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.

Comments

When you encrypt everything...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

nope

[BradMajors]

"Video streams... examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly."

No they don't. Bad example.

net neutrality isn't protocol agnosticism

[TheDawgLives]

Net Neutrality means you don't favor one host over another for the same protocol, not that you treat all protocols exactly the same. In the case of the ISPs vs. Netflix, the ISP's are trying to slow or block streaming videos from Netflix while allowing or prioritizing streaming videos from providers who pay the ISP's fees. This is non-neutral prioritization.

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.

Neutrality *IS* about that, except for shills

[mrchaotica]

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.