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Net neutrality advocates are planning two days of protest in Washington DC this month as they fight off plans to defang regulations meant to protect an open internet.
A coalition of activists, consumer groups and writers are calling on supporters to attend the next meeting of the Federal Communications Commission on 26 September in DC. The next day, the protest will move to Capitol Hill, where people will meet legislators to express their concerns about an FCC proposal to rewrite the rules governing the internet.
The FCC has received 22 million comments on "Restoring Internet Freedom", the regulator's proposal to dismantle net neutrality rules put in place in 2015. Opponents argue the rule changes, proposed by the FCC's Republican chairman Ajit Pai, will pave the way for a tiered internet where internet service providers (ISPs) will be free to pick and choose winners online by giving higher speeds to those they favor, or those willing or able to pay more.
The regulator has yet to process the comments, and is reviewing its proposals before a vote expected later this year.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:14AM (11 children)
I have to admit, I do not understand this topic very well, so some of the things I say and think about treating different protocols differently may be misguided or even nonsensical to someone with more technical competency.
You do not need net neutrality for this, that's my whole point. You just need the right to privacy, free expression, and association. If they block you or throttle you so much as to block you in practice, that's censorship, and should be illegal. If they merely make you slow, why do you care? They would have to do actual R&D to slow you down, too, for no apparent benefit, as you would still be accessible. I see what you are saying, but this is not a good example.
Movie streaming: another non-example. If it's slow, cache it. If it's really really really slow, too slow to download and cache the whole thing, it's censorship, and should be illegal. And if a DRM peddler like NetFlix, who won't allow caching, is too slow to be streamed, that's just the icing on the cake.
Other types of streaming, especially P2P ones, should be encrypted. Blocking them should be illegal, so how can an ISP identify them in order to throttle them? More R&D, and the ensuing arms race between the shaper and the shapee, and hence false positives. Unrelated customers get mad, while the service still works, albeit sluggishly, since full blocking is still illegal. Why would an ISP engage in this kind of behavior unless there was a legitimate technical reason for shaping that traffic? They would not. They would only shape it until the point of zero returns, and settle on that.
I agree wholeheartedly with every bit of the "net neutrality" package which concerns censorship (freedom to serve bits to everyone) and access (freedom to receive bits from anyone), but I feel very strongly about endorsing these ideas as "freedom of expression", and not as a part of some commercial player fairness package. The part of the package I am opposed to is the ongoing frenzy of regulating the traffic shaping. It is a distraction at best, and a dangerous scheme at worst. Not only I think it is highly misguided to lump the freedom of expression together with "net neutrality", which is some kind of level playing field for service/content providers, rather than a fundamental human right. I also think that regulating the traffic shaping by law to any appreciable extent is really, really bad idea just by itself. Traffic shaping for the sake of solving technical issues such as congestion and network management is a technical decision to make, but the proponents of net neutrality seem to want to hand it to the courts. What good can possibly come from that?
On a very basic level, let's go back to Charlie, who is serving 4 city blocks with his private fiber. A bunch of wankers move in, and clog his network with the net streaming service of the month. Today Charlie can simply shape them, and if they don't like it, then they can cache the videos, downgrade them, or use a different streaming service if they can find one that works for everyone on that pipe. In the net neutrality world, Charlie has to make a decision: leave them be, while all of his other tenants get livid, or shape them, and get taken to court. And after Charlie wastes a bunch of cash and wins by proving the shaping was technically necessary, they will take him to court again, just to improve their quota. That's right: the immediate consequence of strong net neutrality is that every traffic-shaping decision creates a whole new liability. How can one know whether a shaping rule is truly required for network management or not? Sue, of course, that's how, and let the judge sort it out based on some expert's testimony he can't quite understand. So even the large ISPs, with swarms of lawyers on retainer, see it as an absolutely awful prospect, and small ISPs would have an even harder time.
This is basically my thinking, and look again: why don't we have those small ISPs, for example, or any kind of real competition in that area? Shouldn't we be fighting against the monopolists by being vocal about basic consumer rights? Or should we keep wasting time on fighting for the bandwidth & latency quotas on behalf of a few select movie-streaming services, to no-one's obvious benefit, by making traffic shaping a legal minefield?
