Hacker News Reader

Comment by brndnmtthws | Hacker News Reader

VPNs for everyone?

I keep seeing people recommending VPNs to fight Net Neutrality, but I don't think that will help.

Let's say that they want to slow down sites like TPB and Vodo while making Netflix faster.

Instead of "making everything normal and making TPB slow", which would be a bad for marketing and would be avoided by VPNs, they'll make "everything normal and Netflix fast", which sounds much better in marketing and you can't avoid with a VPN (if you use a VPN, everything will be the same, except for Netflix which will be slower).

This is the same thing that is happening with zero-rating in the EU: If you use a VPN, the only thing that happens is that you'll have limited traffic for all services.

Note that this is exactly what's already happening with services like T-Mobile's "Binge On," AT&T's "Stream Saver," etc. You pay for some amount of data, and certain providers like Netflix don't count against that data allotment (and maybe their videos are compressed, or precached near cell towers, or something).

The FCC was inquiring into these programs until Ajit Pai's appointment as chairman: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/fcc-ends-inquiries-t-mobiles-b...

And the EFF has criticized these programs as a violation of net neutrality: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...

How do you scale that?

Getting a significant number of users on VPN would take a long time...

Yep. Beat me to making the comment. This is already a solved problem.

A VPN solves this problem quite well. Only exception I see is overall bandwidth usage. They'll obviously still see the total amount of traffic going across their lines and may throttle that, but that would apply to everyone equally, which I don't have an issue with. Since they won't be able to see the traffic due to encryption, they can't inhibit/block certain sites or services. Nor can they inject ads or anything else into the HTML responses. They would also be essentially blind and unable to build a profile about you to sell.

That doesn't work if they decide to throttle anything not on the "whitelist" of high priority sites based on your plan.

i don't believe that's true. they won't be able to see what you are accessing other than the VPN as long as you are routing all traffic through it (which you should be). so it's all or nothing for them. They can't really pick and choose what to prioritize because they can't see what it is due to the encryption.

They can easily choose what to prioritize. VPNs won't be prioritized, so any traffic over them will get slowed down.

Right, I think we're talking about two different things. Yes, they can choose to not prioritize the VPN traffic. But they won't be able to, for example, slow down Netflix because they have a competing on-demand service because they won't be able to see the traffic. So it's all or nothing when on the VPN. All of your traffic is throttled or none of it will be.

Right. So in other words a VPN isnt actually a work around at all.

What if the ISPs block VPN?

It's possible, but tricky, since a lot of companies use VPNs and the US is a corporate welfare state ruled by Big Cos Inc.

Perhaps they will try and charge a VPN or encrypted data surcharge.

Can't they (the ISPs) just block or charge extra for VPN traffic? I've read that China detects and blocks VPN traffic.

Correct, and this also sidesteps the issue of VPNs falling under legislative scrutiny in the future.

they can see encrypted traffic and that it is being sent to an IP associated with VPN services without too much difficulty, but they won't have granular control/access over your data/bandwidth. Meaning they won't be able to prioritize some of the sites/services you access over others because of the encryption. they need to throttle everything or nothing. And they won't be able to see any of your traffic or the sites you visit whatsoever.

VPNs can solve the problem only temporarily.

But what will happen is that ISPs will stop upgrading their "regular" networks, and upgrade only the "fast lanes" networks.

VPN providers will either be outright denied access to those fast lanes or they won't be able to afford using them. So in a few years, whether you're using a VPN or not, you'll still be in the "regular" (read: slow) lane, while the big companies will likely have to move to the "fast lane" (and pay the ISPs for the privilege).

The more time passes, the worse this will get for small companies, as the needs for data consumption and bandwidth increase, so eventually internet users will slowly move to the fast-lane-using services and dump the others.

Also, the more money the ISPs will make from the "fast lanes" the less incentive they'll have to upgrade their regular slow lanes (unless fierce competition appears, which may not), because it just means companies will have bigger "incentive" to pay them for the fast lane access.

Existing ISP's wouln't ban VPN's because of business use but they could make a special high cost lane just for VPN's.

Business VPNs usually look different, traffic-wise, from personal VPNs - you can permit Cisco IPsec and ban OpenVPN, and get close enough.

Also, you can just keep track of known-business or known-personal VPN endpoints. VPNs don't hide the fact that you're using a VPN, nor which VPN you're using, from your provider. (You could still use Tor pluggable transports, but then you've completely given up on performance.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com