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Oracle And Cisco Both Support The FCC's Rollback Of Net Neutrality (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader quotes The Hill:
Oracle voiced support on Friday for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's controversial plan to roll back the agency's net neutrality rules. In a letter addressed to the FCC, the company played up its "perspective as a Silicon Valley technology company," hammering the debate over the rules as a "highly political hyperbolic battle," that is "removed from technical, economic, and consumer reality"... Oracle wrote in their letter [PDF] that they believe Pai's plan to remove broadband providers from the FCC's regulatory jurisdiction "will eliminate unnecessary burdens on, and competitive imbalances for, ISPs [internet service providers] while enhancing the consumer experience and driving investment"... Other companies in support of Pai's plan, like AT&T and Verizon, have made the argument that the rules stifled investment in the telecommunications sector, specifically in broadband infrastructure.
Cisco has also argued that strict net neutrality laws on ISPs "restrict their ability to use innovative network management technology, provide appropriate levels of quality of service, and deliver new features and services to meet evolving consumer needs. Cisco believes that allowing the development of differentiated broadband products, with different service and content offerings, will enhance the broadband market for consumers."
Cisco has also argued that strict net neutrality laws on ISPs "restrict their ability to use innovative network management technology, provide appropriate levels of quality of service, and deliver new features and services to meet evolving consumer needs. Cisco believes that allowing the development of differentiated broadband products, with different service and content offerings, will enhance the broadband market for consumers."
Oracle and Cisco want to sell hardware and services to the ISP's to manage their traffic prioritization
some decision is wrong when Oracle/Larry Ellison decides to support that decision.
Yeah... whoever wins, we lose.
#DeleteFacebook
This... is why I have stock in Juniper Networks and not Cisco. I have a moral compass that guides me when I survey the stock market. This is another reason I won't purchase stock in "One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison" as I refuse to pay for his lavish lifestyle as he tramples world+dog under his feet. Maybe someday the adage will change... "Nobody got fired for picking Cisco"
Peace out.
I own Sisco stock. Bad investment.
It's finally getting to where I can sell it for a gain equal to my savings account.
I only own a little. It was part of my learning experience in the land of investing.
At least I won't lose money on it, after 15 years.
Sisco is crap.
Oracle is trying to preserve a day gone by. Rather than doing something new, they're sticking to the old business model
Sell your Oracle stock NOW!
>Cisco has also argued that strict net neutrality laws on ISPs "restrict their ability to use innovative network management technology, provide appropriate levels of quality of service,
I don't know what "innovative network management technology" is except maybe some expensive Cisco hardware. But, QoS and net neutrality aren't incompatible. T-Mobile uses a variant where they will throttle your bandwidth after 30GB of data but only if the network is in heavy use where you are located. Which seems reasonable, unless they've changed the plan again.
It's fun, watching the scum self organize.
Hint: If you are ever on the same side of an issue as ATT, it's probably time to evaluate your life's choices to see where you went wrong.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Big companies tend to have the budgets to oursource their solutions to companies like oracle. Many entrenched fortune 500 companies use Oracle's horrid software databases to manage their tiem and effort reporting, etc... Small companies with stronger needs to have a competitive edge go with other cheaper smaller scale back office solutions.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why do I, as an ISP, need to build out my network so that some Silicon Valley company can serve ads to my subscribers when the subscribers don't even want ads?
Because without the ads, lots of the websites which are the reasons why people pay an ISP won't exist. Once there isn't enough content for people to want to use the internet anymore, they'll stop requiring your service as an ISP.
Let us, the engineers, technologists, and supporters of the Internet remember this, and use this knowledge when choosing network and database vendors.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Why do I, as an ISP, need to build out my network so that some Silicon Valley company can serve ads to my subscribers when the subscribers don't even want ads?
"Because the customers have already paid for their connection, and that Silicon Valley strawman has already paid for theirs. You're a dumb pipe. Carry the damn packets and stay in your lane."
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Wow, that's really smug and really wrong at the same time. Let's break it down.
