Slashdot Mirror
Dutch Net Neutrality Law Goes Too Far Say Critics (telegeography.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Dutch Senate has passed the revised Net Neutrality Law as part of an amendment to the country's Telecommunications Act. The strict new law seeks to ensure that telcos and ISPs treat all internet traffic equally and cannot favor one internet app or service over another. Opponents, however, say the legislation, which was approved by the lower house of parliament in May this year, is overly severe and is out of line with the EU's own open internet standards. Afke Schaart, Vice President Europe at mobile industry body the GSMA, commented: 'We are greatly disappointed with the outcome of today's vote. We believe that the Dutch Net Neutrality Law goes far beyond the intent of the EU regulation. We therefore call on the European Commission to ensure the harmonised implementation of Europe's Open Internet rules.' The GSMA says the tighter laws in the Netherlands will 'hinder development of innovative services and consumer choice'.
Just a bunch of spokesfuck noise; no actionable information in either the summary or the "news" story itself. Why post this crap?
You get TCP/UDP packets and you move them in the order they were received. No "traffic shaping" no "zero-rating" no "graceful degradation."
...what the worst possible outcome is for a business that has to operate under net neutrality rules that severely favor the consumer? The most I can come up with is limited investment possibilities.
Anytime I read that quote, I imagine its because they don't have any real objection other than "this will cost us money." If they said "this will prevent 5G rollout because X" I would think they had a reason.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
In order to tell if this is a realistic complaint, or just some crazy whining, we need to know exactly who these "opponents" are.
the tighter laws in the Netherlands will 'hinder us from profiting even more from other peoples services and let us be paid for consumer choice'
A group representing psychopaths issued a statement saying that the laws against murder had 'gone too far". They particularly complained that legislators focused primarily on the public interest, and failed to balance those concerns against the needs of killers.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
Either you shape traffic based on type or not, how can you be tooooo neutral to the type of traffic. Packets are packets. You can't shape delivery and resell the artificial disadvantage you just created as a service. That's double dipping.
As to trying a reacharound via the EU Commission, yeh we get it, the unelected problem gets more influence from lobbyists than electorates.... if you have a valid argument why can't you argue against it in Holland?
Manuel Barrosso just joined Goldman Sachs, he undermined EU's privacy, commercial interests and finance. An Elop for the EU, and the mechanism by which these men get to the top isn't anything approaching a democracy.
Objective rules means no opportunity of injection of subjectivity by the regulatory bodies.
No subjectivity means no opportunity for "rent seeking".
No rent seeking means no additional power or profit for politicians.
Therefore, simply "treat all traffic equally" is a definition of Net Neutrality that won't be tolerated.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
How that yahoo uses HIS paid for bandwidth is up to him. He paid for it.This idea that you play customers off against each other, and or resell that tradeoff for profit is the issue here, it's why Net Neutrality laws are needed.
Our. Hearts. Bleed.
Naaaat!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I should start by saying I support the CONCEPT of network neutrality. It's just very, very hard to write precise wording that accomplishes the NN goal without making it illegal to do basic network management required to have the service work well.
Strict, poorly thought out network neutrality means the service completely sucks, even as it gets more expensive.
One very simple example which doesn't require any understanding of networks is this:
Dumb NN says "all packets for the same protocol must be treated equally". In other words, you can't accept some email and not other email. Also the millionth copy of the same email is treated the same as the first copy. So you have to handle, and try to deliver, a thousand times more spam - a Viagra sales pitch sent to aaaa@yahoo.com, aaab@yahoo.com, aaac@yahoo.com etc from a known spammer is no less prioritized than an email sent to one, correctly addressed, recipient from a network with no spam issues. That means consumers get far more spam (if you deliver one email you have to deliver them all) and email slows down (the server has to process the 10 million bogus emails before processing the one valid email - you can't just block the spammer's IP).
You can read 2,000 pages about carrier networking and still not know everything, and with each thing you learn you'll learn another way that NN can go wrong. To give you a taste, there are four major measurements of the quality of a connection. When I'm using SSH, latency is the one that matters; I want my keystrokes to show up right away, not a hundred milliseconds later. I don't care at all about bandwidth in that connection, I only want less than 1Kbps anyway. I also don't care about jitter. I care very much about losing packets, which could change "rm -i" to just "rm".
