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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

> What if an ISP wanted to prioritize all real time traffic (voip, videogames, streaming video)?

Then they should increase bandwidth in their backbone or reduce latency for everyone.

All that prioritizing real time traffic means is the ISP gets to judge what is important on the wire and what isn't, rather than the consumer. I don't want my ISP going anywhere near my packets.- or anyone, really - except for whoever I am sending them to. All they need to know is the destination address and the fastest way to get it there.

If there were competition in ISPs, you could reasonably argue that ISP's being given sovereignty over the traffic on their lines would be acceptable. But as long as Internet service in the US is the domain of very few regional monopolies, they have too much power over the consumer to be able to mess with such critical infrastructure for their own gain.

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I mean sure, theoretically sounds good, in practice you would not want to give up the myriad QOS instruments that are already in place. They make your internet usage feel faster with very little downside.

Absolutely, the Net Neutrality rules need to be in place, but your parent commentor is right when he says it's not going to be a trivial thing to define.

What kind of QOS adjustments would be made impossible by assuming the above definition of net neutrality?

Genuinely curious.

Analyzing the traffic to optimize the service.

- With p=0.86 this UDP stream looks like a VoIP traffic and the least latency route would be over this peer.

- And this TCP connection is to the YouTube video servers. No matter what, it's better not route through this peer, because for only $deityName knows why but it doesn't work well and customers complain about random buffering.

- And that is BitTorrent traffic - better feed that info_hash and so the locally-running cache would prefetch the data. Okay, that's probably not possible in the US, lol, but this simple trick significatly lowered upstream utilization, making network perform better for everyone.

That's how it works in a "good ISP" scenario. There's a "bad ISP" scenario though. There, NN prevents those:

- This is Netflix traffic and customer'd better pay for our cable if they want 4K. Shape this down to 5Mbps. Not like that customer has any choice of ISPs in their area.

- That's VoIP and and user's better burn minutes on our telephony services. Add randomized 1-5% packet drop.

- That's BitTorrent and we know it's only for pirates. Block the traffic, no Debian ISOs for you buddy.

So, as far as I get it, NN is unnecessary or even harmful where there's a significant competition (like, no less than 4-5 different ISPs), and may be helpful in case of mono- and duopolies.

All of that is a terrible idea, as you still suddenly have idiosynratic behaviour of some traffic streams, with some VoIP protocols working on some providers, stuttering on others, what have you ... just an unreliable, undebuggable mess that makes innovation essentially impossible (because now you need to upgrade/reconfigure all ISPs' routers to introduce a new VoIP protocol, say ... which in practice means that you can't).

If you want to do QoS, you have to do it using a standardized mechanism (such as the qos header in IP) and let the customer control which data streams they want prioritized.

Maybe it is, would we've lived in a world of standards being developed, implemented and followed and users having good understanding about their computer systems and networking concepts.

Have you ever saw HLS or DASH HTTPS traffic tagged distinctively from bulk .iso downloads, and all that being distinct from page loads? Does your VoIP client uses DSCP field? Which level does it set? What ISP is to make if some "smart" client marks all their traffic as "critical"? And more importantly - how that's supposed to even work across multiple ASes?

Heuristics is the only way it can be made work in the real world scenarios.

That, or "sorry, we understand that your MMORPG lags terribly since the last week but we can't even try to help you" ISP support replies.

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