> Charging for transit is unrelated to net neutrality. You don't understand the issue.
I agree. I'm talking about settlement-based peering. Not transit.
What good will it do if my ISP has to treat traffic to YouTube and Netflix equally if they can charge Netflix (or the tier 1 that peers them to my ISP) such a high price for peering that the pipes to Netflix are terrible while the pipes to YouTube are awesome?
That's not where my analogy breaks down, that's the whole point. Netflix can arrange their network to get very low per packet costs because they can move their endpoint wherever they want. Comcast can't do that. So, necessarily, Comcast's per-packet costs are higher. Yet Netflix and Comcast cooperate to deliver packets that benefit them both equally. When benefit is equal, but costs are wildly unequal, it makes sense for one side to pay the other. And that's what the free market developed over many decades.
That makes my point, doesn't it? Will net neutrality prohibit that practice or not? If not, what good will it do? If so, what are the new rules that will decide when Comcast can or can't ask for money to colocate equipment? How much of the currently largely unregulated Internet peering/hosting/connecting landscape will have to be regulated to fix a problem that pretty much does not even exist?
Yes, you say it's "more about" that. But that's the side that has no immediate, tangible effects. Why isn't it "more about" the part of it that's trying to drastically re-organize an efficient, free market?
> They already do. You've missed this point. Netflix pays a Tier 1 company for their Internet connection. As a customer to Comcast I am paying them for my ISP connection. As a Netflix customer, I am paying them for access to their library. I'm a customer of both companies.
Yes, I agree. The way it works now is with settlement-based peering. That is, companies do charge each other for peering when their bandwidth costs are asymmetric. As I said, the system the free market has built works just fine. But it does allow ISPs to demand whatever fees they want to build faster pipes to particular peers.
> In your analogy which is highly flawed you've asserted that one company does more work than the other in transporting. In the real world Internet, that is not the case. Netflix has a huge pipe with their ISP to deliver the packets to the Internet. For the most part, Comcast only deals with the last mile. Other Tier 1 companies deal with the part in the middle. So neither company does more work.
It's not flawed. A typical ISP network is way more expensive than anything Netflix does. Netflix puts their servers in cheap datacenters -- they specifically put their servers wherever the costs are the very lowest. Comcast has no choice but to take their customers where they live. You cannot deny this, it is an absolute simple obvious fact. The highest costs for moving a packet between Comcast and Netflix are born by Comcast's last mile.
> Second in your analogy, the shipping company you are dealing with and paying is responsible in figuring a reasonable price in transport including paying intermediaries. If they miscalculated pricing, that's on them. They don't get to ask you for more money after you've sent the package off. The last. More importantly, the postman at the other end that is delivering the package to the recipient doesn't get to extort more money from you otherwise he will delay the delivery.
But that's just the thing. They didn't miscalculate pricing. So long as the costs are fairly divided between all the companies that did the work, their pricing is just fine. And today, that's how their pricing works. We do have settlement-based peering today.
The situation now is that content providers do pay money that winds up flowing to access providers. That's how settlement-based peering, the norm for decades, works. The ISPs didn't miscalculate, they got it right. The content providers benefit disproportionate to their costs, so it's fair they pay some of the costs of the access providers. That's what the free market set up. Nobody miscalculated. One side just wants to use the government to strong arm a better deal.
> And ISPs can't locate buildings where they want? They can't have infrastructure in places that are cheaper? Your argument falls apart because ISPs in places that have cheap bandwidth do not necessarily have better performance or cheaper Internet. They can, but they can't move their customers. All the costs can be fairly split but the first and last miles. Comcast has datacenters that are cheap just like Netflix does. But Netflix can put the endpoint (their servers) in those datacenters. Comcast simply can't do that. Their customers are where they are. It is a fact that the access provider almost always has higher costs than the content provider.
> As another example of how flawed your argument is, during the Netflix-Comast slowdown, several people showed that running their Netflix connection through a VPN was actually faster than Comcast directly. Comcast was throttling Netflix specifically. If it was a matter of bandwidth, there would have been little difference in speed.
Comcast wasn't throttling Netflix specifically, they just had poor bandwidth to Netflix. A VPN allowed you to avoid the congested links between Netflix and Comcast.
> Two flawed premises: ISPs don't deliver across the ocean.