The bulk of your argument is simply based on a false premise. For heavy users, ISPs *already* throttle traffic, apply a (sometimes excessive) surcharge, or even disable the account. Net neutrality has nothing to do with that issue; net neutrality deals with prioritization and throttling among data sources *other* than the ISP's customers, such as granting NetFlix the "priviledge" of not being throttled to the point of uselessness by an ISP that has a competing (though usually inferior) video service.
Net neutrality means that an ISP can't prioritize traffic for specific services on the internet, and is unrelated to an ISP distinguishing among its own customers.
Also, to your first point, ISPs won't use the dissolution of net neutrality to throttle ad providers, because there's no money to be made in doing that (to say nothing of the fact that ad sellers often have multiple direct and indirect business ties to ISPs). That argument is a red herring.
Are you kidding? Even if there were a valid reason for prioritization, it will not be used for the customer's benefit. Prioritization will be used as a tool to impose artificial scarcity and extort customers.
Prioritization may be useful if fully under control of the customer, but it has no place on the open Internet, where it will inevitably lead to higher congestion and degraded best effort performance. Investing in bandwidth is both cheaper and provides more value.
To put it another way:
End-users pay for their access. They should have the right to control what goes in and out of their personal connection.
ISPs are paid to transfer data, and should no right to decide how that data is moved, other than dealing with technical realities of limited bandwidth (e.g. QoS).
Let me guess... promisses of buying new equipment infrastructure is a great incentive to sell out, right?
F*ck Cisco. And I don't even have to say anything about Oracle, the litigious troll company. Oracle has to die in a pool of fire for the stuff they've been doing lately.
Cisco knows, because it's their entire business to know, that some flows need low jitter, and bandwidth isn't an issue (voip for example, 64Kbps bandwidth is plenty, any significant jitter is unacceptable). Other flows require high bandwidth, and don't care about jitter or latency (Netflix for example). Other flows need low latency, regardless of jitter (gaming for example). ISPs pay Cisco billions to deliver the type of flow you'll want for each application.
You can do almost nothing about any of those metrics on your local network. Its up to the ISP to route, queue, drop, and police packets in order to provide you the right flow parameters for each application.
Even so, customers do not always realise this. For example: people loved the recent offer from a European telco, where music streamed from Spotify and a few others to mobile phones would not be counted towards the monthly data allowance. Even people using a music service not included in the offer didn't mind too much; they might be disappointed at missing out on a nice deal but nothing would change for the worse for them. That idea got shot down by Net Neutrality rules which pissed a lot of people off: "Thanks to this stupid rule (worse: thanks to "Brussels"), we now have to pay for music streaming again." Which is exactly why the telco made this offer in the first place despite net neutrality rules already in place, I suspect. Riling up the masses.
People seem to be buying the positive message from telcos about rescinding net neutrality rules, and it resonates especially well with the "we hate government intervention" crowd. "No more rules that forbid us from making you a great offer". "Less rules means a fertile ground for innovative business". They don't see or understand the negative aspects. For instance: I don't agree that investing in bandwidth is cheaper; telcos hate net neutrality because it forces them to do exactly that. It is far cheaper to not invest in bandwidth and instead prioritize traffic in such a way that the popular services still come through at a good speed, to the detriment of anything less popular. A few people might grumble but as long as Netflix and Facebook still perform well, the masses won't object. In fact they will probably blame poor performance on the shitty server of whatever service they are trying to access.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
while enhancing the consumer experience
I'm dying to know how consumers benefit when you sell their private information. Please elaborate on this. Are you counting on them all being sadomasochists?
...(Oracle) played up its "perspective as a Silicon Valley technology company," hammering the debate over the rules as a "highly political hyperbolic battle," that is "removed from technical, economic, and consumer reality"...
Translation: "We're a knowledgeable and trustworthy tech company, and we know better than even the tech sector workers who create our products and services, so you should listen to us, not them. We don't like it that so many of those workers support Net Neutrality, so we're trying to pull rank. We'll also pretend that we both know and care about 'consumer reality', (even though it's patently obvious we know nothing and couldn't care less), because we'll happily polish our stinking turd of a strategy until it shines like gold, so long as there's even a minuscule chance that we'll gain some support for our plans for world domination".
