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."

I Oppose The Argument Against Net Neutraility Laws

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!

I guess I don't understand.

I think the article has some valid points regarding the technical aspects of the Internet, but I don't understand why those aspects make net neutrality legislation a bad thing. My understanding of net neutrality is that people want the Internet to remain neutral. They do not want providers to charge favorable rates to their friends and extortionist rates to their competitors. They do not want small ISPs forced out of the market. They do not want websites and users to be double-charged for the same use. I don't see how any of these issues are technical. I don't see how legislation that would keep things fair also would eliminate an ISP's ability to improve the performance of jitter sensitive applications as well as jitter insensitive applications. I mean you could argue that it'd be legislated wrong, and you'd probably be right. But from a technical standpoint, assuming it's legislated correctly, why is net neutrality technically impossible? Or am I completely misunderstanding the net neutrality issue?

Re:I guess I don't understand.

Or am I completely misunderstanding the net neutrality issue?

No, it seems to me you understand it perfectly. However TFA seems to be blurring the lines between net neutrality and treating traffic differently. For instance if it were technically necessary to treat all Voice packets as high priority (it seems it isn't as VoIP works, but for the sake of argument) then there's nothing to stop a standard being agreed and implemented on a neutral internet, just so long as the voice packets are treated the same no matter who is sending and receiving them.

Bang-on.

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.)

Missing the point?

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...

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"?

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

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.

I'm not sure if I like his alternative

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.

Companies can't be trusted

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

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.

What crap

"I know that's not true. The Internet has some real problems today, such as address exhaustion, the transition to IPv6, support for mobile devices and popular video content, and the financing of capacity increases. Network neutrality isn't one of them."

  The effen telcos already got paid 200 billion dollars to do something about getting fiber to the premises and blew it on anything but that. Where's the "political engineering" solution to look into that to determine where the "QOS" broke down at ISP intergalatic central? Where are the ISP and telco fatcats sitting in front of congressional hearings explaining what happened to all that freekin money? Where did it go, real facts, real names, real figures.

  And why in the hell does the bulk of the public air wave spectrum only go to the same billion dollar corporations, year after decade after generation, instead of being turned loose for everyone-you know, that "public" guy- to use and develop on? Why the hell do we even *need* ISPs anymore for that matter? This is the 21 st century, there are tons of alternative ways to move data other than running them through ISP and telco profitable choke points, and all I am seeing is them scheming on how to turn the internet into another bastardized combination of the effen telco "plans" and cable TV "plans". Really, what for?

    Where's the meshnetworking using long range free wireless and a robust 100% equal client / server model that we could be using instead of being forced through the middle man of isps and telcos for every damn single packet? And what mastermind thought it was a good idea to let them wiggle into the content business? That's a big part of the so called problem there, they want to be the tubes plus be the tube contents, and triple charge everyone, get paid both ends of the connection and a middle man handling fee for..I don't know, but that is what they are on the record wanting, and industry drools like this doofus are providing their excuses. Not content with hijacking all the physical wired reality, for 100 years now, they get to hijack all the useful wireless spectrum, and no, WIFI DOESN'T CUT IT. That's at the big fat joke level in the spectrum for any distance.

Net Neutrality is about censorship, not QoS.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

One very important point here is that this 'afterthought' in TCP works at the end-points. The network remains dumb, it is the end-points that decide how to do congestion management.

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

Good point. ATM died because the benefits weren't worth the costs (much more complex hardware all around, never mind the protocol stacks).

A related point that seems to run through the article is that more bandwidth is not the solution. But he doesn't explain why - for example

This problem is not going to be solved simply by adding bandwidth to the network, any more than the problem of slow web page loading was solved that way in the late 90's or the Internet meltdown problem disappeared spontaneously in the 80's. What we need to do is engineer a better interface between P2P and the Internet, such that each can share information with the other to find the best way to copy desired content.

In the first case I think he's completely wrong, more bandwidth is exactly what solved the problem. Both in the network and the applications use of that bandwidth (netscape was the first to do simultaneous requests over multiple connections - which did not require any protocol changes). In the second case, he's talking about Bob Metcalf (the nominal inventor of ethernet and nowadays a half-baked pundit) predicting a "gigalapse" of the internet specifically due to a lack of bandwidth...

It's interesting to note that ATT themselves have declared more bandwidth to be the solution. They didn't phrase it quite that way, but ultimately that's the conclusion an educated reader can draw from their research results. 1x the bandwidth of a 'managed network' requires 2x the bandwidth in a 'neutral network' to achieve the same throughputs, etc. Sounds like a lot, but then you realize that bandwidth costs are not linear, nor are management costs. In fact, they tend to operate in reverse economies of scale - bandwidth gets cheaper the more you buy (think of it as complexity O(x+n) due to fixed costs and the simple 1 to 1 nature of links), but management gets more expensive the more you do it because the 1-to-1 nature of links gets subsumed by having to manage the effects of all connections on each other n-to-n style for O(x+n^2). Ars Technica analysis of ATT report [arstechnica.com]

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

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.

The problem is subtle, and I've only seen it now that I read the TFA although I've experienced it with our internet connection at work.

The sliding window mechanism of sending packets before the ACK of the previous one until you get NACK and then back off has an unpleasant side-effect. An ACK train coming back over three hops from the local P2P clients or ISP-based servers moves faster than one heading across the world over 16 hops with higher ping times. Therefore the sliding window opens more and the traffic over the three hops can dominate the link.

Now add that problem with BitTorrent clients reported earlier that try for max bandwidth. That can force the window even wider.

