Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality

penciling_in writes "CircleID has a post by Richard Bennett, one of the panelists in the recent Innovation forum on open access and net neutrality — where Google announced their upcoming throttling detector. From the article: 'My name is Richard Bennett and I'm a network engineer. I've built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed's on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing. I'm opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we're going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain ...' This article is great insight for anyone for or against net neutrality."

No, he's talking about replacing TCP/IP.

[khasim]

I do not have the experience he has, but I see some strangeness in the phrases he uses.

The Internet's traffic system gives preferential treatment to short communication paths. The technical term is "round-trip time effect." The shorter your RTT, the faster TCP speeds up and the more traffic you can deliver.

Yes. And? Do I really want the server next to me to be as slow as the server in Tokyo?

The Internet's congestion avoidance mechanism, an afterthought that was tacked-on in the late 80's, reduces and increases the rate of TCP streams to match available network resources, but it doesn't molest UDP at all. So the Internet is not neutral with respect to its two transport protocols.

I'm not sure about this. But he's the expert so I'll accept his claim. But wouldn't it be easier to add UDP management capabilities to the existing structure than any of the alternatives?

VoIP wants its packets to have small but consistent gaps, and file transfer applications simply care about the time between the request for the file and the time the last bit is received. In between, it doesn't matter if the packets are timed by a metronome or if they arrive in clumps. Jitter is the engineering term for variations in delay.

Wasn't that what Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) was supposed to address?

The Internet is non-neutral with respect to applications and to location, but it's overly neutral with respect to content, which causes gross inefficiency as we move into the large-scale transfer of HDTV over the Internet.

Yes. And? So grabbing a huge file off of the server next to me is more efficient than a VOIP call to Tokyo. I'm not seeing the problem yet.

Multicast?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK services like FiOS and U-verse handle HDTV over IP by making the breakout box an IP multicast client.

He completely ignores multicast in the paragraph about HTDV being trouble for the Internet, and someone should at least explain why it's not relevant. Otherwise it kind of sinks his battleship w/r/t that argument, IMO.

Re:I hope he's not referring to QoS...

[A beautiful mind]

Because pretty much every isp is part of a vertical monopoly and QoS provides a convenient excuse to leverage their monopoly in one market to push their product in another.

I Oppose The Argument Against Net Neutraility Laws

[Nom du Keyboard]

I am in favor of Net Neutrality regulations and laws, not because I like regulations and laws (I don't), but that I am finding them necessary in this case.

We supposedly have Truth in Advertising laws already on the books, but super-fast, all-you-can-eat, Internet connections are still being advertised. I'd start by applying the existing law to those claims.

I'd like to be sold a truthful amount of bandwidth (DSL tends to be more honest in this area than cable), and not some inflated peak amount that I can only hit when going to the cable sponsored local bandwidth tester site. And when I have that honest amount of bandwidth available to me, I want to be the one to set the QoS levels of my traffic within that bandwidth amount - not the cable company. When I know what I have available to me, then I can best allocate how to use it.

First the cable companies started killing BT, and other filesharing apps to some lesser degree. I believe that to have been a Red Herring. When that was complained loudly about they offered to just cap usage in general, instead of limiting certain bandwidth-intensive applications.

Who does this benefit? The cable companies, of course. Think of the business they're in. They deliver video. But so do a lot of other people on the Internet. Kill everybody else's video feeds because that is the high bandwidth application for the rest of us and pretty soon you'll only be able to receive uninterrupted HD video over your broadband connection from your local cable company. They will become a monopoly in video distribution (and charge every provider for distributing their videos), and all because we insisted that they throttle all traffic equally on their vastly oversold networks.

All they're waiting for is DOCSIS 3.0 to roll out so that they can promise us even more bandwidth that we can't use since they won't even let us used our promised current bandwidth under DOCSIS 2.0. A royal screwing is on its way if your cable ISP in particular isn't clamped down on hard by the federal government by way of the FCC.

And why does it have to be the federal government and the FCC. Because the cable companies have already managed to get all local regulation preempted by the federal government to avoid more stringent local rules, so the feds are the only ones left who are allowed to do it!

So, the article boils down to...

[Anonymous Coward]

...let the engineers do their job? He makes no mention of how he thinks it would be best resolved, just that it shouldn't be done via legislation? I agree with his point, but for anyone who knows has even half paid attention to the net neutrality issues, this article holds nothing new.

Missing the point?