I never said they did. ISPs simply have much higher per-packet costs than content providers do because content providers can put the
That's a red herring. If that was all net neutrality was about, it wouldn't solve anything. What good would it do for, say, Comcast to treat traffic with Netflix the same as traffic to Google if they had big, fat pipes to Netflix and small, slow pipes to Google? If net neutrality doesn't regulate peering agreements, ISPs will still be able to demand however much money they want from content providers or access to that content will be slow for their customers.
So which is it? Does net neutrality still let ISPs demand however much money they want from content providers or access will be uselessly slow for their customers? Or does net neutrality regulate peering agreements? There is no third option.
Imagine if two companies wanted to exchange physical packages. And assume that each package exchanged equally benefited both companies, say each company made $10 for each package exchanged. Should each company bear their own costs in exchanging the packages?
Well, if the costs were roughly equal, sure. But what if they were wildly unequal? Say one company had to carry them across an ocean and the other only had to carry them across town. And yet each package carried benefited both companies equally. Then wouldn't it make sense for the company that has to carry the packages across an ocean to also get some money from the company who only has to carry them across town? (Roughly half of the difference in their costs to carry the packages.)
The company that only has to carry the packages across town could say, "The other company already makes $10 for every package exchanged, paying us would be double dipping". But that's clearly nonsense.
Content providers like YouTube and Netflix can locate their servers in datacenters where bandwidth is absurdly cheap. They're like the company that only carries the packages across town.
ISPs like AT&T and Comcast can't ask their customers to move into datacenters. They have to build massive networks that cover cities. They're like the company that has to carry the packages across the ocean.
And it's reasonable to assume that data exchanged between a Netflix server and a Comcast customer benefits both companies equally.
This is the rationale for settlement based peering. And this is the arrangement the free market has worked out over decades. It's been reliable and stable and has fostered the growth of the Internet with relative freedom from regulation, fairly splitting costs between content providers and access providers. Now, one side wants the government to strong arm the other side into getting them a better deal than the fair deal the free market got them.
In sum, I see net neutrality as companies that got a perfectly fair deal from the free market trying to get the government to strong arm them a better than fair deal. And suckers are for falling for it.
Your understanding is correct, but your conclusion is not.
Imagine if two companies wanted to exchange physical packages. And assume that each package exchanged equally benefited both companies. Should each company bear their own costs in exchanging the packages?
Well, if the costs were roughly equal, sure. But what if they were wildly unequal? Say one company had to carry them across an ocean and the other only had to carry them across town. And yet each package carried benefited both companies equally. Then wouldn't it make sense for the company that has to carry the packages across an ocean to also get some money from the company who only has to carry them across town?
Yes, each bear their own costs. But where those costs are wildly unequal, the one with a higher cost is entitled to some compensation from the one with the lower cost.
Netflix can put their servers where the cost of bandwidth is the lowest. They're like the company that only carries the packages across town.
Comcast can't ask their customers to move into datacenters. Comcast is like the company that has to carry the packages across the ocean.
And the Internet has worked this way for decades, with a free market where settlements are negotiated between companies to ensure that the costs are divided fairly.
Because that has worked well for decades as a delicate balance has been sketched out between content providers and internet service providers. Now, one group wants to get the government to disrupt that delicate, fair balance in their favor. And a bunch of suckers support this massive increase in government regulation because they fear something that, even though it is currently legal, has not happened and is not happening. That is, the free market is working perfectly, and they want to replace it with regulation that benefits information providers and harms ISPs.
Except that's not the problem net neutrality fixes because an ISP can still have awesome, fast pipes to NetFlix and shitty, overloaded, slow pipes to Imgur. Sure, the traffic would be treated the same on their network, but so what? If some services are still absurdly slow and some super fast and my ISP gets to decide which based on what other people pay them, what does net neutrality accomplish?
And if you think through what it actually does accomplish, you'll see who it benefits and who it harms. And then it won't be any surprise who supports it and who opposes it. The baffling thing is why so many people have been suckered into making arguments like the one you made that aren't supported by the facts.
Okay, so net neutrality means that Comcast has to treat traffic to YouTube the same way they treat traffic to Netflix. But Comcast can still upgrade their pipes to YouTube to be superfast and not upgrade their pipes to Netflix so access to Netflix is still slow? What good will that do?
If net neutrality doesn't regulate peering, it won't accomplish anything. ISPs can still charge content providers whatever they want to upgrade their peering connections. And there will still be fast lanes and slow lanes, just at the edges of the ISP's networks.
And if net neutrality does regulate peering, then what will the rules be?!
