Decius wrote:
To be perfectly honest with you, I think this is bunch of fucking bullshit.

Except for the computer chick at 0:33. Mmmm... Love that 70's getup.

Can the phone companies do wrong? Yes, of course they can. Blocking or degrading service to existing customers who have already agreed to pay for "Internet" access should not be legal.

As best I understand that is the main thrust of the Net Neutrality argument. Everything else you described seems to be superfluous to the issue.

Hijexx wrote:
As best I understand that is the main thrust of the Net Neutrality argument. Everything else you described seems to be superfluous to the issue.

That is because you've been mislead. With regard to laws that say "the internet shall be neutral" there is literally no difference between a situation where you have a base latency of X and they add on a special low latency connection to a particular video server such that your latency to that particular server is now Y instead of X, and a situation where you have a base latency of Y and they degrade your performance other than to that video server such that your base latency becomes X and your latency to that video server becomes Y. Net Neutrality laws would ban both situations, and the later is extremely unlikely to occur in practice. It is literally a law that prohibits ISPs from setting up leased circuits or SLAed channels to particular servers.

Decius wrote:

Hijexx wrote:
As best I understand that is the main thrust of the Net Neutrality argument. Everything else you described seems to be superfluous to the issue.

That is because you've been mislead. With regard to laws that say "the internet shall be neutral" there is literally no difference between a situation where you have a base latency of X and they add on a special low latency connection to a particular video server such that your latency to that particular server is now Y instead of X, and a situation where you have a base latency of Y and they degrade your performance other than to that video server such that your base latency becomes X and your latency to that video server becomes Y. Net Neutrality laws would ban both situations, and the later is extremely unlikely to occur in practice. It is literally a law that prohibits ISPs from setting up leased circuits or SLAed channels to particular servers.

I haven't read the actual laws being ballyed about, so I can't say that it would or wouldn't cause that situation. To me, it's moot. The root problem is monopoly protection of last mile providers, most of which was stolen (acquisition of @Home properties by Comcast, Cablevision, Adelphia et all at ridiculous valuations) or hijacked (acquisition of BellSouth, Qwest, NYNEX, Ameritech, etc by ATT & Verizon over the years while using tax abatements, and the USF fees to boost profitability and valuations). Eliminate the monopoly protection and you eliminate the problem.

One thing that you're forgetting is that up until fairly recently, most Internet traffic was exchanged in public peering points, which gave everyone equal QoS through the exchange (and equal access to each other, that was the point). It was only within the last 8 years or so that private peering became a real concern and where private peering contracts would contain sections that would allow for tiers of QoS between peers. Within the last 3 or so years, this has gotten further up the stack to layer 4 and above. While technologically speaking, this is useful and tremendously nifty, it is being used for evil. If the net neutrality issue goes either way, all we'll be doing is entering into an arms race where core routing technology will get ever more sophisticated (and slower) to break the ever clandestine use of packets to evade detection or hijack better QoS levels than they should have. Someone will figure out a way to profit from that arms race and the customer will lose.

Unfortunetly being "informed" of the issue doesn't lead people to the root problem. It just polarizes everyone on the basis of "big business" versus "freedom", which is utterly insane. The issue has always been, and will continue to be, monopoly of access to the resource. The best solution to that which I've heard is to put the plant into a public trust and force every provider to lease it. In my mind, that's still suboptimal, but it's better than what we have today.

flynn23 wrote:
Unfortunetly being "informed" of the issue doesn't lead people to the root problem. It just polarizes everyone on the basis of "big business" versus "freedom", which is utterly insane. The issue has always been, and will continue to be, monopoly of access to the resource. The best solution to that which I've heard is to put the plant into a public trust and force every provider to lease it. In my mind, that's still suboptimal, but it's better than what we have today.

Thanks for these comments. I agree. I don't think a blanket promise of "network neutrality" is the right way to resolve the issue. Basically I think that a more nuanced approach of case by case analysis will work better. Net Neutrality is a good principal that can guide that debate, but it shouldn't be a law. There are all kinds of ways to provide enhanced performance for particular applications that I don't think we want to ban. Akami is a simple example. I also think there are clearly examples that are anti-competitive that perhaps we ought to ban in monopoly situations, such as the context where an ISP drops all traffic from a competitors VoIP offering.

I think there are cases in the middle that I'm not sure how I'd resolve. For example, in France, you can get an ATM (yup) circuit run to your house, with three IP connections running on it. One of these connections provides general internet access, one provides IPTV, and one provides Voice over IP. Each has it's own virtual circuit back to the phone company's POP with a fixed bandwidth. All three are essentially ethernet sub interfaces on your home lan. You can IP your laptop on the IPTV address space but it won't do you much good because there is no transit gateway on that network. Now, I'll bet that the VoIP you get down that VoIP VC is much more reliable than the VoIP you could get down the general internet pipe from another company. Should it be illegal for phone companies in the US to do the same thing? I don't see why.

I can think of things I would disagree with, such as the idea that you HAVE to buy that VoIP VC in order to by internet access and there is no competitor. We see similar things done with land lines in the USA all the time.... Gotta have a pots line to buy DSL. I don't think thats right. But I also don't think the phone companies should be prohibited from offering this kind of service.

I can see how they might use this sort of issue as a wedge in the debate about infrastructure improvements, but if thats the case I think this video is them winning. I think what we really need is leadership from Congress and perhaps the FCC that says we need more bandwidth, and I think debating net neutrality diverts attention that discussion.