And once the DSLAM/switch/aggregation port is saturated with traffic, it will delay or drop packets. If those are ACKs from the other side of the world, that window closes up more. There goes the time-sensitive nature of VOIP down the toilet.

On a shared-media network like cable, it doesn't even have to be you. If two people on the same cable are P2P transferring between each other, there goes the neighborhood. They dominate the line and the chap only using Skype down the road wonders why he isn't getting the performance he needs.

I'm opposed to price-oriented non-neutral networks, your ISP charging Google for your high speed access to them. But a non-neutral network that does proper QOS by throttling bandwidth-heavy protocols that don't behave themselves on the network is acceptable. As long as the QOS only moves the throttled protocols down when needed.

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

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.
A simplified economic model of the Internet calls for multiple level of service providers that sell bandwidth to each other. So I, as your ISP / backbone provider make as much money as bandwidth you can use. I have the option of enabling a technology that allows you to be more efficient and use less bandwidth, therefore pay me less. Meanwhile, this technology offers no benefits for me, in fact costs me money, the money needed to implement it and manage it.
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.
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.

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

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

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.

Re:Multicast?

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.

Multicast only works if internet TV is going to be like regular TV where a show is aired at a particular time. If it's going to be more like youtube on steroids multicast doesn't help.

Re:Open source throttling detector?

Network Neutrality Squad Network Measurement Agent [nnsquad.org]. It's LGPL.

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

That's not entirely fair...

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. Right now though, the ISP's like Comcast are trying to push "unlimited super-super high speed" while still doing the bandwidth limiting, which is the real problem in my book. I think the FCC just needs to set proper definitions so there isn't any confusion when you see commercials or ads for this stuff.

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

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

they should just quit offering unlimited data plans unless they can actually offer unlimited data. unlimited dialup is easy to provide for, as in a whole month a user can get at best theoretically about 12gb if they are continuously downloading at full speed.

the real problem is the marketing people are defining service options that the networks are not capable of supporting. some services are making a profit to support other services that aren't, which is fine in, for example, pre-packaged computer bundles, but because with internet service this affects everyone, this is the end result - isp's don't have the ability to provide the level of service they advertise so they must resort to throttling, which is of course done arbitrarily to certain kinds of traffic as they are the biggest bandwidth users, rather than doing it generally.

if isp's just didn't spend so much time trying to hook those high bandwidth users up and made the prices of service to them higher, then the isp's could spend more money enhancing their bandwidth capacity instead of ending up having to explain why and what traffic they are shaping to keep use within the parameters of their networks.

there is many factors related to how network applications are written, how various tcp/ip stacks schedule, how effective QoS systems are, and how widely deployed they are, but there is one guaranteed way to ensure networks aren't bogged down by bulk traffic and streaming users - always keep traffic levels below about half of capacity. the line might be rated to transport data at a certain speed but when you fill that pipe past a certain point you wind up with a great deal of turbulence which leads to latency issues.

it's a bit similar to mastering levels in audio engineering - sure, you may have 120 dB of resolution in your recording medium, but the closer you get to filling all that space the less headroom you have for periodic spikes, which has lead in the commercial music engineering to more use of dynamic range compression, which produces a much 'duller' sound with less dynamics (some even say that this compressed dynamics leads to fatigue in the listener) - this problem never happened in cinema sound engineering because someone set a standard for how many dB average power should be targetted in a mix. Similarly, if the network provision industry would set a standard of aiming at around 50-60% utilisation average and accordingly adjusted planning for bandwidth upgrades and market penetration none of this would be a problem.

beancounters see the network capacity specification and expect that they can run the network at that level without any problems. But of course beancounters also rate the potential of a resource according to a percentage of customer turnover below a certain level, meaning they can cheapskate to some degree and of course being that businesses care more about the bottom line than good service, this is the sort of issue that cannot be solved by anything other than legislation.

i believe network neutrality as a concept misses the real point at issue here, which is simply businesses squeezing more money out of their lines than it is possible in real practise to allow, and pushing this limit just short of messing up the whole network. throttling bittorrent and streaming video is all about trying to hold back the flood of bandwidth demand so they can put off the upgrades for longer.

there would not be a problem if they just didn't provide more bandwidth on the local loop than can be carried through the peering connections.

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

LOL Richard Bennett is the guy that repeatedly spammed the wikipedia Network Neutrality article with his garbage, over a long, long period. He tried to rewrite the *definition* of network neutrality about a dozen times maybe in bizarre ways, he repeatedly deleted referenced material (usually describing them as 'lies' in his subject line), rewrote stuff, and in every possible way you can imagine tried to spin reality in ways that were self-evidently harmful to the balance of the wikipedia article.

He even deliberately misquoted another engineer to say the exact opposite of what they said; to the point that they logged onto the wikipedia talk page to complain. This was even after it was pointed out they never said what he wrote them saying and that the references disagreed.

He also thought that it was a good idea to get interviewed in articles in 'The Register' and then quoted himself in the wikipedia to 'prove' his points.

Oh yeah, and he used 'sockpuppets' to continue to also push his point of view while temporarily banned.

I could go on about this sleazebag for quite a while. When you even try to list the stunts he pulled it runs to several pages.

I would also challenge some of his depth of understanding, for example, at least at one point in time he didn't seem to have the slightest clue what a contended service is, which is kinda... basic. Really, really basic.

Really, he's just a bizarre guy, with bizarre views, and personality wise he's a total asshole.

(See wikipedia RFC, which contains references to a small fraction of his 'work' in the wikipedia if you want to get a measure of the man).

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

Oops: RFC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/RichardBennett [wikipedia.org]