Net neutrality?

[kamper]

So per Spidey's last post here, I want to hear the arguments for and against net neutrality legislation.

I recently read this in which the Richard Bennett guy seemed to kick some serious ass in the technical side of the debate. However, I don't know anything about him. Is he generally correct?

All the infrastructure people seem to be saying that legislated neutrality is bad for progress & technology. Is it possible that the opposition understands this and considers it an acceptable loss in order to achieve some kind of freedom?

 

[spidey07]

VERY good discussion on that site. All parties have a firm grasp of how the internet and providers work.

Net Neutrality supporters generally don't know what the issue is really about nor are they in the position to really understand all the problems/challenges faced by any network. It can in all honesty get very complicated and as soon as Entitlement mentality takes over the "OMG! They're touching my traffics!!!!" they're lost. The FCC has been very firm about striking down any anti-competitive practices.

Every router on the Internet at a basic level employs selective dropping of traffic when congestion occurs. They selectively drop TCP packets of select conversations to make them slow down/close their send/receive windows, etc. Richard Bennett touches on this a little and it's clear he understands TCP, that is not a protocol that you can really explain to a layperson. This is known as queue management, when a router can't SEND traffic out an interface because packets are queued up some inevitably HAVE to be dropped. Think of pooring water into a bucket with a hole in it...if you put more water than the hole is capable of spilling the bucket fills up and you gotta do something with all that water. So it would be best if you did something to slow down the water being poured into it. That's queue management.

The reason why most infrstructure people believe that legislating it is bad is because it's hard enough for ME to wrap my head around all the complicated mechanisms to traffic engineering. Let alone expecting the gubment to make a good decision on it. The future (and current state) of a modern network is to maximize performance and resources to provide good/guaranteed performance to all users. This cannot happen without quality of service. Don't take away the one tool that gives network architects/designers to build next generation networks.

 

[Ninjazx]

nice article!

I think you are envisioning this in a theoretical world which I'll agree with on principle. I just cant imagine that it would ever be implemented (and maintained) in an unbiased, consumer-first atmosphere. What technologies get the nod. What gets dropped first. Ok so everyone agrees on an item (say voice). Whos voice? A competitor? Or someone also on the same ISP? What about providing services from competing providers. Ok, small things here and there, and most will work for the benefit of everyone... for now. How long until they work for the benefit of themselves.

Since this is under the assumption that these issues aren't solved by internal network upgrades/changes, if you have 2 services running through one connection, you cannot increase the QoS of one without decreasing the QoS of the other. You cant move one item higher up on the list without moving something else down. Everyone will be scrambling to get their service higher on the list. And what slowly happens to whats left behind. This is a huge longterm concern for me. Again, I am looking at only the long term here.

And lets not forget who would be regulating all of this. *shudder*



I especially enjoyed the bank analogy. I don't think this would even be an issue if so many providers hadn't overbooked themselves on what they can provide, under the assumption that the demands of the users wouldn't ever change. This was a large debatable issue during the early dsl vs cable debates over oversubscribing cable nodes.

-I have a 100meg pipe. I serve 10meg to 20 people. How often would they even notice? Probably never, maybe on the busiest of times.
- I have a 100meg pipe. I serve 10meg to 50 people. I bet you'll notice in the evenings. But hey, look at the money I'm making, I can afford to do more with my infrastructure, but my shareholders would prefer I only spend what is absolutely necessary. I'll move up to 200meg.

Extremely oversimplified, but the point is there.

This is all a side effect of the consumer environment and the downside of the bandwidth race that benefits consumers so much. It wasn't very long ago that comcast raised their caps, did they not? Thats another issue I don't care for, since they obviously cant handle it.

 

[Ninjazx]

to add, and I realize im kinda all over the place here... I'm not disagreeing with QoS, I'm disagreeing with the mass regulation of it and the direction it will take us. If comcast wants to shape their traffic, so long as that is covered in their contracts, then thats their choice. If Their customers dont like it, they will boot them if its bad enough.

When this goes cross-provider the consumer loses that power.

