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Stanford Engineers Propose A Technology To Break The Net Neutrality Deadlock (phys.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Stanford engineers have invented a technology that would allow an internet user to tell network providers and online publishers when and if they want content or services to be given preferential delivery, an advance that could transform the network neutrality debate. Net neutrality, as it's often called, is the proposition that internet providers should allow equal access to all content rather than give certain applications favored status or block others. But the Stanford engineers -- Professor Nick McKeown, Associate Professor Sachin Katti and electrical engineering PhD Yiannis Yiakoumis -- say their new technology, called Network Cookies, makes it possible to have preferential delivery and an open internet. Network Cookies allow users to choose which home or mobile traffic should get favored delivery, while putting network operators and content providers on a level playing field in catering to such user-signaled preferences. "So far, net neutrality has been promoted as the best possible defense for users," Katti said. "But treating all traffic the same isn't necessarily the best way to protect users. It often restricts their options and this is why so-called exceptions from neutrality often come up. We think the best way to ensure that ISPs and content providers don't make decisions that conflict with the interests of users is to let users decide how to configure their own traffic." McKeown said Network Cookies implement user-directed preferences in ways that are consistent with the principles of net neutrality. "First, they're simple to use and powerful," McKeown said. "They enable you to fast-lane or zero-rate traffic from any application or website you want, not just the few, very popular applications. This is particularly important for smaller content providers -- and their users -- who can't afford to establish relationships with ISPs. Second, they're practical to deploy. They don't overwhelm the user or bog down user devices and network operators and they function with a variety of protocols. Finally, they can be a very practical tool for regulators, as they can help them design simple and clear policies and then audit how well different parties adhere to them." The researchers presented a technical paper on their approach at a conference in Brazil.
Could we please get everyone to implement RFC3514?
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt
Please? It would make network security a lot easier to deal with.
This is like the "do not track" button.
Only worse.
Every advertiser in the universe will want to programmatically toggle this option "for the convenience of the user."
No. Treat all traffic identically. Bits from CNN are more more important than bits from lemonparty.com
Nobody gets special treatment, that's what net neutrality IS.
Idiots.
It's not about the users. The whole reason ISP's want to give preferential treatment to traffic is specifically so that they can force content providers to pay them for access to their customers. They want to pick the winners, punish competitors, and make money doing it. Anyone that thinks this is about improving the end user experience isn't paying attention.
Which will obviously give me an advantage over everyone else because they sure won't do so.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Way back when, the definition of net neutrality was not "the proposition that internet providers should allow equal access to all content rather than give certain applications favored status or block others."
When I first heard the term in the 1990s, net neutrality meant that the main trunks all processed data the same for every provider and end user. They could certainly make the decision to route some data packets before others, such as video before text. The problem is that the ISPs are now also providers, and have decided that their video is more important than another provider's video. So Comcast is fucking with Netflix, claiming Netflix pushes out too much data. But if I am Comcast's customer, I don't want them disrupting my video feed just because they want more money than they already gouge from their customers.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
ISPs wouldn't go with this simply because it'd require quite a lot of extra work on their end to make this happen for zero gain to them, and everyone knows ISPs do traffic-shaping for their own benefit, not for their customers' benefit. Also, end-users would just tag *everything* as to be prioritized, because they obviously don't want any of their traffic to be slowed down, so what would be the point? Besides, how the fuck would you even implement this for something that doesn't use a web-browser? Ask the ISP to list every possible network-protocol ever invented and all the ones still waiting to be invented, so you can click on them? That'd be one ginormous list to go through.
Also, I have to take offense at the whole "But treating all traffic the same isn't necessarily the best way to protect users." -- works fucking well over here in Finland, but then again, our ISPs aren't nearly as obsessed with overselling capacity. Maybe fix ISPs overselling their capacity, instead of trying to come up with workarounds that only harm end-users!
Why is individual A's desire to see CNN load .5 ms faster more important than individual B's desire to see their friend pranked into being sent to lemonparty asap, given priority?
No. Traffic. Is. Traffic.
The person requesting the traffic wants it asap all the time. Now, an option to DELAY delivery, that may be useful. I am less interested in some kinds of data hurled at me than others. Especially data I don't particularly want, like flash ad streams.
