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FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

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Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#51

Post by pjc50 »

jerkstate wrote: post #16

Does anyone with a strong understanding of internetworking, peering and transit contract negotiation actually believe that "net neutrality" is possible? traffic shaping of saturated links seems like a necessary outcome to not undermine the smaller users (i.e. low bandwidth communications) that are impacted by heavy users (i.e. video streaming) if two peering parties can't come to terms on cost sharing for link upgrad…

Interesting example there, because if you apply traffic shaping against video streaming you either force it to reduce quality or ruin it completely.

What everyone is worried about is that ISPs will threaten to "shape" Netflix traffic unless Netflix pay them - straightforward extortion. Or zero-rate Facebook traffic while counting use of independent non-Facebook news sources against users' quotas.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#53

Post by wtallis »

grandalf wrote: post #46
riskable wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone actually believe we will "run out of bandwidth" to the point where traffic shaping will become essential? Traffic shaping of saturated links sounds like a waste of time and resources when it's so much easier to just upgrade the hardware. It's cheaper too! It also happens to be the fucking purpose of the ISP (to provide adequate bandwidth for their customers). Think of how much it costs to pay people to ma…

> Traffic shaping of saturated links sounds like a waste of time and resources when it's so much easier to just upgrade the hardware. It's cheaper too! It also happens to be the fucking purpose of the ISP (to provide adequate bandwidth for their customers). This is a very naive comment. For anything other than a dedicated "business class" circuit with hard performance guarantees, speculation and shaping is involved i…

> For anything other than a dedicated "business class" circuit with hard performance guarantees, speculation and shaping is involved in delivering the end product.

The alternative to a connection with a SLA guarantee is a best effort connection, not discriminatory traffic shaping. Underprovisioning part of your network doesn't require you to show favoritism to certain traffic—the normal way to cope with larger than expected usage is to just start dropping packets where there's congestion. That doesn't imply or require traffic shaping.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#54

Post by seibelj »

I know several people who are highly involved with the FCC, telecom industry, and telecom law that think that "network neutrality" is just 2 words. Until 1970, and only because of lawsuits, it was illegal to connect anything to your phone line. You could get any phone you wanted from Ma Bell as long as it was black.[0] If you wanted a different color you had to pay extra. It took force to make Ma Bell and the FCC allow you to plug in your own phone, your own computer, etc. The FCC supports monopolies, if you want competition you should applaud the deregulation of telecom.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone#Ownership_...

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#55

Post by arebop »

dopamean wrote: post #40
dragonwriter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Republican Party is against net neutrality and now controls a majority of seats on the FCC, hence, the FCC now opposes net neutrality. Since the issue really became a big deal, the FCC has been split on party lines over it.

Then why are Republicans against net neutrality? I suspect the answer is "money" and that the wrong people are greasing the right palms to get this done. If that really is the truth then why aren't companies in tech doing more of the same to protect their interests? How the hell is it that companies like Comcast have the upper hand here?

Comcast is/should be willing to spend the net present value of their future revenue streams to defend their monopoly. Ditto AT&T, Verizon, etc. The combined market cap of these companies is a pretty big lobbying bill to pay even for Apple, let alone Netflix. Google tried just building a competitive network but apparently they didn't have the stomach to combine network construction with lobbying at the necessary scale.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#56

Post by and0 »

guelo wrote: post #44
subverter wrote: post #39

This raises the limit on the number of subscribers a provider can have before regulation kicks in. In other words, a larger number of smaller providers have one less regulation to worry about. Isn't more competition among providers what we want? Shouldn't we be doing everything we can – even if it's saving 6.8 hours per year in regulatory compliance – to help these smaller guys be able to take on these horrible behem…

Do we want secret network caps and slowdowns to be how they compete against the big boys?

This ^

I say this every time and no one has ever been able to answer: how is a simple "don't prioritize traffic" some kind of competition-killing regulation, and how would removing it actually create competition anyway?