... Oracle wrote in their letter that they believe Pai's plan to remove broadband providers from the FCC's regulatory jurisdiction "will eliminate unnecessary burdens on, and competitive imbalances for, ISPs [internet service providers] while enhancing the consumer experience..."
"unnecessary burdens" == anything that reduces the ability of ISPs to do whatever they want in the pursuit of profit
"enhancing the consumer experience" == forcing a consumer experience that's the cheapest, most convenient, and most profitable for us
... Other companies in support of Pai's plan, like AT&T and Verizon, have made the argument that the rules stifled investment in the telecommunications sector, specifically in broadband infrastructure.
Translation: Companies like AT&T and Verizon withheld investment in their own infrastructure in order to create an artificial scarcity so they could tighten the screws and persuade people that abandoning Net Neutrality is the less painful alternative.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I don't know if you're a shill or simply uninformed, but you seem to be repeating the erroneous line that network neutrality prevents QoS. It is completely acceptable under network neutrality, for example, to put SIP traffic in queues with shorter or more deterministic latency. It's even permitted to charge the customer more for doing this. What is not permitted is only putting SIP traffic to the ISP's own VoIP service in a low-latency queue and putting everyone else's SIP traffic in a normal queue. It is not permitted to charge Microsoft money to prioritise Skype traffic, at the expense of other VoIP traffic. It is not permitted to penalise Netflix traffic unless Netflix pays extra to reach your customers. Which one of these do you think would be in the consumers' interest?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Since each end user location (think individual home) has a single connection to the internet through a single ISP through which the occupants of that location may need to (per your example) concurrently play a streamed game, stream a movie, and make a VoiP call, how does that ISP realistically argue they can provide different quality and speed of connections to all members of the household at the same time?
Because it's cheap, extremely profitable, and you ARE in the bandwidth business. If you don't want to be in the bandwidth business become a content provider. Oh wait, you are a content provider and no one wants it in the format you deliver it except for people over 70. Yeah, I am looking at you bundled cable TV with the super slow, super inefficient, space heater, cable box that changes channels slower than midgets running the 100-yard dash.
It's like asking, why would the electric company want to build out their network so we can all plug in electric cars?
It's because that is your business. You sell kilowatt hours.
If you don't want to be an INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER, notice that last word PROVIDER, then get out and go back to selling your (sic) innovative content cable TV and VOIP service.
Cable, you had your shot, you blew it. Now you're just a dumb pipe. Innovate or die, but don't stand in the way of others innovating just because your network is conveniently bigger and you have lobbied for states to pass laws to keep your monopoly going. Ala, the no municipal broadband laws and taking federal FCC grants to build out your network for FREE, then trying to upcharge.
Even so, customers do not always realise this. For example: people loved the recent offer from a European telco, where music streamed from Spotify and a few others to mobile phones would not be counted towards the monthly data allowance.
For the companies involved it is about profit as much as anything. It is similar to how smaller ISPs are wary about investing in under served areas, since if a big one finally gets off their arse (I'm looking at you AT&T.), then their investment goes in the toilet, because AT&T's intro pricing will wipe them out.
Basically the offers to let you stream certain services are not about making friends. The offers do two things. First they help them acquire customers. Sure it may cost them in the short term, but it kills off competition, which is good in their books. It also helps them control content, and it is content where the real money is to be made.
In short it is nothing more than a drug dealer offering you a few hits for free. Sure just some exercise and eating right would have been better for you, but the drug dealer offers gratification now, while silently harming you and positioning himself to continually leech money off you to continue to poison you.
Put another way, project this down the road 5 years. They are already say giving you 1 or 2 channels for free, sort of like how local channels were included in cable tv unencrypted originally. Once you get used to it, maybe they can offer you a few premium channels for special rates. Perhaps they even become popular. Well the ISP needs more bandwidth, so lets devote less resources to that "normal" content. In fact, we can make that another special fee to return normal service. Oh look there is another special channel.
In short, I suspect their long term goal is to basically resurrect something like cable through your internet line, so they can maximize profits.