For Netflix, I don't care about latency at all, I don't care about jitter, I don't care about dropped packets. I only care about the average bandwidth of that flow. I want at least X MBs/minute. I don't even care if it stops for 1 second, then goes for one second, back and forth, because Netflix and Youtube bufffer. While watching the video, I make a Skype voice call. For the Skype flow, I only want 64Kbps, but I need consistent latency. If one packet takes 40ms to make the trip, I want them all to take 40ms. I do not want the next packet to arrive sooner, in only 10ms, because that would turn my voice saying "no" into "own". For different flows to different people, I want very different service. Sometimes, such as voip, faster is BAD. I'd prefer my voip packets be *slowed down* in order to have low jitter (consistent latency). I think you can start to see that "a packet is a packet, nobpacket is different than any other" is a terribly naive view. "Good" service has a very different meaning for different packets.
The whole discussion of "good" as bandwidth, latency, jitter, and dropped packets is just one example. The more you learn about networking, the more ways you learn to improve the user experience, and many of those are impacted or prohibited by simplistic NN.
"The *strict* new law seeks to ensure that telcos and ISPs treat all internet traffic equally and cannot favour one internet app or service over another"
Huh? How is that even "strict"?
T-Mobile NL is complaining about having a music streaming service (such as Spotify, Deezer, Soundlcoud, Apple Music, whatever) that does not count towards the data cap, and it helps them get users. We also have a lot of these stunts here in Portugal (e.g. for Youtube, Vodafone, Spotify, and even ISP-exclusive services), and this is a good example on why this might seem as "going too far" in their scope: it is affecting their marketing. Honestly, I believe hard measures like this are for the best, as they ultimately force ISPs to end any sort of "hit-a-brick-wall" traffic limitation. Because you know what, these caps are always a measure for the ISP to make more money, and never to keep average quality good through acceptable policy or to keep control their infrastructure.
There have been much better "acceptable policies" in place since the inception of broadband, and they have always worked well enough for all sorts of users: you are on the top percentile traffic count of a specific demographic, such as "people connected to the same node", you get to have ALL your traffic QoS'd until you fall into more acceptable practices. You have critical services that can't be QoS'd? Pay a real premium service that can only be supplied to organizations with plausible justification, such as one explicit in law. there are examples of this: not many people here know about it but in many countries, such as Portugal, there are state-owned fiber optic lines for utilities, that go through rural areas for instance, and that can be pulled for whoever makes a founded request. Problem is some "privileged" people abuse power when it is so obscure and not publicly advertised, but a better way for such a system would be to restrict it to registered organizations and companies, who would still be required to define strictly and found well their specific needs. After all, you only should get a Formula 1 car if you know the car and have the credentials for using it.
Why aren't measures like these used for wireless data? It's obvious: cell providers never found a good way, with data caps, to scale wireless internet revenue as profit to their investors, and different ISPs entered in consensus about this. It's the only place they can make the ever-hungrier normal user shell out more money when he gets hooked to the service, which he is bound to because the technology in his pocket evolves in directions that enable him to. We are literally carrying year 1998 super computers with in our pockets, at multiple orders of magnitude above RDIS throughput these days.
these assholes at the EU want to make the net 'neutral', but only THEIR form of neutrality, which is, of course determined by which content providers pony up the most cash.
This world is truly fucked.
'hinder development of innovative services...'
Usually when bullshit like this comes up one can be pretty sure that the nail has been squarely hit on it's head and that the law is exactly doing what it is supposed to do. Perfect.
TFA title uses the word 'critic' which implies someone versed in the field and knowledgeable about all aspects. TFA itself talks about lobbyists, ISP-employed shills, and financially incited opponents of the bill. These are not 'critics', they are PR- and marketing- people every step of the way with limited to no understanding of society's needs outside their own profit margins. Please define these two very distinct groups separately.
How do I mark this message as SPAM?
Jesus Fine Christ, and this is like the first time in about forever that I RTFA-
Though I was hoping for more, I did find at least that bit of sanity in the f'n article.