[JustinOpinion]

His analysis is in many ways good... but seems ridiculously idealistic. He emphasises:

Where do we turn when we need enhancements to Internet protocols and the applications that use them? Not to Congress, and not to the FCC. ... Engineers solve engineering problems.

(Emphasis in original.)

Probably most of us agree with that statement in principle. The problem is that the various players in this (users, content providers, and network operators) do not have their objectives aligned. Thus, the engineers for the network operator will come up with a solution (e.g. throttling) that solves the network company's problem (users using too much of the bandwidth they (over)sold), but the engineers working for the users (e.g. people writing P2P apps) will engineer for a different objective (maximum transfer rates), and will even engineer workarounds to the 'solutions' being implemented by the network.

The problem is thus that everyone is engineering in a fundamentally adversarial way, and this will continue so long as the objectives of all parties are not aligned. Ideally, legislation would help enforce this alignment: for instance, by legally mandating an objective (e.g. requiring ISPs to be transparent in their throttling and associated advertising), or funding an objective (e.g. "high-speed access for everyone"), or by just making illegal one of the adversarial actions (e.g. source-specific throttling).

This is not purely an engineering question. The networks have control of one of the limited resources in this game (the network of cables already underground; and the rights required to lay/replace cables), and this imbalance in power may require laws to prevent abuse. It's not easy to create (or enforce) the laws... and ideally the laws would be informed by the expertise of engineers (and afford ways for smarter future solutions to be implemented)... but suggesting that we should just let everyone 'engineer' the solution misses the mark. Whose engineers? Optimizing for what goal? Working under what incentives?

Put more simply: engineering is always bound by laws.

No net neutrality these past 5 years has meant...

[Kohath]

No net neutrality these past 5 years has meant ... what exactly? What is the horrible problem we've all had to endure because the government hasn't forced ISPs (against their will) to operate in "the preferred way"?

I'm not sure if I like his alternative

[Whuffo]

While some good points are made about the current state of the internet and how technical improvements could be made - his article lost credibility at the point where he states that the proper way to correct the problems is for "industry" to do it.

Of course, the "industry" he's talking about are the corporations that control large chunks of the infrastructure. As we've established time and time again, those corporations aren't acting in the public interest. Their only interest is in what makes their corporation the largest profit. To those interests, blocking competing services or forcing popular websites to pay more to stay online are quite reasonable things to do.

This is why net neutrality is such an important idea. Look at what has been accomplished so far with our "ad hoc" arrangement of computers connected to a crazy quilt of networks. All that you see is just the beginning - but a better future will never come to pass if the corporate interests are allowed to filter / segregate / block network traffic.

Think about it for a minute: consider AT&T. They own a substantial amount of internet infrastructure and they're also the major telephone company. When they look at Skype and discuss how to limit the loss of business to this competitor - you'd better believe they consider blocking VOIP on the backbone. Call it a benefit to the customer and put a competitor out of business; another good day in corporate headquarters.

Re:Multicast?

[PCM2]

And maybe I don't understand how multicast really works ... but it seems to me that multicast made a lot of sense as a solution back when everybody was used to watching the same show at the same time every week and then waiting for the reruns to see it again. These days everyone is getting more and more used to watching their shows anytime they feel like it, and On Demand is one of the top selling points of a lot of digital cable packages. It doesn't seem like multicast is going to be much help if you're committed to letting each individual viewer start and stop the show at the precise second they choose.

Companies can't be trusted

[kherr]

Yes, there are technical reasons to shape traffic to optimize network flow. But the problem is that the large ISPs are using business, not technical, reasons to determine the network traffic policies. If companies like Comcast, Time Warner and Virgin Media could be trusted to base network design on technical issues, that'd be a nice utopia.

But we know these companies are instead targeting packets that they see as business competitors, so they are not making sound technical decisions. I say it's better to make it harder for a perfect network than to allow corporate interests to balkanize the internet for their greedy purposes.

Net neutrality is a matter of antitrust

[BlueParrot]

The main issue here is not weather companies double charge for bandwidth or if they charge per use or don't offer this or that service, the issue is that if you allow a situation where a company like AT&T can make a deal with Microsoft to prioritize their traffic, then it will eventually end up in a situation where you get a cartel of companies controlling that keep competing smaller ISPs and content providers out of the market by artificially degrading their connections.

Furthermore because the communications infrastructure is partially government funded, and as the radio frequencies are government controlled through the FCC , the "free market" argument doesn't hold water. There are numerous barriers to entry into the ISP market, both government imposed as well as technical ones, and thus coercive monopolies will be able to form unless actively restrained by the government.