Nothing stifles innovation like laws, supported by Verizon/Comcast/Time Warner/ATT etc., preventing communities from building their OWN infrastructure for what should be a public utility. But, yes, it does stifle their profits, which they want to equate with innovation. Its not. Communities building a telecom network operated for the common good.. new there's innovation.
Just wait until someone starts lobbying to have 'golf course neutrality'. Once deals on the golf course have to have the same scrutiny as other deals, the likes of Cisco and Oracle will meet their demise.
I can see the value of both vendors products, but what I still don't get is why anyone buys more than a modicum of it. With Oracle, the DB is fine, but once you move to RAC then you're on the bandwagon and getting off it is very hard. You'd have been better off re-engineering out your legacy when you outgrew the non-RAC solution.
For Cisco, again, their core switch stuff seems pretty good - it's not really my area, but the specs are impressive. Why we need Cisco top-of-rack or Cisco workgroup switches is beyond me though. In the workgroup case especially, other vendors offer better and cheaper solutions (sure, they don't do all the stuff Cisco can do, but you don't need that in a workgroup switch). For some reason though, if you're not 100% cisco then you're somehow a weirdo and 'not doing it right'.
Then Cisco Call Manager... very capable, but man is it weird - I mean, born in the fires of Mount Doon and then shat on by every ork in Middle Earth. Weird.
IMHO, both companies need to die off - Oracle is already going that way, in so much as all the small databases of the world are Postgres/Maria/MySQL/No SQL or whatever, and not paying Oracle for the privilege. Cisco is a harder nut to crack - no one would dare go up against them, but yet, if someone did, we'd all be better off as a result.
Who cares if the people of the US are losing freedom, and getting less value for their dollar, when there are corporations who will make extra money! I, for one, am proud to become "consumer cattle" for the benefit of an ever-shrinking number of trust fund brats!
And before that, a contractor to CISCO - trust me, whatever side these companies are on, on any issue, is never the side that you should support. These companies evil incorporated.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Consumers benefit from prioritising traffic based on TYPE. They are HARMED by prioritizing it based on SOURCE. Consumers are doubly harmed when the ISPs can sell higher prioritization to sources that can afford it (since that automatically creates the incentive for ISPs to deprioritize everything else to gridlock levels).
Only the latter is prohibited by net neutrality.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I would love to watch certain TV programs live on my computer, just using the internet that I've already paid for!!! Net Neutrality enables that, and stops the ISP or the channel from preventing me from watching it. I don't agree w/ the parts of net neutrality that say, for instance, that you can't accelerate Netflix after having an agreement w/ them. But I do agree w/ the parts of it that say, you can't stop Bob Blow Joe from watching FNC on his computer directly from FNC's website w/o having to log in his ISP's TV subscription
Consumers benefit from prioritising traffic based on TYPE. They are HARMED by prioritizing it based on SOURCE.
That statement is inherently stupid. As a consumer, I want Netflix traffic in my house to take priority over web traffic OR YOUTUBE VIDEO that kids might be watching.
Sounds like I want traffic prioritized by SOURCE. Sounds like MOST people would want the same thing.
Sounds like you have no idea what you are talking about.
You don't really want traffic priority by source. You want your traffic to be more important than someone else's traffic. That's not the same thing.
If you watched YouTube Red and the kids watched Netflix, you would want the reverse. Which would really be the same, your's over theirs.
Here's a question: are you upset that the site/app you're reading/watching is using your bandwidth to serve ads to you?
If you're on a metered plan, you probably are.
Now take a step back (I know, it's hard) and pretend you're an ISP. Why do I, as an ISP, need to build out my network so that some Silicon Valley company can serve ads to my subscribers when the subscribers don't even want ads?
Because that's the entire definition of being an ISP, and Internet Service Provider.
If you're not going to actually deliver Internet, why call it an Internet service? Maybe build something like an "AOL Network" or a "CompuServe Network", "Your Company's Closed System Network" and sell that instead. Maybe people will buy it, maybe they will not. But, it's NOT "Internet Service" anymore, it's something else.
Let's try something else: 2% of an ISPs base is using 85% of the upstream and downstream bandwidth for torrents. Can you throttle their traffic?
