or you can't reason with them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Rulemaking is more akin to a court proceeding.
No, it's more akin to negotiating a price over some martinis and sending the courier to the bank to make a deposit. The "court proceeding" is also a charade. It doesn't have to be this way, but nobody gives a shit, and will reelect the same scum who are doing this, next month, and again in two years. Let's not talk about the government any more. Let's discuss why people want it like this. The government is just a reflection of it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The real reason is we don't live in a republic anymore but a plutocary. Even a fair courtcase would find in favor of net Neutrality
I have received some very nice e-mails from my representatives agreeing with my correspondence to support NN. Even more shocking, one made a complete turn around. I feel that our voices were heard a little! The best line was from Maria Cantwell stating "Without strong protections, broadband Internet providers will likely favor their own or affiliated content, service, and applications because they have the economic incentives and technical means to do so."
I think poor Walter means that "It can continue to SHIRK the comments of ordinary Americans" not shrink.
http://dictionary.reference.co...
Hire me...
Let's take a realistic approach to what will happen: Who can provide the FCC the most economic encouragement to go their way? That's the way they will good.
"It'll be good for the economy," they'll say. The fact they have a new summer retreat on Martha's Vineyard will have nothing to do with it. "Don't worry, we won't let the gap between 'normal' speed and 'high-speed' be very big," they'll tell us. While many people are still waiting to get the minimum of 4 Mbps that qualifies as 'broadband.' by their rule.
It's just the way it will likely be, so we should get used to it, or we should choose to elect people who still listen to the will of the People, who are Statesmen and not Politicians, and have a backbone to do what's right, regardless of whether that's blue, or red.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
These networks are owned by the ISPs. It seems to me that government, before it steps in and tells them how best to run their networks, should have the burden of showing how net neutrality is better for the network than prioritization schemes.
Geez, it's even got it's own damned Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
1. Give government power to regulate something.
2. Groups involved in that something gain effective control over regulations because no one else understands the specifics nor gives a flying fuck.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!!
One staffer explained why some comments in the record matter more than others, saying a lot of comments submitted by ordinary citizens are not "usually very deep or analytical or, you know, substantiated by evidence, documentary or otherwise. They're usually expressions of opinion." That means these kinds of comments are "not usually reviewed at a very high level, because they didn't need to be."
And yet when the US has one of the poorest broadband infiltrations of any western nation, at significantly higher costs, this is not prima facie evidence that the FCC is corrupt or incompetent?
I mean, if we are going by substantiated evidence, can the FCC point to ANY of its rulings where it asked for public opinion having a positive impact beyond enriching a select few?
I get that mob rule isn't the most effective way to govern. I understand that there may be some procedural case law that the public is unaware of, let alone how it will impact other areas.
But I'm also keenly aware of regulatory capture as well, and the continued misgivings most American have about government accountability.
And one of the problems with regulatory agencies is that there is minimal accountability, and is the worst aspects of Nanny Statism where only Lords are fit to rule the masses, and heaven forbid that a lowly welder might have some insight into how he thinks he should be best governed.
Contrary to what people think, opinions expressed in comments submitted to the FCC are not the same as democratic majorities. Neither, for that matter, are preferences expressed in polls.
I wish I had points to vote this up.
What you describe is exactly how it's supposed to work. If the government wants to control the hundreds of billions of dollars of network infrastructure that private companies have invested it, it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest.
And - frankly - it's not. Motivating competition in the last-mile space is a MUCH more effective method for achieving the same interest, AND has lots of other benefits as well in terms of driving prices down and service-offerings up.
"government of the people, by the people, for the people". our system seems to have lost track of the basic principles. just as the courts ignore portions of the constitution, such as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", or "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state".
Not to say that there isn't lots of money and influence-making behind the scenes, but a key problem with policies that are desired by corporations but disliked by individuals is that the corporation can and will pay for evidence to be created supporting their position.
Evidence has a loose definition, of course, and a responsible regulator will do their homework to tell the difference between shoddy evidence and strong evidence. But when evidence is submitted that explains how a policy decision plausibly leads to [xyz] effects, that wins real points.
What is sure is that on the other side, even millions of people getting together won't produce hard evidence that a court/rule-making body can rely on. In the end, even millions people's opinions will only amount to a few soft statistics.
Filling this gap on the "people's side" is somewhat the role of academia/thinktanks/non-profits to fill, but in a fast moving industry they are unlikely to move faster than a corporation that wants to back something.
I think some of the ISPs are worried that legitimate packet prioritization is going be outlawed along with other sorts of prioritization due to ignorance of technology by legislators or regulators.
I've had discussions with coworkers in IT that were very sharp but still couldn't understand why it might be beneficial to prioritize voice packets over web traffic, for example. They really believed FIFO was the only fair way to treat packets and that anything else was somehow morally wrong.
And before some people chime in and say "but that's not what we mean", let me say that's exactly what some people mean by net neutrality. Maybe it's not what you mean, but there's no guarantee that your more informed view of net neutrality is going to be made into law.
This could have been a one word article.
You present this as if net neutrality was a simple policy choice. But what does that even mean? Does net neutrality mean that every connection has the same latency and bandwidth guarantees as every other? Why is that a good thing? What do you even mean by net neutrality?
Actually, those "money grubbing corporations" are likely just going to use "net neutrality" regulation to enrich themselves, because what feeds the flames of regulatory capture is new regulations.
Besides, most of those "money grubbing corporations" are publicly traded anyway, so if you think they are such a good deal, you can just buy your own shares.
Except that those private companies have received 1. direct subsidies, 2. Free intellectual property usage (basic TCP/IP technologies) and 3. free usage of rights of way.
So, since we, the public, have heavily subsidised those privately owned networks, we should also have the right to regulate them. Finally, since the ISPs have been pushing for local monopoly status, they should accept that they are treated like a local monopoly (subject to regulation).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
No, that's not how it works. You don't get to (essentially) trick them into using technologies, and then say, "well, since you're using that thing we put into the public domain, now we get to tell you what to do with it." The same thing with subsidization. Just because I donated to a kickstarter campaign today doesn't mean I get to go to the company five years down the road and say "Remember that $100 I kicked in? Now I get to tell you how to run the company, even though you never agreed to that at the time."
As for "free usage rights of way", those rights of way aren't free. They pay for them. There may be government assistance in terms of mandating that - where necessary - they are given the ability to buy the rights of way through eminent domain, but make no mistake, they weren't "given".
Why the FCC will probably ignore the public on *
1 Because they can
2 Because fuck you because see #1
3 the public has the shittiest lobby groups
Hahahahah, that's a big load of BS. Unless the definition of "evidence" is "lobbying".
... so where is the systematic, reliable evidence that not being neutral in the way you treat traffic is somehow better for the future of the Internet?
This is the part that grabbed my attention. The whole piece is pretty disingenuous in the way it frames the issue. Just check out this quotation from an FCC staffer:
"I find the whole rulemaking context almost hilarious in many instances, because you know you're reading something, and you know it's not true. And you're guessing, you know, the person is hallucinating." Ordinary comments were, in other words, prone to error and lacked truthfulness, in the eyes of many of the Commission's staff.
It's a subtle bit of work, but the author of the piece implies not only that:
a) The FCC gets to ignore most comments because its rules require arguments to be made on technical grounds (true); but also that
b) The public opinion is not just wrong, it's 'hallucinating' (false).
The paternalistic tone of the article was a little much, too. Allow me to fisk it:
In the interviews I conducted for my dissertation [just had to get that in, didn't you?], FCC commissioners and a handful of staffers (e.g., civil servants, as opposed to political appointees) [so... staffers, then?] explained that the rulemaking process does not function like a popular democracy. [It's not a vote. Got it.] In other words, you can't expect that the comment you submit opposing a particular regulation will function like a vote. [Right. Not a vote. Got it.] Rulemaking is more akin to a court proceeding. Changes require systematic, reliable evidence, not emotional expressions. [Yeah. It's not a vote. I fucking got it.] And with the exception of Democrat Commissioners Copps and Adelstein, the people I spoke with at the FCC considered citizen input during the media ownership proceeding as emotional and superficial content. [Ah so it's not really like a court, then. 'Cause courts aren't politicised.]
Not once - not once in this article does the author admit what's central to the entire fucking issue - this is a politicised process. It's not a popular issue only because the power brokers don't want it to be. Though truth be told, they're fine with appearing to support the popular will when it coincides with whatever's politically expedient for them.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
1) Thank God they don't pay attention to most public comments. Can you imagine the magnitude of the disaster that would result from a California style of mob-rule in Washington? We definitely DON'T need THAT.
2) They pay far too much attention to their corporate sponsors instead of doing what they are paid to do- use their brains and think about how to give us the best possible services. It's no surprise that the Republicans have a major hand in screwing us all, after all, their platform includes denial of science.
Breaking up the regional monopolies and regulating both broadband and wireless would be a good start. Or at least threaten it to the point where the big ISP's realize they can either back the hell off or lose the whole game with a regulatory trump card.
While we're at it ( in my alternate universe ) we can do the same thing with big pharm and medical providers. There isn't a legitimate reason for any legal drug to cost $100,000 + per year ( cancer drugs are notorious for this ) nor a single visit to the hospital resulting in bankruptcy ( even if you have insurance )
In short, Big Corp needs a giant regulatory kick in the balls or they can gtfo.
I think it's more fair to say that you get what you pay for in packets per second. There is a large amount total amount of bandwidth, but it's not unlimited. If people can agree on that then how can it be argued honestly that some form of metering and charging by fractional use or ability to use is not fair?
These networks are owned by the ISPs. It seems to me that government, before it steps in and tells them how best to run their networks, should have the burden of showing how net neutrality is better for the network than prioritization schemes.
You've got your cart on the wrong side of your horse, young man.
It's up to the ISPs to demonstrate to the people (via government) that they're using the resources —to which they have been granted limited monopoly rights— in the public interest, and that their pursuit of profits is not leading them into anti-consumer activity such as creating artificial scarcity for extortionary purposes when negotiating with other network operators, holding their users hostage, arbitrarily throttling bandwidth to customers whom they have testified are causing network congestion when in fact no such congestion exists.
For example.
Network Neutrality is the neutral position. It's not telling ISPs how to run their network - it's telling them to stop fucking with their customers' traffic. It's telling the ISPs to stop indulging in funny business and get back to making money the old-fashioned way: by providing an actual fucking service.
But yeah, fuck big government and Ayn Rand and America Fuck Yeah and all that because... Oh, I don't know, because who the fuck cares any more? This stopped being a dialogue years ago.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
That means about 1% of the public thought it was worth commenting on. That's not enough to make a lot of waves unless that 1% is planning to make a lot of campaign donations or something.
Oh, frell off. you know, I know, everyone knows that net neutrality doesn't mean every connection has the same latency and bandwidth. It doesn't mean you can't prioritize a skype connection over a download.... It means you can't prioritize Company A's traffic over Company B's traffic because Company B didn't pay the ransom. It especially means you can't prioritize your own content over everyone elses to stifle competition.
Damn Trolls...
Remind me how Net Neutrality was passed into law by our officially elected representatives again...
If you need to prioritize voice traffic on your network then you're network is in serious need of an upgrade. 20 years ago when VOIP was brand new this was a necessity as 6.4k/channel was actually a chunk of your connection. In the modern world we live in with 10, 40, and 100gig ethernet available to the players being discussed in this thread and you're talking about 6.4 being a laughable amount of traffic. The only reason it needs to be prioritized is because of the DPI systems imposing completely unnecessary bottlenecks on these networks.
As someone that manages hundreds of networks for companies ranging between 5 computers and 5000 I can confidently tell you that VOIP doesn't require QoS anymore. The only remaining prioritization comes in the form of HD video transmission, this can be throttled during times when there is legitimate congestion. Of course the ISPs in question actually aren't congested to the point where Level 3 is trying not to break its sarcasm unit when Verizon trumps out that old chestnut. When a single 10gig link costing about $1500 to deploy at the most is all it takes to alleviate congestion its pretty easy to come to the conclusion that the cause of the congestion isn't the network, but that of business policy creating a problem that doesn't need to exist.
Hence why I think that ultimately, the battle over municipal broadband projects goes hand-in-hand with the debate about net neturality. When all is said and done, the fact of the matter is that there is a colossal and growing demand for a service that the incumbent broadband providers are not only failing spectaculary to give us, but are continuously warping and degrading to sate their own greed. Even if they successfully kill net neutrality and municipal broadband for now, they will only prolong the inevitable. Society has tasted what a free and open Internet can give us, and will only grow more and more outraged if it is withheld. The technology-backwards old farts in congress will eventually die off, and even the misguided people who ate the boloney they were fed by the ISPs and their shills will see reality as our broadband infrastructure becomes more and more of a joke compared to every other developed country.
This is pretty much the way I see it, working in the field. On the "pro-net-neutrality" side there are those with reasonable views on balancing common carriage with legitimate needs for priority, some with a basic level of network literacy with a wide range of conflicting specific suggestions who don't usually understand the consequences of what they are asking for, and a whole lot of people who don't even understand what it is they are asking for and prefer to converse in vague terms and catch phrases. I doubt there are even 3 million Americans who know what "statistical multiplexing" means so how are they supposed to weigh in on the issue.
