Wehe – Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations
dd.meddle.mobi
dd.meddle.mobi
EDIT: Re-read the technical details. I think it can only measure one aspect of Net Neutrality I.e. Throttling one in favor of the other. Which seems reasonable. But I don't think it should be marketed as detecting "Net Neutrality Violation".
that alone would get them very low grades in my book.
> cue in google apologists telling me how to root or install hacks to do that and that it is totally possible
There is 100% some funky shit going on in Android though; I was working on a project the other night and my phone absolutely refused to connect to the service on my PC. My phone and tablet both on Android simply gave me "no route to host" or timeouts even with data disabled and WiFi only set; this is connecting directly to IPs no hosts/DNS. Of course I assumed the firewall was up until I confirmed every other computing device I can access was able to hit it.
Why is my phone messing with my networking on my private network?
You run the risk where your phone is set to always use 192.168.1.147 but another device @ .147 is already connected via DHCP, but it's not really a thing that will happen because the chances are so low. And it's a bit hard on public WiFi where finding the gateway, subnet mask, etc. could be hard, or there might be some access control mechanism on the network side.
But for a large amount of people, setting the DNS on their home WiFi with this method would cover 50-90%+ of network usage. No root required.
> cue in google apologists telling me how to root or install hacks to do that and that it is totally possible
I'm not a google apologist btw. Running lineageos with no gapps. With a root-based workaround to get around Google's stupid/illogical/incorrect geography-based call recording restrictions.
Gross. I want to accept an IP address without accepting anything else. Just the IP address. Nothing else. Let me choose to turn off the default gateway on this network or even do something dumb like assign a different default gateway. Let me choose what DNS server to use. Let me opt-in to any other routes the network thinks I need. Let me opt-in to a time server. Give control of my device back!
The real problem with this is that I never use the ISP supplied DNS servers. I double checked everything to ensure something in the network chain didn't default to the ISP DNS, turned out either Spectrum was either hijacking every DNS query but passing valid replies or running DPI and hijacking certain queries. I reported all this to EFF but never heard back. I switched to DNSCrypt to mitigate.
Now that *no* app uses the OS dns anymore, but the HTTPS one, you can change it at will. Go fiddle with your useless settings :(
t-mobile, for instance, can't MITM TLS1.2 or TLS1.3 connections between the youtube client on your ios or android phone, and google.
they have direct peering connections all over the place with the google AS and can manipulate traffic in other ways, as it hits the edge of their network.
but they absolutely can recognize traffic on source/origin, or per-flow basis and rate limit it so that you get a 480p stream instead of 1080p (nevermind 4K).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880146
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=t-mobile+...
As bigger players use more bandwidth, if treated the same they will have congestion at peak hours as they use more bandwidth per visitor than smaller sites.
For someone like Netflix to be as fast as a smaller website, they would need a peering arrangment that is special for them.
I don't see a need for net neutrality to say you can't pay for more if you need more. I think "we're gonna charge you extra because of the TYPE of data you are" or "we're gonna charge you extra because we have our own competing service" or "we're gonna throttle you [for those same reasons]" are much bigger concerns.
What's the big concern with Netflix operating as their own CDN vs paying a third party one?
https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/exa...
Now that users produce the content, they kept the distribution and revenue model (i.e. you go to the central places and they sell you to advertisers) but they have zero cost for content since everyone is a producer and consumer, which was the use case for the non-centralized portals in the first place.
1. As I remember it, news was one of the early internet centralisation points. As dial-up telephone charges were expensive, we patiently waited for someone at a large university to download the news and forward it. I am not a great source of internet history, others will may correct me here, but one of the largest operations like this, downloading Usenet news and making it available, ended up becoming what some called the first "ISP". That was UUNet. The takeway from this footnote is that "news" showed to be an early centralisation point, high traffic. Everyone wants "the news".
2. The trend today with Google and Bing, and those who use their feeds, is to limit the number of unique search results any user can retrieve. Around 250-300 max but with many searches one is lucky to get 50-100. The search engines are trying to market themselves as a way to "get answers" instead of a way to discover what websites exist on the web today. We all know what this looks like on Google and Bing. The companies place their own "web properties" in the results, i.e., many of the "results" are links to the companies own servers, and they scrape other websites to provide "instant" answers. The user never leaves the search results page, never even visits another website. DDG, following the lead of Google, calls this "instant answers" and "zero-click info". This statement from DDG sums up the present day popular search engines:
"When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links."
source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
(Personally I do want "just links". I have written scripts to get them.)
