Net Neutreality

Gelare · Post by **Gelare** » Thu Apr 02, 2009 9:33 pm

Whatever the opposite of Net Neutrality is - Net Partiality? - is actually economically sound. When there are multiple qualities of a good, the people who want high quality can pay for it, and the people who want low quality can save money, and everybody's better off. It also increases the ability of firms with market power to extract profits - that is, the businesses get to hose us more efficiently.

As a matter of fact, I think Net Partiality would be a bad thing overall, but it's possible that as the net becomes more ubiquitous, that might change - people might find more value in being able to prioritize their stuff in certain ways.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Thu Apr 02, 2009 9:40 pm

The problem is that content companies may try to pay the cable companies to give them better service. This can't possibly work, but it would screw all of us and is the kind of bullshit that some executive somewhere might think is a good idea.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Apr 02, 2009 10:17 pm

The core problem is that everyone gets the best possible service by intermediate routers. So the only reason anyone could ever get better service by paying for the "higher quality" service is by default when the people who didn't pay for the higher quality service get their packets shoved to the back of the line.

So there's nothing being sold that people don't already have. At best, some people will fail to keep up with the state of the art and then the people who do will continue to get the best service. But honestly, we could get the same effect by imposing any other arbitrary barrier to entry on the internet. The more it costs to get your packets sent, the less packets will be sen and the less lag you personally will experience if you are one of the people still sending packets. Or if you go to Saudi Arabia and shoot everyone with an internet connection. That would drop the lag on your packets too.

But the whole "if other people would get off the internet, I would be less likely to hit lag" thing is just senseless misanthropy. If there are too many people throwing packets through the backbone the solution is to add more backbone, not to give economic incentives for less people to send packets. This isn't like land use or clean water where population control is a viable strategy. This is information. We want everyone to have it.

-Username17

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Thu Apr 02, 2009 11:34 pm

Currently the way it works is you pay your ISP, A, they pay a backbone, B, which connects to another ISP, C, which hosts a webpage or has other users like whoever you're Skyping.

Net Neutrality is saying that C cannot just ditch packets from A, because A didn't pay C (they paid B), and B cannot ask the users of A and C to pay more (because they paid A and C).

There's nothing in Net Neutrality stopping A and C from creating a secret tunnel where their packets go directly to each other; in fact, most ISPs are connected to several backbones to get the best coverage for their users. That would be an awesome premium service (well, as long as you wanted to talk from A to C, if B gets overloaded and you want to talk to D, it'd be a nightmare, because your packets would want to go from A to C to B to D instead of A to B to D because B is having trouble, but that's really an edge case that happens to pop up all the time.)

Google has servers all over the world. And in order to get the best service to its users, it often works with ISPs to allow it to control their cache of its data... Which is sorta against Net neutrality, but it's really just Google paying A and C to lower the number of duplicate packets it's sending through B. This doesn't affect A and C to get to each other; and it isn't A or C requiring Google to pay them off to get to their users.

Lastly, it has absolutely nothing to do with the words coming out of the guys' mouth (or cthu, you're really spouting nonsense here) I linked to, hence it being funny.

-Crissa

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:00 am

Can we stop with the 'and all your packets are dropped' scenario? We all agree it is retarded. Also the 'extortion or you cannot connect to comcast haha' situation is equally dumb. Now having established that.

, I seriously think that many, many people would make this trade off

Less data allowance for less latency

and more data allowance for more latency.

PPS: There just isn't any way to have high/low packets in TCP, UDP, current network architecture, okay?

ToS has been replaced by DiffServ.

Anyway, really it boils down to what you think is going to happen in the big bad world of the internet, and how viable over provisioning is going to be.

If you think that switched data via cables will continue to proliferate, and we'll get loads more backbone, and we can over provision all our links, we probably don't need it - current uses are corner cases.

If you think wireless is going to become more common, we're going to need QoS. Studies indicate that in a QoS'ed enviroment you can jam more, say, IPTV streams of voice calls through the same pipe than in an unregulated contention environment.

Why is wireless less able to be over provisioned? Spectrum limits mostly, you can start using 'microcells' to lower the ratio of Devices:APs, but the inescapable rule is that as devices increase then bandwidth and latency increases because their is contention.

http://www.cse.unr.edu/~yuksem/my-papers/iwqos07.pdf (Discloure, one of the authors works for AT&T and thus might be satan, but conculsions are reasonable to me)

Thats just my view, I think that data requirements will outstrip the ability to provision, if you don't (and heck if it doesn't) QoS isn't needed!

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 2:46 am

You still haven't explained how the ISPs can magically guarantee that your high-priority traffic will go through faster when everyone else is also using high-priority traffic at that point, or how they can guarantee that you won't run into any delays somewhere on the internet outside the friendly borders of the ISP.