Decius wrote:

flynn23 wrote:
Unfortunetly being "informed" of the issue doesn't lead people to the root problem. It just polarizes everyone on the basis of "big business" versus "freedom", which is utterly insane. The issue has always been, and will continue to be, monopoly of access to the resource. The best solution to that which I've heard is to put the plant into a public trust and force every provider to lease it. In my mind, that's still suboptimal, but it's better than what we have today.

Thanks for these comments. I agree. I don't think a blanket promise of "network neutrality" is the right way to resolve the issue. Basically I think that a more nuanced approach of case by case analysis will work better. Net Neutrality is a good principal that can guide that debate, but it shouldn't be a law. There are all kinds of ways to provide enhanced performance for particular applications that I don't think we want to ban. Akami is a simple example. I also think there are clearly examples that are anti-competitive that perhaps we ought to ban in monopoly situations, such as the context where an ISP drops all traffic from a competitors VoIP offering.

I think there are cases in the middle that I'm not sure how I'd resolve. For example, in France, you can get an ATM (yup) circuit run to your house, with three IP connections running on it. One of these connections provides general internet access, one provides IPTV, and one provides Voice over IP. Each has it's own virtual circuit back to the phone company's POP with a fixed bandwidth. All three are essentially ethernet sub interfaces on your home lan. You can IP your laptop on the IPTV address space but it won't do you much good because there is no transit gateway on that network. Now, I'll bet that the VoIP you get down that VoIP VC is much more reliable than the VoIP you could get down the general internet pipe from another company. Should it be illegal for phone companies in the US to do the same thing? I don't see why.

That's pretty much how DOCSIS works on cable. There are devoted channels for separate IP services and they are QoS'd at layer 2. Ironically, on the telco side, ATM has gone the way of the dodo bird because everyone fell in love with IP. Besides the fact that IP is much much cheaper, it has delivered us to this place where in order to get the same control that you had with ATM, we're now having to dink around with crap like net neutrality. I agree that it should be the service provider's choice on how to engineer and provision their network. The problem in the US (nay, the world, let's get real) is that the last mile providers ALWAYS use this as a bargaining chip to protect their monopoly status. So in effect, you have to fight fire with fire. That system is stupid and needs to be repealed. Open up the competition and get rid of the regulation. Doing one or the other will not solve the problem.

I can see how they might use this sort of issue as a wedge in the debate about infrastructure improvements, but if thats the case I think this video is them winning. I think what we really need is leadership from Congress and perhaps the FCC that says we need more bandwidth, and I think debating net neutrality diverts attention that discussion.

That's precisely the point. The telecom industry plays DC like a master fiddler. They're doing this on purpose and it has a high strategic relevance. You will continue to see the US fall in relative terms to the rest of the world in bandwidth availability (and ultimately innovation, and economic growth) until they get what they want. They're going to use upgrades as the stick. We should've had FTTH back in 1992. It was available and doable. Think about THAT for minute.

Hijexx wrote:

Decius wrote:
To be perfectly honest with you, I think this is bunch of fucking bullshit.

Except for the computer chick at 0:33. Mmmm... Love that 70's getup.

Can the phone companies do wrong? Yes, of course they can. Blocking or degrading service to existing customers who have already agreed to pay for "Internet" access should not be legal.

As best I understand that is the main thrust of the Net Neutrality argument. Everything else you described seems to be superfluous to the issue.

See this.

Net Neutrality prevents Internet providers from speeding up... Web content based on its source,... or destination.

Decius wrote:
To be perfectly honest with you, I think this is bunch of fucking bullshit.

The internet is not neutral, and has never been neutral, and none of these people who are arguing about net neutrality are willing to acknowledge what that really means nor do they have any interest in it actually happening!

Around the turn of the decade I used to make (completely futile) arguments that we should have symmetric technologies like IDSL rather than things like cable modems in our homes. They would provide an infrastructure where consumers REALLY had the ability to serve content and peer to peer networks would work well. No one cared. There were no lawyers arguing that the phone companies ought to provide more upstream bandwidth. There was no "grass roots" effort to advocate that symmetric links be made available in the marketplace at consumer prices. I couldn't even convince people in the hacker scene that I was right. Literally, no one cared.

Now, because we built this asymmetric infrastructure, you can't effectively serve content from your home; you have to use a service provider, or you have to buy an artificially expensive symmetric link. You can't even get a static IP address from AT&T for a residential connection at any price! For some people, like me, that want to host a full website, this means we have to spend a lot of money on colocation in a place where static IP addresses and symmetric connections are available. I've spent enough on hosting MemeStreams over the years that I could have bought a car at this point. For others, with, well, more mainstream kinds of content that they want to host, there are services available, like YouTube, Blogger, and MySpace. Those services are making hundreds of millions of dollars selling advertising on the content that their users are creating! And NOW all of a sudden there are all these people who claim to care about "net neutrality."

It is those hundreds of millions of dollars that are funding this "grass roots" effort! All this emotion and advocacy is NOT actually defending network neutrality. Its defending the status quo architecture which is not neutral, to protect the exclusivity of that revenue stream. That video, in then end, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Its overtly manipulative. Does Vint Cerf think Net Neutrality ought to mean that AT&T is required to sell me a static IP?

Furthermore, have online services like AOL and Compuserve ever been a problem? Are we suggesting that it ought to be ILLEGAL for them to offer a special closed garden specifically to their customers? If not, than what, specifically, are we suggesting? I don't understand the difference between that and most net neutrality proposals. No one can articulate exactly where they draw the line between these two things. The difference seems to be that AOL is OK because it started out that way, but services that currently only provide internet access cannot add close... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]