Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

I fail to see how this breaks even the US Internet. Comcast will never cut off the flow to certain parts of the Internet for the sake of charging you to go there. They'll always let you go to those places, they just won't let you go there as quickly if you don't pay extra.

I don't think I have to tell you all how shitty this would be, but it's not a "broken" Internet. We can sit here and concoct all kinds of worst-case scenarios, but we could also do that with anything. Your babysitter could feed your kid a bottle of aspirin - this is within the realm of physical possibility, just as it's within the realm of physical possibility that Comcast starts shaking down websites.

And before anyone even brings it up, Netflix and Comcast's peering agreement has nothing to do with net neutrality. Without peering, Netflix's path to consumers was long. With peering, it's not, which leads to faster speeds. That's it. Peering agreements have existed for many years, and will need to continue to exist for the Internet to continue to exist. It'd be much worse for the Internet to abolish all peering agreements in the name of neutrality (wtf?) than it would be for the FCC to have no teeth in enforcing net neutrality.

If deliberately congesting links to encourage another company (who happens to be a competitor) to negotiate peering is not a violation of net neutrality then we need to update the definition.

Their peering agreement lapsed, that's all.

Nothing "deliberate" about slowing Netflix down, that's just what happens when packets have to travel further and through the greater Internet.

Put the pitchfork away.

Since when does an ISP negotiate peering agreements? It seems like a conflict of interest there, when Comcast's trunk business is actively thwarting the internet delivery service part of the business.

It's like McDonalds charging their suppliers because they're 'sending a lot of product into our kitchens.'

A McDonalds analogy makes a certain amount of sense, but to make it work, McDonalds would have to be paying nothing to start with for their supplies. Then, the discounts McDonalds does get for buying in such high volume could be seen as "charging their suppliers".

Normally, Comcast doesn't pay anyone to be able to serve their network traffic, so in that way they're like a McDonalds who doesn't pay for their supplies, and only acts as a middleman to give their suppliers a way to sell their buns or fries or whatever.

So yes, I think you have the right idea.

Also, ISPs have been peering both with one another and with others since the dawn of ISPs, as far as I can tell. Frankly, it is unfair, but it's been happening since the beginning. I don't honestly know how one would solve this imbalance - perhaps require ISPs to accept ALL peering requests? I don't know enough about networking to know if that would end well, but I suspect it wouldn't.

> Since when does an ISP negotiate peering agreements?

Since "forever"? When I ran an ISP in '95, peering was pretty much top of the agenda from day one given that bandwidth is such a huge cost centre. The only reason we never tried to charge site providers for peering was that we didn't get large enough before we sold our dial up customers.

> It's like McDonalds charging their suppliers because they're 'sending a lot of product into our kitchens.'

That's a horrible analogy. Comcast is not selling the chicken, they're selling access to the local roads that gets you to the freeways that can get you to the McDonalds, or any other business. Comcasts customers are not paying for a specific level of access to McDonalds.

But since you're using that kind of analogy, many suppliers pay for shelf positions in large super market chains, for the same reasons site site operators sometimes pay ISPs for more direct access: both sides know who is most dependent on the improved access.

Whose peering agreement with whom lapsed? AFAIK Comcast and Cogent never peered.

I'm having a hard time finding an unbiased source. I don't know the precise prior state of affairs between Comcast and Netflix's content providers. I know Cogent has been causing problems with Verizon over this same issue back in June/July.

I find it hard to believe Cogent had no peering agreement with Comcast, however, prior to 2014.

This is almost certainly deliberate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandvine#Comcast_controversy

And if that's true, is it really much different than what we have today? If you have deep pockets, you can already buy speed by using the services of a CDN like Akamai. We already have an unlevel playing field.

Right now Comcast (except for torrent traffic, fuck them for that) doesn't meddle in what the packet is or where it's going, per se. However they do, apparently, have peering agreements with companies which allow these companies to serve traffic directly from THEIR networks, straight into Comcast's networks. This effectively does favor certain traffic over other traffic, but it's a kind of favoring that's been going on forever, and is generally accepted.

I dunno. I actually fail to see how peering in general is not a violation of net neutrality, however it's so critical to the smooth operation of the Internet, I'd rather have peering than net neutrality, if I had to choose.

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