It is up to the reader to decide whether this is intentional or not, but either way, unlike in the 1990's and early 2000's, search engines are limiting how much of the web users can actually "see" at one time. Regardless of intent, that is the effect. If, hypothetically, the web was not growing very much, no one could detect that using a search engine. The web today is portrayed by search engines as some sort of oracle that can provide answers. For easy questions, sure. For more difficult ones, we can fabricate answers but that does not mean they are good ones. Than add in "AI" hype. What happens when people lose all critical thinking ability. They just accept the oracle's answer as "good enough". We can already see this happenig with young people. You can end up with a Wizard of Oz scenario, but no one ever discovers the tiny man behind the curtain. The truth is that the web is still a motley collection of websites, along with some very large "walled gardens" of UGC that draw the lion's share of daily traffic.
Sorry, but I think this is totally wrong.
I knew the guy who wrote the very first web crawler/search engine, and even then, the intent was to find answers, not websites.
Moreover, I don't see any limit on what google returns when you search. I just searched for "the trend with google today" and it told me there were 927,000,000 results. When I got to page 22 of those results, it told me that the rest were all very similar but gave me a link to fetch them anyway. I could get to an arbitrary Nth result.
The reality is that search engines actually are, by any historical standard "some sort of oracle that can provide answers".
And when they can't/don't, they still function as tools that provide you with links to help you explore the question more.
Recognizing whether or not you've actually found the answer (from a book, from deductive processes, from a human oracle or from a search engine) has always required critical thinking skills, and that has not changed.
For the query you tested, I could only retrieve 101 results. Could you get more than that. If you can retrieve more than 300 results (the actual results pages with the links, not just a line about how many results were "found"), I would like to know what headers you sent. I do not think this is possible anymore.
Interesting if you believe critical thinking skills are not on the decline.
request with arbitrary results accessible out of 927M: https://i.imgur.com/PHzrXSu.png
I didn't suggest that critical thinking was declining. I don't have a position on whether it is or is not - I can think of several different factors that would (collectively) push in both directions.
You should read a bit about the cold war in my opinion. This logic can burn you.
My analogy is more: When the giant dinosaurs are fighting amongst themselves, us little mammals can scurry about and survive :-)
If that ever changes, we can stop the fight. To do so now is, to say the least, premature.
— Maxim 29, The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries (https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...)
My brain isn't sure if you're talking about:
1) Things which disrupt HTTP like IPFS 2) Things which disrupt entrenched ISPs like Starlink or 5g internet; or 3) Both
> This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (CNS-1617728), a Google Faculty Research Award, Arcep (Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques et des Postes), Verizon Labs and Amazon. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, Google, Arcep, Verizon Labs or Amazon.
© Copyright 2012-2021 by David Choffnes, Northeastern University.
I admit, I bought into that fear. But it didn't happen. Plus average US broadband speed has increased drastically, up 91% from 2019-2020[1].
Maybe big tech/media needs to ask themselves, "are we the baddies?"
1. https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe-intern...
NN went away in 2017. Reading the replies on reddit is troubling, thinking we need something that we actually don't. With plenty of data to back it up.
It means "Don't you dare" in German
Here's my current stab at understanding each side:
Customer perspective: Rent seeking bad. Don't want to be gouged.
Broadband providers perspective: Mitigate the free rider problem(s), make the system fair.
Examples would be very helpful. Of course there are bad actors. I'm trying to not get sucked into that food fight. My hope is that we can curtail bad behavior (cheating) with better policies.
Surely we can design markets to satisfy the needs and concerns of both sides. Right?
--
Mea culpa: My bro created and runs the ISP portions of a cable company. He relates examples of their struggles. Stuff like spending millions of dollars on gear and having other companies abusing it.
We pretty much don't agree on anything. But my bros examples and concerns are legit. So I've been trying to dig into his positions on net neutrality, to better understand the larger impasse.
Most of our policy discussions quickly devolve into partisan bullshit. It's a lot of work to keep convos on track. And when he talks about topics I do know about, a lot of the stuff he says (repeats) isn't even wrong.
