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I think it is time to regulate the Internet. And before you all go ballistic on me, I mean the term "Internet". There should be a certain basic definition of th

• toth 11y ago
  Well, in this case T-Mobile is not modifying your packets, they are just slowing them down, so maybe they would still qualify?
  • jwr 11y ago
    Ok, add "no selective throttling based on packet content" to the definition then. I'm sure it needs to be worked out, but my point still stands.
    • ars 11y ago
      Why? It's not like there is unlimited bandwidth available. There isn't. If people followed your plan no one would have any bandwidth for anything. At least this way it's just video which can handle it. Your cure makes things worse, not better.
      • jwr 11y ago
        I would like there to be options — 1) "Internet" which means IP traffic, cap it or throttle if you wish, but without "better" or "worse" providers of content and all the other options, which do whatever the marketing department thinks the customers will bear. I really don't see how it follows that "no one would have any bandwidth for anything".
      • intended 11y ago
        The cool part of this argument is that if you limit bandwidth, you can get more out of people by doing less. (Adding bandwidth/infra is expensive - vs - finding ways to charge people more or double charge them for what was normal)
      • Retric 11y ago
        Bandwidth is not limited by protocol. If you can offer HD video streams you can offer plenty of bandwidth for just about every other use. Congestion is real, but it takes place at specific times of the day. Outside of that a customers using bandwidth is irrelevant to your bottom line.
        • acdha 11y ago
          Bandwidth isn't limited by protocol but the effects of latency vary widely. It'd be really helpful if the discussion could shift to prioritization and reservation so ISPs could implement a better version of this feature where e.g. any traffic flagged as latency-tolerant costs less but you could simply pay to have a greater share when the network is congested.
          • deleted 11y ago
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• TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Here's a cynical view: if those regulations you describe would ever be enacted, "Internet" providers would rename their selective service into "ExtraNet" or something ("now with Super Fast Netflix in Ultra HD!"), with the regular (regulated) Internet access also available, but properly throttled-down. As an ISP trying to provide neutral service, good luck convincing your customers that they're selling shit and yours is the real deal. They're bullshitting the general population now, I don't see how regulating the term "Internet" would stop it (unless the rulings would cover a lot of technical details about connectivity, e.g. if you connect to a third-party IP network, you're part of the Internet, etc.). RE Free Internet in Poland, the situation is absolutely ridiculous. The company that runs it, Aero2 (they deserve to be named and shamed), is an absolute mockery. Not only they started with the Captcha bullshit[0], they now actually advertise two options - "Free Internet" and "Internet without Captcha". To apply for the free Internet, you had to (around 2012-2014; I'm not certain what the situation is now) be personally present in Warsaw to pick up the SIM card. And pay the deposit. For the free SIM card. They made sure the paperwork is nontrivial, and the procedure not easy to discover - they did exactly what one would do if one had to provide a service but absolutely didn't want to do it. The end result is that most Polish people don't even know this service is available. I don't even know who to blame more. Our FCC-equivalent (UKE; they're probably the nicest and most easy-going government agency in Poland) had a good idea. But whoever let Aero2 win the bid fucked up, and then the company fucked everything for everyone, and I'm pretty sure they did it on purpose. [0] - I know. This is because they want their service to be only for personal use, and to get rid of people who download lots of stuff (for whatever "lots" you can download at 256kbps). But in the process, they've managed to fuck up the service and destroy plethora of potential applications - from MiFi equipment (dual-SIM phones are still rare in Poland) to giving your Arduino a data service to non-profit scientific measurement equipment.
  • jwr 11y ago
    > They're bullshitting the general population now, I don't see how regulating the term "Internet" would stop it While I do see your point, a similar approach worked fairly well for banks, law practices, and medical services, just to name a few. Sure, you can get a crappy deal, but regulation helps to at least roughly separate the wheat from the chaff, and people learned to distinguish between them.
