Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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