If that can't be guaranteed, a "high priority" plan is nothing but snake oil.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 2:54 am

Its seriously a tough beat and requires a degree of co-operation in mutual self intrest.

Anyway, it boils down to the same way you do it now - though commerical contracts. Backhaul providers sell bandwidth to ISPs, or own it themselves.

If your an ISP renting pipes off someone else for backhaul to america, you want to monitor your blend of traffic going into the backhaul, because otherwise you're either going to breach your customers SLAs, or get billed for a lot of money by your backhaul provider.

And if you get a customer spewing out high priority traffic, you're going to do what you do to customers now - shape their connection or charge excess fees.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 4:48 am

Why is the Internet all of a sudden going just too damn slow for people?

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 5:00 am

Crissa wrote:Your ISP can tell that you're getting many packets, but nothing really else about those packets without stopping and interrogating each packet - which is an invasion of privacy.

Its called DPI and its already happening. Which is a travesty.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 7:05 am

cthulhu wrote:Can we stop with the 'and all your packets are dropped' scenario? We all agree it is retarded. Also the 'extortion or you cannot connect to comcast haha' situation is equally dumb. Now having established that.

No we can't. Because that is the reality of life without Net Neutrality.

A world without Net Neutrality is dumb. And if you are suggesting it, you should be treated as if you were dumb. It's a dumb suggestion. The real implications are things that you've really admitted are dumb.

There is no way to get get faster service out of the internet through a removal of Net Neutrality. Currently everyone gets the fastest service the internet is capable of providing. The only way economic shenanigans could give you better service is by on way or another systematically excluding people from the internet so that you were sharing the same hardware with less other users. That's it. That is the only possible way that a new capitalist economic plan could speed up the internets, and it is monstrous to even contemplate.

Drop it, this is an argument you totally lost. The EFF has actual charts.

-Username17

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 12:48 pm

Technically we could make some things faster my slowing down other things. Like objectionable content, oh wait, I'm not Conroy. Fuck people trying to decide who's content is more worthy.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 2:48 pm

I still want to know why trading freedom for speed is anything but a raw deal in the first place.

No offense, cthluhu, but complaining that some traffic is better than others' sounds exceptionally whiny.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 2:50 pm

http://www.cnsnews.com/Public/Content/a ... rcID=45245

Kansas signs law mandating ultrasound at least 30 minutes before abortion. By Kathleen Sebelius. Who is going to be nominated for HHS secretary.

I do know that if I got teen pregnant and some asshole demanded that I get an ultrasound in some haphazard attempt to make me feel sympathy for some cells the size of a grain of rice I would punch them in the fucking face. Then again, I don't know any doctor or nurse out there that would do something so meanspirited and blatantly manipulative--and I know some assholes. So I'd probably wrap my hands around the neck of the entire state legislature and choke the shit out of them.

What a time to be out of tequila. I think I have a frozen Sam Adams somewhere in the back of the freezer...

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 2:53 pm

The other funny thing is that the current IP network backhaul is built on an ATM network that implements QoS.

@Draco: Yeah, thats obviously the plan, but clearly you want users to prioritise their own traffic.

Its not like it happens now - its exactly the same concepts as on-peak/off-peak caps. You trade off data during peak usage for data during non peak usage times... Seriously, I just don't get why on-peak/off-peak caps are the end of the internet and will lead us to a fascist imperium.

But we clearly disagree and we've never going to pursade each other, so oh well.

Bigode · Post by **Bigode** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 9:54 pm

cthulhu wrote:And if you get a customer spewing out high priority traffic, you're going to do what you do to customers now - shape their connection or charge excess fees.

Wait, wasn't shaping one of the complaints you used as reason?

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 11:19 pm

Yeah, exactly. If my high-priority traffic is getting shaped, and I paid for that high-priority privilege, what the fuck man? That's exactly the kind of snake oil bullshit I was just calling out.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 12:56 am

Bigode wrote:
cthulhu wrote:And if you get a customer spewing out high priority traffic, you're going to do what you do to customers now - shape their connection or charge excess fees.
Wait, wasn't shaping one of the complaints you used as reason?

Did you see the orginal bit before when I proposed the breakdown? I didn't communicate it clearly in the statement, but the implication was supposed to be 'if they've exceeded their allowance of high proiroity traffic, you could either shape them or reduce their high priority traffic to medium priority traffic' Sorry for presenting poorly on that front!

Heath Robinson · Post by **Heath Robinson** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 1:48 am

Cthulhu,
You make convincing arguments if (and only if) I accepted that the average computer user is a competant, knowledgable person who is motivated to seek out information for themselves. Instead, normal people work on an exception interrupt system where they only learn about technology topics the moment they get an error message. Not a moment sooner. They will not notice the fact that they are being inconvenienced by their QOS settings until someone drops an alarming article on the subject directly into their path.