Problem is you are already absolutely wrong this early. If an ISP or a network sees some other host or network blasting out saturation levels of spam from a known botnet, they absolutely can block that traffic wholesale while accepting all other email traffic. I'm pretty sure that falls under the intelligent aspects of the "reasonable network management" clause.
If the oposition complains about something being too restrictive, it`s probably just right. ;)
If the primary backlash is from industry lobbyists and their surrogates, the law is probably a good one.
Wake me up if the EFF criticizes the law.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Where do you see that clause? In the Dutch law? In your own head? I sure see the exact opposite in the EU guidelines.
http://berec.europa.eu/eng/doc...
The EU rules say that ISPs may *not* consider the content (Viagra spam is equal to a legit invoice) and it must all be non-discriminatory based on source or other factors, all parameters must be *objective* rules. Treating a Viagra spammer differently from a doctor's office would of course be discriminatory. It would certainly be *reasonable* to allow for blocking spam, making Skype and Vonage work better by slowing down any packets that are ahead of schedule, etc, but I've never seen a NN proposal that does so, while still providing meaningful protection against the things NN proponents wish to outlaw. The EU document is 45 pages and in order to be specific enough to be effective without being damaging it would need to be a hundred times as long. Of course, just about the time a government finally finishes a 4,500-page document, a different protocol will become popular which needs to be handled in a different way.
I love the idea of net neutrality, I really do, so I hope that some effective and efficient means can be found to encourage those goals. The best I can think of is that some geographic locations have five or six ISPs to choose from, so if one ISP doesn't provide quality service for the application and content you care about, you can choose a different provider who will. I wish all locations had that type of competition, but most places in the US still have near monopolies left over from when most places had absolutely laws absolutely enforcing monopolies.
but that doesn't mean it goes far enough.
Sadly, you need to prioritize certain types of data over other types of data. For instance, if that bits that make you your cute cat picture show up out of order, late, or need to be retransmitted, it isn't really a big deal. However, if the packets making up your 911 call show up out of order, late, or need to be retransmitted, someone could quite literally die as a consequence. That's why we have things like DSCP marking. Different services, by definition, need to be given priority over other services based on their intrinsic characteristics.
The spam example isn't relevant. Net Neutrality is about treating traffic equally, it has never been related to email spam, not least because that makes no sense. I don't want my ISP deciding arbitrarily which emails to block when it's prioritising traffic. I have a mail provider, at work we have a pre-delivery spam/virus detection service. If Gmail/Mailwall lets the email through then the last thing I want is my line provider sticking their nose in uninvited
You say the more you know about networking as though you yourself know about it, but you consistently completely misunderstand or misrepresent what net neutrality means.
It sounds like, in order to perform the sort of optimization you describe you have to be aware of the intended use of the data being transmitted. If some legislative organization made a regulation that is dependent on this awareness (eg: "video gets lower priority than everything else"), how hard would it be for an organization transmitting from their server to their application on the recipient's computer (or perhaps also having their applications on end users computers additionally transmit to one another) to fool a professional like you? Does this sort of optimization depend on them identifying to you the use of the data and trusting you to have their best interests at heart, or can you reliably tell the use of the data, regardless? I'm just wondering what sort of legislation is actually practical, and what would be a pointless exercise in demonstrating a lack of understanding of the technology.
You can easily lie about the type of data, and it's common for all sorts of things to "look like" http in order to traverse firewalls, etc. In general, it's self-defeating to have it appear to be anything other than what it is.
Suppose you have a flow that appears to be voip. You want to give that flow a steady 64Kbps, and low latency, but most importantly the lowest possible jitter. Quality is improved by *slowing down* any packets that would arrive more quickly than their neighbors*.
Suppose you have a Netflix stream and pretend it's voip. You'll end up with 64 Kbps, which is perfect for voip but unusable for video. Sure, you have low jitter, which does you absolutely no good whatsoever. So you've completely shot yourself in the foot.
Suppose you do it the other way around. It's actually voip, but it looks like Netflix, and we're on a cable modem. Netflix wants high bandwidth as measured in megabytes per minute. With normal settings, the cable modem will get high bandwidth for a couple seconds, then turn off for a couple of seconds, then high for a couple of seconds, alternating. That's perfect for Netflix - the application has several seconds of buffer. If you've lied and it's really voip, you've caused your audio to stop and start every second or two, which is horrible for voip.