 

[kamper]

I normally have a fair bit of respect for Ed Felten but it seemed like he was not really interesting in acknowledging the technical points made. He wrote this today, which comes out really pro-neutrality again except that it's about a totally different issue (Verizon messing with DNS like VeriSign did). I think by trying to lump different problems under the same term he's abusing the term net neutrality and it's going to lead to worse decisions. Like should we stop comcast from RSTing bittorrent traffic simply because Verizon is abusing dns? Obviously not but I think that's what he's implying.

 

[spidey07]

Yes. He's completely missing the picture. What verizon did has nothing to do with neutrality and he's really reaching there.

Somebody go read the DNS RFCs to see if verizon is actually doing anything wrong. Manipulation is done all the time with DNS specifically with content switching and global site selectors.

-edit-
I see there is an opt-out of this service. So essentially his entire point is invalid and mute. Verizon is offering a feature.

 

[kamper]

Geez there's a lot of dns related rfcs... I've never heard anybody argue that what Verisign did was alright. Was that different than Verizon because they manage tlds?

Google didn't tell me anything about dns context switching and it seems like gss is similar to round robin for load balancing (from a very brief read). Isn't that a little different than returning an ip for a host name that doesn't actually exist? Seems to me that's a case much better handled by the browser. Oh well, if Verizon gives you a choice then I don't really care.

 

[BadRobot]

id like to be able to use all the bandwidth i purchased for whatever i want to

 

[Ninjazx]

am i missing something? how does routing non existent returns to verizon have anything to do with net neutrality...

 

[cmetz]

kamper, network neutrality is good. I like it, I want it.

I do not want government to tell ISPs to do it, and I don't want government to set the rules for it. Why? Because government has a track record. In case you haven't been paying attention, government allows an average of two rat droppings per can of chili and is about to allow food labels to list MSG as "natural flavoring." Depending on government to set or enforce the rules here is IMO totally naive - the rules will get manipulated by lobbyists to the point of uselessness and the extra government regulation and burecracy will stifle ISPs the same way it's stifled telcos. Look carefully at the telco business and how screwed up it is - government is partly to blame for that. We don't need to make the Internet like that!

I am strongly in favor of market-based enforcement. There's a consortium recently set up to measure, name, and shame. If ISPs want to slow down certain applications or slow down traffic to competitors, it should be measured, proven, and they should be publicly tarred and feathered for it. In fact, even unintentional slowness of protocols or to certain destinations should be measured by third parties and advertised to shame the offenders. ISPs should be free to be non-neutral, and we should be free to make sure potential customers know that.

Quality of service is a big deal and will be a bigger deal as time goes on. For an ISP with real capacity, QoS is basically a peering issue. ISPs should be encouraged to do the right thing, and customers should be educated. Right now, as a customer, I have to rely on experience and anecdotal evidence to evaluate what a potential ISP's peering quality is really like. I'd love to have good hard data to be able to say that ISP X (which costs 1.5x as much) has that much better with 80% of the Internet than ISP Y. And if ISP Y is deliberately doing that as a business choice, that makes it even more damning.

All that said, be careful also how you define network neutrality. Verizon's FIOS service gives you a lot fatter data pipe than you realize - they shape down traffic to the public Internet consistent with your purchased Internet service package, but they have megabits of excess capacity in the data VC that can only be used to go to private IP address spaces for their VoD network. Should they be allowed to do that? They're not really hurting public Internet traffic, they're actually giving you excess total capacity and then giving you what you paid for to the Internet. Now, should they be allowed to let third-party providers on their VoD network? What if that's not just for VoD, but for real IP transit to certain address blocks? Slippery slope, isn't it? Is it bad if they give you more, or only if they give you less?

We do need to draw the lines somewhere, but where those get drawn should be done by technically clueful people in a reasonable and open forum, and in practice I expect multiple groups to do so and the marketplace of ideas to judge each definition. This is a lot better than having government burecrats and telco lobbyists make the rules up, I assure you.

The VZ thing is another fine example of why you should just not use ISPs' name servers to begin with. But since you can easily circumvent that stupidity, it's not a big deal. The only real concern is that it again separates the network clue haves from the have-nots.