Net neutrality does redistribute the cost of providing bandwidth. But it does it from content providers (who would pay less) to ISPs (who would pay more). That's why content providers are in favor of it and ISPs are against it.
That has never been the way the Internet has worked, and it has worked fine for decades. You can push for a rule like that, but make no mistake that this would be a massive change in the way Internet connectivity is paid for, and it would be forced on the market by government regulation. The companies arguing for net neutrality understand that, and that's why they support it so heavily.
He didn't violate the guidelines. The guidelines don't specify how you have to indicate that it's an ad, you just have to indicate somehow. And he did. The link in the tweet goes to an ad that mentions him by name. The tweet is clearly part of that same campaign.
Say FedEx was knowingly carrying packages that carried illegal child pornography. And say they knew which customers were shipping them and could easily stop just those packages. They could raise this kind of argument: "We aren't materially contributing to the distribution of the child pornography because if we didn't ship them, they would just drive them themselves. So there's no point in us refusing to knowingly transport illegal child pornography. Don't even ask us."
If you've got twenty hours of painful repetitive play into a game, you might spent a few hours trying to get back to your ship so you can continue from there rather than starting over. This is especially true if you are close to a promised reward.
They must say no. They have a duty of loyalty to their employer. They know that their employer is being compelled to direct them to write this code and does not actually want them to write it. To comply with their duty of loyalty, the must refuse. At that point, it would take a court order that specifically named those employees. It will be interesting to see if any court is willing to go that far.
"The government also implicitly threatens that if Apple does not acquiesce, the government will seek to compel Apple to turn over its source code and private electronic signature.... The catastrophic security implications of that threat only highlight the government’s fundamental misunderstanding or reckless disregard of the technology at issue and the security risks implicated by its suggestion."
San Jose Navigation's FV-M8 GPS module is available everywhere (including from Amazon) for less than $30. It has an NMEA output and a 1 PPS output for time synchronization. I haven't measured the time accuracy of this module, but the module it replaces had a measured time accuracy of better than 100 microseconds, the limit of the equipment I had to measure with.
Slashdot Mirror
> Charging for transit is unrelated to net neutrality. You don't understand the issue.
I agree. I'm talking about settlement-based peering. Not transit.
What good will it do if my ISP has to treat traffic to YouTube and Netflix equally if they can charge Netflix (or the tier 1 that peers them to my ISP) such a high price for peering that the pipes to Netflix are terrible while the pipes to YouTube are awesome?
That's not where my analogy breaks down, that's the whole point. Netflix can arrange their network to get very low per packet costs because they can move their endpoint wherever they want. Comcast can't do that. So, necessarily, Comcast's per-packet costs are higher. Yet Netflix and Comcast cooperate to deliver packets that benefit them both equally. When benefit is equal, but costs are wildly unequal, it makes sense for one side to pay the other. And that's what the free market developed over many decades.
That makes my point, doesn't it? Will net neutrality prohibit that practice or not? If not, what good will it do? If so, what are the new rules that will decide when Comcast can or can't ask for money to colocate equipment? How much of the currently largely unregulated Internet peering/hosting/connecting landscape will have to be regulated to fix a problem that pretty much does not even exist?
Yes, you say it's "more about" that. But that's the side that has no immediate, tangible effects. Why isn't it "more about" the part of it that's trying to drastically re-organize an efficient, free market?
> They already do. You've missed this point. Netflix pays a Tier 1 company for their Internet connection. As a customer to Comcast I am paying them for my ISP connection. As a Netflix customer, I am paying them for access to their library. I'm a customer of both companies.
Yes, I agree. The way it works now is with settlement-based peering. That is, companies do charge each other for peering when their bandwidth costs are asymmetric. As I said, the system the free market has built works just fine. But it does allow ISPs to demand whatever fees they want to build faster pipes to particular peers.
> In your analogy which is highly flawed you've asserted that one company does more work than the other in transporting. In the real world Internet, that is not the case. Netflix has a huge pipe with their ISP to deliver the packets to the Internet. For the most part, Comcast only deals with the last mile. Other Tier 1 companies deal with the part in the middle. So neither company does more work.
It's not flawed. A typical ISP network is way more expensive than anything Netflix does. Netflix puts their servers in cheap datacenters -- they specifically put their servers wherever the costs are the very lowest. Comcast has no choice but to take their customers where they live. You cannot deny this, it is an absolute simple obvious fact. The highest costs for moving a packet between Comcast and Netflix are born by Comcast's last mile.