Being a progressive my peers are generally surprised when I answer :"it depends" when asked whether I support "net neutrality" rather than "yes."
Someone had to do it.
it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest. And - frankly - it's not.
Yes, it is. See common carrier. It has been tested empirically for more than a century including physical carriage networks. The empirical testing has shown that when carriers are prohibited from discriminatory behavior, the resulting increase in competition among merchants and manufacturers who use the carriage networks results in greater overall economic expansion. It is why FedEx is not permitted to negotiate preferred carrier status with one manufacturer to inhibit shipments made by a competing manufacturer.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
So it would be easy to say "FIFO, anything else is illegal." That solves any kind of throttling and such nicely and has no way around it. However, as you note, it has the problem of making any kind of useful QoS undoable. It isn't like QoS is something that nobody wants either, there's a reason why all the nice business gear you get has support for it. Ok so we'd like to allow that. Thing is, how do you write the law so that it doesn't mess with legit QoS, but doesn't have loopholes that allow companies to throttle traffic they don't like? It isn't an easy answer.
I'm sorry, but there is no easy way to say this: You are an idiot.
There is a clear difference between a Kickstarter campaign and direct subsidies from taxpayers. So let's try another example: I put money into a company in the form of an investment (shares) and, in your world, I don't get any say over how the company is run?
Kickstarters are just an end-run around rules that limit certain types of risky investments to the wealthy. They don't represent a wider example. They are not even investments.
Companies pay for use of the rights of way? They pay the homeowners for the use of the poles that are in back gardens, do they? I think not.
Policy results have correlation with public opinion that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. See this article for the details.
We didn't put anything into the "public domain". That concept has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion. We're not talking copyright here.
The public paid these companies to develop something for the public. We commissioned/bought a product. It's our product. They don't get to tell us how to use it.
Did you miss the part where taxes come out of the pockets of the public and go towards projects for the public? It's a group buy.
And what kind of "legitimate packet priorization" would that be? Because I can't really think of any right now. If you have trouble delivering your real time dependent services, you can either up your bandwidth or not offer them rather than keep overselling 1:1000 and throttle everything else into oblivion.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> everyone knows that net neutrality doesn't mean every connection has the same latency and bandwidth. It means you can't prioritize Company A's traffic over Company B's traffic
You and I know somewhat what a REASONABLE set of rules of rules might be, but GP is right as to the draft language. It basically said every packet has to be treated the same. As to company A and company B, if company A is a hospital and company B is a Nigerian prince, that's a difficult situation to write legislation for. Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first? That's not allowed if the rule is "all users must be treated the same."
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ? They are both http web traffic.
Administrators making case-by-case decisions can make reasonable decisions in most cases. Coming up with simple rules deciding what admins must do in all cases for the next 20 years is much trickier, especially for bureaucrats who don't know the tech as well.
Why did they ask for submissions on the subject? Wouldn't an online poll have been sufficient to ignore?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm sorry, but there is no easy way to say this: You are an idiot.
There is a clear difference between a Kickstarter campaign and direct subsidies from taxpayers. So let's try another example: I put money into a company in the form of an investment (shares) and, in your world, I don't get any say over how the company is run?
Kickstarters are just an end-run around rules that limit certain types of risky investments to the wealthy. They don't represent a wider example. They are not even investments.
Companies pay for use of the rights of way? They pay the homeowners for the use of the poles that are in back gardens, do they? I think not.
Why should they pay you to run lines from your property line to your house? They're the ones footing the construction and maintenance costs, and you're the one who wants the demarc at your house instead of the alley.
And yes, they do pay to use the poles in the "back gardens". They pay the city/county for use of the right of way, and in some situations they will work out a deal with a private landowner to pay for access across his or her private property.
You also seem to be confused over how free access to IP works. If a technology is free for use without restriction, that doesn't mean the person who gave the license away can come back later and say "Oh, by the way now I want a say in how you use it". Too bad, it was put into public domain.
> Motivating competition in the last-mile space is a MUCH more effective method [...]
Just REPEATING a dogma and PUTTING it in CAPITAL LETTERS doesn't MAKE it MORE true. Sheesh.
I know some people worship the Invisible Hand, and I have some respect and tolerance for religions, but it's getting ridiculous.
So now the guy running the FCC, who for all intents has "Property of the Cable Industry" and his capital equipment serial number tattooed on his ass, is getting ready to turn US internet access into a monopoly that will dive the user experience back to the days of 9600 baud dial up access. So where are the threats and bluster? Where are the outraged howls about inalienable rights, and prying guns out of their cold dead hands? Sound of crickets...
In one case there is a black guy, and in the other case a conservative old white guy. I can't imagine why one would invoke talk of violence, and the other gets none of that flack. Gosh, what could possibly be the reason?
Why is Snark Required?
So I've got a question that seems like none of the ISP's have thought of. As long as internet is an open access kind of thing people essentially make their service more attractive for them. Comcast isn't selling you anything you want. They are selling you access to the things you want, Youtube, Netflix, Slashdot, news, online games.
Nobody says "Man I love me my Comcast, they say "Man I love me my Netflix".
If we are gonna break down the ISP's into interfering middle men instead of simple facilitators whats to stop all the big name content providers from asking for a cut for all the value they add to the internet from the ISP's?
What happens when Amazaon, Netflix, Google, and Facebook decide that if the ISP's are allowed to abuse them they can abuse the ISP's?
Precedent is already there, so you'd think they'd have noticed. TV channels and show exclusivity.
Sure there's like no competition in the ISP market but the four named above have enough cash to make the threat of building their own a real one, and there's always Bell, so the big ISPs would have to take negotiations seriously.
As someone that manages hundreds of networks for companies ranging between 5 computers and 5000 I can confidently tell you that VOIP doesn't require QoS anymore.
Until the first DDoS attack or malware infestation or plain old misconfiguration which will inundate the network and make all VoIP streams sputter out and die. People: please keep deploying QoS and don't relegate VoIP to bulk. Sooner or later that will save your network and your hide.
Actually skype is a program made by a company known as skype, which is now owned by microsoft.
If you're downloading a file from apple.com and your skype software is deliberately interrupted, you have just now discriminated over Company A's traffic over company B's traffic.
Why isn't the issue, why are the theoritcal ( and very likely reasons ) people will do this.
The issue is we don't want to be manipulated on that level.
So yes, net neutrality actually does mean the things you said it doesn't.
Actually it does mean you can't prioritize a Skype connection over a download, because that would indeed be prioritizing company A's traffic over company B's traffic. Just because you prioritize certain kinds of traffic on your network, where you're the sole user (or benevolent dictator), doesn't mean VoIP or streaming media packets are special little snowflakes which are allowed preferential treatment on an ISP's network. The customers paid for their bandwidth. What they can do with it is not for the ISP to decide. Congestion is a failure to provide sufficient bandwidth, not an excuse to start triaging packets.
But ISPs get to trick people pay and then companies pay and govenrment pay? So triple dipping is ok, but making sure it's even someone equal is not?
How about those media rights? Soon you'll pay for "buying", for each use and for the equipment and then some pirate tax and govenrment will be paying them, DING DING DING pentadruple dipping! BONUS points!
Hmm, then ISPs need to up their game and you can only use equipment "bought" from them in THEIR networks, that handles the hardware aspect, then they need the ISP tax and then with the rising monthly payment, you need to start paying for each bit as well. The last thing is ISPs are turned into religions and they can collect their own taxes! DING DING DING DING! septuple dipping! MEGA BONUS!
Network Neutrality is a great concept for the consumer, but not for the provider. So given that there are millions of comments broadly in favour of NN in the "Public Consultation" phase and a small group of lobbyists/back-room power brokers against NN, we get to see where the power lies - with the public who vote into power the politicians who set direction for the FCC, or the corporate interests behind the scenes.
The biggest part of the problem, though, is that there is no real choice in the domestic internet provider markets in the US. There is certainly the illusion of choice, but in each market, the vast majority of consumers have access to a single incumbent backbone provider who also provide "last mile" connectivity, or one of a small number of alternatives which are either themselves clients of the backbone provider re-using and reselling that provider's last-mile capability or alternative access methods which offer a service which is either inferior or significantly more expensive.
The traditional capitalist approach to this is for a smaller, hungrier, competitor to the incumbent to set up shop and offer a better service for lower cost, thus enticing customers away from the incumbent and providing the new competitor with the revenue to expand services. In this scenario, centrally enforced Network Neutrality is not required - if one provider chooses to prioritize traffic in a way that its' customers do not like, they can leave in favour of the alternative. However, the massive initial infrastructure costs associated with setting up as a backbone ISP with last-mile connectivity, so that the new competitor is not dependent on the existing incumbent breaks the model, and you need high-value independent actors, such as Google, going in and setting up their own networks, because they can absorb the huge initial capital outlay.
The alternative to having several "backbone plus last-mile" providers with broad or total coverage in each region (which would be eye-wateringly expensive) would be for the backbone elements to be treated as utilities/managed by independent Not For Profit entities, and for all ISPs to be resellers of bandwidth competing on services and price.
Once you have genuine competition, Net Neutrality becomes something that individual providers (resellers) can offer to their customers or not (although verifying that a provider actually IS offering Net Neutrality would probably be beyond Joe Public and most of them would not know or care, anyway). A customer can choose to sign up to a service provider who guarantees low latency for online gaming, or one with high video streaming bandwidth, or the odd one who offer a life-size Lara Croft blowup doll, if they choose to. Because the free market with a low barrier to entry encourages providers to provide the services that the customer wants and is willing to pay for.
What he's saying, put bluntly, is that most of the people making comments obviously have no understanding at all of how Carrier grade networks actually operate.
And he's right. Just looking at the comments here and on other tech forums it's astonishing that so many people have such massive misconceptions about how large scale networks, and the internet in general, actually function.
But from what I've read, what most people don't like seeing is a large company using their position to extort fees from other companies, and they don't like seeing companies treat direct competitors' traffic in a punitive fashion. Which I agree are both problems, the big question is how do we solve those issues without fucking things up entirely. Simply saying "treat it all equally" is not realistic when dealing with large scale networks. We need to be careful what we ask for, as there could be some very severe unintended consequences stemming from broad legislation or regulation.
That's pretty simple. Allow the user to prioritize their own traffic. There is even 3 bits set aside for this in the IP header known as precedence. Then do QoS using that as your indicator on what to drop first if connections become overtaxed. Which, was the exact purpose of those bits but no one ever actually implemented them. I'd be more than happy to tell my browser, etc to please mark those packets as "Best Effort", but please mark my actual browsing as "Priority", my netflix and pandora as "Immediate", and Skype and VoIP as "Flash".
Note that doesn't mean always don't throttle stuff I have marked as Flash, because then everyone will just mark everything as a high priority. Just throttle the packets I marked lowest first, and if there aren't enough of low priority packets then throttle the next highest priority until necessary. Or limit the number of packets per second for each tier, and silently treat them as a lower tier if there are too many.
I know you meant Skype as a genericised trademark, or just a common example of a technology (iPod = MP3 player etc), but it was a pretty silly mistake to make.
:D
Extension of Muphry's Law maybe?
Still, better clarify:
It doesn't mean you can't prioritize VoIP connection over a download....
Captcha: prolific
And where, pray tell, will be the competition when Time-Warner, Comcast or just Time-Cast, is every mile from first to last?
They have already proven (to us and to themselves) that one can easily achieve a stranglehold over a state-subsidized, privately-owned-yet-no-strings-attached set of networks and jack the prices up, when they even deign to offer as high speed internet for high prices what most of the rest of the world (short of other 3rd world countries like Ethiopia and even then) consider barely better than dialup.
The service they offer is dismal, the speeds they offer snail-like, the data-plans are strangulating, more and more of said data plans are eaten up by ads injected by those charging us for said dataplans themselves, and the US is falling behind everywhere not restricted to satellite-only access. This on lines and infrastructure taxpayers have paid for... several times over, including in places that have never seen said infrastructure yet (but the money sure got pocketed).
Now they want to triple-dip. Are you truly suggesting the situation will improve by letting them run free, rather than ensuring their heads roll?
Still wrong. You can't prioritize VoIP over downloads with net neutrality. That doesn't give everybody the same latency or bandwidth, but it prevents ISPs from choosing what you can do with the bandwidth that you paid for. Your download may be less important to you than your VoIP traffic, but your download is not less important than my VoIP traffic (or else why did you pay the same for the same bandwidth?)
You and I know somewhat what a REASONABLE set of rules of rules might be, but GP is right as to the draft language. It basically said every packet has to be treated the same. As to company A and company B, if company A is a hospital and company B is a Nigerian prince, that's a difficult situation to write legislation for. Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first? That's not allowed if the rule is "all users must be treated the same."
I don't see how "the ISP should treat every packet the same" is unreasonable. The ISP should guarantee latency, throughput, jitter, availability, etc. per their SLAs. The end user can do their own QOS and decide whether they want netflix or remote robotic surgeries to take priority. If the user needs a stronger guarantee, they should get a better connection with a better SLA. None of this is illegal or unreasonable.
