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Net Neutrality Alone Won't Solve ISP Throttling Abuse, Here's Why
MojoKid writes Net neutrality is an attractive concept, particularly if you've followed the ways the cable and telco companies have gouged customers in recent years, but only to a limited extent. There are two problems with net neutrality as its commonly proposed. First, there's the fact that not all traffic prioritization is bad all of the time. Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly. Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example. Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people, or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency. These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.
tl; dr: It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
...then you won't be able to decide what traffic gets priority except through port designation.
Fighting "net neutrality" a silly thing to get hung up on; sooner or later, the need for high speed, low latency connections will be ubiquitous. Hiding from that very real fact, will only make that process uglier in the future.
Problem is, Wheeler is not qualified to make those distinctions and as a cable industry lobbyist shoehorned into a position he has clear and obvious conflict of interest with, it is not in his interest to seek out qualified assessment.
Sure, there's a right way to do it, and everybody would win. But instead, Obama sold the world out.
"Video streams... examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly."
No they don't. Bad example.
Truthfully most streamed video can tolerate latency problems fairly well with caching. Real time communications like Skype, Facetime and VoIP are more susceptible to latency problems than Netflix. But your point is valid.
Neutrality should be about all sources and destinations being treated equally on a network with some rules about not using QOS to prevent certain services from working. I, also feel that we need to force ISPs to allow caching servers to be installed at cost to the content providers, this could greatly reduce backbone traffic from YouTube, Netflix, etc. Maybe a universal caching frame work that content providers could lease, etc. I know Netflix makes a caching machines available but they don't pay to co-locate them near large pools of their users.
It'd be like having Ford control traffic flow on the Interstates. "All Express lanes are only open to Ford vehicles and the 'partners' who've bought premium service for their customers."
You want low latency for web traffic, and most video streaming can handle some latency. It's not latency that gets in the way, it's variations in latency/jitter. You could have a constant 500ms latency and a video stream would work fine. There's almost no traffic that actually requires high bandwidth and low latency.
> Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly
Very wrong. Horrible latency, 500 ms, will require that the video buffer for half a second. Latency does not matter at all for prerecorded video. Jitter matters some, and sufficient bandwidth matters a lot. When someone doesn't have a basic understanding of the facts, the opinions they come to based on their misunderstanding of the facts are not persuasive.
VoIP is a good example of an application with specific needs, low jitter and low to medium latency, contrasted with Netflix style video, where bandwidth is #1. A low latency application is ssh/telnet or any other text based interactive protocol.
The reason it became an issue in the first place is that deep inside TCP is a notion of "fairness" that's broken and exploitable. And being exploited by bittorrent, which is why it first provoked ISP retalliation. It's that heavy-handed meddling with customer's packets that put the debate on the railroad to nowhere it's been stuck on ever since. See the Briscoe paper on flow rate fairness for the essential technical background that everybody is ignoring.
The result of throttling comes from ISP's over promising its services and how to use them. How many ads have you seen from any ISP talking about media streaming, downloading of HD movies or just about every other high data sucking content. Yet, their hardware can't deliver so they throttle certain services.
Folks, as more people cut the cable TV or Satellite cord the demand for bandwidth will only get worse in peak times. We are not expanding our technology especially in areas of cellular data as fast as the media content quality demands. When you start streaming 4K video content your just asking a lot of a network.
In most ISP broadband the bandwidth is shared and if you start putting more and more users on it sucking bandwidth for those high data content. The whole net nutrality thing will be mute. It then becomes a technology road block not net nutrality.
Neutral prioritization is giving priority to streaming video/music/gaming over other types of data like e-mail without regard to the hosts providing the services.
This critical distinction seems to be ignored by the poster.
Net Neutrality doesn't demand that no network optimization by the ISP's ever occur, it states that the host should not be a factor in the ISP's optimizations. If the host does factor into the optimizations, then the ISP's begin extorting hosts to pay for priority service which the ISP's customers have already paid for. Additionally, hosts that can't afford to pay for priority distribution by the IPS's soon find that users can't access their services.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
eh BW fixes all issues. a real competitive ISP market (not the US select monopolies) can deliver that.
the answer is more bandwidth not traffic shaping. Then we can talk about net neutrality.
This point of view only works if one accepts that bandwidth is a limited resource. In reality the ISPs are artificially keeping bandwidth capacity constrained for their own benefit. A network with adequate capacity does not require throttling, shaping, prioritization, QoS, or any of the other network management tools we've been brainwashed into accepting.