> Second in your analogy, the shipping company you are dealing with and paying is responsible in figuring a reasonable price in transport including paying intermediaries. If they miscalculated pricing, that's on them. They don't get to ask you for more money after you've sent the package off. The last. More importantly, the postman at the other end that is delivering the package to the recipient doesn't get to extort more money from you otherwise he will delay the delivery.
But that's just the thing. They didn't miscalculate pricing. So long as the costs are fairly divided between all the companies that did the work, their pricing is just fine. And today, that's how their pricing works. We do have settlement-based peering today.
The situation now is that content providers do pay money that winds up flowing to access providers. That's how settlement-based peering, the norm for decades, works. The ISPs didn't miscalculate, they got it right. The content providers benefit disproportionate to their costs, so it's fair they pay some of the costs of the access providers. That's what the free market set up. Nobody miscalculated. One side just wants to use the government to strong arm a better deal.
> And ISPs can't locate buildings where they want? They can't have infrastructure in places that are cheaper? Your argument falls apart because ISPs in places that have cheap bandwidth do not necessarily have better performance or cheaper Internet.
They can, but they can't move their customers. All the costs can be fairly split but the first and last miles. Comcast has datacenters that are cheap just like Netflix does. But Netflix can put the endpoint (their servers) in those datacenters. Comcast simply can't do that. Their customers are where they are. It is a fact that the access provider almost always has higher costs than the content provider.
> As another example of how flawed your argument is, during the Netflix-Comast slowdown, several people showed that running their Netflix connection through a VPN was actually faster than Comcast directly. Comcast was throttling Netflix specifically. If it was a matter of bandwidth, there would have been little difference in speed.
Comcast wasn't throttling Netflix specifically, they just had poor bandwidth to Netflix. A VPN allowed you to avoid the congested links between Netflix and Comcast.
> Two flawed premises: ISPs don't deliver across the ocean.
I never said they did. ISPs simply have much higher per-packet costs than content providers do because content providers can put the
That's a red herring. If that was all net neutrality was about, it wouldn't solve anything. What good would it do for, say, Comcast to treat traffic with Netflix the same as traffic to Google if they had big, fat pipes to Netflix and small, slow pipes to Google? If net neutrality doesn't regulate peering agreements, ISPs will still be able to demand however much money they want from content providers or access to that content will be slow for their customers.
So which is it? Does net neutrality still let ISPs demand however much money they want from content providers or access will be uselessly slow for their customers? Or does net neutrality regulate peering agreements? There is no third option.
It's not really double dipping. Again:
Imagine if two companies wanted to exchange physical packages. And assume that each package exchanged equally benefited both companies, say each company made $10 for each package exchanged. Should each company bear their own costs in exchanging the packages?
Well, if the costs were roughly equal, sure. But what if they were wildly unequal? Say one company had to carry them across an ocean and the other only had to carry them across town. And yet each package carried benefited both companies equally. Then wouldn't it make sense for the company that has to carry the packages across an ocean to also get some money from the company who only has to carry them across town? (Roughly half of the difference in their costs to carry the packages.)
The company that only has to carry the packages across town could say, "The other company already makes $10 for every package exchanged, paying us would be double dipping". But that's clearly nonsense.
Content providers like YouTube and Netflix can locate their servers in datacenters where bandwidth is absurdly cheap. They're like the company that only carries the packages across town.
ISPs like AT&T and Comcast can't ask their customers to move into datacenters. They have to build massive networks that cover cities. They're like the company that has to carry the packages across the ocean.
And it's reasonable to assume that data exchanged between a Netflix server and a Comcast customer benefits both companies equally.
This is the rationale for settlement based peering. And this is the arrangement the free market has worked out over decades. It's been reliable and stable and has fostered the growth of the Internet with relative freedom from regulation, fairly splitting costs between content providers and access providers. Now, one side wants the government to strong arm the other side into getting them a better deal than the fair deal the free market got them.
In sum, I see net neutrality as companies that got a perfectly fair deal from the free market trying to get the government to strong arm them a better than fair deal. And suckers are for falling for it.
Your understanding is correct, but your conclusion is not.
Imagine if two companies wanted to exchange physical packages. And assume that each package exchanged equally benefited both companies. Should each company bear their own costs in exchanging the packages?
Well, if the costs were roughly equal, sure. But what if they were wildly unequal? Say one company had to carry them across an ocean and the other only had to carry them across town. And yet each package carried benefited both companies equally. Then wouldn't it make sense for the company that has to carry the packages across an ocean to also get some money from the company who only has to carry them across town?