This doesn't necessarily say much about HOW you should regulate the market, but it pretty much implies that simply leaving ISPs to screw over customers and smaller competitors is a big no-no. Completely free unregulated markets only work when there are low barriers to entry, many suppliers, no external costs or benefits, perfect customer insight into the market, completely homogeneous and equivalent services being offered, zero cost of switching supplier, and no barriers to trade. The number of markets in which that applies can be counted on fewer hands than most people have.

I have an idea, let's call it Web 3.0!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, listen, really, it'll be great. What we need is for ISP to host a single system that stores content. This system then talks to the systems of other ISP's and propagates that data so that it is stored very closely to the user base... solving the Multicast timing issue... Oh, wait... that was Web 0.1 and ISP's are now dropping the protocol [slashdot.org] because Andrew Cuomo's been wackin' it to 88 kiddy fiddler newsgroups. He feels so guilt ridden about it, he wants the entire Usenet shut down. You know it's true. I'll bet if you searched his computer, he's saving all the 'evidence' just in case he ever needs to refer back to it.

Re:No net neutrality these past 5 years has meant.

[Anonymous Coward]

>we've all

We've not all been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. That doesn't mean it's acceptable for anyone to be imprisoned there.

Some of us have been affected by this non-neutral network. I now have the "opportunity" to subscribe to my ISP's (sister division's) offerings (such as "digital home phone"! hah!), since I can no longer VoIP over my internet.

Please also remember that people outside your country, but still within its sphere of direct influence, also get anally raped by proxy when your market fails like this (ie the failure is quickly exported as a "success").

Neutrality means different things

[Cracked Pottery]

I can understand charging for lower latency time, higher bandwidth or other aspects of higher quality of service, and even at reasonable prices for large amounts of data exchange usage. What should not be permitted are corporate level deals that create content favoritism based on the source and nature of the content, whether from direct monetary consideration or corporate partnership or favoring in-house content or services.

Especially offensive is any sort of attempt at frustrating the dissemination of content based on political bias. The cable companies that own most of the broadband ISP's would love to model the Internet after their cable TV business. They have a news product that has done just a terrific job at political neutrality, and they would love to extend that model to Internet services.

300 baud

[Haxx]

Those of us that have been here a while, the people that used to watch the blocks move across the screen at 300 baud, can see a another of many drastic changes coming in the way the huge ISP's will handle content. There was a time when ISP's were everywhere. They were small companies with access to local dial-up node sites. Then AOL had 10 million people convinced that they were actually the whole internet. Today high speed internet has given birth to bohemoth ISPs that were huge cable/telephone/satelite companies years before. These companies may eventually package web access the same way they package movie channels. After a few years of this the smaller ISP's with open access will be back and the cycle will repeat in new and strange ways.

Re:I Oppose The Argument Against Net Neutraility L

[techno-vampire]

We supposedly have Truth in Advertising laws already on the books, but super-fast, all-you-can-eat, Internet connections are still being advertised. I'd start by applying the existing law to those claims.

It wouldn't do any good, because of the weasel words in the advertisements. You see, they don't say you'll get N Mbits/second, they say, "...up to N Mbits/second." And, what they say is true, because your equipment is capable of handling that much bandwidth and your cable connection can carry it if it's provided. Of course, what they don't tell you is that they don't have enough bandwidth available to give every customer a connection like that, so the fact that your equipment could handle it is irrelevant. It's just like a car manufacturer telling you that their newest line can go from 0->150 mph in X seconds, but not reminding you that the legal limit is 65. What they say is true, even though they don't tell you all the truth.

Net Neutrality is about censorship, not QoS.

[Zombie Ryushu]

Look, the fact is that the telcos are engaged in criminal conspiracy to censor the Internet. Of course tiered rates for bandwidth usage will always be there. Thats been the way of the world since Broadband began. Anti-Net Neutrality is about WHAT you can access, not how fast you can access it, people who advocate against net neutrality are advocating FOR Internet censorship.

link fix

[Anonymous Coward]

The first link above should not have linked to WIkipedia "internet governance" but rather to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-democracy [wikipedia.org]
or perhaps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Government [wikipedia.org]

Re:No net neutrality these past 5 years has meant.

[Anonymous Coward]

ISPs have been operating "the preferred way" out of convention, in keeping with the norms of the Internet, for some time now. But they have only recently signaled their intent to deviate from historical principles in order to pursue additional sources of revenue.

Their intended path optimizes the Internet in their own favor, and works against the Internet as a whole. They're saying, "Yes, we like the Internet. But you're going to like our take on the Internet even better, want it or not." They're bundling "their way" over what should be a common carrier type situation.