I'm sure a lot of people will say "don't oversell your bandwidth." Yeah sure, welcome to reality. But is it fair to let 2% of your subscribers screw the other 98% of your subscribers? Those 98% are paying customers of both you the ISP and, say, Netflix. Why can't you touch that 2%?
Is throttling a violation of the "net neutrality" regs? I'll bet you don't know, because you never read them. Try reading them. It's not hard.
QOS is fine. As long as it wasn't source based by applied to everyone. If you want to set bittorrent traffic to a lower priority than other traffic so when the pipe is full it's slower, go for it. For bittorrent traffic to every source. If you as a company run you own bittorrent stuff for distributing whatever, it just needs to follow the same QOS rules.
You don't really want traffic priority by source. You want your traffic to be more important than someone else's traffic. If you watched YouTube Red and the kids watched Netflix, you would want the reverse.
Aha, so you ADMIT that people would reasonably want traffic prioritized by source!!! It's just a matter of figuring out which source takes priority at which time. But it is something that people WANT, and it is very reasonable, and net neutrality is trying to take away as a possibility.
But lets be realistic. No one cares about shitty YouTube quality. They just want Netflix (and possibly HBO and a few other sources) without buffering.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You don't really want traffic priority by source. You want your traffic to be more important than someone else's traffic. If you watched YouTube Red and the kids watched Netflix, you would want the reverse.
Aha, so you ADMIT that people would reasonably want traffic prioritized by source!!! It's just a matter of figuring out which source takes priority at which time. But it is something that people WANT, and it is very reasonable, and net neutrality is trying to take away as a possibility.
But lets be realistic. No one cares about shitty YouTube quality. They just want Netflix (and possibly HBO and a few other sources) without buffering.
I did not "admit" that people wanted priority by source. I pointed out that even YOU don't want priority by source.
You want your stuff to be faster than others stuff, for whatever site you happen to be using vs whatever site they're using. It's not the same thing.
ISPs already sell this difference. You can buy access at any speed they offer. If you buy 100 Mbps and others by 20 Mbps, they've sold you faster access than the other person.
I took your use of "that kids" to mean "other users of the network", could be anyone doesn't have to be kids. But, if you really meant, "kids in the same house as you", then just setup you own router to do QOS for the internal network to give them less priority. That's totally fine on your internal network and not a problem.
If you really did mean, "other users of the ISPs network", we're back at that the ISP should not be in the business of deciding which content is more important or which customers are more important than others. They sell an access product. They can sell different speeds of access already, or quantity of access (which I dislike caps, but that's at least neutral when applied to all and not when stuff is exempted), or committed vs best effort service. All fine. They don't get to pick which content is "better" though, that's abuse.
> Port throttling for all sources does that just fine. And if Comcast throttle http video, they either throttle their own VoD stream too, or they're committing a crime.
I think you just answered your own question. Most http requests, most port 80 flows, aren't video on demand. Therefore treating all http as if it were video means handling most of it *wrong*, creating a worse experience for the user. The delivery of a text-based site such as Slashdot has opposite performance metrics as pre-recorded video, and live video has different needs depending on if it's one-way of video conferencing.
Also, I guess it would be illegal for an ISP to store/cache their own videos at their POP for better efficiency and performance, since they can't possibly store every video from every web site at the POP? Unfair advantage to store the frequently-accessed stuff close to the users and make it faster, right?
It's possible to work toward net neutrality as a principle. As a law, I don't see how you could possibly write a law that didn't have major unintended consequences. Network optimization is just too complex for law makers to decide how it must be done five or ten years later, using technologies that don't even exist at the time they write the law.
If you're not going to actually deliver Internet, why call it an Internet service?
If providers called it an "online service" instead of an "Internet service", the average subscriber wouldn't notice nor care. They just want Facebook.
Oracle is going to make a ton of money selling user tracking databases.
Really? Oracle master plan is to crush net neutrality so they can sell more database licenses to "track users"?
Yes, as you said, duh. Do you recall when Oracle billed California for per-user database licenses based not on the number of users accessing the database but rather the number of citizens in the database?
What's next, Staples will jump in so they can sell more pens to Netflix who will sign a bunch of checks to ISP? How the fuck can people come up with such ridiculous theories is beyond me.
