Comment by hkuo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkuo | Hacker News Reader

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I may not be up to speed with the whole argument, but is there a middle ground that neither party seems to want to meet at?

Net Neutrality proponents seem to want to do away with QOS entirely, but this seems to be on the grounds of ensuring the big operators don't use it for evil.

QOS can be an extremely beneficial thing. How many times has anyone been on a Skype call when the video dropped or the audio came through garbled? How many of you want to ensure that when you're playing Call of Duty that the very milisecond you hit the trigger for a headshot, your packet doesn't get dropped and you miss your target? On the flip side, how many of you don't care if an email you send gets sent that very milisecond or one or two seconds later? And who would care if a podcast you have downloading from iTunes overnight takes 15 minutes or 20 minutes?

This kind of QOS ensures that video, audio, and gameplay get priority over other forms of data that are not as time-sensitive.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, because this overall issue does seem a bit complex.

You are right. The reason Google supports net neutrality (for example) is to prevent Comcast from making a deal with Vimeo to offer QOS on Vimeo videos, allowing them to play at noticeably higher quality.

Comcast could even make a deal with a yet unheard of startup and suddenly Google would lose lots of market share to an upstart who was willing to accept Comcast's terms.

YouTube isn't exactly a shining example of high-quality grade video, but I totally get your point.

I'm just hoping that a tiering of QOS from a technical standpoint is not entirely ignored. Perhaps it's something already being addressed by Net Neutrality proponents.

Edit: Here's an article from a Cisco podcast that discusses this same issue I've mentioned: http://www.ciscohandsontraining.com/2009/09/need-for-qos-ver...

I hope so too. Surprisingly, I was watching youtube 1080p content via AppleTv the other day and was quite impressed. I certainly know why Comcast opposes net neutrality :)

What you're saying is totally valid, but notice this: you're talking about types of traffic, and the customer's priorities.

If customers had control over this - saying 'prioritize my traffic on port X' or something like that - it would be fine.

What net neutrality proponents fear is discrimination based on carriers' priorities and the origins of traffic.

For example, imagine that Comcast throttles Youtube because they want you to buy the cable package. They're not benefitting the customer. They're not delivering what the customer or the taxpayer paid for.

What if AT&T wouldn't connect my call to Verizon's sales department? What if my Toyota stalled out when I tried to drive to the Honda dealership?

The bottom line is that if a customer pays for access, it should be theirs to use and prioritize as they see fit.

Actually, I had not considered this. Thanks. QOS could easily be controlled on the client side, the same way Firefox or Safari apply less memory and bandwidth to webpages in unfocused tabs, while giving the page in the current tab the most love.

QoS can be used for good and some people (e.g. George Ou) have been pushing this angle, but when broadband ISPs talk about QoS (or any kind of "improvement" to their networks), it's always for evil. Many techies, seeing an environment where "innovation" is solely used for evil, are responding bluntly: if the ISPs can't use these tools responsibly, let's take them away completely.

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