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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'.
In order to tell if this is a realistic complaint, or just some crazy whining, we need to know exactly who these "opponents" are.
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.