 

[spidey07]

cmetz,

That's about how I think. Keep gubment out of it and let free market and people that understand the consequences decide. So far the FCC has been very clear and on the correct side IMHO. The entire issue has been so misconstrued and misinformed that I wouldn't dare let legislators decide or even attempt to write verbage into a bill. Especially since the entire industry is moving at such a rapid pace in terms of capacity/features, etc.

 

[spidey07]

Looks like my ISP is playing with DNS as well. A bad query gets results from http://www33.not-found-entry.org no matter what the url is including what look like search results. Even using NSLOOKUP I get A records for "bad" queries.

go figure. Or I've got malware/spyware, but I don't think so...this is a work machine and it happens in IE, firefox and nslookup.

 

[kamper]

That's cool that you guys think that any problems can be sorted out by the market (not being sarcastic there). For that to happen it would require a fair bit of consumer education. If so many geeks are clamouring for legislation, what are the chances that the bulk of the money spending public is going to be able to choose a good solution? (How many people can actually understand QoS and/or peering?) If you guys are evaluating an isp for your home (or lets throw in small business), what do you look for and where do you find out about it? I know there's lots of broadband review sites out there, but in my experience, they're mostly full of people who are just looking for isps that won't cap their 24x7 bittorrenting.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: kamper
That's cool that you guys think that any problems can be sorted out by the market (not being sarcastic there). For that to happen it would require a fair bit of consumer education. If so many geeks are clamouring for legislation, what are the chances that the bulk of the money spending public is going to be able to choose a good solution? (How many people can actually understand QoS and/or peering?) If you guys are evaluating an isp for your home (or lets throw in small business), what do you look for and where do you find out about it? I know there's lots of broadband review sites out there, but in my experience, they're mostly full of people who are just looking for isps that won't cap their 24x7 bittorrenting.

The truth of the matter is the consumer level broadband of The Internet is grains of sand on the beach. It's small play. That's why the prices are so incredible low. You get what you pay for more or less. But somehow entitlement mentality has crept in. Another truth is that people the majority (> 50%) of folks with access to broadband residential access have a choice between two or more providers.

Just because there are a lot of posting on blogs about things do not make it an issue.

And don't throw home with small business, there is a HUGE difference. Why do you pay more for a business line than a home line? Honestly? Why? Because if you know the answer to this then you know the answer to the net neutrality BS.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: BadRobot
id like to be able to use all the bandwidth i purchased for whatever i want to

http://asert.arbornetworks.com...e-net-neutrality-pipe/

 

[cmetz]

kamper, I forget the name, but there was recently an announcement of a group of reasonably notable 'net people who are putting together a consortium to measure, name, and shame the bad ISPs. That kind of information is kind of available today on sites like dslreports.com, but is not put together in a consistent, reasonably objective, and easy to get at form. So we really do need a good rating system and it's being worked on.

n0cmonkey, the link you provided is interesting but misses the point. One thing that's missing from this debate is what I personally consider to be the most critical issue for home connectivity nowadays:

"UNLIMITED"

For years now, ISPs have marketed their services as "unlimited" and then gotten into an arms race about putting the tail link speed in big print. So ISPs say, for example, that you have a cable connection with 10Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up, and it's "unlimited." They say that in big print, then they have pages upon pages of TOS fine print that basically say that the speed might never be that fast and if you use more than they feel like you can get kicked off, and that they can do anything they want to slow you down or otherwise "manage" your traffic.

This is dishonest, and it needs to stop.

Until residential ISPs stop the dishonest marketing and TOS practices, they will always be fighting a losing battle against high-volume users and getting a bad rep for anything they do to try and reign them in.

It seems to me that a lot of the traffic shaping/application filtering problems that are part of the "network neutrality" debate could be solved by simply charging by used data volume.

 

[spidey07]

cmetz - while the data volume would be a much better model I don't think it is going to happen in the consumer world. They're too accustomed to all you can eat.

What is mom gonna do when johnny has a 1500 dollar internet bill? And it wouldn't be a rare occurance, it would happen to a TON of households, not just johnny calling 900 numbers or texting too much.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm surprised to hear responses that seem to be anti-net-neutrality. In my mind, it comes down to one thing - let ME (the end user) be empowered as to WHO I want to contact, and HOW I choose to contact.

