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Comment by Nokinside | Hacker News Reader

The net neutrality laws prohibit anti-competitive blocking and "throttling" of Internet services or discriminating by protocol, ip-adress, application, etc.

What should be outside net neutrality laws are protocols that leave the customer and applications in control. There is nothing wrong with using Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP), DSCP and IPv6 flow labels to get QoS that differ from the dumb pipe. Many future applications require it.

- Online games might want to request low lag.

- Streaming services might want constant bandwidth with less strict lag requirements.

- File downloads might be OK with bursts and pauses as long as the best effort throughput is good.

- Safety-critical applications like, robot cars, remote surgery or emergency messaging, need guarantees that discriminate against other uses.

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> The net neutrality laws prohibit anti-competitive blocking and "throttling" of Internet services or discriminating by protocol, ip-adress, application, etc.

Except that NN does not prohibit it for traffic engineering purposes. And I'm here, just doing traffic engineering:

if (you-pay-me-for-PNIs) { set-local-preference really-high } else { set-local-preference default }

Oh look, your traffic is going to the non-congested path which happens to be the path to my PNI locations, directly into your network. Jack on the other hand, Jack gets to use the standard transit. "Hey Jack, you know, we will drag all your traffic to SJC, even if you are on the East Coast and hand it off to TATA because TATA gives us the lowest transit price. Man, TATA seem to be congested from 5pm Eastern to about 2am Eastern. Oh well, maybe you guys need to yell at TATA. Oh, do you want to buy a dozen of 10Gs to me all over the country? That would avoid those dolts at TATA."

> Except that NN does not prohibit it for traffic engineering purposes.

Not outright but it does restrict it specifically to prevent it from being a backdoor for this kind of edge provider discrimination.

There's zero discrimination in here. It is basic network engineering:

1. Terminate transit on transit-edge. All routes form transit edge get preference X.

2. Terminate peering routes on peering-edge. All routes from peering edge get preference Y.

Oh wait ma, I have traffic engineering and it matches $$. Aint life grand? NN rules are what happens when dilettantes who have never seen a 20U sized router are in charge of writing rules about networks.

So you're in favor of eliminating NN rules?

TCP/IP is optimized for neutral nodes in a network, sure you're doing traffic engineering, throttling is already happening. At a network level this makes sense, doesn't make sense that we give ISPs carte Blanche to openly start filtering traffic based on any rules they see fit. The people who want to repeal NN are the suits, not traffic engineers and techies like yourself. Obviously

Yes, I'm in favor of eliminating NN rules because NN currently does not work, did not work since 1995 and people pretending that NN works would make it impossible to encourage competition which is needed to make "ISPs cannot mess with authorized access" happen.

If we are to stop pretending that NetFlix does not pay Comcast and Verizon directly to get content to the customers of Comcast and Verizon without sucking in addition to paying others to deliver the same content to customers of Comcast and Verizon ( like an upstart MyFlix.com ), we can have a conversation about Net Neutrality 2.0, traffic engineering and settlements.

Sure, corruption there. But repealing what's in place just makes it even easier for them do things like this and get a way with it too. What legal ramifications will consumers have now that the FCC is siding with ISPs? Any? We'll have to take this to the supreme court. I think we both agree, the network should remain neutral.

You raise a good point. I think the net neutrality ethic can accommodate traffic shaping by application type, provided certain conditions are met:

A) Traffic shaping is done in the public's best interest.

B) It doesn't discriminate between packets of the same type but different providers.

C) Carriers are transparent about how and why they shape traffic.

D) All affected parties retain ultimate control over how shaping happens.

But who is going to determine what gets which priority at what price? The only one who can is the ISP and I don't trust them.

If any positive effect will come from the rollback of net neutrality, it's that more people in the US may realize that ISPs are generally adverserial. They have been for a while.

Customer determines by requesting QoS for connection.

ISP sells service with fixed price that states what kind of QoS requests it can fulfill. Net neutrality prevents the ISP from setting them on their own.

I believe it is best to leave traffic shaping to the endpoints, what is important to me doesn't mean it is important for the ISP.

ISP should just provide enough capacity to pass all their traffic without being dropped. Don't oversell what you can't provide.

You've listed a set of applications that require priority on the network. Do you think that there is value to traffic prioritization?

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