ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law • Hacker News Board

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#321

Post by wtallis » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

amadvance wrote: post #155

d110af5ccf wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can they selectively drop packets Absolutely not. That practice should literally be illegal. > or do they have to drop them randomly? Yes. This is the only reasonable approach. > And can you pay to be in a “never drop my packets” group? No. That should be illegal to offer. If the ISP's network is incapable of meeting their customer's demands during peak hours and they oversubscribed themselves so badly that they're…

> > Can they selectively drop packets > Absolutely not. That practice should literally be illegal. Why not ? From an engineering point of view, with a scarce resource, dropping only the biggest user (Netflix) looks reasonable. Obviously, it should be illegal to ask money to do not have them dropped.

> From an engineering point of view, with a scarce resource, dropping only the biggest user (Netflix) looks reasonable.

The decision of who is the biggest user needs to be made in realtime at the point of congestion, not identified on a quarterly basis by the accounting department and pushed out as policy across the whole network.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#322

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #262

jaywalk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a consumer ISP anywhere that doesn't oversubscribe bandwidth. It makes zero sense to give a residential connection dedicated bandwidth.

That's an absurd proposition. If you can't guarantee to not oversubscribe at least 10mbit/s on a 100mbit/s plan what's the point of advertising it as such?

[deleted]

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#323

Post by wtallis » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #299

wtallis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can pay for better QoS, which will result in better QoS for their customers if they want. Please, stop using QoS as a synonym for explicit prioritization. QoS strategies have advanced greatly since the 1990s, and the goal of providing better quality of service should not be used to defend obsolete non-neutral techniques. Net neutrality and QoS are not conflicting goals, and enforcing net neutrality is an excel…

I used to work in networking to help define such QoS terms, and clearly you didn't read what I wrote because I'm using QoS as an example of how to properly do Net Neutrality.

You seem to be using QoS to refer exclusively to stuff like DiffServ. That's wrong, even if it was widely accepted back in whatever decade you were working in networking. The DiffServ/DSCP mindset for how to achieve QoS is obsolete and inferior, and encourages non-neutral network management to the detriment of everybody except the ISPs that get to charge third parties extra for fast lanes and the few content providers who can afford to pay for the fast lane.

If your mental model of QoS treats packet scheduling as a zero-sum game and views latency and bandwidth as inversely related (implied by one of your other comments in this thread), then you're more than a decade out of date. Business models based on such wrong ideas do not deserve any protection from public policy.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#324

Post by Nullabillity » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

jaywalk wrote: post #238

Karunamon wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe regulators should look into that? Common practices or not, it’s nothing short of fraudulent to sell something you know you can’t provide.

They're selling a service that provides "up to" the quoted speeds. Generally, the provisioned rate is actually higher than the quoted speeds, so unless the ISP is particularly awful they definitely can provide those speeds. Just not 100% of the time, which is why they're "up to." The amount of capacity required to guarantee speeds would be massive. And how far does that extend? Does the ISP have to maintain that capa…

> They're selling a service that provides "up to" the quoted speeds. Generally, the provisioned rate is actually higher than the quoted speeds, so unless the ISP is particularly awful they definitely can provide those speeds. Just not 100% of the time, which is why they're "up to."

No, the "up to" is written in such tiny print that it's practically invisible. It's not what people think they are buying.

The ethical thing to do would be to sell it as "X, bursts up to Y", with legislation ensuring that X is displayed at least as prominently as Y.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#325

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 8:47 AM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #300

2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my neighbor streams a movie from Netflix and I download a Linux ISO at the same time, there's no reason why the ISP should be allowed to charge extra from my neighbor or from Netflix, but not charge me or the guy hosting the Debian mirror. Netflix, the Debian mirror, my neighbor and I are all paying for our connections. If we saturate the agreed-upon bandwidth then the ISP's could offer to sell more bandwidth. If…

