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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.
> 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.
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
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.