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Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

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Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

#291

Post by takeda »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #12

Thanks in part to net neutrality, the open internet has grown to become an unrivaled source of choice, competition, innovation, free expression, and opportunity. Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1…

> Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.

The net neutrality was not necessary early on because it was not feasible in the past to control it on such large scale.

So between 1980-2015 net neutrality (did not exist as a law) but was there indirectly in forms of:

- the technology at the time did not allow for deep packet inspection

- net neutrality was indirectly present due to telecom regulations. For example telecom could not just block calls as they wished. So during dial-up times anyone could enter that market and provide service and cost was low. During the time of DSL there was a regulation that required telecom companies to lease their lines so again cost to enter and be DSL ISP was relatively low. There's no such thing with cable companies.

> Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."

I think you're misunderstanding it. This has nothing to do with Internet being a public good or not. It's all about controlling access to it.

What net neutrality does in a nutshell is preventing the ISPs (which provide Internet access) from being able to censor at their whim what you can access.

In normal scenario, free market would solve this issue. No one would use ISPs that place restrictions on their service and would move the competitors.

The problem is that we don't have a normal scenario, we have regional monopolies, and if you don't like your ISP, tough luck.

It's also nearly impossible to enter this market anymore, for example Google was attempting to deploy Google Fiber, but even they failed.

We need net neutrality now more than ever, because a single company essentially now will be able to control what content you can access. It would be a smaller issue if each region had its own separate company, but in reality the only companies that benefit on this you probably can count on your one hand.

Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

#292

Post by DaemonKrog »

bobcallme wrote: post #32

"Net Neutrality" in its final form did not solve or fix any problems with the Internet. The definition of "Net Neutrality" is poorly defined, too vague and does not have any proposed legislation attached to "fix" things. Even when new rules were implemented, ISPs still throttled torrents and manipulated traffic. The only way to fix the Internet is to do so from a technical perspective, not by adding more regulations…

I'm also of the same opinion. So, don't think you're alone here.

Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

#293

Post by magila »

cheald wrote: post #241
nickysielicki wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Neutrality regulations have jack-all to do with peering mutual maintenance agreements. Can you please write more about this, or provide some links where I can learn more? I don't feel I have an understanding of how peering would change under proposed net neutrality rules. Particularly, I am curious about the claim that "[Comcast was not throttling Netflix traffic]". Under the proposed FCC rules, would it be claimed…

> I don't feel I have an understanding of how peering would change under proposed net neutrality rules. tl;dr: I don't think the neutrality end of the rules would change peering at all, and peering disputes are never grounded in the kinds of things that neutrality seeks to protect. Title II classification permits the FCC to arbitrate peering disputes, which is a desirable side effect for people who just want to watch…

The idea that settlement-free peering always assumes symmetric flows is a common myth. Nobody expects peering with a residential ISP to have symmetric traffic because that doesn't make sense, of course the flows are going to be overwhelmingly towards the residential side of the link.

Back in 2014 when all this was going on Level 3 published an unusually scathing series of blog posts where they called out residential ISPs for deliberately allowing their exchange links to saturate in order to extort extra payments from Level 3 and their customers.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140512082831/http://blog.level3... http://web.archive.org/web/20140512082813/http://blog.level3... http://web.archive.org/web/20150508143932/http://blog.level3... http://web.archive.org/web/20150313121250/http://blog.level3... http://web.archive.org/web/20150320123512/http://blog.level3...

Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

#294

Post by EdSharkey »

logicalmind wrote: post #174
EdSharkey wrote: post #87

I don't understand the logic of ISP's throttling certain sites based on the traffic to those sites. As a consumer on ISP's last mile lines, I make a series of TCP requests and I expect responses. Fill my pipes with those responses as best you can and charge me for the privilege. If you're not making enough money on that, charge me more for the bandwidth. Market-wise, why would an ISP anything else than fill my pipe w…

The problem is that the ISP resources are shared resources. Some day we might all have 1Gbps+ fiber to our houses but today this doesn't exist. Many parts of the network you use to access the internet are common to some other set of people. So if you were to saturate your internet line, your neighbors (or possible more people) would have seriously deteriorated access. There is no way around this problem without upgra…

I can't speak to what ISP's want and I do not know what is truly going on here. But, from my vantage point I get the sense there's open warfare going on between these companies. Everyone is using their pipes on the internet and in Washington, trying to knock the others off their game. Net neutrality appears to be one side's weapon in the war. The fact that net neutrality might work in my favor may just be accidental.

I can speak to what I want. I want to be charged for service. If the ISP's aren't charging me enough to make the money they need to make off the service they provide to me, I want them to charge me more. And, if they get too greedy, then let a competitor try to come in and charge me a bit less for similar services.