People will assign QOS 8 to their BitTorrent traffic, thinking that it actually affects their local bandwidth allocations. Meanwhile, the middle aged lady who's trying to have a Skype call with her son at university will be mystified by the fact that her call is all kinds of distorted. The young man who's trying to pick out a new internet connection package is confused by all the numbers he has to know about - he remembers that when he was a boy it was all so easy, and there was just one big number.

Applications will hardcode their QOS. People will leave it at the default setting. The distribution of QOS settings on packets will not sync to your plan, meaning that you will be paying more for allocated high priority packets that you don't use. In short, life will happen to your efficient economic design. It will make people worse off, whilst benefitting the people who can afford to pay people money to care about optimising the settings.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 1:49 am

But then I, were I a dick with a botnet, could spam you with 2 gigs of high-priority pings until you couldn't get high priority service for the rest of the month. Also, every content provider is going to mark all their stuff as high priority, and we end up in the same situation, only your internet is randomly accelerated some of the time.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 4:36 am

zeruslord wrote: Also, every content provider is going to mark all their stuff as high priority, and we end up in the same situation, only your internet is randomly accelerated some of the time.

Yeah, that's the problem. Most providers are going to want their applications to work faster and thus optimize them by making them work on high priority.

Heath Robinson · Post by **Heath Robinson** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 4:49 am

zeruslord wrote:But then I, were I a dick with a botnet, could spam you with 2 gigs of high-priority pings until you couldn't get high priority service for the rest of the month. Also, every content provider is going to mark all their stuff as high priority, and we end up in the same situation, only your internet is randomly accelerated some of the time.

I assume that would only consume the botnet's high-priority allocation instead of yours (you would be able to set your ping responses to use only low priority bandwidth). However, botnets could set their spam to high priority to screw the unfortunates who are victim to them even more than they are already.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 5:31 am

Heath Robinson wrote:I assume that would only consume the botnet's high-priority allocation instead of yours (you would be able to set your ping responses to use only low priority bandwidth). However, botnets could set their spam to high priority to screw the unfortunates who are victim to them even more than they are already.

Depends, Telstra charges for upload traffic and download. Most ISPs here only charge for download. No reason to assume they wouldn't count high priority inbound packets against you.

cthulhu wrote:Its not like it happens now - its exactly the same concepts as on-peak/off-peak caps. You trade off data during peak usage for data during non peak usage times... Seriously, I just don't get why on-peak/off-peak caps are the end of the internet and will lead us to a fascist imperium.

Simple, peak/offpeak doesn't discriminate based on type of traffic. Its actually a pretty decent way to get people using the bandwidth that would go to waste in the early hours of the morning. Since its still blind to the type of data it can't be used for censorship.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 5:49 am

Your incoming packets are not controlled by you, Heath.

cthulhu wrote:Can we stop with the 'and all your packets are dropped' scenario? We all agree it is retarded. Also the 'extortion or you cannot connect to comcast haha' situation is equally dumb. Now having established that.

You are seriously uninformed in the ways of network traffic if you do not know this is indeed the case when a router is at capacity.

Your packets are being thrown away all the time. That you do not know this is strange; that's primarily what 'lag' is - your packets got lost, thrown away, trapped, and you had to resend them.

-Crissa

Heath Robinson · Post by **Heath Robinson** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 6:13 am

Crissa wrote:Your incoming packets are not controlled by you, Heath.

Yeah, but most ISPs won't be charging you on the basis of what QOS your incoming packets have. The charges are sent to the originating ISP, who aggregate it into their rates and, on average, charge the originating user.

Your response, meanwhile, is something you can control. So long as you set your ping daemon/service to use QOS 0 you won't be vulnerable to a ping-of-DOS.

D_A,

That fact isn't even relevant. You are always charged on both sides, under the assumption that you actually choose most of your down and up traffic. QOS is different because it's easier not to maintain large QOS remapping facilities at your network borders.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 2:59 pm

Why would every content provider do that? They have to pay for bandwidth too, it wouldn't make economic sense.

@Health: Yeah, probably, but the flipside of all this is I think, and I could be wrong, that more and more applications are going to be convered onto our IP backbone because its just more flexible. That said the telecomms engineers think IP is the spawn of the devil, but there you go.

@Crissa: I think you may have misunderstood the difference between Latency and Packet loss. Packet loss is very different from latency. The netgraph function on any modern FPS will also report them differently too just to keep a relevant example. And the effects of packet loss and latency are felt differently too in different applications:

In a VOIP application packet loss causes breakup in the voices via inducing jitter, while latency causes conversation delays, resulting in talking over each other. In an IPTV application, latency isn't important, but I need to minimize jitter because if I don't the picture will breakup.