You're confusing things a bit. Item 1) 'nor reason to charge extra for Netflix'. Of course there is a reason: QoS. You neighbour might want a low-latency, high bandwidth service that doesn't worry about packet loss. You might want a service which is better for downloads: no worries about latency, medium speed, no packet loss. Different prices for different services. Also - Netflix may choose to subsidize their servic…

Frankly, I don't see why both me and my neighbor can't have low-latency, high-speed connectiosn without packet loss. We manage to have such things outside the US so I assume you lot should manage on the other side pf the pond too.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#326

Post by ekianjo » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 3:44 PM UTC

lelandfe wrote: post #212

ekianjo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. Really? Some highly developed countries have fairly expensive Internet as well. Not sure the US is much of an exception, if you consider not just the cheapest countries.

It's definitely expensive (2014 data): https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared... > the United States ranks second on the list of OECD countries, behind only Mexico, for most expensive internet prices > When we look at Europe as a whole, we can see that the United States pays more for broadband internet access than any other country on the continent; in fact, rates in the US are more than double…

> > the United States ranks second on the list of OECD countries, behind only Mexico, for most expensive internet prices

Looking at absolute cost is not a good metric. You have to factor the cost vs the median purchasing power otherwise the comparison is meaningless.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#327

Post by kelnos » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 11:23 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #150

kelnos wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Arguments that center on what the Founding Fathers actually intended for the country fall flat for me because a) how do you know what they actually intended I think it's further than that: regardless what they intended , it's very easy to see the opposing views of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists via their respective Papers. It's pretty clear that some of the founders wanted a strong central government, and som…

The thing people forget though, is that fight continues to this very day, and it is with We The People that the right to determine and change where that balance sits. Frankly, I think the Federal Government is just aggregating greater and greater degrees of power over time, and becoming a political sledgehammer reached for out of expedience.

That's a fair point, but I don't think either major political party seriously wants a smaller central government. Democrats explicitly want to provide more social services, and Republicans claim to want smaller government, but what they seem to actually want (through their actions) is less regulation, but with the government itself not really much smaller.

Certainly some parties -- like libertarians -- would actually enact policies to make the central government truly smaller were they to come into power, but they are guaranteed not to with our electoral system as it is.

While in theory We The People have the right to determine all this, in practice we have little choice, it seems.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#328

Post by lelandfe » Mon, Apr 25, 2022, 1:28 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #326

lelandfe wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely expensive (2014 data): https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared... > the United States ranks second on the list of OECD countries, behind only Mexico, for most expensive internet prices > When we look at Europe as a whole, we can see that the United States pays more for broadband internet access than any other country on the continent; in fact, rates in the US are more than double…

> > the United States ranks second on the list of OECD countries, behind only Mexico, for most expensive internet prices Looking at absolute cost is not a good metric. You have to factor the cost vs the median purchasing power otherwise the comparison is meaningless.

That's a great point!

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#329

Post by hansel_der » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 7:18 AM UTC

noworriesnate wrote: post #231

hansel_der wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isp contracts usually include something called an Service Level Agreement (SLA) that gives room for this sort of service degredation. maybe there should be some discussion over statistical properties of that degredation and minimum service levels, because ppl tend to watch tv at roughly the same time.

Instead of regulating the statistical properties of the degradation, what if we just required ISPs to refund customers for times when they tried to use the bandwidth they were sold but couldn’t? Maybe the refunds could be 1.2 times the original price of that bandwidth. So if there’s an outage, you don’t pay for that time. That might line up the incentives better.

it's not only about outages.

cable customers routinely see service degredation (reduced bandwitdh, packet loss) at peak usage hours, because the lastmile topology is a shared resource (ring/bus) with an oversubscription ratio >20. (tbf docsis 3.1 did get it somewhat under control)

most (non gamer/tec) customers don't bother/notice unless it's so bad that their voip or netflix craps out. isp support will shift the blame to wifi (also shared resource) and noones the wiser.