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ? They are both http web traffic.
Data should be delivered as determined by the client and the server, not the ISP. I'm not a web developer, but I suspect any real browser will load title, layout, text, then images.
Administrators making case-by-case decisions can make reasonable decisions in most cases. Coming up with simple rules deciding what admins must do in all cases for the next 20 years is much trickier, especially for bureaucrats who don't know the tech as well.
Thanks for proving my point. Local administrators should be allowed to prioritize their own networks. ISPs coming up with simple rules that override admins is much trickier, especially for large media companies with conflicts of interest. I mean, bureaucrats.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Our governments' policies, national and local, are not up for sale - that deal closed ages ago, about the time the Civil War wrapped up. What we have been seeing since in the matter of $$$ is only the dividends paid to Congress on the investment made at the time that "company" was formed. Congress gets to remind the board of directors that they own minority shares at stockholder meetings but they have no controlling interest, certainly not when the money keeps rolling in to remind them of how successful things have been managed. The names and faces change as the decades roll by, but ordinary citizens are only consumers who long ago forfeited the opportunity to do more than buy the products and wait eagerly for the next new delights.
3 million people having a coherent opinion on the subject is as systematic, reliable evidence as any other survey of public opinion. That the bulk of those 3 million are likely saying that network neutrality is a really good idea should be considered a fairly reliable data point. I'm not sure it would be a good idea for the FCC to just brush it off.
Log in or piss off.
Since when is rampant speculation not supported by any facts equal to journalism?
At work we have a 100/100mbit internet connection (fiber), "business class" from a very solid ISP. We're 10 people here. Not long ago internet was horribly slow to the point that it took literally a minute to load my usual news site. Ping was up in the 1-2 second range.
Turned out one of my coworkers was downloading the some Windows ISOs from Microsoft.
If we didn't have QoS on the VOIP I'm pretty sure we would have noticed quite quickly.
The networks run physical infrastructure across public lands. Furthermore, they hold natural monopolies at both local and state levels. The government - and citizens - have an interest in equal access to that infrastructure. Particularly since open communication access is crucial to a functioning market. These ISPs are engaging in restraint of trade, hobbling competition not just in their own market but across whole swaths of the economy with potential for vast damage to market competition.
Even Milton Friedman would recognize the danger here.
And what kind of "legitimate packet priorization" would that be? Because I can't really think of any right now. If you have trouble delivering your real time dependent services, you can either up your bandwidth or not offer them rather than keep overselling 1:1000 and throttle everything else into oblivion.
Legitimate packet prioritization is based on the service, not on the vendor. "Quality of Service" is already part of TCP/IP, and lets routers know how to balance latency and throughput. For example, it is more important to deliver VOIP or streaming video packets on time than to deliver SYN/ACK packets quickly. You should let VOIP packets skip ahead of SYN packets or FTP packets. However, it is not appropriate to let Verizon VOIP packets skip ahead of Nextiva VOIP packets, just because Verizon has paid for that prioritization.
Common carrier rules mean that the carrier can't discriminate among its clients, they can still distinguish between "First class" and "Book rate" services.
It is why FedEx is not permitted to negotiate preferred carrier status with one manufacturer to inhibit shipments made by a competing manufacturer.
Except FedEx does do such things. The rate you pay Fedex versus the rate I pay FedEx, versus the rate Amazon pays FedEx are all different, because it IS in fact doing such negotiation.
Further, The government hasn't shown that there is any actual harm caused by the model that folks like Comcast intend to use regarding cost-recovery of high-bandwidth content-providers. There's been a lot of emotion-laden assertions made, but precious little actual evidence. Trying to assert that the internet is like "a series of UPS trucks", as you do, is not in any way an apt analogy, and you know it (or should, at any rate, if you're hanging out on a site like Slashdot).
Something's wrong with your setup.
Our Comcast "business class" is 15Mbit/sec and we can stream HD video, which seems to average about 6-7 Mbit/sec, without any kind of noticeable issues with web access.
One user out of 10 on a 100Mbit connection shouldn't render it unusable.
As to company A and company B, if company A is a hospital and company B is a Nigerian prince, that's a difficult situation to write legislation for. Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first?
No, that's not ok. Email is already a best-effort service without guaranteed delivery. If the S&R team actually needs a particular piece of information delivered immediately, they should choose a service that is optimized for that purpose. It's not the job of every internet middleman between here and Beijing to rank the moral value of each IP packet or source.
Note that this is different from an ISP determining that an email source is "spam" and blacklisting that source.
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ?
Aside from the technical fact that the client only finds the ads in the web page text, it is (again) not appropriate for the internet middlemen to determine whether the client is more interested in images from doubleclick or images from slashdot. If the client chooses to prioritize which images it requests, that's a completely different question. The point of net neutrality is that, within a recognized communication stream, people who transfer the data should not look at the data to determine whether or how quickly to forward it. The post office accepts your letter, looks at the postage you've paid, and delivers it. It will deliver my Priority Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes, but it will not deliver Netflix Media Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes.
I know, we should do one of those White House petitions online, I'm sure that will make a difference?
-Styopa
The FCC got three million responses, or almost one percent of the entire US population. And FCC staffers deride the public comment process as filled with 'hilarious hallucinations.' Because, according to this staffer, those comments submitted by 'legal and economic experts' prepared under the employ of institutions with a vested interest "collated information in a more systematic way" and "from a much broader population of consumers."
Think about this. Actual citizen voices don't matter because private interests have the money to hire people and staff time to organize large submissions with systematically collated information about the population of Net product consumers. Do you see how citizenship to impact public policy has been stripped from the process, leaving the public as nothing more than consumers of product in a rigged market?
They think we don't understand. That we're simply unqualified to understand the nuance of policy. But that's clearly not the case. As highly qualified Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig have been stumping for Net Neutrality for the better part of a decade. These people are not policy stupid. They've submitted comments with 'systematically collated information' by nationally and internationally recognized experts.
These FCC staffers quoted would have us believe the public is misinformed and uneducated. That is the spin they want to present to the press.
It's offensive. Regardless of what position you take on the matter.
I don't see how "the ISP should treat every packet the same" is unreasonable. The ISP should guarantee latency, throughput, jitter, availability, etc. per their SLAs. The end user can do their own QOS and decide whether they want netflix or remote robotic surgeries to take priority. If the user needs a stronger guarantee, they should get a better connection with a better SLA. None of this is illegal or unreasonable.
That's fine for the client ISP and the server ISP, but their packets will traverse an unknown number of intermediates whose networks are completely out of the control of server, server's ISP, client, and client's ISP. In fact, one of the internet design principles is that the physical network is unreliable and subject to congestion. This is unavoidable: traffic grows to fill the available bandwidth, and during times of peak demand, every network can be congested
This is why the internet has different protocols. Compare Email and VOIP: for VOIP it is essential that each packet be delivered, in order, and as quickly as possible. Delays of even 100ms create audible distortion. For email, your message is still understandable if it's delivered 5 minutes late. SMTP has that resiliency built-in: if it fails to deliver a packet right now, it will keep trying, periodically, for a day. Eventually, it will find a time when the network is uncontested and it can transfer that terabyte attachment. If your VOIP packet has to wait around until SMTP has delivered that attachment, you're going to think someone has hung up on you.
I know, now that everything is a browser plug-in, that it's easy to forget that HTTP is only one of many protocols on the internet. It's completely appropriate prioritize RTP/RTCP (VoIP) over SMTP or FTP. The problem is when an internet middleman decides it should be able to prioritize YouTube's HTTP over Hulu's HTTP, just because YouTube has paid a ransom.
300 billion$.
In 2006 dollars.
That's how much tax subsidy the ISP industry has recieved from the public.
subsidy that was SUPPOSED to pay for expanding the "last mile" across the country, to every nook and cranny the they did with telephone decades before.
Only they pocketed the money instead and delivered nothing in return for it.
And yes, they very much were given.
You're nothing but a shill.
If you give Comcast the ability to become the gatekeeper to their competitors services you have crossed the line. This is not about emotions rather stifling the freemarket. At least change the equasion so that comcast charges the customer directly so the customer knows who is milking then and can then choose the lowest bidder of those services ( if there is one, but thats another problem). The customer is already paying for Internet services, and the costs of that service should be directly reflected in that price. Its dangerous to give the ISP the right to adjust the indirect costs of other businesses whos services are depending on that connection that is already paid for by the customers monthly fees. Allow this and Comcast will be able to kill off their direct competition.
Yes....because my 1 share at 100$ is really going to compete with the millions of shares the controlling members have?
"Publicly traded" companies are like baseball cards or pokemon for rich people. We lowly poors may snag a share here and there, but we're just along for the ride.
Then then need to work on their English comprehension.
NETWORK Neutrality means I treat one network as equal to another. Therefore, I will treat packets from Akamai the same as Netflix and the same as Comcast.
What you're thinking of is PACKET or APPLICATION Neutrality, where I treat each packet the same regardless if it is voice, email, FTP, torrent, or video.
In Network Neutrality, it is perfectly acceptable to treat video has higher priority than FTP, as long as you treat video from every *network* the same way. So, internal Comcast video will get the same QoS marking as Netflix video.
Just because some people don't understand the words they're using isn't a reason to abandon a whole idea.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
But that is what the right wing talking heads have been pushing. That or it will mean that Google will need to serve you up opposing ideas to be "Fair and Balance".
Time to offend someone
ISPs don't have their networks to be their networks; they have their networks to be other peoples networks.
Can we make a new, separate, free internet? If you get into a cab, can it go 15mph until you pay more? Should all roads be private and then should the owners be allowed to decide who/what businesses can drive on the roads, in what lanes and how fast?
In previously seen communist systems, the party leaders decide what businesses are needed and should flourish. In this system, intermediaries, road builders, network providers, gate keepers, choke point holders, renters and property owners decide, not the free market, nor the public.
It's also been tested that when this is ignored things go wrong, see standard oil and there anti-competitive collusion with the railroad companies
Trying to assert that the internet is like "a series of UPS trucks", as you do, is not in any way an apt analogy, and you know it (or should, at any rate, if you're hanging out on a site like Slashdot).
Of course the Internet isn't a series of UPS trucks.
When something is shipped via UPS, only one party pays UPS. Sure, sometimes the other party pays the first party so they can pay UPS, but UPS doesn't collect money for the same package from multiple parties. On the other hand, ISPs do collect money for the same packet from multiple parties. This is a bad thing and net neutrality should prevent it.
If you can't understand why it's important that ISPs not be able to be paid more than once for the same packet, then you really shouldn't be in a discussion about whether the government should or shouldn't impose regulations on ISPs.
> I don't see how "the ISP should treat every packet the same" is unreasonable. ...
> If the user needs a stronger guarantee, they should get a better connection with a better SLA. None of this is illegal or unreasonable.
In your first sentence you made it ILLEGAL to sell New York City a more reliable connection with a better for emergency services to use for emergency commications. Everyone has to have the same SLA that Netflix does. Remember, every packet has to be treated the same.
It truly is a non-trivial issue, and any simplistic bumper sticker policy will be wrong. Of course, restraint of trade is ALREADY unlawful, and throttling Netflix in an anti-competitive way may very well be restraint of trade. So maybe the proper response is to use our pre-existing laws which already account for ambiguity rather than enact new simplistic laws that are guaranteed to be harmful in many cases.
Turned out one of my coworkers was downloading the some Windows ISOs from Microsoft.
Then, your setup is horribly broken, as Microsoft limits individual download speeds to far less than 100Mbps. You can get more total speed if you are downloading multiple files at the same time, but even 4-5 at the same time shouldn't cause a problem.
If you can't understand why it's important that ISPs not be able to be paid more than once for the same packet, then you really shouldn't be in a discussion about whether the government should or shouldn't impose regulations on ISPs.
Ah, yes, let me paraphrase that sentiment: "If you can't agree with me, then you really shouldn't be in a discussion about the topic of debate."
You, sir, can take that sentiment and retire to your echo-chamber of choice with it.
in other "news", grass is green, and the sky is blue.
Why not? One user can use the full 100Mbit bandwidth and then the pipe is full, so things are slow for everyone else. Hint: there are things that take more bandwidth than HD video.
If you treat everything as neutral, everybody slows down and you'll know. With some sort of QOS, maybe just non-time sensitive things slow down and you might not notice.
"this can be throttled during times when there is legitimate congestion"
Not with net neutrality. All hail FIFO.
Moreover, it's the ISPs that want to change things. Previously, if you tried to get a video from YouTube, NetFlix, or some website owned by your cable company, they would have been treated the same. ISPs then realized three things:
1) Those Internet video upstarts were making the ISPs' own cable TV offerings less popular.
2) Those Internet video upstarts were making lots of money. (Cue dollar signs in the eyes of the ISPs.)
3) They (the ISPs) were duopolies or monopolies in most areas and thus can do whatever they want without fear of competition.
With this realization, they implemented caps and overages to "manage network traffic" (really to make it more expensive for you to utilize Internet video to replace cable TV) and they want to make "Internet fast lanes" to extort money out of Internet Video providers (further raising the cost of these) or to slow them down (making them unusable and making cable TV seem better by comparison).
