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Europe's 'Net Neutrality' Rules Fail to Ban BitTorrent Throttling (torrentfreak.com)
Europe has finally agreed on a set of net neutrality rules. According to a report on TorrentFreak, these rules offer improvements for some individual members states, various activist groups and experts. But the current language would also allow ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic permanently if that would optimize overall "transmission quality." From the report (edited):"Europe's new net-neutrality rules should ban throttling BitTorrent, but they don't. They leave ISPs a loophole," said Holmes Wilson of Fight for the Future (FFTF), one of the driving forces behind the Save Net Neutrality campaign. "ISPs can say they're doing it for 'traffic management' purposes -- even when their networks aren't clogged, because the rules say they can throttle to 'prevent impending network congestion,'" he adds. In addition to file-sharing traffic, the proposed rules also allow Internet providers to interfere with encrypted traffic including VPN connections. Since encrypted traffic can't be classified through deep packet inspection, ISPs may choose to de-prioritize it altogether. In theory, ISPs may choose to throttle any type of traffic they want, as long as they frame it as a network congestion risk. "So if your ISP is lazy, or wants to cut corners and save money, they can throttle BitTorrent, or VPNs, or Bitcoin, or Tor, or any class of traffic they can identify," Wilson says.
There's a difference between bandwidth hogs and bandwidth abusers. I prefer they could spend a little effort to discern the difference.
Sounds like that's what Europe got.
The laws I hate the most are those which claim (by their name) to protect something and are actually craftily written to do the exact opposite.
Another win for moneyed interests by lobbying.
There are many examples. This is one of them.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Net Neutrality is a word that's used & abused to mean everything these days, including calls to make it illegal to charge for bandwidth usage (imagine how much Hummer H2 owners would like "gas neutrality" to make sure Prius owners pay just as much as they do).
In this case, it would only really be a violation of a stricter definition of "net neutrality" if there were select content providers that were given unfettered bittorrent access with no limits while other non-preferred sources were being throttled. If you want to throttle the whole stupid protocol to keep the network operating for useful purposes and don't make specific carve-outs for "preferred" users then it's not a violation of net neutrality.
Bear in mind that if you want any throttling of bittorrent to be made illegal, it's hard to see how preventing DDoS attacks at the network level or even filtering Spam could be considered legal.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Also funny how a bitcoin logo is being used in a story about bit torrent.
But that's the technical competence level of the Slashdot "editorial" staff, who once again make the case for why the federal minimum wage should be lowered.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I'm not in Europe. But I'd hate if they throttled VPN. I work from home fairly often (one day a week at least) and if they just up and throttled VPN I'd be far less effective at you know - performing my job. It isn't like all VPN access is for pirating or even region shifting (which dammit should be OK). Some of it is just plain WORK. They can't tell the difference - they don't know what the data is in the VPN tunnel. So they shouldn't mess with it.
The only effect that blocking filesharing traffic will have is that people will find ways to disguise filesharing traffic as normal traffic and it ends up adding additional bandwidth overhead for the disguising.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Of course, the regulated corporations will tend to outsmart the regulators.
The only thing that keeps businesses providing good services and offering quality goods is competition...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Europe's new net-neutrality rules should ban throttling BitTorrent, but they don't.
You idiots still do not get it, do you.
What Net Neutrality "should" do from the standpoint of those making the rules, is allow compete dictation of what is and is not allowable by government agencies... they same ones that would rather see bit torrent vanish.
Net Neutrality as a concept is one of the biggest jokes of all time, and the funnies part is the joke is really on those whole clamor for it most, expecting the opposite of what it delivers.
Before Bit Torrent could come and go, sometimes being punished by an ISP, sometimes not... going forward since the rules are codified EVERY SINLGE ISP will be throttling torrents and you can thank your demands for Net Neutrality for making that happen.
Enjoy the future you have crafted for yourself. I don't care since I can afford a truly un-encumbered business line, I'll just laugh as the rest of you suffer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To minimize network collisions you build a fatter pipe.
A more simple rule you will not find.
Obviously the EU is letting the service providers and entertainment industry write the rules
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Stop shilling and help cleaning up the airport.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
net neutrality only guarantees that the source or destination of your data does not cause your data to be throttled. if they want to throttle all video traffic, they can do that. what they can't do is throttle video traffic from site X while not throttling it from site Y.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The VPN part worries me more, since there are lots of legitimate uses - even business uses - for VPN's (there are legit uses for BT - such as game updates etc - but there's less of a case than VPN).
I remember being on Bell in the east (Canada) and noticing that whenever I opened up an SSH connection to work my traffic would slow to a crawl after a short while. Not just my SSH traffic, but *everything* else as well was being throttled. If they're going to start slowing up connection just because they *might* be related to P2P traffic, that's shit.
For Torrents themselves, I'd be OK if they're throttled to something reasonable so long as one is still getting decent value. Reasonably though, there should be a trade-off. If you want to throttle my P2P or other heavy traffic, then cut out the data limits for my account. There's no point in having a 50MB/100MB connection if they only shit you can do on it is maybe 15MB max and everything else is throttled, but where I am the "fast" packages are also the ones that come with higher caps.
Since I tend towards gaming and streaming of non-HD content rather than massive bandwidth gobbling torrents etc, I'd much rather have a slower speed but bigger cap, but nobody offers that because really they're just trying to offer you the biggest price with the lowest service they can get away with.
A bit is a bit is a bit (from the perspective of the dumb pipe network)
With possibly justifiable exceptions for packets known to be pure DDOS (i.e. entirely malicious, no beneficial purpose to end users).
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
A bandwidth hog is using more than typical for him/herself, a bandwidth abuser is using more than typical to abuse others.
The summary also says that the same loophole could be used to downgrade VPN'ed traffic too. If you can't deep inspect the packet, it may simply assert that unclassifiable traffic is a traffic threat too. So, you could find that both specific BitTorrent and unrecognizable encrypted traffic could both be deprioritized in deference to other protocols.
Not sure how this would work in practice, but the loophole sounds just wide enough to make it easy for the ISPs to make use of while requiring expensive litigation to clarify.
BitTorrent is recognizable either through port selection of the client (688x and 6969) or because it opens a LOT of simultaneous connections or because not all trackers/clients are fully encrypted (I think most clients still default to opportunistic encryption, not strict requirement).
VPNs are recognizable as well by the same method (well-known ports, well-known sites or well-known unencrypted control/setup traffic).
They could also just throw "anything encrypted" into that class, the law allows them to do that as long as they give the excuse.
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QoS is not really an aspect of any (common) carrier, only the originator of a packet specifies QoS . You can thus set QoS bits as a customer (or end-point) and your (and other) ISPs may or may not follow it (depends largely on your agreement, business lines are more prone to listening to QoS bits but once outside the 'agreed upon' network, QoS pretty much gets ignored).
Net Neutrality is about your ISP not interfering with your QoS settings or otherwise not forcing QoS on your packets without your agreement. They should, unless you specify otherwise, treat all traffic as it did not have any QoS bits set.
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The Internet does not have/supply emergency services unless you have something like that in your agreement. Additionally, this is not about the ISP throttling your line if it doesn't have capacity, this is about your ISP throttling certain aspects of your line regardless of it's capacity. This would be similar to your phone line company only giving a dial tone to companies that have paid them and inserting artificial line drops when you contact companies that haven't.
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