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#57

Post by bubblethink »

subverter wrote: post #39

This raises the limit on the number of subscribers a provider can have before regulation kicks in. In other words, a larger number of smaller providers have one less regulation to worry about. Isn't more competition among providers what we want? Shouldn't we be doing everything we can – even if it's saving 6.8 hours per year in regulatory compliance – to help these smaller guys be able to take on these horrible behem…

What's a provider ? Can't you arbitrarily break a provider into smaller ones to avoid triggering this rule ?

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#58

Post by wtallis »

subverter wrote: post #39

This raises the limit on the number of subscribers a provider can have before regulation kicks in. In other words, a larger number of smaller providers have one less regulation to worry about. Isn't more competition among providers what we want? Shouldn't we be doing everything we can – even if it's saving 6.8 hours per year in regulatory compliance – to help these smaller guys be able to take on these horrible behem…

> Isn't more competition among providers what we want?

Only at some levels. Physical last-mile connectivity is a natural monopoly; we shouldn't want more than one trench along each driveway. If an ISP has a local monopoly that only covers one city rather than a whole state, that doesn't change the dynamics of what's fair to their users.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#59

Post by grandalf »

jerkstate wrote: post #16

Does anyone with a strong understanding of internetworking, peering and transit contract negotiation actually believe that "net neutrality" is possible? traffic shaping of saturated links seems like a necessary outcome to not undermine the smaller users (i.e. low bandwidth communications) that are impacted by heavy users (i.e. video streaming) if two peering parties can't come to terms on cost sharing for link upgrad…

> actually believe that "net neutrality" is possible?

I don't think very many of the net-neutrality zealots have much technical understanding of internetworking or how ISP business models work.

Anything other than a dedicated, business class circuit has a lot of shaping and speculation baked in. This is why "residential" bandwidth is so much cheaper than dedicated.

One commenter last time this came up mentioned that the best practice for residential bandwidth providers is to have 50% headroom. As QoS algorithms get better, and traffic patterns are better understood, the amount of headroom ISPs need to buy will decrease, or it will get cheaper (as upstream providers arbitrage into a peak / off-peak (expected vs unexpected) model.

The thing we need to preserve about ISP incentives is that there should always be an incentive to improve network quality.

However for networks, quality is in the eye of the beholder. If your customers want to download 4K movies, maybe 1000ms of latency is not a big deal.

But if they want to do remote screen sharing or gaming (where even small latency is noticeable) then 1000ms latency would cause the ISP to go out of business.

The technical aspect of this that many people miss is that the same piece of cable can support very different traffic patterns (often but not always) AT THE EXPENSE OF other ones. Net neutrality seemingly advocates having lawyers and politicians come up with the "correct" shaping for all traffic, with no knowledge of what an ISP's customers want to use the circuit for, and no knowledge of what protocols might become popular next year.

Net Neutrality advocates want politicians and lawyers to effectively force ISPs to support a QoS that is closer to some unspecified ideal which those pols and lawyers have no idea about. They are simply being pressured/hired to do something they are clueless about, which helps some businesses and hurts others.

Google wants net neutrality because all service providers prefer that others bear the cost of delivering their content to end users. All content providers would generally agree.

But last mile providers would disagree, because they are faced with spikes in demand and growing/shrinking user-bases and are fighting not just against the price of bandwidth but the technological limits imposed by cable modems, LTE, etc. They would rather not have added constraints placed upon them (which will add costs).

While someday it may be necessary to prevent predatory QoS schemes from being imposed, there is not an adequate level of sophistication in regulators to trust them to create wise regulation in this area.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#60

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

seibelj wrote: post #54

I know several people who are highly involved with the FCC, telecom industry, and telecom law that think that "network neutrality" is just 2 words. Until 1970, and only because of lawsuits, it was illegal to connect anything to your phone line. You could get any phone you wanted from Ma Bell as long as it was black.[0] If you wanted a different color you had to pay extra. It took force to make Ma Bell and the FCC all…

How do you imagine the deregulation in this article will help competition? Specifically, that is.
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