Yes, each bear their own costs. But where those costs are wildly unequal, the one with a higher cost is entitled to some compensation from the one with the lower cost.
Netflix can put their servers where the cost of bandwidth is the lowest. They're like the company that only carries the packages across town.
Comcast can't ask their customers to move into datacenters. Comcast is like the company that has to carry the packages across the ocean.
And the Internet has worked this way for decades, with a free market where settlements are negotiated between companies to ensure that the costs are divided fairly.
Because that has worked well for decades as a delicate balance has been sketched out between content providers and internet service providers. Now, one group wants to get the government to disrupt that delicate, fair balance in their favor. And a bunch of suckers support this massive increase in government regulation because they fear something that, even though it is currently legal, has not happened and is not happening. That is, the free market is working perfectly, and they want to replace it with regulation that benefits information providers and harms ISPs.
Except that's not the problem net neutrality fixes because an ISP can still have awesome, fast pipes to NetFlix and shitty, overloaded, slow pipes to Imgur. Sure, the traffic would be treated the same on their network, but so what? If some services are still absurdly slow and some super fast and my ISP gets to decide which based on what other people pay them, what does net neutrality accomplish?
And if you think through what it actually does accomplish, you'll see who it benefits and who it harms. And then it won't be any surprise who supports it and who opposes it. The baffling thing is why so many people have been suckered into making arguments like the one you made that aren't supported by the facts.
Okay, so net neutrality means that Comcast has to treat traffic to YouTube the same way they treat traffic to Netflix. But Comcast can still upgrade their pipes to YouTube to be superfast and not upgrade their pipes to Netflix so access to Netflix is still slow? What good will that do?
If net neutrality doesn't regulate peering, it won't accomplish anything. ISPs can still charge content providers whatever they want to upgrade their peering connections. And there will still be fast lanes and slow lanes, just at the edges of the ISP's networks.
And if net neutrality does regulate peering, then what will the rules be?!
Net neutrality does redistribute the cost of providing bandwidth. But it does it from content providers (who would pay less) to ISPs (who would pay more). That's why content providers are in favor of it and ISPs are against it.
That has never been the way the Internet has worked, and it has worked fine for decades. You can push for a rule like that, but make no mistake that this would be a massive change in the way Internet connectivity is paid for, and it would be forced on the market by government regulation. The companies arguing for net neutrality understand that, and that's why they support it so heavily.
He didn't violate the guidelines. The guidelines don't specify how you have to indicate that it's an ad, you just have to indicate somehow. And he did. The link in the tweet goes to an ad that mentions him by name. The tweet is clearly part of that same campaign.
Say FedEx was knowingly carrying packages that carried illegal child pornography. And say they knew which customers were shipping them and could easily stop just those packages. They could raise this kind of argument: "We aren't materially contributing to the distribution of the child pornography because if we didn't ship them, they would just drive them themselves. So there's no point in us refusing to knowingly transport illegal child pornography. Don't even ask us."
If you've got twenty hours of painful repetitive play into a game, you might spent a few hours trying to get back to your ship so you can continue from there rather than starting over. This is especially true if you are close to a promised reward.
Morpheus is fighting Neo.
"All your bass are belong to us."
Well, to be unreasonably charitable to Venmo, that's what they were investigating.
How come every time I try to type "Venmo" it comes out "Venom" and I have to correct it?
A "foreign asset" is one owned or controlled by a foreign entity, even if the asset itself is in the United States.
The problem with slavery wasn't about compensation, it was about compulsion. There's a massive difference between a volunteer and a slave.
They must say no. They have a duty of loyalty to their employer. They know that their employer is being compelled to direct them to write this code and does not actually want them to write it. To comply with their duty of loyalty, the must refuse. At that point, it would take a court order that specifically named those employees. It will be interesting to see if any court is willing to go that far.
As Apple said in it is brief:
"The government also implicitly threatens that if Apple does not acquiesce, the government will seek to compel Apple to turn over its source code and private ... The catastrophic security implications of that threat only highlight the government’s fundamental misunderstanding or reckless
electronic signature.
disregard of the technology at issue and the security risks implicated by its suggestion."
San Jose Navigation's FV-M8 GPS module is available everywhere (including from Amazon) for less than $30. It has an NMEA output and a 1 PPS output for time synchronization. I haven't measured the time accuracy of this module, but the module it replaces had a measured time accuracy of better than 100 microseconds, the limit of the equipment I had to measure with.