So, it is like asking, "No net neutrality for telephone calls over the past 5 years has meant... what exactly?" Nothing, because the telephone companies have kept with the status quo, and not introduced 'features' that degrade the overall value of the network. Were they to announce an intent to do this, you'd see telephone neutrality legislation bounced around.

"But we don't need telephone neutrality legislation! If you legislate the telephone system, then it will kill innovation!" See? We're blaming the wrong folks here. It isn't the customers or the legislators. It is the carrier rocking the boat, and then crying foul when people try to address their money making schemes.

Re:It's not gonna happen, sadly.

[lordofwhee]

Being a dumb pipe is every ISP's worst fear. It means they have to deliver bandwidth, not content. It means they don't throttle based on protocol or content, just pass packets along.

It means they have to provide *gasp* an INTERNET CONNECTION! No ISP wants that, what with all the upgrades to existing equipment they'd have to make to make as much bandwidth as a customer bought available to them AT ALL TIMES.

It means smaller profits and higher customer satisfaction, which seems to be the seventh circle of hell to any large company in the US, and most other places.

Re:I Oppose The Argument Against Net Neutraility L

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just like a car manufacturer telling you that their newest line can go from 0->150 mph in X seconds, but not reminding you that the legal limit is 65. What they say is true, even though they don't tell you all the truth.

Uhhh ... no! It'd be more like saying that a car can go from 0 to 150 in X seconds, but then admitting that there is only X/2 seconds worth of road available to you.

Re:No, he's talking about replacing TCP/IP.

[hobbit]

In the second case, he's talking about Bob Metcalf (the nominal inventor of ethernet...)

It's particularly ridiculous to talk about how increasing bandwidth will not solve problems in the face of Ethernet, which has consistently beaten off all other comers by piling on the bandwidth even though its link utilisation is piss-poor...

Re:No net neutrality these past 5 years has meant.

[Lunatrik]

Comcast and Bittorrent [torrentfreak.com]? Deep Packet Inspection [p2pvine.com] commencing by Time Warner and Comcast? And, Today on slashdot, Verizon preventing access [slashdot.org] to a chunk of usenet?

Either your trolling or live in a cave.

Bang-on.

[weston]

This is the important distinction. It's not traffic type neutrality that's the essential character of an appropriately neutral net, it's source-destination neutrality.

(A non-type-neutral net has some of its own problems, but not the same ones as a non-source-destination-neutral net, and there's a good argument that the latter is more important.)

Re:No, he's talking about replacing TCP/IP.

[johndfalk]

Just forget about Multicast, it's a dead-end idea. Not because it's technically flawed (actually, it works pretty nicely), but because it ignores economics.

Except that IPv6 uses multicast for pretty much everything. As the telco's upgrade to IPv6 they will be forced into using multicast. The telco's want to move your data as efficiently and at the lowest cost to them while still charging you the same price. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6 [wikipedia.org]

To add insult to injury, this technology works properly only if all the hops between you and your destination have deployed it correctly. So a bunch of telcos who's primary business is selling bandwidth must go trough hoops to make your data transfer more efficient. No, it's not gonna happen.

Once again incorrect. You can tunnel multicast through devices that do not support it by having multicast point to point servers. We did this at I2 all the time to reach schools that weren't on the Abilene backbone. You would setup a server at the closest place that could receive multicast and then one at the destination thus reducing congestion.

To be successful, Multicast must be completely redesigned from an economical perspective such as to provide a immediate benefit for the provider that uses it (if this is at all possible), without reducing his revenue potential.

It already does by reducing their costs associated with routing traffic.

Re:No net neutrality these past 5 years has meant.

[Lunatrik]

I don't have the time to respond to all of your comments, but your limitation of net neutrality to a concept which is "supposed to treat everyone's comparable traffic that same and not to charge extra for preferred delivery of packets" is not only incorrect, but also concurs with the idea that Comcast violated issues of net neutrality.

From Wikipedia (very well cited, check it yourself):
"A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams."

Under this idea of what a neutral network is constructed of, it is the restriction of the "modes of communication allowed" which has violated network neutrality. Even under your own (incorrect) definition, by slowing Bittorent packets, Comcast is charging customers that pay monthly MORE to download the same amount of data over Bittorrent, as they take more time to download. For example:

Customer A downloads music_file.mp3 (3 megs) over HTML. It takes 1 minute, and he is paying $10/month. This means they, in effect, paid ~.0002 cents to download the song (43,200 minutes in 30 days).

