Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane
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It's the upload bandwidth.
Weak upload effectively killed peer to peer. File sharing is slower than it could be, and e-mail, chat, blogs… are all in the "Cloud". Very convenient, but also dangerous (insert random EFF or FSF argument here —they all apply).
With a worthy upload bandwidth, all these things could use a server at home, with many advantages for choice, control, privacy… You could argue it's impractical for a lambda user (and it is), but that's not the problem. If someone try to sell a simple server with a fantastic UX that host e-mail, blog, vlog, social network, and distributed encrypted backup, all out of the box, it would still suck because of the damn bandwidth —and firewalls in some cases. So, this business model is dead in the water, which is why it is still so dammed difficult to install one's own mail server.
You want net neutrality? Start with a neutral bandwidth. Stop treating users like consumers, and they may stop acting like ones. With any luck, it should kill YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Skype… except the users will still do what these "services" offer.
The whole debacle may have started for technical reasons, but I suspect now they're just addicted to centralization. Maybe tighter control of the end user leads to more money down the line?
I used to run email/dns/web/etc off of Speakeasy (and college before that, and dialup before that), but I switched to Linode (like 8 years ago) and haven't looked back. It really sucks when your home server has a hardware issue/power outage/changing things around/etc, and you feel like you need to fix it ASAFP lest your emails/etc start getting bounced/etc (yes, smtp is supposed to queue. no, that doesn't alleviate the concern).
What I really want is my home server to act as the primary contact, but when that is down, Linode to serve on my behalf seamlessly, obvious to message contents. And of course I could set something like that up per-protocol (modulo incoming ports being firewalled, etc), but the more complex setup one makes for themselves, the more likely things are to just decay over time.
We're not even at the point where having a distributed file store is straightforward. The best I've found is running Unison across multiple hosts/disks, and I still find myself spending way too much time dealing with administration and overcoming its limitations (cycle-intolerant topology, lack of access levels, etc). Anything else I've seen assumes a reliable central host, constant network connection, would need to be babied in different ways, or is just not robust enough to trust.
Meanwhile with these centralized solutions, they just work out of the box. There are occasional or hidden issues like service outages, vendor dependence, lack of flexibility due to arbitrary restrictions, planned obsolescence, anti-features like ads, abdicating your computing to opaque code you don't control, supporting the destruction of the Internet (what prompted this slew of articles? Netflix setting a terrible precedent..), etc. But the effort required to initially get them working is basically nonexistent. I personally refuse to give in and support (hopefully) dead-end centralized technology. But you can't deny that their user experience is quite compelling, especially for people without preexisting sysadmin skills.
I know the UX is terrible right now (as in so unusable I don't even dare touch the server I set up myself). I know centralized solutions work out of the box, while distributed solutions barely work at all.
Of course bandwidth wouldn't solve our problems overnight. But if our ISPs were suddenly giving us the bare minimum, meaning symmetric bandwidth and a fixed public /64 IPV6 with no firewall, then at long last, we'd have a business model for distributed stuff. It would get more people working on that UX problem, and that would solve the problem.
Eventually.
That said, I don't see how we can claim a decent internet connectivity in the first place, since there is no usage to justify it. Looks like a chicken & egg situation.
Upload traffic is theoretically able to be precisely prioritized, where a long-term file upload uses any extra bandwidth but adds no latency to other traffic (besides unavoidable pktsize/linerate). But easy/standard configs provide best effort shaping even if you go out of the way so that it is able to discern interactive ssh from uploading ssh. (And nevermind download shaping, which really requires application-level involvement to get predictability).
Static IPs could help as a nice crutch, in that they would enable us to start with current server-authoritative protocols and patch/configure them to deal with one-nine uptime. But conditions here are set, and static IPs are not a panacea - I have the option for $6/mo, but don't take it. And I deal with the same fundamental undistributed service problems between my own machines on tinc.
So I don't see much point trying to lobby ISPs for larger upload (esp when it goes against their technical constraints. I do have to wonder how the world would be different if digital computers had been invented before radio, causing p2p to be dominant over broadcast), without the software to make it useful. And I think that software has to be developed with the current conditions and the understanding that most people don't want to have caring for a home server a prominent part of their lives.
(Now, maybe my tune would change if instead of 12M/1M DSL, I were on GigE where my upload throttling would be done by "the cloud" ;))
To be a peer on the internet, you need to be able to be server as well as client. With current protocols, this means a public static IP (or range thereof), symmetric bandwidth, and no spurious restrictions. The network must also be "clean". No deep packet inspection, no transformation of payload, no NAT, no nothing. Just a dumb pipe, who treats packets equally —for some definition of "equal". And if you have difficulty handling a particular kind of data, then just install bigger pipes. Congestions should be few and far between.
Some people would go even further, arguing that you also need an Autonomous System number. I believe this is less important, though I tend to agree. People should be their own ISP if possible (hint: it's difficult). One way to do it is set up a non-profit, and be a member.
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Now let's get more technical. The main reason why consumer upload should match consumer download is this:
Worldwide upload = Worldwide Download
(Modulo lost packets and multicast.)
Actually there's already a huge demand for upload right now: YouTube. Every time someone watches a video, Google must spend that much upload —without requiring the attention of the account owner. This makes the network unbalanced: lots and lots of data are pouring out of Google's network to the consumer networks, and little ever goes back.
This has economic repercussions. Basically, ISPs connect with each other in two ways. The first is Alice and Bob having a peering agreement: when Alice can send data to Bob, and Bob can send data to Alice, and no one charges for anything. Then you have transport ISPs, which charge for the data you send through them. That would be Eve charging Bob for transporting a packet he wants to send to Alice. (When Alice and Bob aren't directly connected.)
Normally, an ISP wouldn't charge for any data for which it is the recipient, because that's data it wants, after all. But that's not exactly the case of consumer ISPs, whose purpose is to transport the data to the consumers. So they charge the consumers themselves. Now here's the problem. If the bandwidth was evenly distributed, the ISP would send roughly as much data as it receives. Perfect for peering agreements. Instead, they keep receiving more and more data. So they're tempted to act like a transport ISP, and begin to charge for the data they receive. Except that won't fly, since their network is the destination of that data! Which is probably why they try the "middle ground" of merely slowing down data that isn't paid for, destroying any illusion of Net Neutrality in the process.
There is also a technical reason: a really peer to peer network would have the data travel shorter distances, instead of say, going back and for the capital even when two neighbours are talking to each other. That means less Tbm (TeraBytes multiplied by meters), which is ultimately cheaper.
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> I have a static IP option for $6/mo
Your ISP is a crook. Static IP cost them nothing: most people are connected at all times anyway.
> So I don't see much point trying to lobby ISPs for larger upload (esp when it goes against their technical constraints. […])
It doesn't go against their technical constraints. If it ever does, it is because of constraints they put in place years ago with the advent of this infamously asymmetrical DSL. It's their fault, and the onus is on them to update.
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Overall, try to step back from your own situation, and watch the big picture. This often yields different answers. (Example: if Joe Random wants more money, a way to get it is to become "more competitive". But if everyone gets more competitive, Joe Random will rank just as before.)
So, regarding the Chicken and egg problem… Sure, if you suddenly had a static IP and smoking fast upload, you may not behave any differently. But if everyone gets that, you may have a market, and it may change things. If anything, it would make overlay networks more practical, and goodness knows what innovation could come out of that.
I don't see the way forward being based on IP addressing (+dns) as identity, which is ultimately what you're talking about. First, the end to end principle arose out of engineering concerns, and IP does nothing to preserve data opaqueness against a network that wishes to categorize traffic. And given that there is little money in transporting commodity bits, yet some of those bits are quite valuable (work VPN session..), there is an ever-present economic incentive for discrimination.
Referencing UL=DL doesn't really make sense. Even with an ideal buildout of multi-homed homes mesh-connected through each other, there's still going to be a network "core" that has more long-haul bandwidth than the outskirts. If I wish to publish a file to many people, it makes more sense to send that data once to the core, and fan out through there (whether by a server, multicast, or some new method).
My ISP is Sonic.net - I wouldn't call them crooks, and given the competition wouldn't begrudge them an administration fee on a static IP. I said that to point out that it is not even worth $6/mo to me, and combined with their deletion of logs after two weeks, having a fixed address is actually a net-negative from my perspective.
So back to the real topic.. I'm definitely trying to analyze the big picture, and I've come to the conclusion that IP-as-identity is a complete red herring. I don't particularly see how it would encourage overlay networks, when the whole idea of an overlay network is to deprecate the underlaying network protocol to layer something better on top. Overlay networks work just fine over dynamic IPs, and only need a few underlying long-lived identities for rendezvous.
The way I see it, the real root of the problem is protocols based on authoritative servers which place undue importance on the reliability of individual hosts, and therefore their network links and administrators. As long as we're reliant on these, then the benefits of locating them closer to the core and having them cared for by a third party is going to outweigh the downsides.
I'm pretty sure you can still get ISDN lines from your local telecom provider. I know a long time ago there was talk of binding ISDN lines to together to increase upload and download speeds. This was right around the time DSL was blowing up so I'm sure it got lost in the wave of DSL hype.
Of course compared to DSL. GigaFiber, or any of the current technologies, it's downright pathetic.
Technically you could also bond multiple BRIs together, but pretty quickly it made more sense to just provision a PRI with some of the B-channels disabled (also known as a fractional T1).
1. Turning site off is a lot easier than installing apache module and configuring it. What if site admin does not even have root access?
2. Customer getting the slow site load might not get the message, but instead turn around for a competitor. [1]
[1] 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. - http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
Instead, I think you want to load two version of the site in to iFrames (or something) and throttle one.
This would also be a good way to show a user how crappy their connection is compared to a _real_ high speed connection: The problem isn't just that they are creating a "fast" lane and a "slow" lane, but the fact that US-based "fast" lanes are actually fairly slow to begin with.
A ton of popular consumer sites - facebook, instagram, reddit/imgur are hugely image based. A few lines of JS to make them slowly load (perhaps PNG artifacts for bonus points) and you could very effectively get the point across all while quickly serving a nice large banner.
Offtopic: As a google fiber customer myself, his mention of not remembering the upload speed, made me think of how we need bandwidth to get to the point where it doesn't matter. CPU speed used to be something you quoted. For the last few computers, I don't care anymore, because its simply "enough". I fear the current telco/ISPs wouldn't agree with that idea...
Or how about just using a webfont? I already get a reminder of what the 'slow lane' was like when I hit a site that uses one - it does layout so I can see where the text will eventually go and then I get to wait 5 seconds for it to load and do whatever else it needs to do with its fonts.
Back then of course you'd be opening an image that big & detailed in a separate window, but now we've got some image-heavy websites with dozens of these things. Retina screens don't make things easier, either. Loading 12 pseduo-GIFS in serial would be the mind-killer. My imgur? Facebook?
Serious question: would it be evil for Google to push out an 'educational patch' to Chrome? Firefox probably wouldn't.
I do like this idea. However, as one of the minority of people who have disabled js by default, I'd hope this could be done in a way that doesn't break websites.
I dislike ad tracking, information culling, and I think that JavaScript underpins and makes possible many of the things I dislike about the modern web. We agree on that I'm sure. But so does a web browser. So does the operating system it runs on. Turning off JavaScript only protects you from the parts of the web you don't like by breaking all of the web so much that nothing runs as it's supposed to - but what's the point in browsing a shattered web?
I am a front-end dev, and I've hit the extent that CSS will allow me to style and lay out pages. I need per-element @media queries, and the ability for elements to peek inside and count their contents so I can make it fit into the space better. JavaScript lets me to do that, but I'm afraid that if you disable JavaScript from today forward you're going to run into this a lot more.
It doesn't take a whole ton of JavaScript to supercharge a CSS layout, but if you block all JS you're going to be looking at a broken page.
I use text-mode browsers on the command-line, and for checking the source of pages from the command-line so I understand when there's a time and place for restricted browsing and it's less useful than a full browser to me because of it.
Having said all that, would you mind explaining why you choose to break your exerience of the web by disabling JavaScript, and what gains you perceive from the exercise. I'm genuinely curious but can't find any of you no-JSers in person anywhere.
- Poorly written JavaScript that causes my system to stall for a time, to the point where I have to kill all my browser's processes manually; more common than you'd think.
- Websites that attempt to mine cryptocurrencies using my browser with JavaScript; without my knowledge or permission.
- Then there's XSS and CSRF vulnerabilities that can leverage JavaScript to hijack active sessions.
And I am probably forgetting a few more reasons..
I do enable JavaScript for specific trusted websites, and I make temporary exceptions every now and then if necessary. But, I usually try to keep the list of exceptions short.
In regards to needing JavaScript for styling / design purposes.. Are you sure you need it? It might take you a bit longer to tweak and restructure the HTML and CSS to accomplish your design without JS, but it's well worth it.
I am intrigued. Can you send me a URL of somewhere that will mine bitcoins on my computer?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0
http://www.bitcoinplus.com/miner/embeddable
https://github.com/progranism/Bitcoin-JavaScript-Miner
You should probably not embed such scripts into your website(s). If it's not illegal, it's certainly super shady, and an extremely inefficient method of mining bitcoins.
When I asked why they disabled JavaScript, it was rare to get any sort of coherent answer. Usually they would just mumble about viruses, or occasionally about privacy, but every single one of them cited "a friend" as the original source of whatever reason they had.
So my theory is that most people disable JavaScript "just because". Reminds me a bit of the five monkeys and a ladder experiment.
Summary
I generally browse the web to read things. I want a simple document reading environment with limited power over my computer and minimisation of who is informed of my activities particularly as they cross between different sites. Javascript is not needed and is in fact detrimental to these aims in the majority of cases.
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I use NoScript so in many cases I enable scripts but in others I don't, it depends on the value of what I expect to see and to some extent on the trust in those the scripts are being loaded from.
Sometimes the page is broken although not fatally, most Washington Post links look broken but work fine if you scroll down to where the actual article is.
Some domains are whitelisted permanently but more often I will temporarily allow .
Reasons - Privacy and control
Some sites want me to load Javascript from dozens of different domains, many of which are advertisers and trackers. I don't want to be tracked and each script loaded could be reporting almost anything about the page I am viewing back to the associated domains.
Disabling Javascript disables most of the intrusive moving/audible adverts on the web and hopefully also much of the tracking and privacy invasion that goes along with them.
The web with Javascript enabled is simply broken. Sites take ages to load, refuse to show you content, throw overlays all around the screen, or just stop working.
And then, there are security considerations. But as I said, I never remember them.
But, of course, there are always exceptions.
If your web page doesn't work without javascript, you are no longer publishing to the entire world. You are publishing to the subset of everybody who will trust a complete stranger to execute unknown code locally on their own computer--otherwise known as the gullible and the naive.
While it is true that most website authors will not abuse that trust, they may not be entirely responsible for all elements served to visitors, as there may be a compromised ad server, or the website itself might have been subverted without the author's knowledge.
I will often at least temporarily allow scripts to run from the domain I am currently visiting, but if a page is serving scripts from 30 different domains, I may spend some time researching those domains, or simply forget about the page and go elsewhere.
I want my computer to serve my desires, not those of strangers. And I go to the web for information, not fancy layouts.
Also, I sometimes browse over a SSH shell with links, a text-mode browser, and javascript support in that has been suspended indefinitely. Some browsers are simply incapable of rendering images or executing script. You shouldn't ever be tying the core functionality of your website to a user interface, any more than you should make the business logic of software dependant on the GUI.
So, what OS do you run, exactly?
I don't consider Microsoft, Google, Debian, Apple, Nintendo et al to be complete strangers. I don't trust them unconditionally (hence all the rooted, modded, and jailbroken devices in my home), but I do trust that if I do discover malfeasance, that I have some well-established path to seek redress, and that they have the bank accounts, insurance policies, and reputations necessary to make me whole again.
I'm not nearly as trustless as RMS, but I am at least aware enough of the problem to be skeptical even of the software I have actually paid for, and downright paranoid towards everything else. Even the stuff I write myself could be subverted by a compromised compiler or OS. But like the two friends fleeing from the tiger, you don't have to run faster than the tiger to escape; you just have to run faster than your friend.
If someone is likely to be more damaged by breaching public trust and getting caught at it than you are likely to be damaged by trusting them when you should not, you're probably safe to trust them. But then again, even Sony can install a rootkit. You can trust, but remember to verify.
Of course there is a difference between web applications and information sharing. I don't mind Javascript for an application that needs it but I tend to prefer non-web apps anyway.
It seems odd to me how much work goes into making a web page do things that don't need to be done.
Because this "experience" is not designed with me (the user) in mind. Most of the times it is created to extract value from me, not to provide it for me. Aside from webapps, which use JavaScript to drive the program doing things useful for the users, JS serves two main purposes:
- so that advertisers can better target ads for me (their ads are mostly worthless, I don't want them anyway)
- so that the website author's sales team can "convert" me easier (I want to be "converted" by value of what they offer, not by cheap "experience" tricks)
JavaScript is mostly detrimental to the main goal I browse web for: to learn, read stuff I care about and participate in meaningful discussions.
Unfortunately Internet today is one big marketing event. The real value is being drowned by all that startups and companies trying to sell me some half-baked nonsolution to my nonproblems.
The majority of the content I consume online doesn't _need_ js. In the sense that it's easily possible to design websites to display text and writings without needing js. So from a practical standpoint, I think js is mostly unnecessary. There are obviously services which wouldn't be possible without js (e.g., openstreetmaps), and I do un-block js for those sites.
You are of course correct that js is not the only way users can be tracked, however it is one of major components in tracking.
Looking at the EFF's panopticlick [0], with js blocked: > Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 57,814 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours. Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 15.82 bits of identifying information.
With js enabled: > Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 4,104,774 tested so far. Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 21.97 bits of identifying information.
So even something as simple as disabling javascript turns my online fingerprint from being unique to being one of 5% of users who have used that site. So while disabling js doesn't make one immune to tracking, it does make it more diffuclt.
In summary, for most of my use of the web, js is unnecessary and does more harm (tracking) than good (it's not needed for consuming text). I enable it on a case-by-case basis for some websites, if it's needed. But unless the js is truly critical to the presentation of the information, I won't enable it and I'll likely leave the site. Because, yes, much of the web is broken without js; but that's frequently due to (in my opinion) poor site design which doesn't fail gracefully in the absense of (usually unnecessary) js.
I'm not sure what to do about the people who turn JavaScript off, the reason I reach for it are when HTML and CSS can't do something.
I use No-Script and whitelist sites as required, it's just a click or two, but for any new site I go to JavaScript is disabled.
There are many blogs that don't work at all without JS. I don't bother reading them. Those blogs might be very informative; but my security is worth more than that.
I can think of a few - Netflix and Skype would work better.
Most likely, we'd be able to pay for priority traffic, just like we pay for a large AWS instance. Non-priority traffic might be cheaper than current bandwidth.
It would be crazy to suggest all sites be forced to use the same size AWS instance...
Some types of traffic are bandwidth sensitive, like video. Others are cost sensitive, like Linux DVD images.
If you think that an end to neutrality will 'ruin the internet', don't you expect consumers to choose ISPs and services that don't do it?
Yes. In the early days there was a competing networking technology called ATM. It provided quality of service (QoS) aspects in the protocol. So, you could prioritize packets, e.g. protocols affected by latency could be prioritized (e.g. VOIP, gaming), while those that weren't could be given a low priority (FTP, email).
The beauty of ATM was that on a relatively low bandwidth connection you could utilize all of your bandwidth and services like VOIP would still work beautifully. TCP/IP still today struggles with this.
So, as a consumer, I'd be happy to pay for QoS so that my VOIP packets had an expressway on my 2Mbps connection. However, that ship (for many) has sailed. With my largely under utilized 50Mbps connection there is no reason to pay for QoS because we've largely solved latency by throwing bandwidth at the problem.
However, with the approach that the FCC/comcast/et al are taking, I see no benefit.
That's what non-neutral means. QoS is different, that's applications behaving themselves. BitTorrent, for instance, led to the development of uTP (micro transport protocol). One of its nicest features for torrent users is that it will slow itself down now in response to congestion and play nice with other network-using processes on the client side.
Putting this into the underlying connection like ATM did just means that you at least have to pick a default QoS and hopefully applications/systems pick a sensible assignment for the traffic. Rather than the default being to treat every connection as equal.
Comcast, however, wants to flip this around, so that even if I have bandwidth to spare they seem to be purposefully slowing down traffic (or under provisioning their own bandwidth) to force the Youtube's, Netflix's of the world to pay more.
TL;DR: all data is not equal; traffic shaping is 'ok' in theory; Comcast is evil, so please god don't let them artificially create slow lanes to force those willing to pay into the fast lanes.
So when theres no problem transferring all of Netflix, Skype and BitTorrent simultaneously, why slow any of it? Sure, at times hardware fails, fiber is damaged, and ISPs can feel free to prioritize traffic at that time, we certainly have the technology to do that.
But what is certainly not ok is slowing traffic because you are not willing to invest into your connectivity, investing not even enough to actually deliver all of the meagre bandwidth (100 Mbit is 1995 vintage technology, where in the US can you even get that?) you have sold to consumers.
This. The US market is ripe for disruption or regulation. Sure, if you live remotely in Arizona, it may be hard to get a fat pipe, but it seems that even most cities have outrageous prices.
I currently live in Germany. We have 150MBit downstream, 5 MBit upstream, plus phone and television for 40 Euro per month. When we lived in The Netherlands we were on 130 MBit downstream internet. Even in the stone age (2004) we had 20MBit downstream DSL for 20 Euro per month. Since downloading music and movies was legal in the Netherlands until recently, many families were saturating their connections. Netflix is not that demanding in comparison.
The current situation in the EU shows that it is possible to get high-speed low-cost internet with net neutrality.
I googled the American cable market a bit, and some of what was described - the cable majors carving up the country so as not to compete, or aggressively blocking new competitors - that stuff sounds like anti-competitive practice.
Writing from a country with a functioning cable market, when I hear 'ISP will charge for X', I think 'Well I will change ISP then'. If you can't do that, I think net neutrality is the least of your problems.
Think about everything that goes into this: they can't just pick a piece of hardware off of Amazon; they have to review proposals for companies to manufacture and support the hardware over their 10-year lifespan. They then have to train their employees on them, develop migration plans, rollback plans, schedule maintenance windows, etc. These migration plans often involve significant changes to CPE configurations, which also need to be planned, tested, implemented and trained for.
It's a huge infrastructure. It costs a lot of money to make any significant change. And you seem to be confusing Ethernet with a last-mile technology; it's more of a last hundred feet technology. A lot of the effort over the last 10 years has been spent moving the telecom-owned equipment closer to consumer homes so that faster speeds can be obtained over shorter cable runs. As the length of a cable run increases, so does interference and you have to dial down speeds as a result (this is even true of fiber, albeit to a lesser extent).
But the terrible state of last-mile technology in the field isn't even what this is about. Netflix servers and the intermediaries they peer with are not in a shed in Nebraska with data coming in over microwave. Telcos don't invest in the last mile where they would have to create actual infrastructure, they don't invest where high technology rules in the heart of data exchanges all over the world.
(Of course ethernet isn't the relevant benchmark here, but at that time it wasn't just about what you could do over a hundred feet of copper, but also at what speed systems could actually communicate.)
> If you think that an end to neutrality will 'ruin the internet', don't you expect consumers to choose ISPs and services that don't do it?
I have 2 wired ISPs to choose from and several wireless (well, primarily via tethering with a cellphone) ISPs. My apartment has shitty wireless reception so Verizon, Sprint and AT&T are out. That leaves Cox Cable (who repeatedly disconnected me when they meant to disconnect a neighbor, costing me two days of leave to fix their fuckup) and Windstream (a DSL provider). So if both of my providers decide to play the non-neutral game, I, the consumer, am screwed. There are no options for me in your scenario. That's the reality of the ISP situation in the majority of the US.
This question seems to be equivalent to "Can anyone think of any advantages to a centrally-planned economy?"
Yes, you can think of certain specific advantages, but the opportunity costs are enough to utterly dominate the long-term picture.
They'll have a monopoly on "working better", thus thake "better" with a huge grain of salt.
> Most likely, we'd be able to pay for priority traffic
You (the customer of the ISP) can do that today. The difference is that they want to sell priority to the customer, and then only deliver it if the data provider pays it too.
Yes! People who are always crowing about how the free market will save us all and how regulation is the enemy will start bitching about their slow Netflix speeds. Some of them may even realize what a terrible idea an unregulated free market is.
> don't you expect consumers to choose ISPs and services that don't do it?
Most ISPs have a monopoly in their local area. Perhaps a state-run option would be a good alternative but it would probably eventually get completely weighed down with bureaucracy and red tape.
In other words, the free market can't save us and neither can our government. A healthy mix of the two seems to be a working solution.
I don't have a problem with regulating them though - As far as I'm concerned, if you've been exploiting a state-granted monopoly for the last 40 years you don't get to demand a free market when someone might pass regulations less favorable to you.
However, the real fix here is going to be removing the monopolies and getting a competitive marketplace for bandwidth.
It would give ISPs an incentive to spend the large sums of money required to upgrade their networks/infrastructure to offer significantly faster Internet speeds. I very much doubt that any amount of legislation/regulation is going to force ISPs into it otherwise.
Why would they upgrade the infrastructure if they can just rise the prices until the demand for higher speeds either dies down or is enough at that higher price point that it will be cost-effective?
Murphy's Law tells me there's a good chance these low priority queues will slow down exponentially at random times. Routing nightmare if you consider DDoS and what not.
Priority is a sucky way to do anything - queues, threads, even email. What we usually want is control over latency.
That's what I'm contesting.
Suppose you have a router which is receiving data to be sent over a 1Gbps link. Over a one hour period there is an average of 600Mbps of streaming video, 400Mbps HTTP traffic and 300Mbps of FTP/BitTorrent/etc. traffic. There is more data than there is link to put it in; you are screwed. The streaming video is going to stutter or degrade to lower quality, web pages will be slow to load, people waiting for downloads to finish will have to wait longer, because there is not enough bandwidth. The latency will also be poor, if router buffers are set too large and create a large queue in front of new packets (bufferbloat), but that's the least of your worries in that situation. Fixing the latency wouldn't clear things up because you still have users trying to play video with a bitrate of 6Mbps through a connection with a 4Mbps throughput. And categorizing the traffic only changes who gets screwed -- if you put downloads at the bottom of the heap then you might make the streaming video and HTTP customers happier but the customer who paid for a 6Mbps connection and would have at least been downloading at 4Mbps is now waiting for a download which getting only 0.2Mbps. That's not a solution, it's triage.
Now suppose you have the same amount of traffic on average but the link is upgraded to 2Gbps. Now there is no packet loss. You might have short bursts where the traffic level exceeds the capacity of the link, but they get smoothed out by the router's buffers, which never get full so the queue length is never more than a few milliseconds. Solving the bandwidth problem solves the latency problem.
The point is, if you're trying to fix the latency that occurs as a result of router buffers getting full or dropping packets in the core of the internet, you're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The underlying problem is that router buffers are getting full or dropping packets in the core of the internet.
So it will basically just look to people like I'm running a shitty technical job serving my site, most people will think I'm stupid, they won't learn a damn thing about net neutrality or why it's important, and stop visiting my site in the process. =/
* that many people use exclusively with their internet-time, like Youtube, facebook, Netflix, etc
Further your examples don't make sense. Youtube is owned by Google, which doesn't have a 100% support track record for net-neutrality, but is mostly supportive. Netflix is on the record as completely for net-neutrality -- they are one of the major services cited by ISPs as causing the need for an internet fast lane, which directly impacts Netflix and Netflix consumers (negatively, if that wasn't clear). I don't know about facebook off-hand, but frankly, who cares about facebook's leadership on the web? It would be great for them to join in, the exposure would be great, but I think more people distrust facebook and their support is the internet equivalent of being on the same side of an argument as the KKK.
How about instead of just slowing your sites down arbitrarily you do exactly what wikipedia did -- explain to the user what is going on, and at least force them to click through to the actual, full speed version of your site -- even better, let them see what your site would be like speed-capped and what your site is like now.
Wikipedia was a notable exception, sure, but OP's got a point: does this have a hope on the Alexa topsites?
Comcast's monopoly seems to be the problem. If a Comcast user in NY can't watch netflix past 5PM, wouldn't they, I don't know, look for a better ISP? After all, their ISP just ain't getting it done. The only missing piece is the market competitor that is supposed to balance out Comcast's dickheadedness. Why, after decades of 'free market', do we have customers that are stuck? I think this is worth mentioning to users.
> explain to the user what is going on, and at least force them to click through to the actual, full speed version of your site
That sounds like the plan. I just can't think who's all on board.
Currently they have no serious competitors, so they see the Comcast-tax as a pure added cost. But if this practice goes big and becomes an added cost to the market, barriers to enter it become higher, which keeps their position entrenched.
Of course this would require a lot of formalisation (and quantization, estimating numbers, times and potential competition and market evolution) but still, most of the same questions are going through Netflix executives' heads.
Prime video. Hulu.
>most of the same questions are going through Netflix executives' heads.
Conjecture. Contrary to populist belief, not every corporation is a soulless, amoral entity. Netflix has yet to demonstrate in even the smallest way that they are for anything but complete neutrality.
I think all this talk of the "slow lane" is a bit tinfoil-hat. Companies like Comcast have no interest in slowing down web site traffic; in fact they do a lot of QoS to make web browsing faster and more responsive. This type of traffic (DNS, HTTP requests, online gaming, etc.) tends to get put in a high-priority QoS class: the data transmitted is often small and it greatly improves the user's experience. ISPs have a huge incentive to make this type of traffic as responsive as possible; and given the low bandwidth requirements, this should definitely be possible. It makes their service "feel" faster to the customer and it's the right thing to do for the customer.
Video streaming services are another story. They don't need to be responsive because they pre-cache a lot of data; in fact the right thing to do from a technical perspective is QoS them into the basement. Video can handle this; it's high bandwidth and low latency. The thing is, streaming video accounts for about 80% of peak Internet traffic. A small percentage of users (~30%) are starting to overload the ISP's last-mile networks with video traffic.
The types of high-bandwidth scenarios that the ISPs will be pushing the "fast lane" on are going to be almost exclusively video streaming services. Video streamers have had to pay CDNs for years anyway if they wanted their videos to stream quickly. The idea is that because these services have such a disproportionate effect on bandwidth usage, they need to contribute economically to avoid a tragedy of the commons [1] situation. Your average website or app that's not pulling 1.5+ mbit/s over an extended period of time is likely going to be fast regardless because it's in the ISPs best interests to make it that way.
Yeah? How about money?
As a comms engineer, I too think about the technical implications of this.
But you have to remember that the people who push for the abolition of net neutrality are mainly the finances guys, i.e the ones responsible for bringing as much money as possible to the company. And when you put yourself in their shoes, all of a sudden you get dreams of Comcast turning the Internet into the same kind of market it has in cable television. And you very quickly forget about QoS, bandwidth, latency and the job of "delivering the bits" and just think in terms of profits. You wouldn't know what most of those terms mean anyway...
But more generally, slow-loading websites make the ISP's service look shitty. There's almost no cost for them to just QoS the low-bandwidth stuff up and it makes people think their service is better.
Exactly, so people will just leave that ISP and sign up with one that doesn't throttle traffic. Except most people have only one ISP in their area. Yay free market!
In a truly free market, there would be one company that owns everything, including infrastructure. Not a world I'd like to live in.
Why should Netflix pay disproportionately more for its bandwidth than a non-video streaming service?
You can't think of a few sites and services that TV cable providers would like to slow down? The issue isn't that the general web will get slower, but rather that cable companies will become the arbiters of which services survive and prosper.
This reminds me of when the TSA took over airport screening after 9/11, over the belief that only a government agency could screen passengers securely. The net effect was longer lines, more expensive travel, less rights for flyers (ie either you get a body scan or a pat-down, and no more liquids on flights), and in general less happy travelers.
Think about it, the only reason Comcast is doing all this is so they can charge premium fees on certain services. If you don't allow them to do so (which is very easy to enforce, as customers can report such pricing policies), they have no incentive to be against net neutrality.
This is why the current status quo has worked for so long: ISPs have no way to legally make profits out of "premium" traffic, so they (generally) don't apply outrageous QoS measures. Money is the only incentive, and removing that incentive solves the problem without the need for active policing.
And because they weren't allowed to charge extra for "premium" traffic, they essentially switched over to the over-subscription model in order to make profit. The tighter you squeeze, the stronger it oozes out the sides. And never in the place or way you wish it would!!
(I was tempted to downvote you for your persecution complex, but that would only validate it so I'm torn.)
Regardless, the point is that QoS exists to keep non-video traffic from getting trampled out by video traffic. Video traffic is such a disproportionately large amount of total Internet traffic that virtually the only services that would be significantly impacted by being in the "slow lane" are video services. The links wouldn't even be saturated in the first place without video traffic.
EDIT: Also wanted to add that congestion is almost guaranteed with adaptive bit rate streaming. Netflix will use as much bandwidth as is available up to like 9 mbit/s.
A citation is needed here. Somehow consumer ISPs got along for 15 years without "permanent congestion".
EDIT: Just wanted to clarify that 50% is a number I pulled out of my ass. The general point is that the percentage of users who stream video online on a regular basis is increasing more quickly than the economics/logistics allow the ISPs to perform network upgrades.
This is another citation needed point. Bandwidth consumption has always increased over time, as has the performance per dollar of routing equipment.
There are exceptions of course. Older OSes have ridiculously small TCP receive windows, and older TCP congestion control algorithms have trouble filling the pipe. But these shouldn't really be the main problem these days. It doesn't apply so much for streaming either, because modern streaming protocols such as MPEG-DASH will select a lower bitrate stream if they sense congestion.
The financial impact could potentially be huge (as I'm sure blackout was as well). But what's even tougher about this idea is getting companies like Google and Netflix in on the "simulation". They're most likely not going to be on the slow lane. Now let's say some we get a whole bunch of startups who would get penalized by the slow lane to do this for a day. Would it make as much of a difference to the masses? The initial effects will be subtle, but the long term impact on economic activity and startups in general could be devastating.
That being said... if this movement is to take hold we'll need some web server plugins and some JS magic to help it happen at a massive scale. Maybe some of my fellow geeks at the bigCo's can convince them to join in for a day too, for the sake of all of us.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Networ...
The services it would impact most are high-bandwidth such as content streaming, but of course those may be reluctant to participate as it could realistically ruin their goodwill and quickly decimate their user base.
The problem is, most people don't realize that, all things considered, their internet really isn't as fast as it could be. They think it is because they have no basis for comparison. And the ISP's bank on this... literally.
Many of us already get a Slow Lane Demo every day during "prime time" evening hours.
If the former, it would make precisely no difference to me. Openreach (UK) provide adsl over copper via an older phone exchange in my immediate area. This is one mile from the centre of a major city. The local authority actually took Openreach to court and lost.
To put this into perspective the government is about to spend around UKP60 Billions over 20 years to provide a high speed train link to London so the journey time drops from 1h30 to 45 min...
/S
This is where we are heading.
Thank you for writing to Comcast. At this time, your wishes are of no concern to us because we have a monopoly in your area.
Best, Comcast Consumer Relations"
And, really, users who have bought based on price per Mb download speed without any other metric are partly to blame for this. If users had been honestly buying based on bandwidth used we would not have ISPs offering "unlimited (until you hit the limits)" internet connectivity. (This is not to excuse the ISPs for their sleazy misleading advertising).
Give people a price per GB and then tell them how many GB they download each month. Price that GB sensibly and route traffic fairly.
As someone who remembers using 110bps connections, this is amusing.
You may want to get in touch with rubbingalcoholic/FFTF and see if you can help out!
I've demoed the widget they're working on and it's painfully awesome.
It's pure JS and simulates the old dial-up-style loading of pages.
Slowness is just the beginning -- the end-goal is making the internet into multiple competing walled gardens where users are treated as silos that require permission to access. The global reach of the internet is at risk here.
Imagine if Netflix wasn't accessible to Comcast users from the beginning because they wouldn't pay the toll. Would it have thrived and grown as quickly as it did, or would it have died in it's infancy?
What about Skype? Skype stepped on the toes of incumbent ISPs' long-distance revenue streams, I wouldn't put it past AT&T to purposefully degrade the quality of Skype calls or even outright deny them from happening. Prior to being bought out by Microsoft, would they have had the revenue to pay for access to users? Would Microsoft have even bought Skype at all?
In fact, it took 4 months to resolve a dispute between DirecTV and the Weather Channel [0], which affected 20 Million people. There was some outrage, but not enough to for DirecTV to relent. Instead, the content provider was forced to change [1].
There are lessons to be learned here for other content providers, like Netflix. My worry is that the gatekeepers still hold too much power and are strong arming content providers, using consumers as pawns.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-c... [1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/04/08/weather-cha...
Here is an example of a gatekeeper forcing blackouts the other way around [0]. The content producer was required to enforce a blackout on local channels as part of the deal with the gate keeper. Net result? Consumers lose.
[0] http://articles.philly.com/2014-03-27/news/48599544_1_philli...
For Netflix, it doesn't matter - having the equivalent of dial-up speed is essentially the same as being blocked entirely, since their service depends on reasonably fast download speed.
To illustrate another scenario, imagine two political candidates, one whose platform includes treating ISPs as a public utility, and one who doesn't. It would be very easy to slow the former's campaign website to a crawl (e.g., 30s or more load time per page). While this wouldn't prevent people from accessing the website, or him from getting his message out, it would seriously hamper it in very noticeable ways.
This way, the ISP isn't censoring any political candidates (that would be bad!). They're "just" not giving him the "premium" speed.
[0] This kind of redefinition happens all the time - notice that five years ago, mobile data plans were unlimited and texting was expensive for the carriers to offer. Suddenly, texting "became cheap" for them to offer, and data became limited. It's not that the costs dramatically changed (SMS always had literally zero marginal cost, since it piggybacks off of the packets already being sent), but fee structures and cost structures are oftentimes very different.
That's why I fear pay-per-view models on the internet. Once I'm connected it isn't about the packets, yet lobbyists trained by cable TV are trying to inject that model where it makes no sense. Except of course to the scalping bastards trying to get rich selling packets.
And, of course, there's the cost of running the SMSC.
If I was building a bandwidth-intensive startup in the US at the moment, I'd be seriously looking at using port-hopping p2p as my distribution mechanism with some randomisation of the payload to make profiling/identification as difficult as possible.
I never actually understood this. DRM is already largely ineffective, but how would P2P distribution make it any more ineffective? It would be trivial to distribute encrypted content using P2P and then DRM the decryption.
And the whole point of DRM is to allow content providers to enforce the restrictions they place on content distribution contracts. For example, if there is a flag that says "this content can only be played on cell-phones and tablets" they want to ensure that any player that can play the content honors that restriction and doesn't allow output via HDMI.
Naturally some people will be able to defeat them, but they're not meant to be ironclad. They are effective for the majority of people out there who aren't hackers/nerds.
Note a very foreshadowing EFF press release:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/08/fcc-rules-against-comc...
The Internet has up til now had a global reach and that may be at risk with recent developments.
Individual services such as Netflix, Youtube or Spotify have not had a global reach and may never have as long as the current structure for licensing and distribution of content persists.
Internet based distribution of content has always been under attack or limited by the traditional content distributors such as record labels, movie and tv studios and publishers. What is new is the attack from the ISPs from the other side.
It is possible, of course, that this rule could corrode over time, or that the slow-lane might be so slow that it serves as a de-facto block. But I think we'll need to see the actual proposed rule before we can assess that risk realistically.
http://bgr.com/2014/05/06/comcast-internet-service-criticism...
So your startup will be going like gangbusters for the first couple of months, then you'll get a letter noting that your "abnormal usage patterns" require "an agreement" or else you "will be subject to rate-limiting".
And the fee will be set as close your estimated profits as the ISP can come...
I heartily disagree with this approach. Not only does it harken back to the days of Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe and the like where each service had its own content, but it's very anti-internet.
>Make users want to switch
That's great if there are alternatives to switch to.
Yes, I could technically switch to dialup. It is technically internet. It's not going to allow me to do any work or any of my hobbies, however. So I don't consider it a valid option.
Yes, I could also try out some kind of dish provider. If I wanted to chop down some trees. Besides, those also don't work for me (almost no upload bandwidth, and horrible latency issues).
>instead of just pretend like there's no alternatives.
I live in an area where Comcast literally is my only option for high-speed internet. I'm not pretending.
IIRC most of the country lives in areas where there are only 1 or 2 broadband options. The non-cable operator is likely to be a Baby Bell that's also spent heavily to lobby the FCC to kill net neutrality and so wouldn't be an effective protest switch.
For instance, in most of Metro-Atlanta, you can get Comcast or AT&T UVerse (AT&T being the name of what was a Baby Bell, Cingular). UVerse is simply slow-as-shit DSL and is awful. (Fun fact: AT&T tried to sell and promote UVerse as Fiber in the mid-2000s. My parents have fiber in their home but no way to get a fiber provider -- AT&T was over-selling them on a "fiber" solution that was literally just copper DSL wires. The whole telecom industry is full of crooks).
In New York City, you basically have one provider. If you're very lucky and live in an area Verizon (another former baby bell) also services, you can get Fiber -- and that's awesome -- but the zoning for this stuff is often street by street. The building across the street from my apartment can get Verizon. My building can't -- for whatever reason. Verizon did tell me they could probably rig me access if I could get them access to the basement -- but I'm not the building owner and I don't have time to deal with what happens when the line gets cut accidentally.
I'm very fortunate that my Internet/TV provider is relatively sane (Cablevision) -- if I lived three blocks further away, I'd be stuck in TWC hell.
What most consumers also don't know is that in many areas, the cable provider can be chosen by the property management company (if you're in an apartment complex) or the condo association. So what happens is that operators will "bid" on that area - and the lowest bid wins. The problem is, even if you live in a Comcast or Verizon or whatever area, you still can't get that service. You're required to be with whoever your property management or co-op board chose. I actually didn't buy a condo that was in a great location and had a great floorplan because of their choice of ISP/cable provider.
The whole system is fucked. It really is. And the net neutrality and fast-lane aspects are only a small part of a much more broken and corrupt system.
That said, just because we can't fix the whole system -- and we can't -- doesn't mean we can't put pressure on companies to not fuck customers over even more, by making access-agreements for content. The system is already not in our favor -- no reason to make it even worse.
Anti-internet to ban an ISP that is trying to decimate the internet? How does that logically make any sense?
What would we end up with? Most of the internet not working for anybody. Friends sending you links that you can't get to because you're on different ISPs. Needing to buy service at more than one ISP to "provide coverage". If it happened on a large enough scale, it would unravel what we know as the internet.
This is what I mean when I say it's a bad idea.
I absolutely want to switch and will as soon as an alternative is available. In my entire life, I've never lived in a place that had anything other than Comcast. And I've always lived in relatively dense areas.
Let me guess, if you all were naturalists, you would all live in the heart of New York and complain to your neighbors (but not your city) all day about the lack of green.
There's no pretending, there are no alternatives.
ISP access has weight when I'm considering moving which is sad.
Not unlimited. Unlimited for 'phone usage' but not for legitimate usage outside your phone.
That's great, I'm really excited to hear that! Let me know what number I can call to sign up!
I could shop at Walmart and have an extra 20 bucks for my internet bill. Instead, I choose the slower internet with the ethical provider so that I can shop not at Walmart.
Not to say I'm perfect by any means, but this is just an example of the decisions I try to make every day. These decisions are hard sometimes.
Giving up on all of my hobbies that require internet, and having my fiancee to the same, is not practical. Paying more for internet is not practical. This is not an unreasonable position to take, nor does it represent some tragic moral failure on my part.
In any case, it's a thought experiment that's not worth defending myself further, because there are no alternatives to Comcast where I live.
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<p>Yesterday when we were having Comcast issues....