What I'm saying is basically let the market do its thing. It can't do its thing if we have these ISP's unfairly using their position to snipe at competing companies' streams flowing over their pipes. It's not transparent, and they're going to double-dip anyways - charging me AND the popular websites for using their pipes.

What I'm saying is basically we can't have the market do its thing when ISP's are allowed to be more than a dumb pipe and a host for near caches.

Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

#295

Post by cheald »

monocasa wrote: post #290
cheald wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't feel I have an understanding of how peering would change under proposed net neutrality rules. tl;dr: I don't think the neutrality end of the rules would change peering at all, and peering disputes are never grounded in the kinds of things that neutrality seeks to protect. Title II classification permits the FCC to arbitrate peering disputes, which is a desirable side effect for people who just want to watch…

> Comcast claimed that the agreement's settlement-free status depended on maintenance of a roughly equal exchange ratio - traffic in from Cogent to Comcast should be appropriately balanced with traffic out from Comcast over Cogent. Eh, Comcast was being extremely disingenuous, trying to act like a Tier 1 ISP. For Tier 1s like Cogent, they expect to more or less equally peer. Ie. BGP routes and the physical routers th…

I do agree that Comcast was stretching the argument, but I'm pretty convinced that it was to try to gain business leverage against Cogent, rather than to try to justify jacking up prices for their customers who watched Netflix. I'm not arguing that Comcast's actions were particularly noble or righteous, but rather, that they were fighting with Cogent, not with Netflix.

> Comcast was trying to make the argument that Netflix was unduly routing traffic unto Comcast's network... but all of that traffic were packets that had been specifically requested by Comcast customers. It's not Cogent's fault that Comcast's customers have asymmetric traffic patterns.

Comcast was arguing that Cogent was unduly routing traffic onto Comcast's network (the majority of which happened to be Netflix traffic). You're certainly right that it's not Cogent's fault that Comcast's customers have asymmetric traffic patterns, but it is Cogent's fault that they've been historically abusive to their peers on the pretext of the traditional agreements built around symmetric exchange. I think that Comcast just got fed up with Cogent throwing its weight around and saw an opportunity in Netflix's huge amounts of traffic to force Cogent into terms more favorable to Comcast.

(It's pretty clear that Comcast won that round, IMO - but the loser was Cogent, not Netflix.)

Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

#296

Post by pas »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #40
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't the spirit of the Internet always been about a neutral Internet? That spirit was being threatened and so regulations were put in place to keep it neutral.

We have retroactively latched on to this RMS style idea of a digital library of alexandria that has somehow been abandoned. It's like nobody remembers the internet of the 90s and how blatantly over the top siloed it was for the average AOL style user. I mean I remember my paid dial up internet service came on a floppy and had it's own browser and pop-up ads. The "free" services required that you click on header links…

Yet from the network perspective, there was not much preferential routing based on service providers, because consolidation is always a late stage thing. (Where content and connection providers combined.)

Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

#298

Post by pheldagryph »

I understand why tech companies and VCs want net neutrality. But this protest is what is wrong with Silicon Valley "culture". It's incredibly out of touch with reality.

Are we really being asked to take this hill? Why? By whom?

History will record the hundreds of thousands of children who will die of the current-and-present famine affecting East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. It will only exacerbate the current, historic, and costly human migration to Europe.

This is a matter of life and death for millions. Though, unfortunately, the cost can only be measured in human lives: https://www.oxfam.org/en/emergencies/famine-and-hunger-crisi...

Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

#299

Post by redy »

wwweston wrote: post #283
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no safeguard in place that could prevent such a course of action if it were attempted I can tell you for certain that there are dozens of safeguards. That scenario not only isn't possible, it's not plausible. Yes the President has the "codes" but those codes don't launch the missiles [1]. The scenario described is one in which there are literally nuclear warheads on a ballistic t…

The article you're citing appears to support the point it seems like you're trying to contradict -- it describes a system where the president is given explicit authority at every stage. There are opportunities for others to dissuade him, but he has every freedom to disregard them, and they have absolutely nothing in the way of legal power to stop him. The only check currently seems to be people disobeying his orders,…

Mutiny is likely. American officers in particular will tend not to follow orders to commit an obvious war crime. This isn't an extralegal check , it's very much legal.

But the system will fail if "the whole chain is stupid." This is why it's so dangerous to have a President obsessed with loyalty.

Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

#300

Post by calafrax »

mabbo wrote: post #19

If Google were actually serious about Net Neutrality, they would use their insane market power to protect it. How? Well, a simple statement saying "any ISP who abuses net neutrality will have their customers cut off from Google products". No Google search, no YouTube, no Gmail. Have those requests instead redirect to a website telling the customer what their ISP is doing, why Google won't work with them, and how to c…

I think Google should allow neutral public access to their 100,000 mile private fiber optic network.

That would really send a statement that they were serious about network neutrality.

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