Finally, I don't quite know who is behind this push, but I am very strongly suspecting the usual scum: the "content providers". Companies like Hulu, who smell a low hanging fruit, which is companies like Comcast. And so these Hulus, who have the copyrighted content but not the pipes, are attempting to pave a legal track for, basically, extortion. Hulus know that Comcasts, who serve both the pipes and what flows through them, just can't resist treating themselves preferentially, and in some cases it makes little technical sense for them not to. So Hulus want to start siphoning money from them, and the traffic-shaping part of the net neutrality would allow them to do just that: sue and settle, sue and settle. These are the same actors who would take the freedom of expression out behind a barn and put a bullet in her head, and I don't want any part of "net neutrality" since they jumped on the bandwagon. I just want freedom, liberty, privacy, consumer rights, and human rights, and I will keep calling them by their names, so that no one gets a wrong idea :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:36AM
You are not going to have "freedom, liberty, privacy, consumer rights, and human rights", at least as far as the internet goes, without net neutrality. It has nothing to do with what individual sites such as Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or whatever do or do not allow on their site, it has to do with allowing anyone to connect with Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or whatever if they so choose with the same ability they have to connect with any other site (allowing for any physical limitations of course). If you do not like what a site does to its visitors, you have the right to not use that site, not the right to force them to do things the way you like.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:18AM (9 children)
In a nutshell, QOS (Quality Of Service [wikipedia.org] which has a very specific meaning in the context of TCP/IP networking) is setting priority based on network header options. Those options are read (or not) by each gateway (router) that a packet passes through, and if that device is configured to do so, will prioritize traffic marked for such treatment over other traffic. This is often used to prioritize VOIP and video traffic across enterprise networks. However, I am unaware of *any* IP transit providers that will honor such QOS tags from other entities. As such, even if you tag your traffic as high priority, other entities will just ignore those tags.
Another (and ubiquitous among network transit providers) mechanism for prioritization (which you mentioned) is traffic shaping [wikipedia.org]. This is used by most network providers. This mechanism (most often, but can take other forms too) looks at application (HTTP, p2p, VPN, SMTP, etc.) network flows and adjusts the bandwidth available to specific applications to fit the requirements of the entity performing the traffic shaping. This can be done by limiting the bandwidth (and increasing latency) for some protocols, or by silently dropping packets to match the traffic profile desired.
Again, there is no requirement that any ISP or transit provider shape network traffic in any particular way (that's true within a net neutrality regime, by the way). Many enterprises (as well as ISPs and transit providers) use devices which perform traffic shaping both internally, as well as at Internet connection points.
All of this is defined by each entity which controls the network infrastructure along the path of any network connection. No overarching design or traffic-shaping profile exists for the greater Internet. As an example, There are at least four (given current routing paths) network providers whose networks I need to traverse from the device on which I'm writing this comment to the soylentnews.org site.
Let's just say for the sake of argument that I wasn't writing a comment on Soylent, but playing an FPS game (as you mentioned earlier). Which network provider should I contact to have those packets prioritized? My ISP? That might work, assuming they care enough to want to make me happy.
The ISP of the end node where the FPS game server is? That is definitely a possibility, especially if the FPS is a commercial entity willing to pay their ISP for prioritization. That's great! Now we're all set to have high bandwidth and low latency, right?
Not so fast. There are two other network providers that my packets need to traverse in order to communicate with the FPS game server. I have no relationship with those network providers, nor does the host of the FPS game server. Those guys have their traffic shaping configured to support *their* needs and have no incentive to prioritize your packets.
That doesn't mean that prioritization at the ends won't help, it just illustrates the fact that the decentralized nature of the internet makes end-to-end prioritization highly problematic.
Which is why many enterprises purchase links from a single network provider (which traffic does *not* traverse the Internet) to provide VOIP and video services between across their various sites. That way, they can prioritize VOIP traffic or video conferences over backups, email, file transfers, etc.
I guess I gave more than a nutshell explanation, but I hope it gives you an idea as to how Internet-wide prioritization is impractical and unlikely.
Which leads us to Net Neutrality. Which specifically requires network providers *not* to implement specific QOS or traffic shaping, within their own networks, unless it's necessary for congestion control and/or network management.
Actually, at least in the U.S., you do. It is illegal for the Government (ala the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, although that's been spotty over the past couple hundred years). There is no law that forbids (at least none of which I am aware) private entities to censor whatever they want on their premises (or in this case, their pipes).
"No shirt. No shoes. No service."
"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, at the discretion of management."
Private entities are not bound by the strictures of the U.S. Constitution. Only the Federal government and (with the Supremacy clause and the 14th Amendment) the several states.
As I mentioned, the net neutrality doctrine disallows traffic shaping/QOS (inside the provider's network) for anything other than network congestion or management. If there is no more net neutrality, ISPs could do *exactly* as I suggested in my example.
What's more, what if I'm not a corporation streaming video or audio, but a human rights or political activist? Without net neutrality, ISPs who disagree with me could just refuse to pass my network traffic. And without net neutrality, ISPs could, with impunity. block your access to the websites of political candidates you support or make access so slow that the site is unusable. Alternatively, they could give preferential access to those you dislike.
Yes, it's about streaming media. But make no mistake, it's also about censorship.
Let's focus on those streaming services for a moment. I don't use Netflix. But if I did, I *pay* my ISP to deliver the bits I request within the limits of the bandwidth I pay for. Guess what? Netflix pays their ISP for the bandwidth they use too. So. Everyone is paying to have the bits they want transmitted to/from them. Why is that somehow unfair to ISPs?