Given that super-realistic Netflix check-signing scenario you envisioned, I can see how it would be hard to imagine or assess the actual possibilities.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Net Neutrality is that set of rules that allow bicycles to share the roads with cars. Without those rules, road providers would certainly limit their roads to delivery vehicles and charge them for access. Sure, cyclists could pay those fees to gain access as well, but would quickly be priced out of the market.
Your entire post argues for the existance of Net Neutrality.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
The intent of the law is so Big Company A doesn't pay Big Monopolistic ISP a bunch of money to prioritise their traffic over Little Company B, C and D.
It is the ISP customer who is supposed to be able to make that choice by paying for the level or type of service they want.
Without net neutrality, the cloud provider with the biggest pockets can stamp out their competition simply by paying to have their traffic made faster.
A big cloud provider who doesn't have anything better to offer than their competition, like Oracle.
Customers may want their traffic prioritised, but they also want it to be their choice which traffic.
I wouldn't want Big Video Streaming Service paying for pipes so big compared to my VoIP provider it kills my phone calls when someone else in the house watches a video.
What I would want is to be able to pay as a customer to prioritise VoIP traffic for the provider of my choosing (or simply pay for neutral service and do the QoS myself on my own router)
Multiple flows over the same peice of copper is the entire POINT of digital communication and packet switching.
You realize of the packets and flows leaving your house don't go to the same destination. So why the *hell* would they be put into the same queues or policed the same way? Most of the work is done on flows (roughly tcp connections), not on physical network ports. So to use your example:
> concurrently play a streamed game, stream a movie, and make a VoiP call, how does that ISP
The game has probably at least two flows, control and content. The control flow is all about latency. It requires nearly no bandwidth, the gamer doesn't care about jitter, they want the lowest possible latency above all else. Reliability definitely counts - packets should be retried. So you put that flow through the low-latency, low-bandwidth path. "Lowest possible latency" implies high jitter, and that's okay.
The voip call again uses damn little bandwidth, but this time jitter is the most important thing. Reliability doesn't count -
undeliverable packets should NOT be retried. Retrying would actually make the connection worse. For best voice quality, you want the ISP to *delay* each voip packet to make to take just as long as the last one. Otherwise you say "automobiles" and the person on the other end of the line hears "smoautobile". That's easily done by moving your game packet ahead of the voip packet, so that the voip packet doesn't arrive early.
Then you have the Netflix flow. For the Netflix flow, neither latency nor jitter matter. Reliability requirements are moderate - only retry recent packets. Only bandwidth really matters. So those go in the "high bandwidth, high latency" queue, to be delivered after your gaming and voip packets are delivered.
Yeah that's the intent, and that's great.
Unfotunately, legislators don't know why users WANT their VOIP packets delayed.* They don't know network jitter from doing the jitterbug. So their chance of writing a law that a) Comcast can't find giant loopholes in and b) doesn't completely fuck up proper flow management is about 0%.
* If you deliver each VOIP packet as quickly as possible, when you say "do not call me" the person on the other end might hear "not me, do call".
No problem your ISP has their own video on demand service that works much better.
What? You expect your own services you paid for to work well??! Pfft communist stay out of the free market.
ICMP is designed to be high priority less chatty for broadcasts as well as video by default as errors are less important over packet prioritization.
http://saveie6.com/
They are not ISPs. They do not exist in America. They are information services and advertising companies. They just happen to deliver data. Go look up the charters? Obama forced them to re-register as ISPs and now it is going back so net neutralities do not apply as no ISP exists in the US.
http://saveie6.com/
* If a UDP packet for an RTP stream comes in out of order, it's timestamp and sequence numbers doesn't align so it's dropped. It doesn't get played in the wrong order.
I don't WANT my voip packets delayed. I don't want my ISP prioritising video streaming websites over my voip provider because the streaming sites have lots more money to spend.
Thanks for pointing that out. So "do not call me" becomes "do call me". That can be avoided by processing a video packet (pr any other packet) ahead of the early voip packets. By delaying when necessary to minimize jitter, the voip doesn't drop out.