I see it as important as the US mail system was and is. Imagine if the USPS started to delay the delivery of letters, to "unimportant" persons, while delivering "important persons" mail immediately. If that happened, I would raise hell. People deserve to have their mail delivered, regardless of who they are or what address they live at, with a best-effort service.

Note also that the USPS allows for different classes of mail, with different priorities, and at different costs. I have no problem with that, as it is content-neutral and addressee/addresser-neutral. ISPs will eventually differentiate traffic, and perhaps charge different prices for different amounts of traffic for various traffic classes.

I have no problem throttling P2P traffic, it would be akin to "bulk mail", in a way. In fact, like junk mail, it also takes up a majority of internet traffic.

But I do have problems, if ISPs start to prioritize various web site traffic over others. (Akin to a violation of addressee-neutrality of mail.) For example, imagine if your ISP served up TomsHardware faster than Anandtech, on purpose, because TomsHardware cut a deal with your ISP.

I likewise have a problem, if ISPs start to actually FORGE traffic. It would be like the USPS sending a letter to my grandmother, asking her to stop sending me mail, but with my handwriting and return address on it, because she sent "too many" letters to me within a month.

Net neutrality is very simple once you view it in the same context as the postal system. It's primarily a political, not a technical, issue. How traffic gets prioritized or throttled doesn't matter. It DOES matter, on what basis said traffic is handled differently.

That's the crux of the matter, IMHO.

Edit: For an extreme example of NON-neutrality - what if black people had their postal mail delay for two weeks, while white people had their mail delivered immediate.

That would seem wrong to you, wouldn't it?

What if it were done on the premise that, statistically speaking, white people paid more in taxes (because they generally were more successful in society, etc.), than black people. The assumption is that they are therefore paying more, and thus deserve better service. (For the purpose of this example, assume that the postal service is paid for by tax money.)

Does that still seem so wrong, once the economic argument comes into play?

For the 'net version of that, replace white people with HTTP users, and black people with P2P (BitTorrent) users, and replace taxes paid with profit made off of that user.

Not so clear-cut anymore, is it?

What if we take it even further, and black people's mail is randomly discarded, once a postal person get busy sorting mail.

What if sending pornography through the mail was illegal, and the argument was made in support of the discarding, that most mail that black people send to each other was porn?

(Analog: All P2P traffic is illegal, therefore ISPs have a right to interfere with said traffic and drop it here and there.)

Would you support, destroying someone's mail, just because they were a black person?

Would you support, interfering with and denying traffic just because it uses a P2P protocol?

 

[cmetz]

spidey07, as long as the business model is "unlimited*" (* - not really), residential ISPs and customers will have interests that pit them against each other. Charging for usage is the only way to align their interests. There's plenty of precedent in utilities - electric, water/sewer, gas, etc. Land-line telephones are unusual in that they are "unlimited" and ISPs are unusual in that they are "unlimited." But cell phones have usage pricing and customers are okay with that - and the tiered block pricing model seems to be a reasonable compromise that gives both customer and provider more predictability. I think that an ISP that offered cell-phone like plans *and explicitly did not filter or muck with your traffic in any way* would be an interesting business model, and as current major ISPs are getting more customer hostile I think they could pick up users at an interesting rate.

Of course, there are always folks who just want to pay $50/month and sustain several megabits of download and a megabit of upload throughout every second of that entire month. Those users are abusers. There's no other way to put it. Those people want to be subsidized by everyone else, to get a lot of data for as little cost as possible. While I can't fault folks for trying to get the best deal possible, those people simply aren't economic given the current business models. ISPs who deal with those users by simply kicking them off solve their own problem, but do nothing to really solve the greater problem.

"What is mom gonna do when johnny has a 1500 dollar internet bill?"

How about explaining to little Johnny that his piracy saved him $200 on DVDs and cost $1,500 in bandwidth this month? Sounds like a self-correcting problem to me! (Maybe we can solve two big residential ISP problems here

Yes, it *is* possible that home users who are in the top 1% of residential data volume are downloading Linux DVDs. A *lot* of Linux DVDs. Every second of every month. Yeah, it's possible.

