Let’s Keep the Internet Dumb
blog.theoldreader.com
blog.theoldreader.com
My two big issues with lots of net neutrality proponents are:
1. Priority of traffic. If my neighbor is bit-torrenting The Avengers I still want to be able to have my VoIP call work. He doesn't really care if his packets move marginally slower while I really care that my packets get through nearly all the time.
The rejoinder here is "well the ISPs should always make enough bandwidth for both of us." But the very nature of shared networks is that what my neighbor does can affect me. If you want a channel reserved for yourself, get a leased line and pay the expensive premium for it. (Or buy a guaranteed channel on the shared pipe, but that runs into the same issue with net neutrality.)
2. Companies with more money will always be able to buy better access. You can say "well we shouldn't make it even easier to them to be faster," but at a certain point this logic leads to crazy things like making it illegal for Netflix to use a private network running parallel to the Internet to move things faster to their CDN end points.
I want a net neutrality that stops my cable company from interfering with my Vonage packets because they want me to sell me their own VoIP service. I want a net neutrality where my ISP doesn't care if my video packets are coming from Microsoft or Netflix or YouTube. But that doesn't mean I'll sign up for anything wrapped in a "net neutrality" flag that is trying to nail jelly to a tree.
It might be workable if it came with a guarantee that rates below (max bandwidth/contention ratio) would always be delivered from each customer, and traffic above that would be at risk from contention.
If it is latency - to have VOIP you need 200ms round trip top. That is the first lecture in Communication Technology 101.
Video streaming is latency tolerant but bandwidth sensitive. You moderately don't care if a packet gets lost or spikes as long as you have long enough buffer.
So any kind of conversation needs a fast lane. Downloading and streaming don't. But they need bulk.
My 2am download of Windows Update goes into the bargain basement slow lane. Let anyone else go first, I don't care.
The problem with QoS is that the window where it's actually useful is miniscule. If, on the one hand, it's 2AM and nobody is using the network, QoS does nothing because all the packets are delivered and none are dropped. On the other hand, if everybody is trying to watch the Superbowl at the same time and $STREAM_BPS * $NUM_USERS > $TOTAL_BANDWIDTH, QoS can't save you. You have more time-sensitive traffic than you have pipe to put it in, so at least some of your customers are going to see choppy video (or no video).
In the middle of that you have this tiny slice where the network is saturated "just right" for QoS to actually do something. You have only just enough bandwidth to handle all of the active streams, so that when some bursty thing (like loading a large web page) comes along, you can drop some packets from a stream and have just enough bandwidth available two seconds later to let the stream catch up before the client's buffer is exhausted.
To skip to the punch line, that never happens. Networks that hit 100% utilization on a regular basis are under-provisioned. If you're at the point where QoS helps you do something, your network is broken, because tomorrow's peak usage could be higher than today's which means you needed to start upgrading yesterday. QoS on the Internet is useless.
And that's before you get to the whole trouble with what to do about ssh tunnels and TLS connections and otherwise unclassifiable traffic.
You can push my Windows Update example to 6pm -- I still don't care at all how it runs. I'd tell my router to mark it as the least time-sensitive of any of my network connections.
Because QoS on a LAN is a different animal. A LAN will have multiple machines that each have a 100Mbps or faster connection to a shared router with a 100Mbps or slower link to the rest of the Internet. That means one person downloading anything will saturate the entire Internet connection. ISPs have the opposite topology: A bunch of users with e.g. 50Mbps connections that come together to share a multi-Gbps uplink. Regularly saturating the uplink in that context is Bad. It means customers aren't getting the speeds you sold them.
There is also a difference between QoS and fairness. If you're using VOIP and I'm downloading something, the ISP should be dropping my packets before yours when we're on the same plan, but because of the quantity of traffic rather than the type. That pretty much exempts VoIP from being dropped, without doing any kind of DPI or traffic classification, based simply on how relatively little bandwidth it requires.
Neutrality means non discrimination on who sends the packet and who receives is.
QoS means that the provider have obligation to deliver a packet with strict timing.
So you buy 100-mbit slow lane and 1Mbit fast. They can even give you 2 IPs for that. If you are a call center you buy 100 of the fast lane and so on.