It's the ISPs that want to change the status quo of every bit being treated equally so they should be the ones presenting proof as to why they need to do so. So far, they haven't presented anything compelling. Unfortunately, their lobbyist money and political influence might count as "compelling arguments" to the FCC even when the vast majority of the public scream against it.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It should also be noted that most Network Neutrality proponents would, ideally, not want the government getting involved. The only reason we're doing so is that the ISPs have made their plans clear to violate Network Neutrality and, given that they are large monopolies, we the people can't rely on "the free market" to push them back in line. Our last resort is the government saying "You can't do this." Is it ideal? No, but it's better than having your video shoved into the slow lane because your monopoly ISP decided the provider didn't pay enough protection mon... I mean "fast lane access fees."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Yeah, I find those kinds of arguments disingenuous, especially when there have been municipal Internet projects blocked by those private companies in favor of maintaining their own monopolies.
We should be sending these companies a message: Either you act like our own public infrastructure, or let us build our own public infrastructure. But don't take hundreds of billions of dollars of government money to build our public infrastructure, block our attempts to build our own infrastructure, and then claim that your network is completely private.
If I have to choose between allowing traffic to be prioritized by which sender has given the biggest bribe or prohibiting that along with prohibiting prioritizing by packet type (i.e., QoS)... then I'll choose to prohibit QoS because preventing bribe-prioritization is worth it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The headline contradicts the FCC's mandate. All Federal agencies (at least on paper) are supposed to regulate corporations for the public good. Of course this doesn't happen in reality because of bribery and corruption. BUT, if the FCC followed it's charter it would HAVE to enforce net neutrality. The public good should trump excessive profits and monopolistic behaviour.
Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first?
If that were really the problem, I'm sure someone could have simply added in something saying that emergency services' traffic can be prioritized. Hell, I think it would be fair to say it *must* be prioritized, as long as you can determine which traffic is being used for emergency services.
But part of the problem is, who decides what's spam? I'm sure that Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon don't think their ads are spam.
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ? They are both http web traffic.
Again, who decides which ads you want to see? If you're on a slow connection and don't want to see ads, get AdBlock. Get a browser that downloads and displays text first, or that doesn't download images at all. You think Verizon is going to deprioritize their ads?
All that aside, I think all of your objections can be dealt with, and ISPs still wouldn't like it. In the end, they're not looking for the freedom to block spam. If they were, no one would be complaining. They're looking for the right to charge Netflix extra money, to prevent competition with their own video services. They want to charge Skype extra money so that they can charge more for their own VoIP service. That's all this is about.
Your point is certainly right, and your explanation of why is pretty much on target. One very minor point:
> for VOIP it is essential that each packet be delivered, in order, and as quickly as possible. Delays of even 100ms create audible distortion. For email ...
For EMAIL, "it is essential that each packet be delivered". You wouldn't tolerate an email service that dropped words out of the middle of your email. For VOIP or other live streaming, you want the packets NOT be delivered if they can't be delivered in order and on time. A phone call that drops out for split second is slightly annoying, a call that changes "ex Stacy" into "sexy Stac" is intolerable.
While horrible latency, over 200 ms, is bad with VOIP, the main issue is that you want CONSISTENT latency. You don't want "each packet as quickly as possible", you want each packet delivered as quickly or slowly as the last packet. If we represent silence with an underscore, the difference can be seen as:
___________This_message_post_by_me. (High, but consistent latency)
Th__is__mess__agepo__ostb__yme. (Low, but inconsistent latency)
It only works once.
After that everyone shuts up and begins sharpening their pitchforks.
> Email is already a best-effort service without guaranteed delivery.
> If the S&R team actually needs a particular piece of information delivered immediately, they should choose a service that is optimized for that purpose.
You are mistaken. Most streaming protocols are best effort and layered on top of UDP, which is explicitly defined as a best-effort service. Packets may or may not arrive, and may arrive out of order.
SMTP is defined as a reliable service, and runs over TCP, also defined as a reliable service. Packets that don't make it the first time will be retransmitted and they will be placed in the correct order. Emails that cannot be delivered will be retried for several days. If, after five days or so, the email absolutely cannot be delivered, the sender will be notified of the failure.
So tell me again why an organization using a service that is defined to be reliable, for life-safety purposes, shouldn't be allowed to buy a slower but more reliable internet connection, one unlike Netflix , who wants lots of bandwidth but doesn't care if 1% of packets are dropped and lost forever? Why exactly do we all have to be forced to use a fast, unreliable network, (or all be forced to use a slow, reliable one), rather than being able to choose and buy the service with the SLA we want?
Spoken like a telco shill.
Sure enough, giving electricity utilities a very strong incentive to become the common carrier (using Fiber + passive splitting + GPON), would certainly be the best solution. Lots of ISPs would be interested in operating in such a scenario, but this is exactly what has been tried and exactly what Comcast and others have invested very hard against, with local govt lobbying, lawsuits and every dirty trick in the book.
In the end, net neutrality mandated by the FCC would be a nationwide solution that would prevent the de facto monopoly Comcast + Time Warner have on the market for getting even worse.
Oh Google Fiber, please multiply all over the country.
So why should ISP's be paid twice for moving the same packet? I'm asking since you deftly ignored the actual argument.
Fine, then local municipalities should be allowed to establish their own publicly funded internet services without any interference from private service providers in the form of lawsuits because of "unfair" competition.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
You don't need net neutrality for that. All you need is for the PUC/PSCs (for telcos) and the local Franchise Authorities (for cable) to mandate competitive wholesale access to last-mile facilities.
What you're trying to un-do in this case is decades of government assisted monopoly, so even the radical libertarian in me says that it's up to the government to regulate the "undoing of that damage". In order to renew their franchises, cable providers would have to provide up to "n" (let's assume n=2 for an argument) competitors access to bandwidth equivalent to the incumbent provider's highest-capacity offering, at a rate which allows for competition for the customer-base.
If you mandate an environment like that for - say - 15-20 years then when you come out on the other side, you've got established companies, with revenue streams, who can have started to invest in their own outside plant and be able to achieve actual competitive independence.
And once you've got a multitude of carriers on the poles and in the conduits, net neutrality is irrelevant. Don't like your carrier's policies, go somewhere else. Don't have a carrier that does what you want, and think it's a sound business plan, start your own and prove there's a demand for what you describe.
Ah yes, the ol' "if you don't agree with me, you must be a shill for the opposition" chestnut.
*plonk*
Do you have a link that shows those public companies received "free usage of rights of way"? As far as I know anyone who occupies the public right of way, has to pay a fee for that usage: http://www.texaspolicy.com/cen...
Cable monopolies were banned by the 1992 Cable Act; the 1996 Telecommunications Act did the same for exclusive telephone franchises.
Fine, then local municipalities should be allowed to establish their own publicly funded internet services without any interference from private service providers in the form of lawsuits because of "unfair" competition.
I have absolutely no problem with that. I would argue that they shouldn't be doing that without also opening up that last-mile infrastructure they're building to "all comers" (ie, if the taxpayers have paid for outside-plant for high speed bandwidth specifically to force competition against an incumbent carrier, then that fiber should be available for anyone who wants to compete against the incumbent carrier).
If a community has the financial resources, and the political will, to take that tack to solving the "lack of competition" angle, versus the usual "competitive wholesale access" angle (where TWC/Verizon/Comcast are forced to allow competitors to use their last mile), then that's a perfectly reasonable solution.
Everyone else did such a great job destroying your points I felt no need to add to the choir. You are either a shill, a troll, or perhaps you really are just ignorant enough to side with the telcos on Net Neutrality. I don't really care which it is and if I had mod points, you'd get a -1.
> If that were really the problem, I'm sure someone could have simply added in something saying that emergency services' traffic can be prioritized.
> Hell, I think it would be fair to say it *must* be prioritized, as long as you can determine which traffic is being used for emergency services.
>
> But part of the problem is, who decides what's spam? I'm sure that Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon don't think their ads are spam.
There is one effective way to separate high-priority traffic from low-priority traffic. We already do it, on a huge scale, so we know how well it works.
Spammers want to send a lot of email quickly, as cheaply as possible. Netflix wants to send a LOT of video quickly, and as cheaply as possible. High bandwidth is what is important to them. Neither cares whether a few packets are lost along the way - nobody will notice the loss of a a few pixels of video for 1/100th of a second or one spam message. Because they use so much bandwidth, they need to pay pennies per megabit in order to be profitable.
The emergency response people I work with don't need more than a couple of megabit, but they want it to be reliable. For an excellent SLA guaranteeing reliability, they don't mind paying $45, which is $15 per megabit.
In the real world, we can tell that Netflix and the spammer think they're traffic is low priority - it's only worth pennies per megabit to get it delivered, while the EMS traffic is worth dollars per megabit. The companies themselves put a priority or value on their own traffic. That metric actually works pretty well. It also means that if Netflix wanted their traffic to be delivered faster, they'd be the ones buying the new routers to make that happen.
Unfortunately, what you said is also true "They're looking for the right to charge Netflix extra money, to prevent competition with their own video services."
Charging more for a better connection with a better SLA works really well. I offer a value oriented hot spare service where we use the bandwidth we buy once only every few months. In the rare case that a customer needs 300 Mbps, we have it available, but it sits unused 99% of the time. To provide good value to our customers, we don't buy (and charge for) the most expensive premium bandwidth. I don't want to double our prices because we're forced to pay for higher quality bandwidth under a "every packet is treated the same" regime.
Reasonable rules can be figured out, but it's not easy because there is value in being able to choose whether your application needs inexpensive bandwidth or premium quality bandwidth. Which means that ISPs will charge more for better.
And why not? Companies A and B already pay peering costs bases on volume. If Company A needs QoS guarantees and company B does not, why is it good to force company B to pay for QoS guarantees it doesn't need?
Everyone else did such a great job destroying your points
I feel like you're reading a different thread than I am. I've yet to see such "destruction" of points.
Thanks for playing, though.
No, it's not. The Nigerian "Prince" and the hospital should have the full access for which they paid. If the hospital is working off the same kind of bandwidth as the dusty internet cafe from which the Nigerian Prince is running his scam, that's not the common carrier's problem, but it might be a good reason for someone competent to replace the hospital administrator. Besides, in the US the healthcare admins are little better than scammers, and this FCC business is US-centric, so really, why are you splitting hairs?
I assume that you think that search and rescue teams conduct their vital, time-sensitive field work over e-mail. I invite you to examine the possibility that this might not be the case. In fact, emergency communications (at least in the areas that the FCC controls) tend to use communications bands specially allocated to them by (tada) the FCC. In fact, with spectrum reclaimed from TV, the FCC recently carved out a new set of frequencies for creating broadband networks for emergency workers only. Their packets aren't in question here. There's no emergency traffic being slowed down by spammers, just entertainment being artificially throttled by competing entertainment companies. Of course, in America circuses are as important as bread, so maybe that does constitute an emergency to some...
The text of the web page and its ads should be delivered as they arrive, period. If the user didn't want the ads, he could have used an adblocker (or jailbroken his phone and mucked about with the hosts file). Through his browser, the user made a request for data from servers, and it's the carrier's job to implement that request, not to question it or examine it.
I've got a hypothetical for you, then. Is it okay to deliver the ads of one political party with normal priority while throttling another?
The comments was just a formality, they don't care at all about you. The decision was made long ago and will not change. It would take street protests and what not to maybe make them think about it a little, comments do nothing. You guys go and protest about some of the most stupid things that don't even have anything to do with your country yet you don't when junk like this happen...
Easements are only paid for once (usually prior to any building occurs) and the city/village gets the money. Courts generally assume easements are created to last forever, unless otherwise indicated in the document creating the easement. http://realestate.findlaw.com/land-use-laws/easement-basics.html
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
I'm against mandating Comcast, Time Warner or other ISPs providing bandwidth on a mandatory basis to competitors.
The natural supplier that sees this as a revenue opportunity instead is the power company (which already has access to utility poles, has an operational need for cheap fiber for its own grid control / smart grid needs).
Electrical utilities have been a neutral fiber provider since fiber prices started to drop in the early 00s. The only peculiarity is they aren't used to providing mass consumer level access.
As far as I know anyone who occupies the public right of way, has to pay a fee for that usage: http://www.texaspolicy.com/cen...
Most cable companies pass those user fees on to customers explicitly, "Regulatory Recovery Fee." Obviously, all expenses of the cable company are eventually paid by subscribers, but they choose to account for those right-of-way fees in the same way as they account for the Universal Connectivity Fee and State Sales/911 Tax, as though it's not a part of their doing business.
Except that electrical utilities haven't already brought sufficient fiber into residential neighborhoods. They're not bringing out NEARLY the amount of fiber to the pole you'd need to in order to sufficiently handle "broadband everywhere".
Realistically, I'm fine with any of the various options for "how to get competition in the marketplace". But I think that is the answer rather than trying to interfere with day to day traffic management policies.
Ah, yes, let me paraphrase that sentiment: "If you can't agree with me, then you really shouldn't be in a discussion about the topic of debate."