Wait, didn't something similar exist in the past, call Type of Service field?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course its been deprecated, for obvious reasons.
From my vantage point, the public wants net neutrality and the cable companies don't. If the cable companies want to give preferential treatment to content providers that pay them off, they should lose common carrier status with all the liability that entails.
No. Traffic. Is. Traffic. The person requesting the traffic wants it asap all the time.
Not true. If I am audio chatting with a friend, I want packets delivered in milliseconds. But if I am running a torrent in the background, anytime in the next hour or so is good enough. It would be nice to be able to set my own preferences.
Whats is wrong with "A" technology? It is a technology if it solves a problem. Technology is not singular (i.e. space technology, video technology), and it is not plural.
I actually agree with what this solution does. No one will care that their netflix packets are prioritized lower than their voice packets, since netflix streams and voice needs to be near real-time. Same thing for SSH sessions, page loads, or IM applications. They need faster response times than your Carbonite subscription or drop-box sync.
The rules should be really thought out. No application bandwidth limiting, just prioritization. Don't allow stupidity by allowing application developers to set their own preferences (sorry advertisers).
Large companies do this all the time to ensure the quality of their hosted VOIP phones and critical applications. It's called QOS (quality-of-service) or COS (class-of-service) tags. The packets themselves are tagged by some network-level equipment by policy sets. These are then respected by the edge routers so that the packets are either prioritized extremely urgent, or somewhat urgent, or not quite urgent, and then for everything else, its a catch-all "best-effort" solution.
Doing it this way (but making it adjustable to the home user by doing something like... right-click on the application and set its "priority" on a scale or something) could be really useful, especially in bandwidth-limited deployments when your backup starts and kills your phone conversation.
To the home user, especially with AT&T and T-Mobile now doing "Wifi calling", this would make that option much, much more palpable.
If the line is not over subscribed, or bufferbloated, your traffic will not be impeded by that other traffic.
You can already set your torrent client to self throttle. The ISP does not need to do it for you, and should not be in the position or business of doing it for you.
You can do exactly that via most routers. The whole idea is patently stupid and simply a paid for PR stunt by the incumbent telecoms who intend to simply lie about end user preferences. By far the majority of users will want what they are currently focusing on to have the most bandwidth and everyone thing else to have exactly zero bandwidth, seriously WTF are they on about. By far the majority do not bother with network tweaking and ensuring certain traffic gets temporary preference on their network.
What they are talking about is an externalised system where by regardless of what ever the fuck you want, your bandwidth between you and the content you seek will be crippled because the incumbent telecom will claim the majority of users are not interested and pretty much fuck you, watch what they are interested in or fuck off (they will claim that is what ever they prefer it to be). I wonder if these junk scientists are related to the sugar fat junk scientists.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
They have some B Technology ready to propose just in case we don't like their first proposal.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Better solution: forbid the same company to be a connectivity provider and a content seller.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
We have this already. It is called QoS, and it is basically ignored on public networks, because it is easily abused by users (malicious or naive) setting everything to top priority. I don't see how this proposal avoids this problem.
No. You can't really do that via most routers. You can only control your own router, and only packets you create can have to QoS you set. The ones coming from the internet don't have your QoS set.
> You can already set your torrent client to self throttle. The ISP does not need to do it for you, and should not be in the position or business of doing it for you.
You can reduce the *bandwidth* of the torrent or whatever between you and the ISP. You can't do crap about how it's treated for the other 99% of the route, currently. And reducing the torrent bandwidth isn't actually what you want. You're hoping that reducing the torrent bandwidth will have the side-effect of reducing the jitter or at least the latency of your voip traffic. That is by no means guaranted.
There are three different measures of connection quality, each important to different applications. For torrent, you want max bandwidth, you want to transfer as much as possible every ten minutes. For voip, you only need 64Kbps, but the main thing is that the latency be consistent. That's called jitter. You don't want 5ms latency on one packet and 25ms on another, because they would arrive out of order, and it would sound like you said "uto of roedr".
For Netflix, you want a consistent X Mbps, with the same amount of MBs transferred every ten seconds. You don't mind if it's fast for one second, then slow for one second - Netflix buffers.