The pricing tiers just have to be reasonable, and documented. Just like cell phones. I pay $X a month, and I get Y minutes of talk time. So say my ISP charges me $50 a month and I get 20GB/month of downloads, with $0.10/MB overage. If little Johnny isn't doing anything he shouldn't be, then he need not know there's tiering going on at all. In fact, what we have today is something similar to that, except that it's not clearly documented when you go over your allotment, and the overage charge is that they pull the plug on you.

This would also encourage makers of certain protocols and games to be more efficient with their use of the network. Right now, there is not much incentive to do that.

VirtualLarry, the USPS is an excellent point to introduce into this conversation. You do realize that you subsidize all that junk mail you get, right? It costs you $0.41 to send a letter with up to three pages folded up. It costs them pennies to send a cardboard letter-sized junk mail item. They have better lobbyists than you do, and the USPS is basically a government entity.

Do you want the same government to set the rules for the ISP business? Care to guess how this one works out?

Oh, and if you think all recipients get the same service from the USPS, you should do more work with the mailing industry. The USPS discriminates in huge ways between various senders and the average Joe, and between various receivers and the average Joe. Once again, money and volume figure heavily into this picture.

The government set up a postal system to guarantee cheap delivery to everyone, a wonderful, egalitarian dream. But slowly, over time, that changed. They don't advertise it widely, they even will claim that it's the same egalitarian system it once was, but when you dig into the details, it's not - the lobbyists got in there and the rules favor certain folks.

This is exactly what a goverment decided and enforced network neutrality will be like. It will start out with what everyone thinks is great, and then the lobbyists and politicians will change that when they think nobody's looking. Slowly, subtly. The way so many things in our government start out with good ideas but often go astray in the implementation. I'd like the Internet to be better than that.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: spidey07
The truth of the matter is the consumer level broadband of The Internet is grains of sand on the beach. It's small play. That's why the prices are so incredible low. You get what you pay for more or less. But somehow entitlement mentality has crept in.

Can I infer from this then that the residential internet consumer's vote hardly counts for anything?

Another truth is that people the majority (> 50%) of folks with access to broadband residential access have a choice between two or more providers.

Sure, but that choice can't be used to bring anything about if the consumer doesn't know what they're really choosing between.

Just because there are a lot of posting on blogs about things do not make it an issue.

And don't throw home with small business, there is a HUGE difference. Why do you pay more for a business line than a home line? Honestly? Why? Because if you know the answer to this then you know the answer to the net neutrality BS.

I assume you're talking about reliability and a reasonable minimum bandwidth guarantee. I'd rather have that to my home than crazy bittorrent speeds (makes it way easier to run a reliable web/mail server). The other reason I mix the two is that when I briefly looked at small business cable or dsl from Rogers and Bell, they looked scarily consumerish (emphasis on high bandwidth, very asymmetric, no static ips, useless things like "the latest in security and data-protection technology"). In my mind, the low end of the small business market is very similar to what's available to homes but that's obviously not an expert's opinion...

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: spidey07
cmetz - while the data volume would be a much better model I don't think it is going to happen in the consumer world. They're too accustomed to all you can eat.

What is mom gonna do when johnny has a 1500 dollar internet bill? And it wouldn't be a rare occurance, it would happen to a TON of households, not just johnny calling 900 numbers or texting too much.

More interestingly, what happens when grandma's desktop gets added to a spamming botnet or Joe the incompetent tech enthusiast gets his ftp server hacked and is hosting warez? Short term, it'd be messy but I guess in the long term it provides a powerful incentive to improve security.

There's another question: how much of that security should be taken care of in the home and how much should the isp enforce? I used to be pissed off at Rogers for not allowing traffic on port 25 and I was always scared they were going to do something about my web server as it was technically against their terms. I understand now that this is actually really important because the average home user can't be expected to keep their machines clean and there is no valid reason for most homes to have port 25 traffic. Now I'm relatively confident that I can handle an unfiltered connection on my own but of course an isp that caters to the average consumer can't be expected to judge that on a case-by-case basis so I had to find myself an isp that doesn't do any filtering.

So an isp can mess with traffic to preserve bandwidth (which you've established is obviously justified) and they can mess with traffic to preserve security (although I imagine their motivation for doing so probably comes down to bandwidth in the end as well). What level of security measures should an isp take and what measures, if any, should be taken to provide a market (albeit a niche one) for those that don't need and/or want protection?