No, I meant exactly what I said. If you don't understand why a single ISP getting paid twice for the same packet is bad for all users of the Internet (end users, businesses, etc.), then you should educate yourself before you continue in the discussion.
You have done nothing to show that you understand the issue...you merely state that the government has to prove that net neutrality is better than the current situation. You also complain about the government "want[ing] to control the hundreds of billions of dollars of network infrastructure that private companies have invested it", when those hundreds of billions of dollars were provided by the government as tax relief with the expectation that the companies would fulfill their end of the agreement (to provide high-speed last-mile universally). Since the companies have not fulfilled their end, and charging twice for the same packet means they are now charging five times for some services (once to the federal government for the tax break to build the infrastructure, once to local governments for tax breaks to build the infrastructure, once to the end user to install infrastructure to their house, once to the end user for monthly fees, and once to the service to avoid artificial congestion caused by using all the other charges to line the pockets of executives), this shows you are woefully uneducated on the subject.
Or, you could be one of those executives with lined pockets. In which case, yes, I don't agree with the way you do business, and your opinion should no longer matter, as you've been paid enough, thank you very much.
Everyone's ignoring the 600 lb gorilla: So what if video streaming and VOIP are poor quality on the internet because of net neutrality? Those aren't good reasons to crap up the internet.
Maybe you should use a landline phone, which is a common carrier and does have regulations about availability of service, 911 calls, and so on.
Maybe you should just go out and rent a disc from Family Video if you want to watch a video that doesn't stutter.
Cheaper for the switch maker, and the ISP, is not necessarily cheaper for society. Routing policy doesn't just effect switching efficiency, it ALSO effects externalized costs for the operator. Many of these externalized costs are _much_ higher after they are externalized, than before. So the consumer cost may be experienced in higher fees, but more importantly those externalized costs will be experienced in sociological change.
There are a thousand ways to aggregate traffic. It would be foolhardy to argue that QOS switching TCP/UDP traffic is more efficient than other alternatives. ISP's use the equipment they use, and implement switching policy the way they do, because that is what they are told to do by their executives. Not because it is the best technical solution, and certainly not because it is the most equitable solution for their customers.
Ultimately FIFO vs. QOS switching is a low level argument that in its larger scope is about the right of the ISP to regulate free speech and trade. The fact that you are arguing at this scope, doesn't preclude the argument from bleeding over into disciplines: Law, Sociology, Psychology, Economics et al.
A big machine has many parts. The likely hood of any one part being the cause of failure is extremely low. The FCC is about to cause a massive cascading failure in a highly complex system. Stop jumping up and down and pointing at the on/off switch. That isn't where this starts, or ends.
When something is shipped via UPS, only one party pays UPS. Sure, sometimes the other party pays the first party so they can pay UPS, but UPS doesn't collect money for the same package from multiple parties.
Actually, this is no longer true, at least for the example you used with UPS. I recently placed an order with a company and selected the lowest/slowest level of shipping. I got an email a day later from UPS telling me that I had a package on the way via UPS Sure Post and an expected delivery date. The email also explained that if I wanted to get my package quicker I could upgrade it, while it's already en-route, to a higher level of service. UPS just needed a little more money. None of this had anything to do with the original company I ordered from.
I am not saying that this is how the internet should work now or in the future.
Right on the money brother.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
You don't need net neutrality for that. All you need is for the PUC/PSCs (for telcos) and the local Franchise Authorities (for cable) to mandate competitive wholesale access to last-mile facilities.
Your minimal-government-intervention solution is for the government to force the incumbent ISPs to lease their privately-owned infrastructure to their competitors, and at government-regulated prices? I am interested to see how you justify that as a lower regulatory burden than forbidding the prioritization of packets based on origin.
Each government department such as the fire department _might_ be able to be individually regulated, but the the general point remains. I offer I value-oriented service where our customers very much want cheap bandwidth, but they only need to use it for two days every three years. When they do need it, they may need a lot of bandwidth - several hundred megabit. Most of the time, it sits idle waiting until it's needed. We don't care at all about jitter, latency hardly matters, and 99% reliability is good enough. We just need a very low price since we're paying for it when when not even using it. The local for-profit hospital, or any general business, has very different needs. They want much higher quality, at a higher price. A VOIP user or provider cares very much about jitter, anyone not using VOIP doesn't want to pay for low jitter. Why should it be illegal for me to buy what I need?
In countries other than the US, congestion of interconnects or ISP networks is seen as a problem that needs to be fixed, not something that is "unavoidable". Flat tops in network utilization graphs are an indication that someone oversold capacity, not that "traffic grows to fill the available bandwidth". It is not OK to prioritize protocols in other people's traffic. If that seems necessary, the right solution is always to add more bandwidth.
I understand your assertion, and simply disagree with it profusely.
There was no "understanding" associated with the tax-relief. If there was, it'd be codified in the laws and regulations surrounding such tax relief. If there had been such codification, this wouldn't even be a discussion, it'd be "no, your statutorily prohibited from doing that," or "OK, that's fine, but to do it, you need to repay the $nnn,nnn,nnn,nnn.00 in tax relief that was predicated on not doing so." Instead, folks like yourself - who actually don't understand the issue at all, get all hand-wavy about "we gave them tax relief" and assume that there was some actual agreements codified around it, which weren't actually there.
Let me be clear on something: you haven't paid for "a packet". You've paid for a pipe, capable of a given flow-rate. In this case, Netflix (for example) has also paid for "a pipe", capable of a given flow rate, into the system you get your data from. It's not nearly big enough, though, to service all the people who want to consume data from Netflix. Now, your argument is that the people who sell the pipes should just give Netflix a bigger pipe and take it on the chin because goddamnit you want to watch your Breaking Bad reruns. But the pipe Netflix needs, to do what you're asking, is really goddamned big. Big enough that if Netflix wants a pipe that big, it should damned well pay for upgrading it themselves. That includes both just the physical pipe, but also whatever the people who sell the pipes need to charge in order to able to handle the inflow of data from a pipe that big, sending it on to all the various places where those bits are going to drop back out into your laptop.
Your attempt to fixate on "charging for packets" is laudable. It certainly makes for a more compelling argument, or it would if there were any companies charging "by the packet" instead of "by the width of the pipe."
By all means, though, if you want to go to "paying by the packet" billing, I suspect the telcos and cable companies would be happy to oblige. It's a much more tenable business model for everyone involved, charging metered service, so that those who put the most actual strain on the network pay the most. But the last time a carrier tried that (TWC, 2008, in field trials in Texas) there was a hue and cry from folks - on this very site - against such "paying by the packet".
So, believe me, I very much understand the issue, and have been paying attention to it before you had even heard the phrase "net neutrality."
He's right: idiot.
Read this before you comment more:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5...
Essentially, these companies claim Title II status whenever they want to build something because under Title II they don't have to pay for right of way to government or private entities, get to use poles and tunnels without having to pay, etc., -- in other words they get a subsidy -- but when it comes to charging customers, they disclaim Title II status.
This is a corollary of "Privatize profits, socialize expenses" -- "Privatize profits, socialize business expenses."
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Sure, it's simple.
The solution you propose is a long-term regulation which needs to exist forever in order to solve the problem.
The solution I propose is a medium-term regulation which only needs to exist for a decade or two until the previously-government-squashed competition is given sufficient opportunity to re-assert itself in the marketplace.
That makes it a less intrusive burden, as it is not permanent, and doesn't actually cost the carrier money (because they still are recouping the cost of the service they're providing to the competitors).
grr ...
obviously, that would be:
This is a corollary of "Privatize profits, socialize losses" -- "Privatize profits, socialize business expenses."
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
*grr* How can it be 2014 and /. still doesn't let you edit your own post? My "your/you're" gaffe is going to bother me for weeks.
> I assume that you think that search and rescue teams conduct their vital, time-sensitive field work over e-mail. ...
> I invite you to examine the possibility that this might not be the case. In fact, emergency communications
> (at least in the areas that the FCC controls) tend to use communications bands specially allocated to them by (tada) the FCC.
> There's no emergency traffic being slowed down by spammers, just entertainment being artificially throttled by competing entertainment companies.
Your first two words are correct, you do assume. I do IT for TEEX. Our departments include Texas Task Force One, one of the nations best search and rescue teams. Our team deployed at the world trade center, hurricane Katrina, hurricane Irene, the Joplin tornado, the Super Bowl ...
Another department here is a founding member of the National Cybersecurity Preparedness Consortium. Since you're into assuming, how do you assume the team at WTC communicated with headquarters here in Texas? Hint - we didn't run a dedicated line from here to NYC. Do you have any assumptions to make about what communications infrastructure was working between Texas in New Orleans during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina? NCPC is responsible for improving the security of the _internet_. Do you have a guess as to what medium the NCPC uses to communicate? Anything else you'd like to tell me about how we operate?
> If the hospital is working off the same kind of bandwidth as the dusty internet cafe from which the Nigerian Prince is running his scam, that's not the common carrier's problem, but it might be a good reason for someone competent to replace the hospital administrator.
Under the rules some propose, they HAVE to use the same kind of bandwidth. It would ILLEGAL for them to buy a more reliable connection with a better SLA. All packets MUST be treated equally, remember? Nobody is allowed to pay for higher quality bandwidth.
> I've got a hypothetical for you, then. Is it okay to deliver the ads of one political party with normal priority while throttling another?
Though that particular phrasing seems distasteful, let us look at how that works in the real world, where better service costs more money.
If one party chooses to send a spam^H^H^H^H message to 10 million people, they'll probably not want to pay more than about one penny per message - it's not worth it to them to pay twice as much in order to increase the delivery rate by 2%. If another party is sending an urgent email to their 600 local campaign leaders, it's important to them that all of those messages to arrive, and arrive quickly. They'll gladly pay 10 cents per message if that's what needed to make sure all messages get through and get through quickly. The senders themselves have assigned a priority to their emails based on how important the message is and what resources should be used to deliver it, based on what resources they're willing to pay to use.
No. Its more like telling the ISPs that they don't get to put graffiti on the park bench just because we let them sit there for a while.
We need to understand that outside of cell phone carriers, any mixing up of net neutrality and day to day traffic management policies don't make much sense.
Current tech can transmit 100Gbps on a single fiber optical carrier and tens of Tbps over a pair of fiber strands (one tx one rx). Routing a Tbps worth of real traffic can be done with a cheap router. Routing 10Gbps worth of real traffic can be done with a dirt cheap router. GPON can multiplex over a gigabit of traffic from 64 users over a single fiber strand (from consumer up to the first aggregation point).
What I mean is there is no technical reason for any rationing of bandwidth. The real reason for rationing of bandwidth with any modern wired ISP is to extract more $$$ from content generators, specially those that compete with Cable TV services provided by the same company.
Cell phone broadband is another matter altogether. There you actually always have a spectrum shortage that makes it very hard to deliver high sustained speeds. High speeds can be reached as long as its a short burst interleaved between one customer and another.
I know a thing or two about this market. I worked in the IP / Ethernet / ADSL world for a few years. I know this stuff (including costs) inside out.
In the end even courts are required to serve the people. Even if they can be isolated from populist movements more than elected representatives, they are not entirely exempt from acknowledging that our system of government is for the people, by the people and of the people.
You're making the classic mistake of thinking that the "transit data-rates" is the dominant cost factor. It's not ... switching and routing equipment, for the types of throughput you're describing, is where the real costs lie. I think your assertions about hardware costs are extremely low-ball, and this comes from someone who's been in charge of spec'ing, approving and buying network hardware for the last ten-plus years of his career.
Explain. A consumer Internet connection is paying for the establishment and on-going maintenance of the connection, not the data that passes through the connection. Carriers on the other hand have carriage agreements that has them settling up when they have a traffic imbalance between carriers - either originating or terminating more traffic than the other.
Such an arrangement is in-place for Telcos, but cable companies were exempt from that requirement. Telcos have a price list established by government and they are required to offer their competitors access to their facilities at the mandated price structure. How does this play out? I can offer DSL service in a region I have no physical plant, no investment in any network equipment by simply renting the required infrastructure from the local telco (my competitor) at a rate that is below cost... This is great for the telco's competitors, not so much for the telco itself.
Six of one, half dozen of the other. If you get penalized for marking your packets lower priority than the same packets from your neighbor, who doesn't know/care what he's doing, and your experience degrades more than his during congestion, then what's your incentive to continue lowering your priority? That's why nobody implements it. It's a great idea in theory, but in practice, relying on people to both accurately and honestly assess the requirements of their traffic doesn't work.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
And that should be mandated on the cable side of the wall as well. The reason it gets no traction on the telco side of the playing field is that they aren't really investing in outside-plant upgrades (FIOS was a dismal money-losing failure for Verizon, which is why you haven't seen a new community be rolled out in years, except in one case where a court ordered them to because they'd contractually agreed to roll it out but hadn't done so after halting rollouts).
Cable on the other hand has a constantly growing need for capacity (for video) and so has been doing plant-upgrade after plant-upgrade over the intervening time.
Trying to assert that the internet is like "a series of UPS trucks", as you do, is not in any way an apt analogy, and you know it (or should, at any rate, if you're hanging out on a site like Slashdot).