The engineers at the ISP know about this stuff, and can control their network to give best results - low bandwidth low jitter for voip, high bandwidth high latency high jitter for downloads, medium bandwidth high latency medium jitter for streaming video, low latency high jitter for gaming, etc.
Simple: ISPs would start throttling traffic when it hits x% of capacity (on a certain segment/ subnet). They can do so by applying some algorithm to allot bandwidth, e.g. people using a lot (at that moment) get cut 30%, people using less get cut 10%, and people using only a little are left alone. Your priority settings will determine which part of your traffic gets cut. If you set everything to high priority, everything will get cut equally. In other words, it's like QoS but it gets applied at the subscriber level rather than the network level.
Of course this idea will fail for a much simpler reason: giving subscribers control means that ISPs cannot double dip by selling preferential treatment to content providers with deep pockets.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It will allow ISPs to provide financial incentive to users, and that would be the end of internet as we know it. Instead of access to the entire internet you might see specialty packages that are cheaper and only offer access to specific services (facebook, youtube, and some messenger service maybe) while everything else is deprioritized to the point where it might as well not exist. Instead of everyone being his own voice on the net, all of a sudden the internet has become like television, with the providers determining what we can see and what we cannot see. Do you, as a content provider, want to be on the preferred channel list? No problemo, it's very cheap! So internet providers will have to provide less service, and get paid by both their customers and the service providers.
Instead of being an open medium where everyone can speak and have his voice heard, internet will become a walled garden owned by a few large companies. And while that's certainly the wet dream of a lot of companies (endless income!) and governments (no more free speech! or at least, not where anyone can hear it), it would be major bad news for us, the citizens of planet Earth.
Yes, and because people are people and people are assholes, everyone will set their own traffic to "maximum speed, all the time", essentially resulting in what we already have.
Prisoner's dilemma at its finest.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Here's a way to break the deadlock. Those that want to discriminate traffic and charge extra for fast lanes, fuck off and start a new internet using all your own infrastructure. Or just fuck off and don't bother with the rest. Deadlock broken.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
In the physical world this is done by giving visitors the possibility to pay to jump queues.
It is nothing more than an attempt to monetize congestion, therefore removing any incentive to eliminate the congestion.
The dark fiber will stay dark.
I do network engineering at an ISP. We are small, though I have discussed these things with my peers at larger networks.
Once you scale above a very small network (like your home connection), allowing congestion isn't really okay in practice, even with QoS. When I say it's not "okay" here, I'm speaking purely technically.
It might be possible to let networks congest somewhat if you had a large amount of elastic traffic that you could reliably identify. Netflix, for example, could meet these criteria. But that's not okay politically; that's an example of why net neutrality is good!
QoS in carrier networks is only useful for priority (de-)queuing of traffic to reduce latency and jitter. For example, real-time voice or video traffic could benefit. This is where it'd be nice to actually be able to honor user traffic markings.
It's not (currently at least) practical to make the decisions on a flow-by-flow basis in the core of the network (which is what your proposal would require). This is a hardware scaling issue. To be clear, tracking flows statistically is okay at scale. ISPs do plenty with NetFlow/sFlow. But taking an incoming packet, assigning it to a flow, and marking it appropriately, for every packet, in real time is the scaling challenge.
The following approach would scale perfectly in trusted CPE (ONT/cable modem) or reasonably well in a DSLAM (for DSL). Give each user (for example) two queues. Honor the incoming DSCP markings. Put a small, but reasonable, limit on the size of the priority queue; overflowing traffic gets remarked and placed into the non-priority queue. Then, honor markings through the rest of the network.
There are a few problems with even this approach. First off, there are going to be users who legitimately create more high priority traffic than any limit that's acceptable across the board. Is it okay to charge them for a higher limit? If not, how do you avoid gaming the system? If yes, won't that incentivize ISPs to set the limit to zero and charging for all priority? Is that okay? If so, what fraction of people will request and pay for priority in that world? Will that be enough to encourage application developers to mark traffic appropriately? Or does this just degrade into our current zero-priority Internet?