Customer B downloads music_file.mp3 (3 megs) over BitTorrent. Because Comcast is slowing this method, it takes 2 minutes to download. They have effectively paid *twice as much* to download the same content.

Just to quickly note, the only purpose for deep packet inspection is *being used for* is to throttle specific types of communications. I don't have a personal vendetta against the technology (though the privacy implications are touchy), but its current use most certainly does violate net neutrality.

For now I'll give you that Verizon can manipulate data stored on its server, simply because I am out of time to construct an argument.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I hope he's not referring to QoS...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

That's true in America maybe, but here in the UK there's no monopoly (you can switch ISPs fairly quickly and there's maybe a dozen or more to choose from) but they do usually still use QOS to reduce the amount of file sharing somewhat at peak times, but mainly to improve the VOIP and web performance.

In other words they use it more or less for what it's supposed to be for- to *make* stuff *work* rather than deliberately breaking stuff.

I think Richard Bennett thinks it's OK to break stuff if it allows the telecoms company to make money, he seems to think that they don't make enough or something, and he's quite happy for that to be at the expense of the users online experience

Re:It's not reality, it's all a lie

[Omestes]

limiting of certain types of traffic or certain pages (like the alt.* section of usenet) is fine.. if the ISP is upfront about it. If they had a cheap plan that limited you like that, and an expensive plan that had no restrictions, I'd be fine with it.

I'd like to add something; they may do this IF I HAVE ANOTHER VIABLE CHOICE. If ISPs didn't operate as minor monopolies, I'd be fine with them doing whatever (if they are honest about it), as long as I can find another service who doesn't.

Re:No net neutrality these past 5 years has meant.

[dpilot]

> Any ISP that tried to block access to GooTube would
> have no customers within 12 months.

You seem to presume that there's a choice. About the best that most can do is to choose between DSL and cable, and if both pull tricks like this, it's no choice. Many don't even have that choice of 2 for broadband, but get DSL *OR* cable - again, no choice.

This is not a free market, in any way shape, or form.

The real goal of net neutrality is to at least make it act like a common-carrier.

This entire article is a red herring, not on Slashdot's part, but on the part of an industry that wants badly to kill the Internet by turning it into cable-tv-on-steroids. They've found what looks like a valid technical objection to net neutrality and blown that appearance into a foregone conclusion. Then they're using that foregone conclusion to try to convince everyone that net neutrality is a bad thing that hinders innovation.

They belong in the same afterlife as the ??AA!

Re:Net neutrality is a matter of antitrust

[dpilot]

That's why legislation is required.

While you're busy turning the Internet into cable tv, why don't you roll back rural electrification and pervasive telephone access.

Certain things are deemed "strategic" for the country, and those things are fostered.

For that matter, why not deconstruct the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Oh wait, we're starting to do that. Oops.

Maybe you're right... Maybe we would be best off with our corporate overlords granting us access to the material we deem fit.

Too many people reserve the term "sheeple" for use with respect to the government. Corporations are fully capable of as much stupidity as the government, and IMHO greater evil.

Re:Get the gub'ment out of technology

[Daniel Dvorkin]

If the government had been making technology decisions twenty years ago, we would all be stuck on ISDN.

Twenty years ago, the goverment was making technology decisions about something called ARPAnet. Typical stupid, wasteful government program that never went anywhere, of course. Fortunately, private enterprise led the way with bold innovative paradigm-breaking optimized syngergies, which is why we can now have this kind of discussion here on the Compuserve forums!

Re:Net neutrality is a matter of antitrust

[MindlessAutomata]

What's most important and moral, above all else, is that the greatest number of people benefit the most, right?

duopoly

[falconwolf]

(That's more than 50 per state, so if you don't patronize one, it's not their fault.) That's hardly a duopoly situation.

It is a duopoly if you only have 2 choices for broadband, and many don't have 2 choices. If you're lucky you have a choice for cable and dsl, many can't get either, and even if you can sign up with a third party ISP they still use either the cableco's or telco's lines.

Rather, it's greed on the part of some bandwidth hogging users

No it's greed on the part of access providers. Nothing made them offer unlimited access plans, but once people took them up on the offer they are crying. It's nothing more than offering more than they can provide and that's a problem of their own making.

Now, if they want to start charging some people more for using more bandwidth then I want them to pay back the billions of taxpayer dollars [newnetworks.com] they got in subsidies to build out their infrastructure. They took the taxpayers' money and used it to boost their bottom line without doing what they were given the money do to.

Falcon