Actually, that is EXACTLY what the internet is like. And routers are like traffic lights and route signs, switches and hubs are like stop signs, yield signs and round-a-bouts. With both infrastructures the method of transport does not care one bit about what company owns the transporter despite your claims to the contrary. The only way the two infrastructures are different (aside from the obvious of physical cars on asphalt vs. electrical/light impulses over cable) is that Streets, Roadways, Highways, and Interstates are all public infrastructure (with the exception of privately maintained roadways that are few and far between by comparison) while America generally made the piss poor decisions to 1) allow our information infrastructure to be laid out by private carriers that were also our primary content providers at the time, 2) make deals that ensured that a single private carrier per medium type had domain over an area's network and 3) trust these carriers to provide adequate infrastructure at competitive rates while disregarding the fact that these were the same people providing the content and that our line provider and content provider are one and the same.
Both modes of infrastructure have another thing in common: traffic wear. The way municipalities deal with heavy traffic management is introducing more control points into a route (more routers), widening the roadways to accommodate increased traffic flow (more bandwidth), create alternate routes (routing/switching), create new on-ramps to the Interstate (route to a higher tier), and adjust speed limits (throttling). All the same methods that an ISP has to manage their internet traffic.
To put this into perspective of what the ISPs are trying to pull lets look at it this way. Say that instead of municipalities, counties, and states owning the roadways we had Comcast, Cox, and TWC owning the roadways. They all charge people $50 a month for 200 miles worth of 25 mph roadway access with higher prices allowing for more miles and higher speed roadways (ie 450 miles and access to roadways with speed limits of 45 mph or less). These companies also make agreements with courier services to give them a fast lane on their roadway; say Comcast makes an agreement with DHL that allows DHL to travel in a 55 mph lane on a normally 25 mph roadway with no bandwidth restriction to any house on its roadway. All other couriers have to use the regular 25 mph roadway with the 200 mile limit per vehicle... unless they pay a premium to Comcast for better access. Now, I have issues with DHL because there's a funky internal routing loop that they use that adds a week to their package delivery even using the fast lanes, and thus much prefer FedEx...but in this case, since Comcast made an exclusive deal with DHL and won't allow any other courier on the fast lane or increase their bandwidth limits per vehicle, I wind up having to wait a week and a half for the package through FedEx. So now...do I go for artificially faster service through DHL with a horrible customer service system or wait longer for the package but deal with an awesome customer service system. I can and prefer to deal with the latter, but in this day and age...who else would? DHL now has an unfair advantage and FedEx can't be as competitive. This is what we have to look forward to on our internet if we let private companies run it. I won't even get into the nightmare that emergency services could become.
For one with such a low ID you should remember the days of dial-up. Yes it wasn't perfect since we were essentially having to pay twice for Internet service: Once for the line use and once for the actual ISP, but there was actual competition between the ISPs of the time. When I lived in a metropolitan area, there were
Excuse me, Where do YOU live. When buildings are built, the owners pay the costs of network connection. In lots of places, the network that connects the last mile to everything else was only built with the guarantee of government business (internet) or with a government guaranteed monopoly (cable).
"...Competition in the last mile space is a MUCH more effective..." How many water lines, gas lines, electric lines, phone lines, sewer lines run down your street? Are you suggesting 3 or 4 or 10 sets of last mile internet infrastructure? In most places outside of densely populated urban areas, even one set is prohibitively expense, so people use propane instead of natural gas, and have have wells and septic systems instead of centralized water and sewer. What kind of last mile competition did you have in mind?
Oh, I remember dial-up ISPs all too well. I helped build two of them, and then was there for the lighting up of one of the first/few MMDS (wireless cable) ISPs. As you point out: I've got a low ID#, I've been to this dog and pony show for a long long time. :-)
As I said elsewhere in this sub-thread, I'm fine with any of a number of ways of introducing competition:
But attacking the problem from the "neutrality" side of the argument is just a misguided tactic, putting another piece of duct-tape on an already shoddy arrangement.
There's plenty of ways to crack that nut.
There are a few ways on how to do routing. You can do it the Cisco way which is always fairly expensive.
You can do it the Global Crossing way, which maximizes L2 switching and minimizes L3 routing.
There is no need for an L3 router handling 100% of transit traffic in every hop.
The backbone can be strictly L2 switches with enterprise features with routers only at the edge of the network.
Before L3 bought Global Crossing, one could traceroute from Brazil to Europe, with just two hops inside the Global Crossing network. One entering and one leaving.
Much for the same reason big telecom people are afraid of adopting linux routing. Can't think outside the box.
For instance, traceroute from my ISP (GVT) to br.advfn.com (France):
6 gvt-te-0-2-0-5.rt01.spo.gvt.net.br (187.115.213.98) 22.203 ms 21.021 ms 23.866 ms
7 xe-3-3-0.ar4.gru1.gblx.net (208.51.41.53) 52.638 ms 52.702 ms 52.796 ms
8 po1-20G.ar4.CDG2.gblx.net (67.16.138.10) 197.301 ms 197.552 ms po3.ar4.CDG2.gblx.net (67.16.138.118) 197.174 ms
9 4.68.63.229 (4.68.63.229) 198.301 ms 197.583 ms 197.523 ms
10 ae-1-60.edge5.Paris1.Level3.net (4.69.168.8) 195.276 ms ae-3-80.edge5.Paris1.Level3.net (4.69.168.136) 196.960 ms 196.793 ms
11 COLT-TELECO.edge5.Paris1.Level3.net (212.73.200.90) 199.115 ms 198.432 ms 198.020 ms
Hop 6 is still in GVT.
Hop 7 is Global Crossing in Sao Paulo (GRU)
Hop 8 is Paris-France (CDG)
Hop 9 is left the long distance global crossing network and entered Level3
In a traditional network, from GRU to CDG there would be some 4 to 6 routing hops.
What you're describing has not really been done "at scale" (in my experience and understanding anyway) by anything other than a few companies. Expecting that the backbone providers are all going to change their traffic infrastructure to accommodate this model you describe may not really be practical for "the current Internet".
For something like an "Internet2" type of green-field deployment, if we "had it all to do over again, starting with the tech of today", you might be onto something. But I don't see that change happening in today's environment.
Well, when we invested over $300 billion of our money to get these companies to build networks out and get people access to standard internet like everyone else had. Then after they take your money and get a bunch of new subscribers decide to change how that network we just subsidized building with huge piles of cash and free usage of public rights of way (which can be a larger cost than the $300 billion we outright gave them) in order to make them more money and do a *worse* job of delivering the product to end customers that we just subsidized their build out to, it seems like we might want to have a conversation about whether that's reasonable or not.
> As for the requirements you describe, that they don't use it often, that you don't care much about jitter or latency, etc. That doesn't sound like a niche set of requirements. That sounds roughly like what most businesses want from a backup connection
Agreed, it's not a niche, many people want low price, and don't care about jitter and latency. They don't want a high quality SLA, and don't want to pay for what they don't need.
> What does that have to do with the topic at hand. We'd all like things to be cheap. I'm not even sure how net neutrality is related.
We don't ALL want cheap things, some of us want a quality connection- ultra-reliable, low latency, low jitter, etc. Netflix wants low jitter. That's not cheap. When network neutrality is defined as "all http packets must be treated the same" that means my jitter, reliability etc has to be exactly the same as what Netflix gets, which has to be exactly the same as what the hospital gets.
Netflix is not allowed to pay more for lower jitter, the hospital is not allowed to pay more for higher reliability. That's network neutrality as originally proposed. If Netflix wants low jitter, we ALL have to pay for low jitter. You can't have Netflix paying more for better service. That's network neutrality as most people define it. Of course proponents say "Netflix can't be charged more" while those advocating freedom say "Netflix can't pay more", but it's exactly the same thing.
Not that I'm against the principle behind network neutrality, btw. I just see that there are complications that make it easy for bureaucrats to screw it up. It should be done very carefully.
More like 'daftly', there was no skill involved, perhaps only speed.
You don't need to replace the whole routing backbone in a single step. ... There once was a time when network engineers where actual engineers that knew bits and bytes, today they are mere systems integrators that don't actually understand how a router / switch works at the lower levels. They just follow cookbooks.
This can be done in stages, migrating one sector of the network at a time.
You can still design the network as a bunch of very large sectors, avoiding 80% of the L3 routers and keeping some L3 barriers to keep the whole thing a little more manageable.
Of course, my forte is working strictly outside the box. So I sound very outlandish to most in the trade.
The real bottleneck is those that actually dictate network topology aren't the backbone providers / ISP but rather Cisco / Juniper /
You invested? like with a prospectus and such?
I've addressed this fallacy elsewhere: the parts of tax subsidies which had actual contractual, regulatory, or statutory "requirements" tied to them have been either upheld, or worked out through the existing oversight processes. What you're asking for is something new which (frankly) nobody thought to include in the requirements when such things were being done decades ago. That's not the ISPs' fault, it's "ours" collectively for having something of buyer's remorse about the deal we negotiated with them.
But pretending that we're Darth Vader, telling them we've altered the deal and to pray we don't alter it any further is not governance, but tyranny.
You don't need to prioritize traffic if you have the proper bandwidth.
Unfortunately, it has been shown that the ISPs are licking and choosing who gets access to their users via whatever pipes you're talking about. They also have worked into prevent companies from paying for machines and power and space and network equipment (i.e. ports) to connect to the interior of their network (I.e. caches) which would eliminate most of the dataflow across chokepoints.
In other words, the ISPs are intentionally creating artificial scarcity by disallowing connectivity.
Can you provide a source for this?
I'm not saying that it isn't true. I just really want to know.
No, I get that. I just don't see the backbone providers changing. Nobody is going to want to be the one who makes such a massive change that impacts billions of dollars of revenue (in connected customers) and the "trailblazer" in finding the pitfalls that need addressing along the way. This is an area where jumping out to the bleeding edge is rarely, if ever, rewarded, and where there is precious little ability to adequately test lab environments under anything approaching "real world" conditions.
It's an idea that might've taken hold if the Internet was being deployed from the ground up today, but I don't see it being implemented in the current environment.
Perhaps that's me being a 20 year industry-vet curmudgeon at this point. Not sure. :-)
I wish I had points to vote this up.
What you describe is exactly how it's supposed to work. If the government wants to control the hundreds of billions of dollars of network infrastructure that private companies have invested it, it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest.
And - frankly - it's not. Motivating competition in the last-mile space is a MUCH more effective method for achieving the same interest, AND has lots of other benefits as well in terms of driving prices down and service-offerings up.
The government only has to say "Sure you can have multi-tiered Internet. You just can't charge anyone for it." Problem solved.
Secondly, the last mile has to connect to something besides the house. Competition for 1 mile will mean nothing if there are only 1 or 2 carriers to which you can connect.
Nobody is saying you cannot apply QoS to your own network. It is your network. ISP's should not use QoS, ISP's are paid to provide Internet service. If they do not have the capacity to provide a reasonable level of service, the ISP needs to upgrade capacity. The 1 person congesting everyone else was because your ISP and Microsoft were doing the right thing, providing something a customer requested at the rate both sides could support.
Google and Amazon wouldn't exit with out a neutral net.
Do you really think AOL, Prodigy and Compusrv was the best form of network? Current ISP ' s are trying to rebuild closed off gardens that limit new technologies and ideas until those ISP can profit from them.
Pandora and spotify will cease to exist if they have to pay their ISP, Your ISP and the riaa to play music.
The question you aren't asking is what will be lost if Comcast can make a deal that foxnews.com fails to resolve on their network unless Fox News pays Comcast $100 million annually.
If you don't think that is possible. That is exactly what is happening to Netflix now.
ISP need to be ruled as common carriers before more deals are made and the Internet stops functioning. umless you like aol and use aol all the time.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I was referring specifically to municipal right-of-way fees, not easements. ROW fees are an ongoing assessment. Many times (but not always), utilities flow these costs through to the end-user. But evenso, whether one-time or a monthly fee, there most assuredly is a fee; access to the public ROW is NOT free, so you basically proved my point.
True, but whether paid for by the utility or by the customer, the point remains, access to public ROW is not free.
"Changes require systematic, reliable evidence, not emotional expressions . . ."
To bad that is not really true. There is plenty of reliable evidence from the massive amounts of what they are calling 'emotional expressions'. There are statistics showing how absolute crap the US ISP's are lacking in comparison to several other countries, rapidly and continually dropping in internet speeds, yet the FCC fails to recognize these very stats that is at the basis for all these 'emotional expressions'.
The FCC being led by a former lobbyist is more than likely looking for any excuse that can sound valid so he can screw over the public while making the people who have lined his pockets with dollars happy. Sad and very pathetic that such a human can have so much greed to allow an entire nation to fall so far behind in a technology that is so important, poor families can not afford internet, families with multiple children fighting over bandwidth, setting up a system to increase costs on an already very cash-strapped society of what should be declared as a utility since the free-market has obviously been well corrupted thru segmentation or markets.
I fail to see how it they were tricked into using them. What were they going to do, completely invent a new way of doing things?