Second, this only gets you one direction (upload). To handle the download direction, you'd need to honor priority bits on your upstream and peering links. But there, you can't trust the markings (unless it's a 1:1 peering link and you are guaranteed your peer implements a compatible policy at their incoming edge), at least without policing. Policing the queues there is easy, but gives you terrible results in real life. If the limit is exceeded with traffic that "should not have been" marked priority, it will destroy the prioritization of "legitimate" priority flows by forcing some fraction of their packets into the non-priority queue. If you accept all (or just a high enough fraction of) incoming traffic as priority traffic, then you have destroyed the prioritization yourself. If you try to mark flows per IP/customer, we're back to that scaling problem.
It might be possible to do something that involves tracking flows at the customer edge and using the incoming markings for the downstream direction. But this is only prioritizing in the last mile. At best, this is a lot of work for very little benefit.
Whats is wrong with "A" technology? It is a technology if it solves a problem.
This appears to be a technological solution to a social problem and those rarely work well. Net neutrality is only a problem because certain companies feel their economic self interest should be more important than the good of the overall system or the needs/wants of the end user.
I actually agree with what this solution does. No one will care that their netflix packets are prioritized lower than their voice packets, since netflix streams and voice needs to be near real-time. Same thing for SSH sessions, page loads, or IM applications. They need faster response times than your Carbonite subscription or drop-box sync.
They will care when AT&T or Comcast starts a massive campaign to convince people to prioritize the services they favor over the ones that the user might otherwise choose. What, you think they'll sit idly on the sidelines over something that could make them huge amounts of money?
Doing it this way (but making it adjustable to the home user by doing something like... right-click on the application and set its "priority" on a scale or something) could be really useful, especially in bandwidth-limited deployments when your backup starts and kills your phone conversation.
This will fail the "mom test" horribly. I can see the family tech support calls coming in now. Shudder...
No matter what user demand, if the network is congested, it is broken and the capacity should be increased. Just like the power company will upgrade the grid to accommodate for power needs, the network companies should upgrade the network to accommodate for data needs.
The US should quit being 3rd world when it comes to network speeds and quit layering bureaucracy on top of network upgrades. If AT&T and Verizon cannot handle the upgrades, the network should be taken away from them and handed to companies that can. Companies that enjoy special regulations that preserve their network monopolies should be heavily regulated and taxed to promote profits going back into infrastructure upgrades.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Why isn't it a valid argument to allow Comcast to decide how to manage its own network?
The problem with Net Neutrality isn't technological, it is one of lack of choice at the last mile. The monopoly caused by franchise agreements is the actual problem, not what Comcast chooses to do with its network.
IF we break that problem up (I've made a comprehensive proposal before) by pushing the last mile as municipal infrastructure (similar to "streets/roads") all the problems with "net neutrality" that everyone is up in arms about, simply goes away, without a single government regulation.
We have to stop making government responsible for solving the problems created by governments, and taking a step back and addressing the real problem (in this case, last mile monopoly)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The path from a neutral Internet to the one Comcast execs dream of at night is a slippery slope. Even embracing partial steps towards that end will lead to yet more, as the specific cases are generalized down to something so vague and weak that any ISP can use it to assign whatever priorities they want to whatever traffic. It will go from "user controlled fast lanes" to "dynamic fast lanes" to "ISP curated fast lanes" to "ISP controlled fast lanes for the sake of general network health".
No one will care that their netflix packets are prioritized lower than their voice packets, since netflix streams and voice needs to be near real-time.
Latency and throughput are very different things. NetFlix does not need to be "real-time" -- it only requires enough throughput to build up a buffer big enough to smoothly play content and handle network variations. Voice calls are very different. They require very low latency and cannot be buffered.
No application bandwidth limiting, just prioritization.
I agree, but we already have that and you even named it. Quality of Service and Class of Service have already largely solved this problem. The only people saying that this kind of prioritization is the same thing as provider or application level throttling (fast and slow lanes), or that QoS will be illegal under Net Neutrality laws are the big telecos and their paid shills.
Once you open the door to "fast lanes" even a little bit, that's it. The level of neutrality will fall over time until it's another fondly distant Internet memory -- kind of like anonymity and the Fourth Amendment.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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The obvious solution is for them to stop overselling their network capacity, or expand their capacity. But of course that would cut into their profits so they don't.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Small communities who roll out their own faster internet access for a fraction of Comcast's costs make a bad liar out you.