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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'.
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.
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.
So when every yahoo on your segment fires up BitTorrent your VoIP stops working? No thank you.
Basic prioritization:
1. Realtime Communications Traffic (VoIP)
2. Remote interactive sessions (RDP/SSH/Games/etc..)
3. Streaming Video
4. Streaming Audio
5. Web / Mail
6. Downloads
That's it. Realtime interactive communications get priority over non-interactive communications, which get priority over high latency operations, which get priority over ANY downloading. Of course, this should only kick in when the tubes are saturated, otherwise it doesn't matter.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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?
So next thing everyone shapes their packets to look like VoIP. Back to square one.
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.
So when every yahoo on your segment fires up BitTorrent your VoIP stops working?
So what? They just have to fatten the pipe. Bandwidth is bandwidth. Content is nobody's business.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's slightly more complicated than that, isn't it? You should guarantee every subscriber a sufficient amount of VoIP because that's become an emergency service. Then all other traffic should be served to customers in round-robin fashion, with no guarantees made, though yes it might be well to have some prioritization.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Basic prioritization is get more bandwidth. NN laws need to be coupled with a requirement to grow the network to support peek demand, preferably with forecasting. QOS is great for constrained systems. Bandwidth is cheap at this point stop acting like it's a massive expense. There are also plenty of programs to make it cheaper netflix coloing cache servers at head ends for example. But for it to be truly neutral their internet connections and most importantly transit links must not be saturated.
No sir I dont like it.
No, video streaming should be the bottom since it wastes the most bandwidth. Games hardly use any bandwidth but require low latency so they should be at the top.
And what is not grown up about games? Have you ever watched sports? The Olympics? Two old men playing chess in the park? All games, just like video games. I'll also leave you with this, since you seem too immature to get it:
“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
--C.S. Lewis
"which get priority over ANY downloading"
How about 'Go fuck yourself'. My bits are just as important as anyone else's. My downloads are as important to me as your voice conversation is to you.
Good-bye
Forget it. Set you and the other yahoo on your segment to equal priority buckets so if you are both sending/receiving you get one packet to his one packet, if there are three you each get every third packet. It doesn't matter what those packets contain.
No you can't allow any prioritization. First, my traffic shouldn't suffer for the sake of your traffic. Giving priority voip does slow down my download it just doesn't have as big of an impact as my download can have on your voip. There is nobody, especially the ISP, who is justified to deciding which is more important so round robin it is. Second and most importantly if you the give the ISP any flexibility whatsoever they can and will abuse it.
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.
You don't seem to realize this: you are a customer. If ISPs are allowed to traffic-shape, they will traffic shape according to THEIR list, not yours.
And you can bet they will prioritize packets according to THEIR friends. So, if they want you to use THEIR voip service, even though it may be so crappy it makes you puke, THEIR service will get priority over everything else. And your VOIP of choice, whatever it is, will be so crappy it will make you go nuts.
This is not about prioritization: it's about who gets the best service. If ISPs are allowed to choose, again, they will choose THEIR "friends", "partners" or "subsidiaries" over your choice.
What's more, if on your ISP VOIP gets crappy because everyone else is busy torrenting, it simply means your ISP is crappy and is not using its money to invest in infrastucture, which ISP the world over have been guilty of, at one point or another.
Educate yourself: https://savetheinternet.eu/en/
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The first round of net neutrality legislation in the Netherlands (2011) was adopted to stop mobile providers from charging subscribers extra for the "service" of not blocking instant messaging and VOIP applications like Whatsapp and Skype, which were eating into their revenues streams from calls and SMS (text messages).
The current round of legislation (May 2016) forbids zero-rating. It's strict only in the sense that, like the 2011 law at the time, it's ahead of what the EU is discussing at the moment. If common sense prevails over lobbying, the EU will eventually reach the same conclusion: that zero-rating is bad for consumers and new services.
The GSMA says the tighter laws in the Netherlands will 'hinder development of innovative services and consumer choice'.
With zero-rating, it's the providers who push users towards particular services (like music streaming subscriptions); without zero-rating the consumer has an equal choice between services. So clearly innovation is better served by not having zero-rating, since that will provide a level playing field for new services.
Or maybe I should vote with my feet and drop them all, set up some sort of packet radio link or use smoke signals.
Better yet, I will build my own network, it will be perfect, with cocaine and hookers, except the cost barriers and local regulation barriers are so high as to be impassable.
Tell me kind sir, how the fuck am I supposed to vote with my feet?
Silence is a state of mime.
Where do VPNs fit in your scheme? Because that's all my ISP ever sees, and that's all its ever going to see. My average performance has gone up ever since I started doing this, by the way.
It's very naive to assume that ISPs should be running things by inspecting packets. Instead, if need be they could partition each connection into different-priority lanes each with their own separate cap rules, and let the OS and/or router figure out the proper QoS. Yes I know that's non-trivial, but otherwise you're going to run into all kinds of issues, not the least of which is the VPN problem.
And sure, one day they could simply choose to screw me and my VPN over, but then they're also going to be screwing over every single person who uses secure teleconferencing, video conferencing or other performance-critical remote applications that need to be run over secure tunnels for security purposes.
Fortunately, nobody needs all the content of the Internet, so this is not a problem to begin with.
How about the government keeps its dirty hands out of private infrastructure and lets customers vote with their feet?
Because that private infrastructure requires government participation. That's what happens when you have a shared resource that needs to be protected -- in this case, private property and public roads. You don't let any little company or startup dig up the streets on their whim to lay cables.
What SHOULD be the case is that ISPs don't own the lines at all, that the lines are publicly managed and the ISPs can all use them. Then ISPs would have to compete on price and features, and consumers would actually be able to get the sort of consumer choice that would let them make the best decision for themselves. We don't live in that world, though, we live in a world where monopolies or duopolies are granted because of the shared land use considerations, and consumers usually have the choice between a steaming turd and a shit sandwich.
Basic prioritization:
1. Fire hydrants
2. Kitchen faucets
3. Other faucets
4. Toilets
5. Outdoor spigots
Except, that's not how it works, and the world still keeps spinning. All you need is a set of big enough pipes.
(something, something, California)
...T-Mobile NL complains about having a music streming service (such sa Spotify, Deezer, Soundlcoud, Apple Music, whatever) that does not count towards the data cap ...this is a good example on why this might seem as "going too far" in their scope: it is affecting their marketing.
Exactly. The practice that T-Mobile wants to implement would be anti-competitive vendor lock-in. If my service provider says its own music service doesn't count against my data cap, but other services do, then that's blatantly against Net Neutrality. Either there is neutrality, or there isn't - just as there is either discrimination, or no discrimination. There is no middle ground on this issue. If T-Mobile wants to launch a music service, let it compete on equal terms with ALL music services on ALL providers' networks. The Dutch have it right, and the rest of the EU should be following their lead, not vice versa.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
Yea I do build networks as part of my living. If your ISP network has congestion save for dedicated last mile connections it's built and maintained poorly. A point of NN is to prevent them from ignoring connections the classic Comcast L3 were just going to let these saturate and not do anything about it. It's critically important that the comcast pay us for access to our eyeballs is not allowed to become the way things work. Not when comcast gets an artificial government enfoced monopoly.
QOS only solves things when bandwidth constrained. Last I knew tier 1's are not running qos on their transit links but been a few years since I would know that for sure. So your still going to get packet loss. If you make it realy work watch all the DDOS's all start looking like VoIP traffic and making it useless soon enough.
Mind you I would love to be able to program my transit providers QoS but I dont want them doing it for me defiantly not on monopoly last mile links.
No sir I dont like it.