And if ISPs can pick and choose who they accept bits from (or who you send bits to) for their customers, what's to stop them from deciding what is acceptable traffic on their network and what it isn't?
A few scenarios of what could happen without net neutrality:
ISP A's management are devout Catholics. They do not support abortion rights, so they block access to Planned Parenthood for their customers. Without net neutrality, that's a possibility.
ISP B's management are staunchly Republican (or Democratic). Without net neutrality, they could decide that they don't wish to support Democrats (or Republicans) and block (or throttle) access to the group they disfavor. Or they give priority access to the those from the group they favor.
So you see, whether it's streaming media that competes with an ISPs own content or sites (or even you) that don't comport with their ideas about what's proper, it's all the same principle. You many not care about streaming media, but there are much bigger issues at stake with net neutrality.
Allowing ISPs to pick and choose content to favor and disfavor, you open the door to exactly the censorship you say you oppose.
I don't pretend (okay, maybe I do :) ) to have all the answers, but despite what some folks may tell you, net neutrality is, in fact, a big deal.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:24PM (8 children)
Not trying to beat a dead horse, but Netflix (at least in the past, using "net neutrality" to try to justify the behavior) did not pay for the data it was generating and sending into others' networks, but instead tried to abuse no-fee peering agreements (the backbone version of ISPs' "unlimited" Internet access). Here's an arstechnica article [arstechnica.com] that speaks to Netflix' schemes.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:03PM (7 children)
I've already gone through this several times. Netflix paid for their own bandwidth. Comcast is responsible for having enough bandwidth to support their customers.
The congestion was all on Comcast's side, because they did not have sufficient capacity to support its contractual obligations to their customers.
I addressed this in more detail here [soylentnews.org] and here [soylentnews.org].
Once more, Netflix pays for its bandwidth and Comcast pays for its bandwidth. One of the two didn't have enough bandwidth capacity to support their customers. That was Comcast.
I'd say the horse is beaten to a bloody pulp by now.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:15PM (6 children)
No, Netflix didn't pay. Netflix tried to drive a dump truck up to a buffet table that explicitly disallowed taking food outside. Netflix tried to use unpaid peering agreements that explicitly demand a balance of incoming and outgoing traffic to dump their huge load of unbalanced traffic on.
Netflix did not pay for the data they sent.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:44PM (5 children)
Bullshit. You are either ignorant, misinformed or a shill for the ISPs.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:22PM (4 children)
Nope. As repeatedly explained, as as you claim to grasp, no-fee peering agreements require that inbound and outbound traffic be roughly balanced. Netflix was demonstrably making use of no-fee peering agreements to send its traffic around the Internet.
If you disagree, then you are claiming that Netflix generates roughly the same incoming traffic to its own networks as it sends in streaming video out to others' networks. That idea is, in your own word, bullshit.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:19PM (3 children)
Netflix was not a party to those peering agreements, either ones between Level 3 and Comcast or Cogent and Comcast.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:35PM (2 children)
True, but irrelevant, as Netflix paid Level 3 and Cogent for access to their no-fee peering agreements with Comcast, which Netflix' traffic load then violated. Comcast isn't the bad guy IN THIS CASE no matter which way you slice it. In my book, Level 3, Cogent, AND Netflix are all scumbags IN THIS CASE.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:23PM (1 child)
You're welcome to your opinion. I respectfully disagree.
Cogent and Level 3 *unbalanced* the peering agreement with Comcast. That it was traffic from Netflix is the part (from a legal standpoint) that's irrelevant. What's more, unbalanced perring isn't generally considered a *violation* of a peering agreement. It likely can annoy people and require a re-negotiation of the peering agreement, but traffic fluctuates significantly from month to month and discussions/changes are a normal part of managing the relationship between network peers.
I have no great love for any of these players, although I will say that having used Level 3, Cogent *and* Comcast as ISPs at the same time in various locations around the US both before, during, and after this debacle, Cogent had, hands down, the best service, up-time and customer support of the three. Comcast was so bad that we tried to replace them, but aside from (IIRC) XO (our primary ISP at that location), Comcast was the only local provider at that time who could provide the bandwidth we required at a reasonable cost.
My experience with these ISPs isn't really relevant to the Netflix debacle, but it does inform my understanding of the regard in which they hold their customers.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:57PM
You're trying to pick at the smallest of nits in an attempt to avoid admitting that Comcast was the only rational actor among it, Netflix, Cogent, and Level 3.
Netflix viewers won't suddenly start sending Netflix streaming video next month. That traffic imbalance is huge and one way only.
That Comcast is also a giant ball of sucked scum is irrelevant to this specific situation. You hang a murderer for the murder, not because he smelled like poop and was a huge jerk.