The "SSL everywhere" movement (who apparently doesn't know SSL was deprecated seventeen years ago) along with TCP port 80 being abused for non-http communication does make things a *bit* harder. You still see small packets vs large, which tells you a lot. generally, applications wanting bulk bandwidth use large packets, applications wanting low latency use small packets. If you also recognize that packets from Hulu, Netflix, and Youtube are probably video, etc, you can get the job done despite the encryption.
* Why you slowing down VOIP packets can improve service:
A voip packet contains roughly 30ms of audio, depending on codec.
It takes roughly 120ms for the packet to travel to the person you are talking to.
Therefore, the recipient hears packet #1 while packet #5 is being spoken, like this:
send 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
recv * * * * 1 2 3 4 5
Suppose packet #3 doesn't take the full 120ms. Perhaps it arrives in 70ms. The diagram would look this:
send 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
recv * * * * 31 2 * 4
Audio received out of order means I say "1 2 3 4" and you hear "31 2 4". I hope you're not calling in a bank transfer. :) That reminds me of another interesting thing good for both voip and streaming music and video, which would be very bad for most other applications. For live-consumption (streaming) A/V, any slow packets should be completely dropped, not delivered late. Better to hear "1 2 * 4" than "1 2 * 4 3". For most non-live use, of course, you'd want the packet delivered whenever it could be, including resending several times if needed.
If you can't take over a town, city, county, or state, to get the services you want passed, then it is time to vote with your feet and go somewhere you can roll out the infrastructure and society YOU desire. If you can't find enough likeminded other people to do it, that is on you.
The future is out there. The question is whether you are willing to endure the struggle necessary to make it a reality.
Most people aren't, which is why our planet is in a state of geopolitical and social decline on all levels and in most facets.
I'd say one could, if you wished, de-prioritize 80% of video services (95% of bandwidth), with almost no false positives. So you could match almost all video traffic.
However, I'd say a key word in your post is "legislators". There are over a billion web sites. Of those billion, certainly at least a thousand offer video that wouldn't be detected. A de-prioritized service complaining could point to 1,000 sites with video that's not treated and such by the ISP. So if it were ILLEGAL to classify one video site differently than another, then classifying traffic at all would be illegal - because you're never going to positively identify ALL of the sites with video.
I totally agree with what you said. There's a related standard called RFC 3514. It's worth a quick look.
I thought I'd add thing other related point to the discussion. Assume we have some high-priority traffic. It can be routed over either a T1 connection at 1.54Mbps or a 10 Mbps satellite connection. Which is better? Of course we know by know the answer is "it depends". The satellite connection is much higher bandwidth (good) and much higher latency (bad). For best service, we should choose the route based on the application. Treating all flows the same would mean most of them end up worse off.
Of course within the carrier network we don't choose between satellite and T1, but we DO have the choice between an OC-48 directly between Tucson and Phoenix or a pair of OC-768s going through Los Angeles. The same principle applies - which route is best depends on the application.
...if the GSMA doesn't like it.
NN is about treating all traffic within a category the same way. So you can prioritize video streaming over others, so long as you don't further discriminate between Vimeo and Netflix and Youtube.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
NN is about treating all traffic within a category the same way. So you can prioritize video over others, so long as you don't further discriminate between Vimeo and a hacked webcam doing DDOS and a news broadcast.
NN is about treating all traffic within a category the same way. So you can prioritize email over others, so long as you don't further discriminate between a Nigerian prince and phishing and a real fraud alert from Paypal.
See the problem? The *concept* of network neutrality is fine. It's all warm and fuzzy. Writing a *law* to implement NN without totally screwing things up is very, very difficult.
Further, you don't, as a competent service provider network engineer, "prioritize video over". You route non-live (buffered) video over a link that has higher latency, bandwidth and jitter, while you route live video over one with medium bandwidth, medium latency, and low jitter, and voip over one with the lowest possible jitter, low latency, and low bandwidth. For all of those classes, you discard any packets. For most other classes of traffic you buffer packets rather than discard them.