 

[cmetz]

kamper, well designed networks are dumb. Dumb ends up winning over smart time and time again.

I would like to see every cable/DSL/etc. provider provide a $20 SOHO firewall/router with their service. It would help *a lot* if people's Windows PCs were not directly connected to the public Internet. At the kind of volumes the big guys have, they could get the unit cost down lower, maybe $5 each - it would cost more to ship the thing than to buy it. It would probably pay for itself in bandwidth and management cost reductions.

VZ has provided a throw-in SOHO router with their FIOS service since the beginning, BTW. The current MoCA unit is actually quite expensive, >$100/ea, but that's needed for some of the wacky capabilities they need.

 

[Ninjazx]

Originally posted by: cmetz
spidey07, as long as the business model is "unlimited*" (* - not really), residential ISPs and customers will have interests that pit them against each other. Charging for usage is the only way to align their interests. There's plenty of precedent in utilities - electric, water/sewer, gas, etc. Land-line telephones are unusual in that they are "unlimited" and ISPs are unusual in that they are "unlimited." But cell phones have usage pricing and customers are okay with that - and the tiered block pricing model seems to be a reasonable compromise that gives both customer and provider more predictability. I think that an ISP that offered cell-phone like plans *and explicitly did not filter or muck with your traffic in any way* would be an interesting business model, and as current major ISPs are getting more customer hostile I think they could pick up users at an interesting rate.

Of course, there are always folks who just want to pay $50/month and sustain several megabits of download and a megabit of upload throughout every second of that entire month. Those users are abusers. There's no other way to put it. Those people want to be subsidized by everyone else, to get a lot of data for as little cost as possible. While I can't fault folks for trying to get the best deal possible, those people simply aren't economic given the current business models. ISPs who deal with those users by simply kicking them off solve their own problem, but do nothing to really solve the greater problem.

"What is mom gonna do when johnny has a 1500 dollar internet bill?"

How about explaining to little Johnny that his piracy saved him $200 on DVDs and cost $1,500 in bandwidth this month? Sounds like a self-correcting problem to me! (Maybe we can solve two big residential ISP problems here

Yes, it *is* possible that home users who are in the top 1% of residential data volume are downloading Linux DVDs. A *lot* of Linux DVDs. Every second of every month. Yeah, it's possible.

The pricing tiers just have to be reasonable, and documented. Just like cell phones. I pay $X a month, and I get Y minutes of talk time. So say my ISP charges me $50 a month and I get 20GB/month of downloads, with $0.10/MB overage. If little Johnny isn't doing anything he shouldn't be, then he need not know there's tiering going on at all. In fact, what we have today is something similar to that, except that it's not clearly documented when you go over your allotment, and the overage charge is that they pull the plug on you.

This would also encourage makers of certain protocols and games to be more efficient with their use of the network. Right now, there is not much incentive to do that.

VirtualLarry, the USPS is an excellent point to introduce into this conversation. You do realize that you subsidize all that junk mail you get, right? It costs you $0.41 to send a letter with up to three pages folded up. It costs them pennies to send a cardboard letter-sized junk mail item. They have better lobbyists than you do, and the USPS is basically a government entity.

Do you want the same government to set the rules for the ISP business? Care to guess how this one works out?

Oh, and if you think all recipients get the same service from the USPS, you should do more work with the mailing industry. The USPS discriminates in huge ways between various senders and the average Joe, and between various receivers and the average Joe. Once again, money and volume figure heavily into this picture.

The government set up a postal system to guarantee cheap delivery to everyone, a wonderful, egalitarian dream. But slowly, over time, that changed. They don't advertise it widely, they even will claim that it's the same egalitarian system it once was, but when you dig into the details, it's not - the lobbyists got in there and the rules favor certain folks.

This is exactly what a goverment decided and enforced network neutrality will be like. It will start out with what everyone thinks is great, and then the lobbyists and politicians will change that when they think nobody's looking. Slowly, subtly. The way so many things in our government start out with good ideas but often go astray in the implementation. I'd like the Internet to be better than that.

well at least one person sees the same problem i do. i was starting to think i was wearing a tin foil hat for a bit there.