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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.
...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.
"Video streams... examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly."
No they don't. Bad example.
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."
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Torrent downloads aren't bothered by latency at all. Just sayin'...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Real-time anything. Voice, video, gaming, remote control, etc.
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
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.
That's not latency, that's a bandwidth issue. Latency is the time one packet takes to arrive. If one packet can throw off your whole video stream then you're not caching. If you're caching, then the bandwidth would have to take a prolonged dip to burn through the cached data and find a point it hadn't downloaded yet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.