The government hasn't shown that there is any actual harm caused by the model that folks like Comcast intend to use
Yes, we have. We have tested it with telegraph, and telephone, and physical carriage. Your insistence that we haven't only shows that you have not studied the history of common carrier.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
If the government wants to control the hundreds of billions of dollars of network infrastructure that private companies have invested it, it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest.
How many of these actually are regular private companies? Public utilities, including telcos, often have all sorts of special rights plus direct and indirect subsidies granted to them even if nominally "private".
Your insistence that internet service is the equivalent to telegraph and telephone service only shows that you don't really understand the underpinnings of internet service.
The government is run by the President. Obama can stop this crap today.... Good luck in finding fast, affordable internet under this Oblunder. Sorry I ever voted democrat in my early, stupid, ignorant life.
What you describe is exactly how it's supposed to work. If the government wants to control the hundreds of billions of dollars of network infrastructure that private companies have invested it, it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest.
A compelling government interest and least restrictive means are required for strict scrutiny, but strict scrutiny is not applicable here, because a fundamental constitutional right is not being infringed, and the companies providing the infrastructure are not a suspect class.
Legislation controlling private network infrastructure does pass both rational basis scrutiny (it is rationally related to a legitimate government interest) and intermediate scrutiny (it furthers an important government interest in a way that is substantially related to that interest).
What he's saying, put bluntly, is that most of the people making comments obviously have no understanding at all of how Carrier grade networks actually operate.
I kind of got that, in spite of some random wanker modding me troll for my troubles.
My point, however, is that that is not actually how the process works. That's how the process is dressed up, but in actuality, the FCC has become a political creature, and will reliably support the party that appointed the majority of commissioners. This rather important element was only barely alluded to in the article.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Of course they will ignore it. I and others have been saying that for months. There is the original meaning of Net Neutrality (Leave the internet alone, because it has been working just fine), then there is the other "Net Neutrality" that Obama and the FCC created, which would result in the FCC having control over it.
FCC, we do not recognize your authority, and will fight you on every level. The Internet is OUR domain, and WE decide how it works.
Fuck you FCC, you Fascist cocksuckers
The revolution will be televised
that
th
We're not talking about YOUR connection to Comcast being cheap. NETFLIX wants their cheap connection to be treated the same as an expensive connection.
Netflix is the Verizon customer who is complaining. Realizing that it's Netflix complaining about the connection they get to Comcast, we end up with:
>It does not specify the Verizon needs to provide the same level of service to all
> It just specifies that Verizon should not be throttling some while prioritizing others.
See the problem?
I mixed and matched Verizon vs Comcast in the post above, but you get the point. It Netflix (only) complaining that the ISPs wouldn't upgrade their connection for free. It's not about the connection from your house to Comcast.
Did you ever notice that there are 5 billion web pages, yet Netflix is the only website complaining? Everybody else just pays their hosting bill. Netflix thinks they should get free hosting, on the ISP premises to boot.
In this case, Netflix (for example) has also paid for "a pipe", capable of a given flow rate, into the system you get your data from. It's not nearly big enough, though, to service all the people who want to consume data from Netflix.
The pipe was more than big enough, but ISPs chose to not allow all the packets through. Once Netfilx paid the ransom, though, the pipe instantly opened up to the full available bandwidth.
Now, your argument is that the people who sell the pipes should just give Netflix a bigger pipe and take it on the chin because goddamnit you want to watch your Breaking Bad reruns. But the pipe Netflix needs, to do what you're asking, is really goddamned big. Big enough that if Netflix wants a pipe that big, it should damned well pay for upgrading it themselves.
Netfilx did pay to upgrade their pipe to their ISP, just like I paid to upgrade my pipe to my ISP. Just like I shouldn't have to pay to upgrade the pipe from Amazon to Amazon's ISP because it is too congested, Netfilx shouldn't have to pay to upgrade the pipe from me to my ISP, nor should they have to pay to upgrade pipes inside transit ISPs. Regardless of the fact that the onus was on other ISPs to either upgrade their infrastructure, Netflix offered to install for free devices inside customer ISPs that would reduce the need to send as much data over the pipes, except for the last mile (which can't be avoided). Still, the ISPs refused and instead requested cash to stop throttling Netflix.
And, again, note that as soon as that cash was paid, the pipes magically opened up, which means that the bandwidth was available all along, but ISPs just chose to throttle Netfilx. If you've got fiber installed, and switch port connections available, lighting up the fiber costs pennies per terabit transferred, but the ISPs saw this as a way to again make money for something they had already been paid money (multiple times) to do.
You are looking more and more like a shill with every post.
You might not be aware of this, but that happens with peering, data-centers, etc., all the time. Where the physical layer is capable of, say, Gigabit throughput, but you're only paying for 10Mbps (and they're only reserving for you throughput through their infrastructure of 10Mbps). You pay for the larger "pipe" (e.g., a higher cap), and voila, the valve on the pipe is opened wider.
That's exactly what happens in this Comcast/Level3 situation.
You are looking more and more like someone who doesn't understand the fundamental cost-centers of large scale network administration with every post.
The people donate the most money technically
> Netflix has good Internet connections, and I'm sure they pay a lot for it. The question is, what happens between Netflix's ISP and my ISP when I try to watch a Netflix movie?
All other web sites do, but not Netflix. That's why Netflix is having this problem. Netflix had an ISP , Level3. Level3 couldn't provide the connection Netflix needed because they hadn't paid for good connections - they mostly relied on free connections based,on an even trade of traffic. Adding Netflix made it no longer an even trade. That's when Netflix started demanding that the consumer- facing ISPs provide free connections to Netflix directly. They're complaining that they're being asked to pay for their connection just like every other web site on the planet.
> my point is, at a certain point, it doesn't make sense to complain, "I can't get a shitty enough connection!" Getting a $50 FIOS connection is shitty enough.
If I want a connection that's worth $50 ($1/mbps) and Netflix wants a connection that's higher quality and therefore worth $4/mbps, should Verizon be allowed to sell us those, as they do today?
Right now, I buy both. I have a cheap, crappy connection at one location and an expensive, quality connection at another location, based on the importance of those two locations. They are roughly the same amount of bandwidth, but one is much higher quality, with a guarantee. Do you want to make that illegal? If "all packets must be treated the same" the services I currently buy (and like) become illegal.
Maybe a different approach will move this discussion along better. Suppose you have a friend in New York. Your New Yorkhas a 5 Mbps connection. You have a 50 Mbps connection. You use P2P software to send your friend a 5MB file. How fast do you think the file will be transferred?
Only 5Mbps?!?!? But you paid for 50 Mbps! You're getting ripped off! Of course, it's transferred at the speed of the slowest connection. That's obvious when you think in terms of peer-to-peer.
Netflix didn't buy a 5Mbps connection, of course. The problem is, they stopped buying the connection from Level3 - their position is that they shouldn't have to buy ANY connection. Well, I suppose they don't HAVE to. If their connection is zero Mbps, transfers between them and you will move at the speed of the slowest connection - zero. Instead of buying a faster connection, Netflix is trying a scam where they claim that the reason they have to pay for a connection is because Verizon is being anti-competitive. Notice that if that were happening, or when it does happen*, Netflix could sue for restraint of trade. Netflix didn't sue, because they knew there was no restraint of trade. Instead, after huffing and puffing for a bit they bought connections from Verizon and Comcast just like everybody else does. They didn't buy very good connections, and now are complaining that their connection aren't better than what they paid for.
* I have no doubt one of the ISPs will do something that at least appears to be unlawful restraint of trade, but that's not what the whole Netflix thing was about. Netflix wanted free connections, then wanted their cheap connections to be treated the same as expensive, premium quality connections.
If I want a connection that's worth $50 ($1/mbps) and Netflix wants a connection that's higher quality and therefore worth $4/mbps, should Verizon be allowed to sell us those, as they do today?
Again, Netflix is not asking Verizon for service. You just pointed out earlier that Level3 was their ISP, not Verizon. If they were willing to move to Verizon as their ISP, Verizon would probably be happy. But then Comcast would still be asking for a cut of the action, and Level3 could theoretically demand a pay-off for not-throttling the traffic. And every other ISP and backbone provider could separately demand a payoff from Netflix.
And now you're setting up a very dumb system, where every time you want to set up a website, you have to go around to each ISP and negotiate terms to have them carry your content on their private network. It's the death of the Internet, the return to the walled gardens of AOL and CompuServe.
Level3 was not relying on "free connections". They were relying on peering agreements, which is what the Internet runs off of. And ultimately, this has nothing to do with the volume of data being moved in or out, but the volume of money being made from that data. Netflix is making money. Verizon wants that money. They're in a position to try to extort that money from Netflix. So they're doing that. It has nothing to do with anything other than that.
And none of this has anything to do with what we were talking about. You changes the subject from you wanting a cheap/crappy connection for your business, which you no net neutrality rule would prevent. Net neutrality is about prioritization, throttling, and blocking of traffic.
> I pay Verizon for access to Netflix. That's what I'm paying for when I pay for my Verizon connection. A connection to Netflix, and any other site or service that I want to access.
For that $50 you pay or whatever, do you expect you'll be able to transfer files at 50 Mbps to a guy in Uganda who has 56K dial up?
One side of the connection is on 56K dial up, the other side is 50 Mbps. How fast will a file transfer?
The answer, of course, is 56K, and that's physics. Verizon can't change that. Verizon can provide you a 50 Mbps connection to THEIR network. If your Ugandan friend also has a 50 Mbps connection to Verizon's network, you can transfer files at 50 Mbps. If your Ugandan friend has a 56K connection to his ISP, who in turn has a 1 Kbps connection to Afriphone, who in turn has a 1,000Gbps connection to Verizon, the transfer will flow at 1 Kbps- and there's nothing Verizon can do to change that. If your Ugandan friend calls up Verizon and says "hey, will you give me free internet so I can exchange files with your other customers? By the way, I want a 1,0000 Gbps connection so I can exchange files with all of your customers at once." What would you expect Verizon to say?
Netflix has a crappy connection and they refuse to buy a better one. There's nothing Netflix can do to change that, other than give Netflix free internet service.
That last sentence should of corse read:
Netflix has a crappy connection and they refuse to buy a better one. There's nothing Verizon can do to change that, other than give Netflix free internet service.
> You just pointed out earlier that Level3 was their ISP, not Verizon.
WAS. Was until they cancelled their service with Level3 because Level3 didn't have sufficient peering.
> Again, Netflix is not asking Verizon for service.
Yes, they are. Netflix buys service from Verizon. First, they asked Verizon for free service. Then, they bought low-quality, cheap service. Now, they are complaining that their low-quality cheap service is low quality. Which is funny, because it's right there in the SLA. If Verizon wasn't providing the level of service specified in the SLA, Netflix would just sue for breach of contract. Netflix isn't suing, because they're getting the service they paid for. They want better service, and instead of buying better service they began libeling Verizon in an attempt to bully them. When Verizon prepared to file suit, Netflix stopped putting up those messages (on June 26th).
> If they were willing to move to Verizon as their ISP, Verizon would probably be happy.
Again, Verizon IS their ISP. They do buy service from Verizon. And then complain that they got what they paid for.
> And now you're setting up a very dumb system, where every time you want to set up a website, you have to go around to each ISP and negotiate terms to have them carry your content on their private network
Yes, it's stupid, which is why nobody else does that. Everybody else just uses a good backbone provider who already has contracts in place with all of the major ISPs. Netflix wanted to cheap out because they use a metric shit ton of bandwidth.
> And none of this has anything to do with what we were talking about. You changes the subject from you wanting a cheap/crappy connection for your business, which you no net neutrality rule would prevent.
Where it all comes together is that Netflix bought cheap/crappy, then tried to change the law to require that Verizon provide premium/expensive service at the cheap/crappy price, saying that all connections should be treated the same. NETFLIX calls that network neutrality. They define it as "every packet should be treated the same". There is another, different concept that can also be called network neutrality, but the draft rule was "all packets must be treated the same", meaning the end of the choice between cheap/crappy and premium/expensive.
Fyi both companies have posts on their blogs where they identify the seven interconnects that are saturated both agree that it's those links that are the problem. The one in Los Angeles is a pair of 10,000Gbps links. The point is, they both say the problem is that those links are saturated, there's no throttling or anything on Verizon's network. Netflix argues that Verizon should upgrade their connection for free. Verizon says they should pay, just like Level3 said about Cogent.
You're arguement lacks merit. The size of the pipe is not the problem.
Verizon is still throttling Netflix even after being paid.
Netflix has offered to host servers closer to the end users, freeing up bandwidth on the backbones.
This fight is not about network capacity or technology. It is about money, plain and simple.
The question mark was missing from the link.
https://www.google.com/search?...
And that would work fine for you, where your bottleneck is over your last mile connection. But that doesn't help when the traffic is flowing across different network paths. For example if there's a bottleneck between 2 tier 1 providers. Only traffic flowing across that link will be affected, and perhaps only traffic from one data source will be considered low priority and dropped. The only fair thing to do in that case is increase capacity.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
If you go past the first paragraph, you'll see they agree with Verizon regarding what the _problem_ is:
congestion only occurs in a small number of locations, locations where networks interconnect
It takes two parties to remove congestion at an interconnect point.