Don't let them change the narrative. Upgrade your goddamn networks if you need to. Quit shoving all of this unnecessary "management" bullshit down our throats.
Fucking ISPs...
My God... Please stop!
Peering has nothing to do with net neutrality.
Stop confusing the two.
No ISP has any legal, moral or regulatory obligation to connect to any specific peer. If they did, the peer could just charge whatever they wanted. It's up to the content provider and the ISP to work out who they want to use together. Those agreements are fraught with arguments, bullying, etc... it should be addressed by the FCC. But none of that has anything to do with Net Neutrality. If it did, the content provider could make a similar argument that "Those people living out on that island. We want them to have our service! You're violating Net Neutrality by not running a cable across the ocean floor!" The ISP as an independent business has the right to hookup whichever customers they want inside the guidelines of their franchise agreements with local towns... as well as whichever peers they want. Netflix can no more force them to use Level3 than the ISP can force Netflix to use a different peer (and that was the actual argument) The ISPs just said "No thanks. We'll do without." which was well within their rights.
A violation of Net Neutrality would be like "ok, we don't want you watching netflix so... Netlfix is priority 9999 on our sandvine... hahahaha!"
Netflix could, and did, fix their bandwidth issues by connecting to the peers the ISPs were ok with them using. Again, you could argue that Netflix should have had more bargaining power in that regard. The ISPs usually force content providers into using the ISPs subsidiary peers. But that's not a net neutrality issue. We almost lost the Net Neutrality battle over this stupid mixup of terms.
First and foremost, video streams do not require "low latency" connections. They require throughput. Always have.
Video games, on the other hand, tend to be low bandwidth usage, but sensitive to latency issues. >100ms is a problem. You really want something like 20ms round trip times.
VOIP, does not require low latency, but that is nice. What VOIP requires more of is low jitter (stable latency). And this includes any video chat. Even 1000ms latency are workable. 100ms are almost not perceivable. But 100mn jitter can cause usability problems.
In any case, packet prioritization is to be determined by the CUSTOMER, not the ISP. That's what Net Neutrality is all about. If ISPs want to prioritize traffic for their customers, that has to be done on a case-by-case basis and as an optional service to customers. For example, if customers don't have a clue how to setup their own QoS rules or don't want to but are willing (to pay?) ISP to do it for them.
Finally, it is quite sad that ISPs do not have the technological know-how*** to setup round-robin fair queues per customer on their (the ones that the ISP controls) network's choke points. Maybe legislation is what is really required here. Yes, specifying specific network traffic policies so ISP (semi-)monopolies don't fuck it up.
*** My ISP does not filter traffic. Basically, net neutrality. All good. But its lines are heavility utilized in the evening. The problem is the 100mbps fiber subscriber gets significantly higher portion of the congested link of the 3mbps distant DSL customer. A sad state of affairs for customers when the congested network has no QoS at all, even QoS that even enhances network neutrality.
Open markets. No monopolies. Problem solved...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
In my area running cables is fairly easy. I see no reason why several cables can not come to my home whether it be all from one supplier or by several cable companies. That would solve the bandwidth issues for areas similar to mine. It would also help with the outrageous costs that we can attribute to a lack of competition in the cable industry.
I don't think you understand the meaning of net neutrality. Neutrality means neutrality. Every user gets the same service, including latency and dropped packet recovery. And the service is clearly defined to the buyer. It shouldn't matter what the end use is. I'm afraid your video downloader and gaming buddies will have to settle for being equal, they can't claim to be more equal than others.
Right. I don't think many people would argue with QoS policies being applied uniformly across all providers of similar services. Having all video set to a different QoS than all email isn't a problem. Having one video provider set at high priority and another one set at low is a problem.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I remember slashdot not polluted with anonymous cowards making up 50% of the comments. You wont be missed.
So it doesn't matter what law says. And if it's a bad law, ISPs will buy a better one.
"Almost everyone agrees"?
Were you asked? Because I wasn't asked. Was anyone here asked whether they agree? So where the fuck do you get off with "almost everyone agrees"? This is another one of those "Everyone means me and this one-eyed mouse in my pocket" situations, I think.
