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Europe's 'Net Neutrality' Could Allow Throttling of Torrents and VPNs (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: TorrentFreak reports that the European Parliament is approaching a vote on new telecom regulations that aim to implement net neutrality throughout EU member states. Unfortunately, the legislation hinges on a few key amendments, and experts are warning about the consequences should those amendments fail to pass. "These amendments will ensure that specific types of traffic aren't throttled around the clock, for example. The current language would allow ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic permanently if that would optimize overall 'transmission quality.' This is not a far-fetched argument, since torrent traffic can be quite demanding on a network." That's not the only concern: "Besides file-sharing traffic the proposed legislation also allows Internet providers to interfere with encrypted traffic, including VPN connections. Since encrypted traffic can't be classified though deep packet inspection, ISPs may choose to de-prioritize it altogether."
If some ISP starts "de-priotizing" all ecnrypted traffic, they'll soon have 95% de-priotized, which will make it useless anyway.
So they de-prioritize things. That's fine. The competition between ISPs is enough to have some cater to the edge cases. So long as they don't sell a "prioritized" VPN service above what anyone else can provide on their network, I would be happy with the "problems" listed in the summary. They aren't problems, and are fair and equitable.
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If they are allowed to set priorities for different traffic, how is this a net neutrality bill?
The torrent part I agree with: torrenting can be very demanding on the networks, and torrents are not used in applications that require real time. They'll be fine if their file transfers take a little bit longer. The encrypted traffic part though - a lot of traffic nowadays is encrypted, so that hardly helps. Furthermore, I don't think that punishing traffic that is encrypted is very fair: the performance overhead is not that great, and I don't understand the obsession with people wanting to monitor and inspect everything. Even in Germany it's a pitiful state of affairs, though not as bad as the US or England. Watching me browse Slashdot is supposed to further secure the state, ja? I don't feel any more secure, and I doubt anyone else does either. I'm very surprised they are as free with it as they are actually; although all (I hope!) banking sites are encrypted nowadays, if they were to read my bank statements unencrypted, I believe that may expose them to a lawsuit from myself...?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
1/6 of the downstream traffic and 1/3 of the upstream traffic is impactful on an ISP network because it consumes resources that would otherwise be available for other uses, and/or requires the ISP to invest in additional infrastructure to prevent that traffic impacting other uses.
it's the nodes that have to do most of the work
You appear to come from a world that has infinite speed zero latency networks. Welcome to Earth, where we have an internet that requires switches, routers, fibre optics and complex networking.
Net Neutrality is needed in the US because there's essentially no competition. It's a regulation on a monopoly operator.
Many European countries have competition in the telecoms sector. Any action perceived as unfair throttling will see their customers go elsewhere.
The problem is, regulation is a blunt instrument. If I want decent broadband speed for Netflix, I don't care if everything else is slower. However, it might be in Netflix's interests to offer ISPs a cut to allow higher broadband speeds for its service only. Beneficial to the ISP, to the customer and to Netflix. Strict net neutrality doesn't allow this. Make an exception and you end up with loopholes, and I'm sure there are other potential scenarios where you simply don't want neutrality.
Whether the governments like it or not, the use of VPN and encryption is on the rise by businesses around the world
My companies, for example, rely on VPN and encryption for all inter-office data traffic, and if EU starts to de-prioritize VPN and/or encrypted traffic many business communication will be hit
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Apply priority to 95% of clients and priority doesn't mean anything anymore
Actually it does, but probably not in a good way: it means the other 5% of clients are losing out, perhaps heavily.
Avoiding this scenario -- keeping in mind that a huge proportion of all Internet traffic is generated by a relatively small number of businesses today, and all the little guys between them might only make up 5% of total traffic -- is a large part of why Net Neutrality matters.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Net neutrality is all about making sure the traffic is not filtered by content, what packet you have on port 80 should not be prioritized because it is coming from cnn.com while the one from say, google.com is throttled because they did not pay an extra fee. It is also about making sure too that the content of the packet is not what decide the throttling, but the functionality and network status. IOW throttling not based on content and origin/destination.