The only problem is complexity for both users and applications. Ideally you would have a set of pipes with different parameters and assign each application the right to use some pipes -- e.g. voip gets a slow and stable while torrent gets a fast but unstable one (but the assignment is your choice). Of course, those should be regionally consistent so that companies can't extort money from users of known traffic types (e.g. I know a priori Joe uses voip a lot so I'll raise his voip-optimal cost).
Consumers may also not be very happy with an inconsistent pricing, though. Some misconfigured app could use ton of expensive bandwidth. But this has to be worked out, it's essential for the future of the net; we can't be completely at the mercy of ISPs as the gatekeepers of content.
I agree with you that the ISP should not care about who is on the other end of my connection. VoIP packets for Skype or for Vonage or for my ISP's phone service should all get the VoIP bit set and all be treated the same.
These are more complicated rules than the water company has, but the Internet is more complicated that the water company. Water usage in a household doesn't double every N years.
I'd draw the line as "semantic" discrimination. (This includes if ISPs are using other things, like DNS names, as heuristics.)
So while VoIP should be given priority over the text of a blog post, two blog-posts should be coequal regardless of the opinions inside them.
"bit-torrenting The Avengers" is a Strawman - illegal things are illegal and should dealt with regardless of net neutrality. Everyone does a load of stuff on the Internet, who's to decide what should have priority? Games? Email? Business? Youtube?
Weakness in your argument 2:
Slippery Slope. Let's see if "not making it easier to buy better access" is a good thing, regardless if it affects Netflix and their hypothetical attempt of "using a private network parallel to the Internet".
ISPs should not care where the packets are coming from, end of story. Agree?
What this means is that good net neutrality rules are more nuanced than you "ISPs should not care where the packets are coming from, end of story." QoS needs to be factored in.
Also, how much are you willing to pay for such a system? Comcast/TWC's margins are like 10%. The margins on their cable businesses alone is probably a lot narrower than that. They couldn't profitably design a network that overbuilt--nobody could.
You should always have 10% more hardware available than what your peak usage is, so when that goes up you have wiggle room to move your boundaries up more.
That, or you advertise your service as 10 - 20MB/s during non-peak hours, and throttled rates from 6 - 12. Which would naturally drive consumers who want the bandwidth to distribute the load throughout the day.
How is this calculated? Do they get to factor in losses from other parts of their conglomerate?
Oh, right, and what about their captive market?
You can disable this behavior:
echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memoryThis can be mostly solved in a neutral way using fair queuing and AQM.
Companies with more money will always be able to buy better access.
Sure, but let's let those companies choose rather than being extorted by ISPs.
If you are saying that a Netflix should never need to negotiate faster speeds with a customer's ISP, I agree.
The the necessary complement that, if it's not economical for the ISP to serve movies to the clients, it's the ISP job to cap bandwidth or increase prices for customers. Not Netflix.
The real problem is when companies discriminate based on the semantic substance of the data.
All "blog post" data should be co-equal, regardless of the political views in it. Similarly, all VoIP data should be equal, regardless of whether it's a religious sermon or a phone-sex line.
But prioritizing VoIP over blog-posts? That's a much different (much more acceptable) situation.
The author suggests that the cable companies should be forced to lease out their hybrid fiber-coax networks to competitors. Leaving aside the fact that these are private networks built with private money, there is the issue that this would destroy any incentive on the part of the cable companies to enhance and upgrade that infrastructure. Why pour billions of dollars into upgrading a system only to get razor-thin returns?
The "to the premises" provider would make a regulated profit, just like utility-model water and power companies, and the upstream providers would pay the going rate for their connections to customers, and compete for customers with rates, policies and over-the-top services.
While it's theoretically possible, it's not what the author actually suggests. He suggests forcing Comcast, TWC, etc, to simply lease out their networks wholesale to competitors. This destroys the incentive these companies have to continue to upgrade their networks. There is an obvious reason why the author advocates that approach instead of the one you suggest: state and local governments have no money, and are extremely inefficient at building infrastructure projects to begin with.
It also looks like we might get full FTTP in the next year or so which will be even better.
Worth noting that we had BT as an ISP years ago and they were awful so I was reluctant to switch back - but the seem to be making significant investments in their network and their customer services - as well as some pretty good add on offerings like their sports channels.
What was most interesting is that Sky, he had bought the ISP we used to use (Be), were desperate to keep our business - they offered to reduce the 20Mbs connection we had to £8 a month...
So from what I can tell, the regulation of the BT-owned "last mile" seems to have created a market with real competition - which can only be good for consumers.
You shouldn't conflate the "regulation" that net-neutrality proponents are calling for in the U.S. with the "regulation" of BT. BT started out as a public corporation, which was privatized in the late 1980's and early 1990's. This privatization was accomplished with an express eye to ensuring that BT would continue to have incentives to invest in its network, and investors had notice of the terms of the arrangement.
What net neutrality proponents in the U.S. are arguing for is an additional layer of restrictions on existing networks that were built with private capital.
They are compatible if you decouple the infrastructure owner from the service providers, as it happens in other industries.
Why not? I can choose to get my electricity and gas from any of about 6 different companies, and water from at least 4. They still come in through the same cables and pipes, but price and packaging varies.
>The author suggests that the cable companies should be forced to lease out their hybrid fiber-coax networks to competitors.
Again, here, BT have to do that as part of being able to have a (near-[1])monopoly on building those networks in the first place. That means people can get fibre to the cabinet/premises without having to pay for BT's overpriced and underreliable service, even if it runs over their fibre network for the last mile.
[1] BT have a near-monopoly nationwide, while some areas have their own local networks in addition, but these can not be nationwide. Virgin (formerly NTL/Telewest) have a parallel national network, which uses coax for the last mile more like US cable[2], but has a far lower overall availability, being in a general case only available in cities and major towns, and in many of those then only in certain areas of them.
[2] BT's network is fibre to the cabinet with copper from the cabinet to premises in most populated areas now(up to 80 mbit), with some lucky area having fibre to the premises(up to 1 gbit), and rural/undersubscribed areas having copper to the cabinet (generally, maximum rates of ~12mbit or worse; many can only get 0.5 mbit). Virgin's network can generally get 100mbit to most/all premises it serves, which is a far more limited subset of BT's. Local ones vary wildly and may be anything up to 10gbit, but are generally around 100mbit.
Huh, seriously? I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that didn't have monopoly gas, electric, water and sewer providers. Monopoly trash pickup is not that uncommon either. Perhaps that's a UK vs. US thing.
It isn't likely that would be repeated in the market for interconnection because it's a lot faster and cheaper for a competitor to run a strand of fiber to a central office than to build a multi-GW power generating station.
Most of the trading is automated and humans aren't involved, as prices are being constantly renegotiated as demand changes, and supply may also be throttled down or up for fuel-consuming non-nuclear sources (nuclear runs as close to max output as they can due to running costs being consistent through output levels, and fuel costs being negligible in any case) to maximise profit - generally by increasing output as prices rise, but for wind and other renewables, sometimes output is artificially limited as a way of manipulating subsidies, which can actually be more profitable for the operators if less power is sold under the right grid conditions.
All the data is open, which lets some interesting sites appear, such as http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php . Mousing over the source numbers shows a brief overview, and the site also includes international purchase/sale data.
Historically, once big-money, rent-seeking [1] entities start profiting from some arrangement, it becomes extremely hard to dislodge them, because they protect their position by hijacking the government to their interests.
There's a little cause for hope in that there might be a mass protest like with SOPA.
The bill existed before, though after everything with the NSA, it got moving pretty fast.
I think the only hope for the free Internet is some kind of p2p wireless mesh network or other mechanism to circumvent Comcast altogether. Comcast and Monsanto are untouchable. (Thinking about Monsanto because of some lame GMO prop I heard on NPR this morning)
What you can do is include the cable and fiber into the p2p network. People can bill routing with some Bitcoin like tech (altough I doubt Bitcoin itself could be used), and let Comcast et al. completely in the dark about whose data they are carrying.
In short, I would appreciate if these recent net neutrality initiatives stopped insinuating that US telecoms policy, FCC action, or Comcast/Verizon/Large US ISP, have any effect on the Internet at large.