Besides which, the only responsibility my ISP has (and by "ISP" what we really mean is "one of two or three giant telecommunications corporations") is to provide sufficient bandwidth consistently. There is absolutely zero need for any of these companies to prioritize network performance. If I want to network performance prioritized, I will do it on my end, thanks. Just give me the fucking bandwidth and send me a bill. And for chrissake, DO NOT FUCKING TRACK ME: Keep your motherfucking "supercookies" off my devices.
https://www.emptywheel.net/201...
Hey, government! Will someone please fucking break up the telecoms again? They need to be broken into tiny pieces, and then in about 30 days broken into tiny pieces again just to show them we're serious. AT&T and Verizon should be like 50 different companies. And please kick every one of their C-level executives and boards of directors in the balls, really hard, just because. And declare them all common carriers and then we'll go have drinks.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Before Net Neutrality got on the radar of the mainstream media, everyone involved in the discussion did understand that we were talking only about throttling based on origin or destination, and explicitly not about QOS based on protocol latency needs.
It is only after the media (and politicians) started paying attention that all the cableco shills came out of the woodwork to try to confuse the issue.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
tl; dr: It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
Democracy is a buzz word politicians use to make voters like them. Democracies are dangerous unstable things.
Luckily, the US hasn't fallen in this trap since we have never been a democracy at any time. The US is a constitutional republic, a nation of written law(or at least we're supposed to be) with the dominant document(supposed to be) being the constitution.
I think the problem we have in the US is that we've forgotten what we are because of this buzzword democracy and that's why politicians and judges are able to abuse us so efficiently. We need to remind government workers that they exist FOR us, and ultimately they answer TO us.
Laws exist to be applied directly to everyone, so I would encourage you to actually read the laws that most apply to you to see what they actually say. You might be surprised to find that what the public believes and what is actually true are two very different things.
Lately I have become less concerned with enforcing net neutrality on the incumbent monopolies and more concerned with addressing the root problem by ending said monopolies. As long as everyone is held captive by these profiteering gluttons, there are always going to be problems and battles over how they can and cannot user "their" pipes. Municipal fiber networks need to be built and they need to be open-access. The good news is that the demand for such networks is increasing by the day; and widespread, nonpartisan support for them is easier to come by than support for net neutrality rules enforced by the FCC. We should strike while the iron is hot and get the ball rolling while the incumbents are still mostly clinging to their crappy copper and wireless networks. Better to do that than wait for them to eventually turn their copper monopolies into fiber monopolies and be facing the same problems ten years from now. To this end, the first step that needs to happen is to clean up the unholy mess that is UTOPIA in Utah. It is fouling up the waters for every municipal fiber project by being the resident whipping boy that every opponent points to when they want to argue that muni-fiber networks are a bad idea.
The ISP should be concerned only with delivering their advertised data rates sold to the customer at low latency, regardless of how much it is used. It is not their problem if the user maxes out their upload with torrents or something, that is the user's problem (and rather easily solvable by using a modern router with fq_codel. Ingress traffic is another issue... also made difficult by the ISP, by buffering stuff too much). If they cannot actually produce the connection they advertised... then it is time for them to start changing their connection packages.
Jitter doesn't really matter for video or voice either, other than increasing the buffer time. Think about it this way, Netflix doesn't care if you get 10s of video as a single burst, as long as it can occur at least once every ten seconds. The information can be buffered and played back smoothly. Now obviously you can take that to an extreme where VOIP or video conferencing is unusable but jitter that significant is hardly common.
Latency is usually the first problem. You'll have trouble when you're running up against the speed of light.
But you can usually run a 2nd pipe to add bandwidth. With the same latency as the 1st pipe. And a 3rd pipe. And so on.
And that's where I think TFA gets it wrong. Network Neutrality cannot be about prioritizing one kind of traffic over another. The ISP's already lack the incentive to add more bandwidth. Even though that bandwidth is what they are selling. Allowing them to prioritize traffic means that they will be more incentivized to NOT add more bandwidth.
That was the problem that Netflix had with Comcast. And once Netflix coughed up some money, Comcast instantly found more bandwidth.
> Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly
Very wrong. Horrible latency, 500 ms, will require that the video buffer for half a second. Latency does not matter at all for prerecorded video. Jitter matters some, and sufficient bandwidth matters a lot. When someone doesn't have a basic understanding of the facts, the opinions they come to based on their misunderstanding of the facts are not persuasive.