So they agree, the congestion is at those seven points where they plug into Verizon's network.
The thing they are arguing about is that Level3 offered to pay for some $10 patch cords to connect more ports.
Verizon looks at that just like you or me saying "I'll buy the patch cords if you give me a free connection to your network".
Verizon wants to get paid for people to connect to their network.
As I said, it's in the IP header. It solves for your not so hypothetical issue of a bottleneck between two tier 1 providers already.
In principle I agree with you, however corporations are so devoid of ethics that I have no hope whatsoever that they will do the right thing. They will load the doubleclick ads first because doubleclick is paying. They will prioritize their own content over competitors content. I'd rather have nigerian spammer traffic be treated the same as everything else then have all of the ads load first or not be able to access netflix content because comcast wants me to use their competing service.
"They pay the homeowners for the use of the poles that are in back gardens, do they? I think not." Then you are engaged in thinking without access to fact. My girlfriend is the General Counsel for an association of Cable/Telecoms, and "pole fees" are one of the many areas where all providers are engaged in contract law, disputes, and rulings. You need to do some minimal homework, pal.
The U$ government, congress, politicians path for the last 40 years has clearly phucked US like prostitutes, without payment, reward, satisfaction, consideration, or even money to buy vibrator batteries. Eventually we will be a nation of illiterate, homeless, diseased, hungry ... People. When you trust a politician, cleric, plutocrat, or bigot you betray all US Folks.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
This time I think there is some chance that the public opinion will matter, because there is big money weighing in on both sides so the public opinion could tip the balance between the two.
There are two big money arguments in the net neutrality fight, one on each side. In favor of neutrality you have internet companies like Google and Microsoft, who argue that allowing ISPs to charge fees to service providers (beyond the normal cost of their access) would stifle innovation in network services. Against neutrality you have ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, who argue that forcing them to carry unlimited data for everybody without being able to recover their costs would stifle investment in network infrastructure. The FCC has to decide which of these arguments is the more convincing one.
The situation in past battles, such as the one about consolidation of media companies, was a very different one. In those fights almost all the money was on one side; it was a battle with big corporations on one side and consumers on the other, and money tends to win those. Net neutrality has big companies and big money on both sides.
On 3) - in australia caps are the rule rather than the exception. Thanks to the a good amount of negative press and governmental regulation overages are less common than they used to be (I believe a company has to include the details of what could be charges as overages prominently in advertisements now).
Having said that, with ADSL 2+ being the rule as opposed to cable, competition is a lot more healthy than it sounds like it is in the US. Internet video isn't a huge factor either (I *wish* we had hulu/netflix equivalents - apparently we're going to get netflix at some stage in the future but from what I've heard it will be a very paltry offering compared to the US site). Some people stuff around with VPNs and/or american credit cards to access hulu/netflix/other US video sites - I've considered it but honestly it's too much stuffing around. I imagine I'm not alone in this.
So caps may just be a result of the market being the market - there will always be some asshole downloading fifty times the norm every day and having everyone else pay for his/her excess. Having said that this fast lane bollocks is just that - and fortunately not something seen on this side of the pond as yet.
So, basically, your government gave up the right of way and private entities, without setting boundaries or demands for usage. Then I ask you: who is the idiot here?
This response is so disjointed and confusing it should be modded down even more than it is.
But it's written by an AC, so...
If you take the offer under Title II for the right of way, you ARE subject to boundaries and demands -- that is where the "common carrier" thing comes from.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
1) Those Internet video upstarts were making the ISPs' own cable TV offerings less popular.
Bullshit. A youtube video does not compete with this week's episode of The Big Bang Theory in any way, shape, or form. Netflix doesn't compete with this week's new VOD offering. None of the services competes with Game of Thrones or any of the other premium channels. Your point is totally wonky and off-target.
2) Those Internet video upstarts were making lots of money. (Cue dollar signs in the eyes of the ISPs.)
First part, true. Second part, true. But not in the way you are inferring. So, the summary for this comment is bullshit as well.
If there wasn't any money in making interesting things on the Internet, no one would do it, leading to nothing interesting on the Internet, leading to no Internet access because there isn't any money in it because there wouldn't be any customers! So, it's in the best interest of the ISP to see Internet-based businesses succeed, because it creates demand in the marketplace for customers.
There has been NO instance of an ISP charging Netflix, Youtube, or any other type of Internet content owner an access charge to a network serving the customer. Some ISPs have offered a "FAST LANE" service at a minimal cost for the traffic from those popular sites, effectively IMPROVING the customer's access to the popular sites. This is a positive customer service ploy, and the ISPs who have tried it have been fried in the press by the very customers they are trying to help!
Some clarifications:
1) "Fast Lane" (known as "QOS" in the industry) marks the preferred site's packets "importance factor" HIGHER than others, so IN THE CASE OF NETWORK CONGESTION the more important packets are delivered BEFORE other packets. So, your e-mail and Amazon surfing may suffer, so that your Netflix doesn't buffer, if you don't have enough bandwidth to your home to carry both.
2) Popular site traffic is POPULAR TO THE END USER WHO IS PURCHASING INTERNET ACCESS FROM THE SAME PROVIDER WHO IS OFFERING THE FAST LANE.
2a) It doesn't affect other ISP's access to the content, so if you are using a competing provider you are not affected in any way.
2b) Customers did not pay for the "Fast Lane": the popular site did.
2c) The popular site was more than happy to pay and was totally in favor of it, to improve customer experience on that ISP's network.
3) They (the ISPs) were duopolies or monopolies in most areas and thus can do whatever they want without fear of competition.
Again, bullshit. Provide even ONE instance where there is only a single ISP available to a customer. Even in rural America, cellular service is widespread enough for a customer to use effectively. And rural America isn't where the bitching is coming from, since a large percentage of it is being served by co-ops and small independent telco/ISPs that actually listen to their customers and care about offering the best service that they possibly can (more and more, on FTTP networks).
With this realization, they implemented caps and overages to "manage network traffic" (really to make it more expensive for you to utilize Internet video to replace cable TV)
The only services implementing caps are the wireless providers. So the inference that all providers are implementing caps is bullshit.
...and they want to make "Internet fast lanes" to extort money out of Internet Video providers
See comment above.
...(further raising the cost of these)
Ummm... No cost to the end user for this "fast lane", possibly only to the content provider, who is happy to pay and is in favor of it. Inference to the customer cost increase is bullshit.
...or to slow them down (making them unusable and making cab
No, they don't. Windows Update is speed limited, but downloading ISOs from Microsoft developer sites does not appear to be, at least not at levels that are relevant to typical internet connections. I have seen those downloads approach 100Mbps, which is the limit of my connection - so I usually have mercy on my housemates and download them over the WiFi connection rather than hardwired because that only gets to 20Mbps or so (limitations of my router).
The lesson here: queue up those big downloads at the end of the business day, not when other people are trying to get work done.
Bandwidth, no (at least not for free).
Bandwidth (whether transit or peering) at a fair rate to keep up with demand, yes.
Surely good network management involves policies such as "if you're using more than 80% of your pipe consistently, we'll upgrade you and charge you accordingly" - so if Netflix needs 10gbit/s 1 month and 20gbit/s the next month, if hosting an OpenConnect box really is out of the question, just provision it (and they can bloody well pay for it).
But what I'd really like to see is access to the infrastructure, yes (but still not for free).
Why would 2 or 5 or 10 different companies be running cables (whether overhead or underground)? Overbuilding is not necessary (upgrades notwithstanding). Moreover, why should a startup have to deal with running cables and the nightmare that is permitting? Surely it would be easier if I could just utilize an incumbents access network up to a certain point where it just gets routed to my data center instead of theirs.
Local loop unbundling, as this would normally be called (at least as it applies to DSL... I don't know what you'd call it on Cable), is a good thing.
Let's say that arbitrarily the wholesale cost of infrastructure is set at say $0.30/mbit/month/subscriber (so a subscriber on a 50mbit plan has a wholesale cost of $15 to any ISP that is offering services on the infrastructure), or maybe there are fixed tiers (eg 10mb for $10, 20mb for $18, 50mb for $25, 100mb for $40).
The retail prices charged by any given ISP can be whatever they like and the services may be as limited (or unlimited) as they like, so the way services are sold change from "you live at this address, and you have either ISP X or ISP Y" to a "You can choose any one of 10+ different ISPs based on factors such as price, customer service, bandwidth caps or lack thereof, throttling etc" basis instead, leading to some actual competition.
Market forces will pretty much dictate that ISPs will remain within a few dollars of each other, price drops by one ISP will often be reflected rather quickly by others in that market, as will speed upgrades, and if customer service sucks, the ability to take your money elsewhere speaks volumes.
I've seen it happen - just not in America... yet - but there's no reason it couldn't.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
DSL is dead moving forward. Fiber is far more economical (moving forward). DSL is short range, requires an individual copper pair per customer. GPON is much cheaper for low and medium density markets, and in high density markets there is demand for ultra fast broadband, so again, its a must.
Plus twisted copper is exactly what comcast doesn't have (it's CATV with its triple play upgrade, so either HFC or GPON network).
I'm all for mandatory peering at common internet peering, but its totally optional both in Brazil and in the USA.
The more competitive the market is without large players the more attractive open peering is.
I agree with most of that - I like GPON very much and I am pushing for fiber in pretty much every way I can, ALTHOUGH, ADSL2+ and VDSL in urban environments is reasonably effective if the telco installs cabinets (like Chorus did in NZ).
VDSL is also often used to supplement a GPON deployment in an FTTB scenario and is quite effective because the last mile is only a matter of a few hundred feet so you can usually get most of (or even all of) the speed. Moreover, with G.FAST hopefully making waves it might be a while before it [DSL] dies properly.
Chorus NZ now offering VDSL services with up to 100mbit/s (70 or 80mbit/s practical) in most of the country, which isn't too bad - the reason they did it, of course, is as a stepping stone toward the currently-being-constructed national fiber network so there's no reason telcos here can't follow suit (they're going to be putting in cabinets for GPON anyway).
I think my previous point remains valid, though - whether DSL, Cable or Fiber, why should there be 2 or 5 or 10 companies each deploying their own last miles and overbuilding?
There's no reason they [Comcast/TWC/Cox/etc] can't open their lines to competition. As I already mentioned, it already happens on DSL (not very effectively) and there there is at least 2 wholesalers providing resale access to Comcast/TWC/Cox/etc that I know of, but the pricing and whatnot is not particularly favourable.
So, what I'd like to see is open access at a fair and reasonable price whether the infrastructure is DSL or Cable (or even Ethernet or Fiber) based, and there is no reason it can't be done.
As far as peering goes, yeah, it's screwed here in the US, in part because there isn't enough real competition.
I agree (partially) with both sides of the Netflix/ISP debates - I understand that ISPs doesn't want to give Netflix free traffic and I understand that Netflix wants what it pays for. And rightly so. But if I were (for example) Comcast and I noticed that Netflix links were running at full-tit all the time, I'd be working with them to figure out how we can either 1. reduce the load or 2. what is required to increase the load (or even 3. both) - my customers are paying me for Internet service which includes watching Netflix, so if I need to maintain or upgrading my infrastructure, that's a cost of doing business. It may be a cost I can share with Netflix, but you have to spend money to make money, and the amounts required to upgrade are (in the scheme of things) pretty trivial.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
No, Netflix's pipe size is irrelevant. My pipe size is irrelevant. $isp arbitrarily restricting $provider's packets because they can is the problem.
Netflix go out of their way to make their pipe bigger and packet delivery easier for isp's. I pay the isp to deliver whatever packets I request as fast as they can within the limits of mine and the senders pipe (and bits in between). If that hits the limit of my or netflix's pipe, sobeit, not their fault. If it hits the limit of the isp's pipe before hitting the limit of mine or netflix's pipe, I'll grudgingly accept that as a reason provided they're doing something about it* and they don't unfairly slow down particular packets. But them unfairly/artificially slowing down any packet just because they can is definitely not what I pay them for.
*Different argument for a different day.
Thank you for the well-thought reply, and sorry for the slow one on my end. I was afraid I wouldn't get to this before commenting was closed (again).
I am half playing devil's advocate, half serious. I am not entirely opposed to prioritizing protocols (say UDP over TCP), provided it's done fairly and in a reasonable, objective manner.
However, this still seems to shift the responsibility and open numerous vectors for abuse. If my neighbor decides to run a call center from home, and use 50mbps of VoIP, and my cable provider oversubscribes their node, is all of my traffic constantly throttled? If my ISP also offers TV streaming over RTP, but a competitor uses UDP, the ISP now has an excuse to "prioritize" their own service and harm competitors.
On a sidenote, I don't particularly want my ISP or any of their intermediaries deciding my skype call or streaming video is more important than a deliverable I need to upload over SFTP by 10pm. I'm not a network engineer, but it seems like it would be pretty easy for them to give me 5mbps, 15ms latency, etc. to the appropriate peering. If peering/backbones/whatever are that congested that often... maybe we can address that instead?
I think we both agree, at least, that ISPs have conflicts of interest and should not be trusted.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling