The Federal Communication Commission’s proposal for new net neutrality rules will allow internet service providers to charge companies for preferential treatment, effectively undermining the concept of net neutrality, according to The Wall Street Journal. The rules will allow providers to charge companies for preferential treatment so long as they offer that treatment to all interested parties on “commercially reasonable” terms, with the FCC deciding whether the terms are reasonable on a case-by-case basis. Providers will reportedly not be able to block individual websites, however.
While several parts of the world – Chile first, Netherlands second, EU followed only recently – move towards proper net neutrality, the US tries to kill it dead for its own citizens.
all 300 millions. Give it to people on food stamps instead.
It’s truly amazing: you perform a 180 degree turn on your policy but keep using the same label for it, then sell it on the same basis that you sold your original pre-U-turn policy under. As a bonus round you simply claim it’s a better policy than your original one, and refuse to answer any criticism that you’ve performed a blindingly obvious U-turn.
The best bit is, no one who cares (I.e. donated large sums or whom are your bosses) matters!
We have OSAlert quoting TheVerge who is sourcing New York Times who runs a subscription based website. I am not saying Thom is doing anything wrong but I believe I’d like to see the the new rules and form my own opinion instead of having my opinion decided for me through 4 layers of separation from actual data.
The “preferential treatment” written by the verge was not in quotes so I assume it is not an actual quote from the FCC.
The reason I make this point is what I believe the reality may be is Netflix etc. wants to outlaw paid peering agreements and the FCC seeks to allow paid peering which really just means selling Internet access to people buying it which is what Internet Service Providers actually do.
What Netflix is doing today is refusing to buy ports and saying “look, those guys are bullying us by limiting our traffic” when in reality limiting traffic is what happens if you don’t buy enough bandwidth to carry all of it.
Charging for bandwidth is an incredibly normal thing to do and should be legal but calling it “preferential treatment” is editorializing it to the point of dishonesty.
If Netflix was making the case that they are being charged too much money compared to other businesses they have a legitimate case but their complaint seems to be that they believe it should be illegal for ISP’s to charge them for directly connecting (peering) at all and if that is really what’s at stake here the FCC is making the right decision.
Either way the agreement wouldn’t be complete without the FCC giving itself more power (and by extension probably more tax money) under the proposal.
Edited 2014-04-24 00:18 UTC
If your scenario is true then the problem would really be that the legislation is being written in legalese rather than as a technical document. This isn’t surprising, but then at the same time we can’t act surprised when a lawyer can’t transmute basic technical issues such as direct peering v’s transit v’s IX into something approaching Latin…
As I am reading more its starting to confirm my suspicion. The new rules being proposed seem to deal with the last mile and outlawing “blocking”. “blocking” would be the practice of saying “if you want to get to Google that’s $5 more a month”.
I doubt ISP’s were ever planning on trying that as a business model but that was the biggest fear of many net neutrality supports and the new law would prohibit it officially.
So it looks like the new law outlaws blocking but doesn’t outlaw paid peering. I am still trying to find the reason I should be outraged.
Yeah, as long as they’re not blocking/throttling anything, I am pretty happy. Hell, I might actually PREFER to have one or two services ‘turbo boosted’. In other words, if everything has the same preferential treatment and Youtube videos are always buffering in the evenings because everybody in my neighborhood is streaming Netflix at 1080p during that time, perhaps I might want an extra 2-3mbps just for that.
I don’t think it is such a terrible thing, as long as the consumers are making these kinds of decisions.
WorknMan,
There’s actually a contradiction there. Ie “turbo boosting” some traffic implies throttling some other traffic. An ISP that does traffic shaping like this may have good intentions, however giving some services a bandwidth advantage at the expense of others is exactly what net neutrality sought to prevent.
My opinion is that the available bandwidth should be divided evenly across all active users in the same class, and it should be up to the users how to use their own share. So if I use my internet connection primarily to VPN to the office, my session won’t be degraded in favor of people watching netflix (or whatever else).
Edit: And of course, any users not using their share at any given time leaves more bandwidth for those who are. There’s no need to prioritize packets based on content/deep packet inspection, just give everyone equal share. This seems like the fairest approach to bandwidth distribution to me.
Edited 2014-04-24 02:58 UTC
That’s possible… I’m not an expert on this shit
But, assuming that they’re not already throttling, why do I struggle to get Youtube videos to run smoothly without buffering on my Time Warner 20mbps Internet connection, when most other things seem to run as they should? I can download from Usenet at 600kbps+, and routinely get speed tests of 18mbps+, while Youtube runs slower than snot on a doorknob.
It does sound like they are already throttling and/or there’s a bottleneck somewhere on your ISP’s network. In either case it means your ISP simply doesn’t care enough about your needs and this proposal won’t fix that. Increasing your own connection from 20mbps to, say, 50mbps still wouldn’t solve anything since the problem lies on your ISP’s end.
If this buffering doesn’t happen during early mornings and days, but starts happening once more people come home from work or school then there’s definitely a bottleneck on your ISP’s network. It’s not at Google’s end, that’s for sure, they have all the bandwidth they need to serve half the world simultaneously.
EDIT: Thought to explain a bit how these bottlenecks works. You see, mostly likely scenario is that your ISP is selling more bandwidth that it can actually offer, like e.g. you have 200 homes all sold a 18mbps connection, ie. 3600mbps in total, but the box all these homes connect to can only handle 2200mbps traffic — it has to start throttling things, prioritizing some services and leaving some others on a lower prio. Or it could be on the ISP’s own datacenter that all these boxes connect to that can’t handle all the simultaneous use and it starts throttling.
Your proposal on the first page wouldn’t fix the situation, there would still be these bottlenecks and then suddenly the ISP would have even less of a reason to fix them — just get either your customers or the companies whose services they wish to use to pay you for preferential treating. Now the ISP would actually have even more of an incentive on creating bottlenecks.
Edited 2014-04-24 06:30 UTC
I can back this up with personal experience. I have a 24Mbps connection at home via Comcast, and Youtube in particular is severely affected, along with occasional sustained downloads from random places. I can rarely watch a full Youtube video, even in standard definition, without it stopping at least once.
At work, we finally got rid of our pathetic 1.5Mbps T1 line and went with a 50Mbps Comcast Business line. Guess what? Youtube suffers from severe bottleneck issues there too, often getting stuck “buffering” on even a two minute SD video that should have finished downloading before the first frame was rendered. On the old T1, we rarely suffered issues with any type of streaming, particularly Youtube.
It makes me think something is severely wrong with Comcast’s service, even on their “Business” package which is supposed to come with guarantees above and beyond home service.
To be honest, it still sounds like Comcast overselling bandwidth and then doing traffic-shaping because they can’t handle all the traffic.
It’s a lot similar to how all my Internet-traffic, online-games, YouTube, Netflix and the likes would slow to a crawl if I had BitTorrent consuming all the bandwidth, but once I set up QoS on my router and applied highest priority to XMPP, SSH, HTTP(S), IRC and the likes, then 2nd highest prio to Netflix, YouTube etc. and all the way down at bulk-prio to BitTorrent it no longer matters — all my interactive activities work even if I have BitTorrent going as fast as it can. Since Netflix and YouTube are given higher prio than BitTorrent they don’t buffer or stutter, it’s BT-traffic that drops to minimum automatically, but neither Netflix or YouTube can rob XMPP or the likes from the bandwidth they need.
In your ISP’s case they likely have assigned lowest prio to BitTorrent, YouTube and the likes and are prioritizing their own services and those of the other companies that are paying them in a similar way.
WereCatf,
Not to defend comcast, but it doesn’t look like anybody’s ruled out that youtube itself may be having trouble. That would be the simplest explanation.
I agree, file sharing services consume lots of bandwidth and IMHO the best way to handle QoS is on the consumer’s end (cable modem/router) rather than traffic shaping at the ISP. Admittedly many users would be clueless about setting this up, so ideally the cable modem interface would have reasonable QoS defaults and then permit users to change them. Verizon Fios has an excellent modem management interface that lets users control way more than I can even do on my own router. By contrast, Optimum Online’s modem here is completely locked down. I only wish Verizon Fios was available around me.
Here’s an interesting article dealing with that issue: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-youtube-b…
WorknMan,
It’s funny you should mention that, I see it sometimes as well. I know it’s not my local bandwidth because, as you noted, other things work fine. Some youtube resources actually stall/error out even as others youtube resources work ok. I don’t believe opt-online does traffic shaping, and my gut feeling is that youtube is overloaded, however conceivably these symptoms could happen if the ISP failed to consistently identify all of youtube’s servers and applied traffic shaping inconsistently to them.
Sometimes it is just the case that the item isn’t cached at the nearest cdn server…
Devil’s Advocate: Why is it ok to put users into “classes”, but it isn’t ok to do the same with content?
Originally, I was honestly all for net neutrality, but in the last few months I have become less and less sure in my stance on this, at least when it comes to how bandwidth is distributed and who should be paying for what in the grand scheme of things… Here is why.
Compare the internet to government roads, and someone like netflix is analogous to huge honking trucking company. They use big heavy trucks that interfere with other traffic, cause increase wear and tear on the roads themselves, and create an impediment to the rapid flow of traffic in generally when there are a lot of them on the road.
The flipside is that they provide an extremely valuable service, they delivery stuff that people want and need. Sometimes this stuff gets moved by other means (cargo planes, trains, ships, etc.) – but public roads remains very important for last mile delivery as well as compensating for bottlenecks elsewhere. Everyone is happy because initially it was a win-win across the board.
But as time goes by the Netflix trucking company becomes so big that they represent 30% of all traffic. Nearly one out of every three vehicles you see is a big Netflix truck – and they are constantly turning left at your intersections and generally making everyone late for work… Used to be you only saw them on the interstate – but now they are everywhere, to the point where they are now driving around in rural areas creating traffic jams all over the place.
That is where we are now more or less. I’m not saying we are necessarily at the point where someone like Netflix must start paying into the system to sustain it, after all they are themselves servicing customers and those customers are paying the ISPs…
But what happens when they are 75% of all traffic? 80%? At what point is an ISP no longer an ISP but instead becomes a subjugated bandwidth provider for Netflix. How can you logically justify (as an ISP) being in a position where your job becomes primarily insulating the other 25% of your traffic from the effects of the 75% that you know is going directly into lining someone else’s pocket?
Thing is it might all make sense if the internet itself was built upon public infrastructure because you could shore up these kind of problems with creative tax policy, but it isn’t – most of the networks that make it up are not taxpayer funded and are in fact private and very much have a profit motive. In order for this to work at all, you have to have a way for money to flow to the bottlenecks. Who should pay for expanding the bottlenecks?
Netflix’s product is like a wide load in transportation terms – it is big, bulky, and difficult to move around. It creates bottlenecks by virtue of its properties. But conveniently, because of how the internet works, Netflix can put the burden of moving it around on all the ISPS (at least for last mile delivery) – it isn’t their problem.
Is that really fair? I can’t honestly say I like it, but I do concede that the “Netflix is a freeloader” lobby is not completely out to lunch – they have a valid grievance…
Here is a flaw in your logic. A Netflix vehicle for one person cannot occupy spots of other people when those other people have traffic of their own on the road. As soon as you have traffic on the road, other people’s vehicles must leave your spot. This is enforced by either throttling (TCP) or magically vanishing (UDP) those other vehicles until they only consume their own space. In other words, it cannot hinder your traffic in any way whatsoever.
Furthermore, Netflix traffic does not equal big annoying trucks, they’re just regular vehicles with the same load and “annoyance” on traffic as everyone else. And while they send a lot more vehicles, they cannot send more vehicles per hour per customer than what the customer is entitled to on the road. It is only a problem for one customer if that customer wants Netflix and Youtube at the same time but does not have enough bandwidth for that, and then it’s just a matter of throttling or dropping them all equally until it fits the bandwidth.
The real issue here is ISP’s heavily overselling bandwidth and not upgrading their network. They promise everyone that they can take X space on the road but when people are finally using their X space, it turns out that sum(X) is much much larger than their capacity, and yes, then other people’s traffic will interfere with yours. But that’s not Netflix’s fault, it’s the ISP’s.
Edited 2014-04-24 09:27 UTC
Maybe a small clarification about the throttling: on the network level there is no such thing as throttling! Both TCP and UDP packets are always dropped, i.e. whenever there’s an issue, the vehicles always “magically vanish” and instantly make room for your traffic.
However, TCP will retransmit the dropped packets and increase its delay to prevent a network congestion. So the effect is “throttling”.
UDP on the other hand simply does not care about dropped packets. It will never retransmit them and it won’t care if the next one is dropped either.
Edited 2014-04-24 09:39 UTC
Except when it is your traffic that is dropped to make room for others…
Your traffic is dropped only when it’s taking other folks’ spots and then only when those other folks need their spot, otherwise nothing gets dropped.
Unless the ISP is misbehaving of course.
Which is exactly what happens when 30% of the active users are using a high bandwidth video streaming service resulting in the ISP peeking their backbone capacity… The irony is most of the time no one notices except the Netflix users – because their traffic breaks if they can’t sustain a minimum bitrate (they start seeing constant buffering).
galvanash,
But how is netflix traffic worse than any other traffic in this regards? I might use my share for a file transfer, someone else uses P2P, someone else uses netflix, another has a work VPN, another user is on skype, etc. So long as the QoS is fair (ie by giving the same bandwidth to each user), then what does it matter to you or anyone else that 30% of the traffic might be for netflix?
I fundamentally don’t understand this gripe, as long as everyone is getting their share then what is the complaint exactly?
Each persons “road” only goes to the nearest “onramp” where it becomes aggregated with with others until you reach the ISPs backbone where it is all aggregate. The problem is not (generally) in the last mile delivery, it is aggregation, and once you reach aggregation points in the network your traffic is potentially hindering the traffic of others if the aggregate bandwidth is under provisioned.
I hate to break it to you but ISPs are by definition always under provisioned. You can only take x space on your road – there is no guarantee you will get x space once you reach roads containing other peoples traffic (which is basically everything beyond your neighborhood junction). In other words sum(x) is always far larger (like a few orders of magnitude) than their capacity, always has been, and always will be. To expect anything else is delusional – it can’t be done with the internet as it exists today. If don’t care what kind of service you pay for, you don’t get XXMbps to every endpoint on the internet – you get up to XXMbps (a completely different thing).
Netflix traffic doesn’t impact an ISPs ability to delivery you 10Mb (or whatever) of bandwidth. If you pay for 10Mbps service that should be what you are getting. However, that doesn’t in any way guarantee that you will be able utilize all of that bandwidth to stream Netflix (or anything else for that matter).
What Netflix does do is create a whole lot of aggregate traffic, percentage wise on average about 30% of it right now, and that affects everyone on the network. On top of that their traffic actually is special, because unlike most other kinds of traffic if it is throttled too much than it breaks – it only works correctly if it is delivered at or above the videos bitrate…
So yeah, the ISPs could simply scale up to deal with it, the question isn’t how to fix it, it is who should pay for it? Do you think it is fair for ISPs to raise their rates 30% for everyone, even the people who don’t use netflix? Netflix is profiting from their content being delivered, their customers pay for it – maybe the bill for dealing with all that traffic should be footed by them (and their customers) and not everyone.
Seriously, at this point I’m not sure what I think should happen… But I do know it is not as simple as “I pay for 10Mbps, that is what I should get – its the ISP’s problem” – that is ridiculous. Your problem is what you are paying for (minimum delivery rate) and what you think you are paying (point to point bandwidth) for are two entirely different things…
Except it’s not Netflix causing this, it’s the ISP’s users who cause it by trying to use their entitled bandwidth. Replace Netflix by a dozen smaller services and it will still have the same effect.
I know ISP’s are overselling their bandwidth, that’s not a problem, in fact, it makes perfect sense as not all the bandwidth is used all the time. However, the issue is that they are overselling way beyond their capacity to the point they can’t provide a minimum quality service. I don’t expect my advertised bandwidth all the time, but I do expect something that’s at least 20% of that during peak hours (which is good enough for netflix). It would appear that the major ISP’s in the US cannot (or want not) even deliver that.
So who should pay for it? The ISP. They received a fair amount of public money to upgrade their infrastructure. Instead, they ran away with it by buying out competitors, suing public initiatives and filling pockets. My ISP can provide a decent service here in Belgium, why can’t yours? Prices in the US are more than double of what I’m paying for half the quality. Where is that money going?
Edited 2014-04-24 13:30 UTC
The difference with the road is:
the road is a paid for by the public, aka everyone through taxes.
The users of Netflix pay their ISP (access provider) for bandwidth.
galvanash,
The users have classes because they have different packages (ie 5mbps versus 25mbps), which is fine IMHO.
However to me the trouble with traffic shaping is that the ISP is making backroom deals with 3rd party internet services on behalf of ISP users. If my choices as a customer doesn’t align with my ISP’s, then I’ll have to suffer worse performance than other users in the same class using the services prioritized by the ISP.
This hurts the choice of users and impedes competition from internet services who cannot negotiate for equal bandwidth priority to their larger competitors. The “free market” cannot generally fix this because in most areas broadband providers have a natural monopoly.
But isn’t it the user’s bandwidth to do with as they please? They already paid for it. Netflix already pays for it’s end too. Why should ISPs need to double charge for the bandwidth used by it’s own users?
Why does an ISP even need to know how users use their bandwidth? If the ISPs left things as a black box and never peaked at where the traffic was going then there wouldn’t actually be a problem. “Are your bits flowing well this month?” “Yes sir they are, thank you very much” “Your welcome”.
In other words, even if 99% of the bandwidth was going to one place, why does that matter? ISPs regularly oversell their bandwidth, but as long as everyone has the opportunity to use the same bandwidth then I don’t see what difference it makes how users use their share?
But they do that now, and have been doing it all along… Every time an ISP chooses to direct peer with someone, or negotiates transit with someone else who does, and so on and so forth – that is in effect a “backroom deal”. It already happens – its not like it happens “sometimes” – it happens all the time – it is the very nature of the internet and how all the ASs coexist.
Look at CDNs – appliances placed on ISPs networks to cache selected content and avoid having to repeatedly transmit it over expensive backbone connections. The simple choice of what gets cached there is a direct violation of network neutrality. If an ISP setups a CDN for Netflix are they not giving preferential treatment to Netflix traffic?
Maybe you prefer Amazon Prime, but you notice your Amazon videos are slow and buffer constantly – while your neighbors Netflix works just fine (same ISP). Is that because the ISP is screwing you by throttling Amazon, or is it simply because they have a better peering arrangement with Netflix?
Im not saying that network neutrality is a bad thing in principal, what Im saying is the more I discover about how the internet actually works the more silly the concept sounds. ISPs don’t sell pipes of varying capacity for you to send whatever you want through – it just doesn’t work that way in reality. Your “pipe” ends a few miles from your home – after that you are slumming it on the subway with everyone else…
So you take it to its logical conclusion – you enforce full network neutrality so no direct peering, no CDNs, nothing that gives certain content/carriers “special treatment”. Guess what happens? The entire internet slows to a crawl and costs skyrocket…
Um… their job is essentially to route traffic. They don’t need to look at what your transmitting, but they certainly have to know where the traffic is going…
If it is 99% of your bandwidth it certainly doesn’t matter… It matters if it becomes 30% of everyones bandwidth going to the same place…
And this is why it matters. If 30% of some ISPs traffic is Netflix during peek hours, and their backbone is at capacity then they are going to start dropping traffic. And pretty much ALL of the netflix users are going to see service disruption. Thing is almost no one else will notice anything at all, things might become a bit slower but few things require the sustained bitrate Netflix traffic does. So everyone starts blaming the ISP for throttling Netflix, when in reality all they are really doing is treating Netflix like all the other traffic, i.e. they are not giving it preferential treatment…
Thanks galvanash. I’ve seen so much ignorance on the issue everywhere I look that its incredibly refreshing to see at least one other person on the Internet somewhere who understands what’s actually happening.
With issues like this the “people who use the Internet” outnumber the “people who understand the Internet” by such an overwhelming margin that its hard for the FCC to legislate based only on popular opinion.
You wouldn’t see uninformed popular opinion dictating something like microchip design but that seems to apply to Internet infrastructure.
galvanash,
For the record, I don’t have a problem with CDNs, it’s pretty much like colocating a server at the ISP to offload bandwidth. It helps both the ISP, the online service, and the customer, nobody looses in that scenario, nobody’s traffic is degraded and in fact there’s even more unused bandwidth to go around. I guess to be fair one might argue the ISP should offer to colocate anyone’s servers on fair terms, but IMHO CDNs aren’t abusive in the way that traffic shaping is.
Also, I’m not against direct peering either, and for similar reasons. Direct peering helps the online service, helps the ISP, helps the users of the online service get better performance, and helps non-users of the service get better performance too (by taking load off of the backbone). Some people might have a problem with peering, however it doesn’t have quite the same potential for abuse in terms of net neutrality. I guess to be fair once again, the ISP should offer fair peering terms, however in this case free market principals ought to create the right incentives anyways. Both the ISP and the online service can save lots of money by direct peering. I don’t see too many negatives, the more peering the merrier.
As for “nothing that gives certain content/carriers ‘special treatment'”. With regards to prioritized traffic and traffic shaping, I don’t think certain content/carriers should get special treatment. Traffic should not be prioritized by a user’s choice of services.
Why? What difference would it make if 30% of the traffic were going to google, or MS, or facebook, or wherever else?
If netflix were divided up into 100 competitors scattered across the country, each would have a fraction of the current netflix userbase. Now does the fact that each mini-netflix consume a much smaller percentage of backbone traffic make much difference for your bandwidth? Not really, so your comments seem better directed at video streaming in general than at netflix specifically.
This goes back to what I’m not understanding, why do you care how other users use their share of bandwidth? After all, with net neutrality you could use the same amount of bandwidth yourself in any way you pleased. The only reason I can discern that someone would care what others do with their bandwidth is that he wants more bandwidth for himself…is that it? “I don’t like netflix/video users because they lower the amount of bandwidth I get”. This might be true, however whoever is saying this is implying (knowingly or not) that they feel entitled to more bandwidth than their fair share.
Well, this results for two reasons:
1) The ISP/netflix failed to setup peering/CDN, both of them would benefit from doing so.
2) The ISP oversells bandwidth rates above what their network can sustain, which is technically their own fault (they collectively caved into market pressure advertising misleading bandwidth rates). What *should* happen (I realize often it does not, but I’m speaking idealistically) is that the ISP should structure their package offerings with bandwidths that *are* sustainable in aggregate. If users need more bandwidth for their video fix, then they’ll have to pay for a more expensive package compared to those who use less, which is the way it should be.
That depends on the definition being used. “Turbo boosting” could be as simple as a direct peering agreement with a content producer, or hosting a CDN endpoint within your own network. Neither require any other traffic to suffer as a result.
Quite true. But there is still the question of whether or not such a peering agreement should be paid for by Netflix or not – actually I think that is the entire question. Netflix wants it to be free, ISPs don’t see it that way…
Yeah, it’s interesting. Traditionally, you ask for private peering if you expect to send a lot of data somewhere, and by default the person who expects to send the most pays for any costs involved (and cable installation & surcharges can be quite high in some datacenters, even if your cable never leave the building). That’s always been seen as fair, because the ones sending the most data are the ones who stand to save the most money, either by not using transit or by not having to buy more IX ports.
Netflix and a few others kind of flips that on its head, because they have such a massive economy of scale they don’t really care so much about their transit costs: they’re probably getting a better deal than most ISPs. Add to that the pressure that ISPs face from their own customers to improve access to Netflix, and it puts Netflix in quite a strong position.
Normally you’d hope that as grown adults they could have solved this on their own; frankly most peering arrangements are agreed in a bar, or barbecue (I’m not even kidding). The problem is that at this scale, the lawyers are slightly more keen to get involved…
You will end up being throttled anyway, not by the ISP doing packet inspection and whatnot but simply because your ISP will have no incentive to upgrade their infrastructure and increase bandwidth capacity.
Why would they? They can always extort money from companies offering services over the internet, which will end up coming from your pockets because… well, that’s how it’s going to be.
These dinosaurs have it good. They massively oversubscribe their current capacity and then they extort money for “fast lanes”…
… but hey, as long as they don’t block shit and give you the illusion of choice, it’s all good.
Brazil approved in senate yesterday and the president sanctioned today the “Marco Civil da Internet” (Internet Civilian Mark) that contains, among other things, net neutrality.
It leaves a hole (the presidency can add a exception if needed by technical reasons) it is a major improvement in a country that almost all companies use traffic-shapping to block torrent and video-casting.
It was signed live at NETmundial 2014:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KemK8YbHrI#t=67m01s
http://netmundial.org/ is the conference where people will discuss how the Internet will be controlled in the future.
Because the US Department of Commerce is going to give up control of ICANN:
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2014/ntia-announces-intent-tr…
This should mean we’ll get some kind of “multistakeholder” model and process just like how everything else is governed right now on the Internet.
Let’s hope they get the rules right.
If you want to see more, there will be more talks later today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2DAvj5M60k
Edited 2014-04-24 10:40 UTC
If customers want to buy lower/higher bandwidth, then they can.
If customers want the option to adjust their bandwidth on the fly, your bill being determined by some formula
based on how much data transferred at what bandwidth + the fixed cost based on max bandwidth used, why not?
Gutting net neutrality is about removing things from consumers’ control,
making bandwidth subject to back room deals that fit the corporate strategy,
favoring their own content subsidiaries or those that make strategic deals, etc.
Popular sites can leverage that to hook providers, even local ones like cafes with Wi-Fi
to cooperate e.g. allow more intrusive tracking of all traffic per IP.
Politically unfavored sources can just not be offered ideal bandwidth at any price.
And while big data wants to present this as “the only viable way” so many countries are doing the exact opposite, so clearly Net Neutrality is not some apocalypse, it just isn’t convenient for certain business strategies. So sorry.
I think the “last mile” rule is about not restricting your access to something and saying “if you want faster speeds to hulu or to use VoIP at all like your neighbor we can offer it for $5/month”
Something like your connection speed or cap would be legal to change because it’s agnostic of service/application type. That seems like a fair approach because why should they care what the actual data is? It’s all just bits.
It doesn’t govern how companies peer with each other because that is much harder to legislate and doing it wouldn’t be fair (as I pointed out above). If I have a business instead of home should charging me for Internet access still be legal? Yes. If my business is Startup Inc. is it legal? Yes. If my business is Netflix is it legal? NO
How does the FCC draw that line in the sand for companies like Netflix that demand they shouldn’t have to pay for peering/connectivity at all?
If its determined they should receive free connectivity rewind back to my small startup I’m being charged to connect to a provider, why is it fair to me? So my startup should be free too. Now what about my home office?
Why should businesses get free Internet if you have to pay as a residential subscriber?
At the end of the day you must draw a line in the sand somewhere and the only place it makes sense is to allow companies to legally negotiate and charge for connectivity/peering.
Peering is different from connectivity. Netflix certainly pays a, probably very handsome, sum of money for their hosting and connectivity. I also don’t think you understand how peering agreements work.
Priest,
It’s not really about free connectivity for anyone though (including netflix). Everyone already pays to get their bits onto the network (albeit some with very large scales of economy). I think it’s misleading to suggest that any traffic today is getting a free ride. These extra deals involve the priority of traffic that’s already paid for. It’s an extra toll that will prioritized some traffic at the expense of other traffic.
Let’s see, how can I put this delicately?…. Fuck that!
Just popped on to say that this kind of thread is the reason I keep coming back to OSAlert, despite it being a bit light on OS news and features these days. I don’t know any other site where the comments add so much value by clarification, criticism and counterpoints. The extended road metaphor debate above is a particularly good example, and one which has expanded my understanding of Net Neutrality as a subject.
as soon as the 2 classes are established, only trusted sites might enter the 1. class. If there is unwanted traffic by the 2. class. Sorry, just au moment there is no capacity to transport that traffic.
A really elegant means of censorship.
Greetings,
pica
Edited 2014-04-25 08:56 UTC
Most of the infrastructure that powers the USA’s internet is based on 1998 technology.
LOTS of fast ethernet, few gigabit ethernet distribution points.
Most of this is due to the fact all of the carriers are actually run by the NSA, and the spy gear would have to be upgraded if much of the infrastructure in the USA were to go fiber/gigabit speeds.
Take the case of IPv6 adoption. Do you know why it is slowest in the USA?
The primary reason is that most of the spy gear doesn’t work with IPV6 and the NSA doesn’t have the budget to upgrade most of the gear there.
So the carriers are forbidden to upgrade many of their network points.
Many of the Cafe’s for example I seen in the Far east are already IPv6, and giga bit speeds are not that uncommon while sipping away in the outdoors.
Much of the USA’s Internet infrastructure is in similair condition to our roads and bridges.
It will stay that way, until the we remove the NSA from our communications infrastructure.