VoIP is a good example of an application with specific needs, low jitter and low to medium latency, contrasted with Netflix style video, where bandwidth is #1. A low latency application is ssh/telnet or any other text based interactive protocol.
And this underscores two issues with the net neutrality debate as it currently stands. First, we actually do want prioritization of packets with services like VoIP having higher priority. The issue is that what we don't want is for Comcast to prioritize their own VoIP service above competing services such as Voice Pulse. That's a somewhat fine distinction in today's soundbite world.
Issue number two is that for services like video streaming bandwidth is king - and it's easy for companies to simply refuse to upgrade overutilized interconnects in order to force companies like Netflix to pay over and above what they're already paying for content delivery. Verizon and companies like them are double-dipping - charging consumers for a connection and charging some larger content providers for a connection. That shouldn't be the case.
As currently debated "net neutrality" fails to solve the latter issue and I'm not sure how well we'll be able to solve the first issue. But - we have to do something. We also have to be mindful that giving federal government agencies more power turns out bad about 90% of the time. But - we have to do something.
It's difficult for most people to truly understand it and I see the debate being muddied badly, particularly from the extremes. Here's a sample from CREDO:
I mean, what? "fast lanes for wealthy corporations and slow lanes for the rest of us"? Whoever wrote that doesn't even know what they're talking about.
It's no better on the right, by the way, just a different set of bogeymen.
I sometimes wonder if our country is beyond the ability to have nuanced discussions.
Do you have ESP?
FFS, we've been over this a thousand times. No one is suggesting that Net Neutrality does away with ISPs performing QoS. Net Neutrality just means that ISPs can't prioritize traffic for their services of video/VOIP/etc over competing video/VOIP/etc. It's one of the few problems that has a relatively easy solution and the only reason we haven't implemented it is because there are enough special interest groups with enough power and money to make sure that they're not forced to play fairly with their customers' traffic.
Unadulterated bullshit.
The point of net neutrality is not to ensure that your stupid reruns perform adequately well but that they perform equally well regardless of whether they are coming from your last mile monopoly or some other competing service.
If my Netflix performance has gone into the crapper then Time Warners competing service better be suffering the same problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"Jitter doesn't really matter for video or voice either, other than increasing the buffer time. "
Which is to say it (and latency) matters a great deal for interactive video and voice.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Defensive constructs are fun!
Guess I'll just vote with my money and if the ISP is not doing what I pay them for, I'll switch. Ohh wait, there is only Comcast and ATT in my area. Never mind! #monopoly
Stick to hardware reviews. The article is outside your field of expertise.
There is an intentional deception being perpetrated regarding the concepts of net-neutrality and quality-of-service. Routers are able to use the port number of the IP packets of my VOIP phone call to adjust the priority and place those packets ahead of the Netflix packets in the queue to be sent out to their next destination. This is called Quailty of Service (QOS) and it really is needed for real-time services to work across the Internet.
What the ISP's are doing is different. The bandwidth exists, but is being intentionally held back by Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and others. Similar technology is used to keep school busses from exceeding 55 MPH. The routers also have the ability to slow connections between peers. Using the same equipment on either end, connected by the same wire, I can type "Router(config-if)# clock rate 56000" to slow the bandwidth down to 56K. This is what is happening now, for no other reason than to extract more money from customers on either end. Note that Comcast's bandwidth with Netflix dropped suddenly when negotiations broke down, then rose just as suddenly when Netflix started paying!
Other ISPs know that they have regional monopolies on home Internet users and basically holding them hostage until they get a slice of the Netflix pie. If network capacity is an issue, then why does AT&T charge $70 per month for 300Mb/s for three years in Austin, Texas and $65 for 45Mb/s (which goes up after 1 year) in the rest of the United States. Network capacity is not the issue. Competition with Google Fiber drove AT&T's prices down.
If the backbones don't have the capacity to handle all of the individual connections, the issue can be solved with peering, local hosting, and more. The ISP's have actually blocked and slowed those technologies (even when legal), or refused to connect local content servers to their networks
I pay for my bandwidth, and Netflix pays for theirs. What the ISPs are doing is the 1970's equivalent of charging the recipient of a collect call after also taking the caller's money. At the same time, they are actively fighting competition from Google and municipalities. The solution is break the monopolies by encouraging competition. Perhaps then, we will see Austin's network speeds in our lifetime.
I remember when quality of discussion and articles was high enough to warrant doing a password reset and logging in.
They can tolerate low latency? That's like saying I can tolerate a higher paycheck. I don't think you understand latency. Low latency is desirable.
It's true that the founders of the US generally spoke of "democracy" as meaning "direct democracy", as opposed to our "republic", and both they would likely agree with your assessment of that system. However, most modern usage clearly intends "democracy" to be an umbrella term, of which "republic" is simply one specific variation. A republic can also be known as a "representative democracy".
So while it may be a buzzword for politicians, it's actually not really incorrect. It's just slightly less precise than the term "republic".
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
There is a simple definition of Net Neutrality that works: the customer gets to decide the priority of his traffic.
There are many ways you can engineer this outcome, but in all countries that pull it off they do it real simply: every household is serviced by multiple ISP's (at least 10's), and you chose the one you like given your budget.
As usual the US, the supposed beacon of capitalism, has cocked it up. Most homes are serviced by one ISP. And with the power that gives them, not only don't they give you a choice in the priority of your traffic (which admittedly would be a big ask), they erect pay walled gardens, and then they actively interfere with outside traffic to force you to use them. They do this in secret, and seem to have no trouble telling direct outright lies about it when queried.
Being able to bleed monopolistic profits off their customers has made them hugely profitable of course. So to cap it all off they engage in crony capitalism by bribing your politicians with campaign donations to preserve this farce.
I have no idea why voters in the US put up with sort of shit. It boggles the mind.
Quality of Service is built into IPv6. The ISP shouldn't have anything to do with QoS. That is solely the discretion of the service or client. If I want, I can configure my servers so that SMTP traffic has a very low QoS for IPv6 based networks. Network Neutrality ensures that ISPs don't alter that QoS along the way.
We're a long way off from IPv6, and we shouldn't be. But that's another issue. ISPs shouldn't handle the throttling. They should give equal priority to everything.
Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example.
Bullshit. You don't know which of my traffic is higher priority. The end user can and should have network management tools, but the ISP better damned well not decide that my kids watching Nemo in HD is more important than my rsync transfer of a log file telling me why the master server just barfed. That is my choice, not the ISP's.
Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people,
Bullshit. Just, bullshit. Citation needed. No, people who understand networks do not believe that the pipeline providers should be doing traffic prioritization based on endpoints.
or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency.
Vague fear mongering. What if the network companies prioritize the wrong things in their search for a little more revenue and something bad happens to the children? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.
I don't know if this is intentional or not, but throwing piles of vaguely related and confusing facts at a story then saying, "Therefore, we shouldn't regulate now!" is a standard tactic from the Koch plalybook. Shove it.
The public, including tens of thousands of network administrators, have spoken without equivocation: We want net neutrality. Period. When the ISPs come up with better regulation, they can propose it, and we will consider it. Until then, we will not move an inch on our demand for Net Neutrality. It has worked since the first day of the Internet. It is why the Internet made so many people, including the ISPs, rich. If they don't like it, they can GTFO or DIAF.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Right. I don't think many people would argue with QoS policies being applied uniformly across all providers of similar services. Having all video set to a different QoS than all email isn't a problem. Having one video provider set at high priority and another one set at low is a problem.
Bingo.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
A low latency application is ssh/telnet or any other text based interactive protocol.
I disagree quite strongly with the above--text based interfaces really don't become unusable until you hit absurd latency (>2500ms). ssh/telnet are quite usable at >1000ms latency, and even high packet loss isn't really a huge concern. Even working over 110bps links, where one could actually type faster than the line rate wasn't a real problem until you filled up the buffer (I can't give you examples of what latency was like under those conditions, because I never measured it, but you've got 200ms or so built in RTT for a single byte from the bit rate alone)
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Is that so? So why the biggest democracy in the world India has higher poverty levels than the most populous country in the world which is not very democratic? One can take your sentence of course and say that for it to work you would have to have functioning government and during process of building one there is no way to have democracy but I think the old fart that allegedly said this thing was maybe drunk but surely did not mean all that much.
+6 Insightful.
The target that you missed in your post is that ISPs need to stay ahead of the bandwidth they are selling.
If they sell 1000 subscribers 20 Mbit/S, then they need to have 1000x20Mbit/S, +20% bandwidth available.
1000 subscribers on Gigabit, then 1.2 Terabit of bandwidth available.
That's what's missing from your analysis, the mandated requirement by the FCC that all ISPs provide enough bandwidth to cover what they've sold, without any kind of throttling whatsoever.
The same would be true for backbone operators as well.
but not to all I hope? I mean that would be a violation of their mandate as people voting those republicans into office would not want such abomination either.
ISPs can drop encrypted packages if they want
If an ISP's subscriber can't get through to the HTTPS site of the bank from an account at which the subscriber pays the ISP, good luck retaining that subscriber.
Voice isn't even latency sensitive
Yes it is. Latency may be interpreted as hesitation, or thinking the other party is uncertain as to what to say. And sometimes it interferes with collision avoidance mechanisms in conversation, when two people will talk over each other, wait, talk over each other again, etc.
YouTube (LD streaming) arrived in 2005 or so, as did HD output in the Xbox 360 video game console. HDTV popularity took off in 2007. Five years ago was the fourth quarter of 2009, by which time full-power analog TV broadcasts had ended in the United States, and it was hard to find a CRT SDTV for sale anywhere but a charity shop.
Noninteractive video such as Netflix doesn't need low latency. But good luck playing OnLive or PlayStation Now (formerly Gaikai) or even FaceTime with a satellite uplink.
Other than that it is a very thoughtful post, thank you.
The last-mile Internet market depends on rights of way, that is, the running-wires-under-the-roads market. And the only way I've heard of to ensure that market remains competitive is to tear up all the roads and bury a bunch of conduits that the city can lease to competitive ISPs who pull their own fiber.
Cogent has offered to pay all the one-time costs to connect with certain large ISPs, such as the cost of a router port. The ISPs rejected this deal because they want a recurring fee for some purported expense that I still haven't been able to get anyone to explain.
You could always vote with your Realtor agent and move somewhere that offers fit-for-service home telecommunications.
That;s what you define it as. That's what technical people everywhere define it as... but it's not at all what regulations are being written around, yet you continue to support them as if they were.
Meanwhile without regulations nothing has actually needed fixing long-term (Netflix is doing just fine now), certainly nothing that would have been fixed by any proposed legislation. But you want to break it, you want to fuck over the internet because you think your technical definition matches the words coming out of a pro-business FCC chair in Washington.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> we have to do something. We also have to be mindful that giving federal government agencies more power turns out bad about 90% of the time. But - we have to do something.
The second sentence needs to be a firm bound on the first and third. All too often, "we have to do something " is followed by "and this idea is something , so we have to do it". Knowing that our type of government is designed to be fair, not to be effective, we should say "we have to do something when and if we know that something will help, and at an acceptable cost ".
The intent behind network neutrality is good. It IS likely that Comcast will do something bad if they are allowed to*. The actual wording of the neutrality proposals so far is always a cure worse than the disease, though.
* NN advocates chose a bad example in Netflix, as that was pretty much a matter of them simply not wanting to pay their hosting bill like every other web site in the world does. Netflix wanted to be treated as special. That makes them a really bad example. Give it time, Comcast will eventually throttle competing content providers in order to promote their own services.
Fyi, India does not have direct democracy either. Morever, India and China are different in the sense that India was under british colonial rule till 1947 and had yo undergo a awful partition.
You certainly CAN use a text interface with 1000ms latency. You can also watch video at 56K, I did a lot of that late at night when I was a teenager. I'd sure rather have a few Mbps for video and 100ms for text, though. At 100ms, even Stephen Hawking's typing will get ahead of the echo, and his arms are paralyzed- he types by blinking his eyes ala Morse code or similar.
I should have used preview. That should say I'd certainly prefer less than 100ms, preferably less than 25 in order to have that "real time" feel, no noticeable lag.
Also should say at 1000ms Hawking will get ahead of the echo.
And lying about it. Comcast, for example, has a very large number of technically sophisticated customers reporting demonstrable throttling of high bandwidth services such as Bittorrent and Netflix. They deny it outright, but their denials are filled with what I would call "weasel words". They deny specific aspects of the throttling, but not the general practice.
No service is less important. There can be a dedicated line for emergency services. All other services are equally important from a humanistic point of view.
>ssh/telnet are quite usable at >1000ms latency,
Only if you type at less than one character per second... sheez.
I've worked on systems with that kind of latency, and it was a horrible nightmare.
To the point where I would open a text editor and type out commands there, then copy and paste them into the session rather than having characters show up well after they were typed and only being able to spot a typo several characters later (when it would take another second per character to navigate back and correct it).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I recently asked someone from an MVPD ISP about transparent HTTP caching as a way to enhance end user QoS is streaming video. They told me that they were scared of transparent caching as it might be seen as anti-net neutrality and they could not afford the bad press or FCC issues. Just saying.
Besides, if an ISP puts a dedicated Netflix or Google cache in their network, is that a "fast lane"?
A republic is not synonymous with representative democracy. Democracy and republicanism are orthogonal concepts; they're akin to the ownership and administration of a business. Democracy is about the state being administered, controlled by, the people, be it directly or indirectly by representatives. Republicanism is about the state being owned by, operating on behalf of and in the name of, the people. It's possible to have one and not the other, or both, or neither.
A great example of this is the United Kingdom, which is a representative democracy because it is administered by ordinary citizens representing other ordinary citizens, but it's not a republic because that government does is not directing the official sovereign power of The People, delegated to it; it is directing the power of The Crown, which power is officially delegated to said Crown by God. An opposite example would be North Korea, which is a republic in that the state officially belongs to and act on behalf of and in the name of The People, but is not democratic because that power is administered solely by the Kim family and their lackeys.
The US is both a (representative) democracy, and a republic, but those do not mean the same thing.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
While its true and Vint Cerf seems to confirmed as much that there certainly would be benefits to fast lane the fact of the matter is the companies we rely on to provide us with internet here in the states are some of the least trustworthy and most underhanded organizations out there. I wouldn't even mind fast lanes if there was a panel of independent experts with, no direct ties to the broadband industry or organizations like the MPAA, that sorted out which services overall, instead of specific websites that pay, were given priority as a means to only reduce latency (overall speed should only be limited by a persons connection and the website itself). After all, virtually any streaming application or constant flow of data would do well to find practical ways to reduce latency. However such a system is pretty much a pipe dream and not likely to happen any time soon. The other risk is that ISP's barely upgrade there networks as is, give them a chance to make certain aspects better than others and suddenly you could find yourself with a fast lane and bus lane. Net Neutrality is certainly not perfect but until the ISP's show they can be trusted there's no way in hell I want the entire Broadband industry to have access to fast lanes.
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Net neutrality doesn't mean that ISPs can't use QoS to mark and prioritize real-time traffic like VoIP, IPTV etc. over http. They can do it but they must not discriminate between different VOIP/streaming providers. For example net-neutral ISP cannot prioritize its own streaming service and throttle competition like Netflix.
telling the ISP that they are to the Internet what the copper wired Bells were to POTS. ISPs sell connectivity. Period.
Wow somebody loves dick riding Verizon....
Look it's quite simple. Verizon has been throttling users of Netflix. Case close. Go no further than that. We have real world cases to look at not some hypothetical double-dutch bull shit. Net Neutrality would prevent Verizon from doing this. Period. That's the point. Let us not forget the Billions of tax payer money that has gone into the coffers of Verizon and other ISPs to enhance their infrastructure and didn't. So don't give me this bull shit crocodile tears about cost. If the telecoms and cable companies can't handle it, then give the tax payers back their money and let local government become broadband ISPs - which they have tried doing since they where not being served by he telecoms and cable companies but the telecoms and cable companies complained.
Fuck Off.
Especially when the one video provider set at a low priority is in competition with the ISP's video services and the ISP has a monopoly (or duopoly) in the area for Internet access. Then the ISP is using their monopoly powers in one market to unfairly compete in another market. If the government had any backbone (and wasn't paid off... I mean lobbied, by the big ISPs so much), they would open anti-trust proceedings against any ISP that interfered with Internet video to prop up their TV services.
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Stop BSing to scare us into rejecting NN.
NN is that the source/destination is not part of what can be prioritised, and the insistence that you CANNOT throttle a connection unless it really IS oversubscribed, rather than just as an extortion racket to get more money.
They define it as the OP does.
Just because you can find some morons who will claim otherwise MERELY SO THEY CAN THROTTLE and extort money from people TWICE does NOT mean the OP's definition is wrong, you thundering moron.
There is still a problem. My ISP will cater to the "average Joe" and bump the priority on most used services (like video streams, that can actually tolerate quite a lot of latency), but they will not consider the case of niche users like SSH interactive sessions, which are very latency sensitive but "who cares", right ? Well I care. So in the end, your rule is neat, but it is not quite enough yet to let prioritization happen: as long as I cannot make my application a priority, I still get the short changed.
I've gone into more detail in this in http://rmf.vc/IPNetFlixSS7 and http://rmf.vc/BeyondNeutrality. Very simply the concept of net neutrality is rooted in the notion that the Internet is like railroads with a provider using rails (or channels or pipes) to add value and, as with common carriage, we seek even handed treatment. The Internet is a fundamentally different concept with our devices using any means to exchange packets and only require best efforts rather than managed circuits.
Rather than neutral pipes we need indifference to packets more like cars on roads than freight trains on rails.The heart of the problem is how we finance the infrastructure. Roads are common infrastructure so we don't have a stakeholder who must monetize our speech. Today's telecom, like railroads puts the carriers at odds with those who create their own solutions.
These concepts are very counter-intuitive because the less you assure a solution the more opportunity you create.
Instead of force feeding regulations that inhibit the market to push for things like net neutrality in a more organic and naturally economic way from a government perspective, let the market dictate if they want net neutrality or not. When enough people realize that they are getting the shaft and that their data is being shunted or held monetarily hostage, they will demand that companies change their tune or else. I think that's possible, but there has to be some things that need to be done on the back end. The first is government protection of the telco's and their subsidies.
.. this whole issue isn't about "Net Neutrality" or any such abstract concept.
It's 100% about "Preventing Telecommunications Corporate F*ckery".
The average person has no idea what "Net Neutrality" really means, nor do they care. But untill you start calling it what it is.. "Keeping these abusive dickbags from wholesale raping the consumer, whoever that consumer happens to be", you will have hundreds of millions of people who will stand up behind that idea..
Because it's a very rare soul who *hasn't* been f*cked over by his telco, cable company, etc.. We *all* share that common, visceral experience or know someone personally who has.
This. Unfortunately, politicians and news media seem to lack the technical understanding to grasp this concept, as simple as it might seem to you or me, so here's a simple breakdown of what network neutrality is and is not, expressed using car analogies, for the technologically clueless:
The Internet is like a series of highways, interconnected. Your ISP is like a car dealer that sells you a vehicle that you can drive on those highways.
Under network neutrality, you can get in your car and drive somewhere, and your car gets roughly the same priority as every other car. However, if an ambulance comes, you still have to pull over to the side of the road, because the ambulance (a real-time video stream) getting to the heart attack victim (a video player) a few seconds sooner is more important than you getting to Wal-Mart (a web page) a few minutes sooner. Similarly, if you're driving a truck (bulk data), you might be delayed occasionally to make room for passenger cars.
With network neutrality, different roads have different speed limits (bandwidth). And automobile dealers (ISPs) can charge you more money for cars that can go faster, to take maximum advantage of those speed limits on distant roads.
With network neutrality, however, if your car dealer's owner also owns a grocery store, he or she cannot install a limiter that limits your car to 35 MPH when driving to a competing grocery store unless it also limits your car when driving to his or her own grocery store. Similarly, he or she cannot install a rocket engine that gives your car a speed boost when driving to his or her grocery store without designing it to also give the same boost when driving to other local grocery stores.
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The problem that Netflix had with Comcast is that Comcast's own video-on-demand service was unaffected by the lack of bandwidth. If it had been, they would have magically found the bandwidth a long time ago. There's nothing wrong with prioritizing traffic based on content, so long as it is done even-handedly.
But at its core, the real problem in that particular case (and, for that matter, in most cases) is not a lack of net neutrality, but rather with monopoly abuse by the established cable and telco cartels. Comcast should not be allowed to have a video-on-demand service that competes against Netflix unless it divests itself of its wire infrastructure monopoly, because there is no feasible way to regulate Comcast in such a way that they can't take advantage of their government-granted wire monopoly to gain an unfair advantage over Netflix and others.
What this means is that at its deepest, the problem is not net neutrality at all, but rather an incompetent federal government that has been hopelessly lax at antitrust regulation for decades, and that needs to get off its lazy @$$ and impose common carrier provisions for communications infrastructure providers so that they'll no longer be allowed to simultaneously be content providers. One tiny change to the Federal Communications Act, and all these problems would be solved. Instantly. And we wouldn't even need to explain net neutrality to a bunch of computer-illiterate legislators to do it!
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.