Comment by nawgszy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nawgszy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Either way, this is an important point and I'm surprised that the HN crowd doesn't discuss it more.

But right now all latency-sensitive applications should be operating just fine. I regularly play online first person shooters, and that is a latency-sensitive application if there ever was one. So that strongly suggests, seeing how I'm on Comcast / Xfinity's cheapest plan, that all lanes are fast lanes right now.

Accordingly, that means if you were to

>nuke [net neutrality] and let the markets figure it out

that's actually just letting a monopoly extract more profit from their network by intentionally degrading the quality of some connections unless paid more money.

I don't really think I need to say more, if this was a fair and competitive market where giant ISPs weren't lawsuit-happy in order to keep out competition, or they weren't able to do that successfully, sure, maybe the market would figure it out, and eventually the ISPs that offer true net neutrality would probably have traffic because no consumer is interested in paying more to be able to use the internet in specific ways.

As it stands, it's extortion being codified into law via bribery, disguised as 'the removal of heavy-handed Obama regulations in order to improve the network you've never had any issues with'.

A lot of games are low latency specifically because they worked with ISPs to reduce latency, or worked with a server provider that did so:

https://www.polygon.com/2016/2/17/11037220/league-of-legends...

As I understand, the monopolies like Comcast and Time Warner have almost no incentive to actually improve their infrastructure unless they have the ability to shake down the services that want speedier connections when they need them.

And this exactly how lack of net neutrality (combined with lack of infrastructure competition) messes up market signaling. A game then inflates its price, and all customers of the game pay a little bit extra because in some areas the ISP is shaking them down. The pricing pressure lands on the game company to resolve, in part with costs to customers which only have an indirect link to the transaction, not on the ISP that could actually resolve the problem with the direct parties involved.

Hi, what is market signaling?

It is how markets use prices as signals to decide what to produce and deliver efficiently. If the pricing of the good if ISP performance is actually hidden from the end consumer, then it muddies the customer valuation of both the game as a product, as well as an ISP as a product. By linking the prices of both in a hidden way, consumers don't have an effective way to make clear product choices which in turn signal to a company that it is producing the right thing (or the wrong thing). If the signals aren't clear, then the market becomes less efficient. The game company is no longer competes or is fully focused to make a good game, and the ISP is no longer competing to produce better network access.

That’s bullshit. I run a small telehealth company and latencies are not “just fine.” I spend much of my day dealing with internet connections for telehealth that are far from just fine, and it isn’t because of raw speeds, but the fact that “everything should be equal” is to ignore the fact that bandwidth is finite. Streaming YouTube is not as latency sensitive as telemedicine. Yet under NN — that traffic has to be treated equally. If I could pay a surcharge to have my traffic prioritized, I would, but under existing rules, real-time telehealth is if equal importance as some kid watching Kinder Suprise egg videos on YouTube, yet if an ISP wanted to prioritize real time traffic, under NN they couldn’t. Now, maybe ISPs could compete on offering things like “optimized for video conferencing or VOIP” or “optimized for large downloading needs” or whatever.

Not all traffic is equal and not all consumers have identical needs.

What the REAL issue is is local governments providing de facto monopoly power to ISPs thus preventing the sort of competition that would make a much more innovative and customizable product for consumers. My needs are more geared around real-time and less around large downloads, yet here in France where I live, all traffic is identically treated, supposedly.

There are unintended consequences with NN that I feel that people don’t understand. The internet isn’t the same as a phone call — some traffic has different requirements in order to be successful, while phone calls are all pretty much the same.

Like I said, the most latency-sensitive topic I can relate to is first-person shooters; in particular, I play the game CS:GO, where one shot can knock you out of a round. I play within a 40ms ping area, generally around 20-30ms of ping, and that seems to get me (from California) more or less the whole west coast of America.

I experience virtually no issues from my internet, and like I said, I pay $30 a month for this service. I don't use a lot of band-width, I simply use a consistent stream, and I see no reason why I should have to pay more for that right. It's an automaton wiring packets, not people scrambling to move data.

Back to you, though: what sort of issues arise from this extreme sensitivity to latency you have? Is 'telehealth' just a doctor skyping with a patient or do you have some kind of real-time devices that depend on communication over a distance? If the latter, how sure are you that your architecture isn't the issue, and some computations couldn't be done in a different link in the chain?

>the REAL issue is local governments providing de facto monopoly power to ISPs

I totally agree. Like I literally said in my comment, the whole calculus of this conversation would change if ISPs actually had to compete, but since they obviously don't, I can't possibly see how revoking net neutrality is a good idea. It simply lets them tighten their stranglehold in a fashion that costs everyone more money and extends the anti-competitive sphere they exist in into the whole realm of business that relies on sending traffic over the internet.

So sure, it's easy to say "telehealth has a real impact on lives and YouTube for children doesn't", but that doesn't mean eliminating net neutrality here and now is a good choice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com