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Routing packets in the order the arrive makes it worse for EVERBODY, and makes very low bandwidth uses like ssh and voip more or less useless.
Streaming video (Netflix) requires a certain (high) BANDWIDTH to avoid repeated buffering. Any more than what it requires does little good, but it needs to transfer X MBs per minute in order to keep up. Latency and jitter do no matter at all for Netflix. It's purely MB per minute- packets can be delayed 200ms and it doesn't matter as long as they arrive before the buffer runs out.
Voip needs very, very little bandwidth- 64Kbps is enough. That's 1% of what video uses. But voip can't have high jitter (variation in latency). It also requires reasonable latency, but jitter is the main issue.
If you have Netflix and voip traffic going through the same router, it doesn't affect the video viewer AT ALL to have a 64 byte voip packet occasionally jump to the front of the queue if it's been waiting too long. Having the voip wait for three seconds of video -would- mean the call goes silent for three seconds. That would be stupid. Really stupid.
Ssh needs virtually zero bandwidth- bytes per second, 1/1,000th as much as video needs. Ssh doesn't care about jitter. But it DOES care very much about latency. When you try type "cat /etc/resolv.conf" it's really annoying to have delays between each character. But the ssh packets are tiny - just a few bytes, so they don't effect anyone else on the network. Again, leaving them waiting in line hurts the ssh user with absolutely no benefit to anyone - it's only damaging. Doing that would again be really dumb.
Suppose a provider has incompetent admins and does ruin ssh, voip, and other low-bandwidth highly interactive traffic by making those packets wait for high-bandwidth non-interactive traffic. People who care about interactive traffic will find that provider's service more or less unusable and switch. So here's a guy (like me) who was using less than 1kbps for ssh while paying the same $45 you pay while you use Netflix. The ISPs cost to service both of us is $70 ($10 for me and $60 for you). Guess what happens when the voip and ssh users leave for a different ISP? We're not there to subsidize your cost anymore, so your bill goes from $45 to $70.
To turn back to your road analogy, you may have noticed that in many places trucks aren't allowed in the left (fast) lane and in most places the left lane is for faster traffic only. If on one tollway all the cars had to line up behind the semis, while another road allowed them to go faster, which road do you think the cars would use? Once the trucks had to pay the full cost of the road by themselves, do you think their toll rates would go down or up? Would the trucks somehow benefit from making it illegal for a car to pass a truck?
Routing packets in the order the arrive makes it worse for EVERBODY, and makes very low bandwidth uses like ssh and voip more or less useless.
You shouldn't prioritize SSH traffic up, because if you do that, then people's SSH tunnels get prioritized up. You should just have a network without shit latency, which is not massively oversubscribed. You can always prioritize down the stuff you know is streaming. The stuff that goes up is DNS, SIP, and maybe NTP would be nice and the traffic is minimal. And the beginnings of HTTP connections, but only the first however-many-kBs-make-sense.
To turn back to your road analogy, you may have noticed that in many places trucks aren't allowed in the left (fast) lane and in most places the left lane is for faster traffic only. If on one tollway all the cars had to line up behind the semis, while another road allowed them to go faster, which road do you think the cars would use?
No, you cannot use a road analogy like that, because networking doesn't work like that. All the cars on a network link move at the same speed. They're not like automobiles, they're like train cars. Unlike normal trains, the cars are of different lengths, or you could think of them as numbers of contiguous cars with contents belonging to the same customer, and naturally the cars preceding yours will reach the station first. If your cars are going to get there before the ones currently ahead of them, they're going to have to be put on a different line which will get there quicker.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Congratulations, you found a good ISP.
If you can prove to me that all ISPs are like yours, I'll concede the point. Until then we both know that my factual statement remains accurate.
God damn fucking piece of shit posted as HTML formatted. Fuck off.