He is very good at his job, and knows the technical stuff cold, which is why I'm more open to his input on net neutrality.
Which free rider problem? The customer pays the ISP for access to the internet.
I understand that the ISP would like to double-dip on this deal. But I regard this as wrong.
I pay my ISP for bandwidth. WHAT I choose to download with that bandwidth has no impact on their bottom line, unless they were counting on me not actually using it.
Websites and web apps pay for bandwidth. Anyone who has paid an AWS bill knows there's nothing free about it.
The only group of companies that are guaranteed to make money in any internet venture are the ISPs. The rest of us are gambling, hoping that our investments will be worth it. On top of that, we're all competing with a global market, whiles ISPs tend to only compete with a handful of local providers at a time, allowing them a lot more control over prices.
Meanwhile, they're selling pick axes in a gold rush and crying victim?
Doesn't make a lick of sense to me.
This is a seprate issue from what most people see as net neutrality. If true net neutrality was enforced, then there would be no caching boxes for Google,Facebook or Netflix and they would have to rely on public peering with the congestion that comes with.
Exactly.
It really feels like the debate over "net neutrality" is conflating multiple issues.
I kinda get the ISP biz model. Overprovisioning and so forth.
I have no clue about the backbone biz model. How the transit fees work. I want the ELI5 (Ray Dalio, Courtney Love) covering how broadband works. What the basics? Who's screwing who? How companies deal with each other. How they deal with content publishers like Netflix, TikTok, etc.
I'd like to learn what fare means, how to curtail consumer throttling, how yo curtail free loaders (bypassing transit fees), what system would be more fair.
Surely we can design market mechanisms to balance these concerns.
It seems to me that Generic ISP Inc would meter all the Netflix traffic and then send them a bill. And if Netflix wants to ensure their end users are getting whatever quantity and quality of bandwidth, the two parties will negotiate.
Is he letting those sources push content to him for free?
Or are his customers determining what's going through his network?
This isn't true in reality. For example, it's significantly more expensive to deliver video traffic from say, my computer to yours, than it would be to deliver from Netflix to your computer.
At which side of the setup? To get the data from the neighborhood hub to my computer? To get the data from the start of the ISP's network to the neighborhood? To get the data from you to my ISP's network?
And are you meaning actually from Netflix or from a CDN or from a Netflix node in an ISP's location or what?
> And are you meaning actually from Netflix or from a CDN or from a Netflix node in an ISP's location or what?
Netflix has a proxy node on your ISP's network, or at least somewhere closer to it than where my computer sits. The video makes a smaller trip to your computer.
That's one optimization, among others, utilized by CPs.
No PC options at all. Interesting choice, and perhaps a JS browser version wouldn't have worked properly. Maybe I'll try it, and maybe my PC VM would have caused issues, but doing a full mobile install is a big ask.
That being said, I have cellular data on my laptop and I’ve always been curious if it gets throttled the same way they throttle mobile, since I’m sure there some differences in the connection that may or may not fit the content filters the carrier has set.
Is this some sort of a US ISP problem that I am too Eastern European to understand?
[1] https://www.arcep.fr/demarches-et-services/pour-tous.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_de_R%C3%A9gulati...
IANAL but I'm sure this was/is legal in those jurisdictions, which indicates a total disregard for net neutrality there.
It's dodgy if the ISP serves it at lower speed for either capped or uncapped. An ISP might throttle uncapped to force the service to use lower quality and less bandwidth, or they might throttle capped to encourage folk to pay for uncapped.
It seems neutral at first glance, but the side effect is a barrier to market for competitors not on the ISP offers.
As for legalities until it's tested in court it's hard to know if any law stands up to scrutiny especially in an area as grey as this. My gut feel is that ISPs would get away with it unless they are abusing a monopoly, but hey IANAL either.
I tried a T-Mobile MVNO or T-Mobile(?) phone a few years ago, noticed regardless whatever resolution I set inside the Youtube app, it is super blur on Cellular but it works fine on Wi-Fi. The I found that the carrier setup its own cache of low resolution youtube videos, it will hijack all your requests to youtube and replacing the content to its own cache (360p videos).
That's how they give you "unlimited" data as you will never able to use it.
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