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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.
If they are allowed to set priorities for different traffic, how is this a net neutrality bill?
It depends on your definition of 'net neutrality'.
1 - Every packet is of equal weight and value, irrespective of content
2 - Every packet is of equal weight and value, irrespective of source or destination
3 - both of the above
Where bandwidth demand is greater than availability - i.e. 6pm on a Sunday on residential networks - something has to give.
I'm very comfortable with my ISP choosing not to take option 1 if it means that packets for online gamers get low latency, video streams don't buffer and web browsing remains interactive. If that means someone's Linux distribution takes another two minutes to download, then that's a reasonable use of the available resources.
Where I dig my heels in on net neutrality is option 2. If the ISP prioritises its own video streaming service ahead of others, its own gaming service ahead of others, its favourite partners' websites ahead of others, then it's prejudicing the market and acting in bad faith.
So no, do traffic shaping by all means. It's a reasonable and proportionate approach to assuring quality of service. Just do it for all packets of that type.
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?