• zanny 11y ago
  Every ISP selling tiers of speed, or even having a set speed at all, is modifying your traffic. The theoretical maximum throghput of a network link is often magnitudes higher than what you get - when you switch from 3Mb/s to 1Gb/s Google Fiber, Google is not changing anything physically, they are just setting a database entry on if you are paying customer to "true" and then their packet scheduler that controls how fast data goes to you and how much data they take from you changes the limits it sets. But there are always limits, every ISP uses them, and to not modify traffic would be to create an... interesting online experience. It would mean sometimes you get incredible bandwidth while at others you get none because everyone else is saturating the lines fully. It means you can have long strings of dropped packets just because your outbound gateway server is overwhelmed, and it would mean backups in the network would build without respite and get worse over time because the traffic saturation will spread to all possible nodes and slow them down with overheating. When ISPs build their networks out and setup the switches that connect their effective LAN of customers to the broader WAN they build around fixed amounts of total bandwidth everyone can use at once, and then often undercut that significantly because not everyone will be using all their speed at once. But the rate limiting means you can have predictable maxima bandwidth, whereas with uncapped speeds your up and down packet rates would vary wildly based on physical conditions. That being said, I would much rather we had that. It would taking full advantage of our available networks, and we have some breakout great network scheduling tech like codel to better handle fully saturated pipes than back in the 90s when this all became standard. Routing would of course be more expensive - you would not only have to expect greater peaks of bandwidth usage by far, you would also need to build your routing infrastructure better to handle full load saturation for extended periods of time. So I guess I mean I agree - unmodified traffic being the definition of "Internet" would be great. But my point is that we do not have anything close to that now. PS: Is this not a symptom? The problem is, for Internet access, either extremely restricted access to wireless transmission (private ownership of radio wave frequency is incredibly insanely stupid) or private ownership of physical infrastructure wire into your house. In either case, competition is extremely limited if present at all, and the markets are saturated with giant national corporations who have enough capital assets to devour startups and corrupt politicians into biasing the market in their favor. If anyone could start an ISP by hooking up their own servers to a coax line on one end and fiber on the other, or anyone could start a phone company by building a cellular tower in their back yard, this would not be a problem. I mean, it would be, but it would be the kind of moral and ethical problem software freedom is - the onus then falls on the consumer to give enough shits to not buy Comcast-SuperSpeed-Facebook-Only-Terrornet for $5 less than actual Internet. The problem then becomes... most people would not, because they aren't using the Internet as global access to anyone anywhere, but as TV stations for Twitter and Facebook. But like I said, then it would not be a technical problem, but a social one, in the same way getting people to care about software freedoms is more about how nobody gives a shit than any particular barrier to entry for free software (besides IP as a whole incentivizing the creation of proprietary software, but thats a different rant).
• jusben1369 11y ago
  I think it's mostly a philosophical issue in terms of how much government/regulatory involvement you want, knowing that you don't have to be a strident libertarian to understand that we can all die death by a thousand lashes via regulation. I tend to think that 1) T-Mobile has several competitors in the US 2) Consumers, who are so inclined, can research fairly easily and compare providers side by side and 3) Switching, especially if you avoid locking in via buying your phone, is relatively trivial. Based on that I feel like we just hand this one back to the market to decide. I think articles like this are important in that they are easily reachable by Google or Bing to help you decide whether an offer really is legitimate or compelling.
  • lukeschlather 11y ago
    On the contrary, buying your phone basically locks you in. Yes, you can theoretically transfer your phone between some providers, but your Internet tech is unlikely to port well. I think it's fair to say there are very high switching costs between US carriers due to wireless chip fragmentation. Averages at least $200 to switch if you want a halfway decent phone, more if you want a nice phone.
  • eximius 11y ago
    I'm not locked in, all of the local providers are just shit.
• deleted 11y ago
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• chimeracoder 11y ago
  > I think it is time to regulate the Internet. And before you all go ballistic on me, I mean the term "Internet". Then companies will just invent their own term that they will use instead of using the word "Internet". We already see this with the term "broadband", which has a legal minimum speed (formerly 500 kbps, recently increased to 2.5 Mbps). Instead of increasing the speeds so they can continue using the word "broadband", we see hotels advertising "high-speed Internet" or "$ADJECTIVE-fast Internet".
  • steve-howard 11y ago
    Hotels might have a reasonably fast uplink but still cheap out on the wifi infrastructure. When reception tells me "the wifi works best in the lobby" I know what they're really saying is "management cheaped out and didn't want to buy the grade or quantity of hardware needed to deliver on promises."
• exelius 11y ago
  > These regulations should be fairly basic: pass all IPv6 traffic unmodified, pass all IPv4 traffic unmodified except for NAT. Erm, pretty much NOBODY does this - even today. Every packet you send out from your ISP has (and has had for at least 4 years - probably longer) headers, cookies, etc. injected long before it reaches the public Internet. Then along the way more companies inject things into it. Then the load balancers at the other end likely do as well. This is not all for evil purposes, either: lots of DDOS and botnet traffic gets blackholed thanks to these optimizations. Trouble is, the ability / need for legitimate network management requires tools that can also be used for less awesome purposes, and those less awesome purposes are usually how you can justify the money for the tools in the first place. A lot of people on HN seem to have a purist view about how Internet traffic should be handled once it leaves your house. The companies that actually manage said traffic haven't shared this view or even operated a network that looks remotely like it for a decade or more. Your data is everywhere; and if it's not being sold by your ISP (which it is) it's being sold by your bank, by Amazon, by Google -- pretty much anyone you do business with on or off line.
  • ploxiln 11y ago
    Every packet you send has headers, cookies, etc. injected long before it reaches the public internet? really? Not for TLS (https). Not for vpn connections. Really, pretty much never. It was big news when it came out that Verizon was doing this to mobile data connections. All that happens to the IP header and everything inside is perhaps the ECN bit being fiddled, TOS bits being zeroed, that's it usually. And, as mentioned before, NAT. For home cable or fiber internet connections, the NAT usually happens on your device, on your local network (and under your control if you reject the ISP-provided cable modem and use your own, or put the FIOS router in bridge mode).
    • exelius 11y ago
      > It was big news when it came out that Verizon was doing this to mobile data connections. Because the other ISPs were sneakier and were only injecting their tokens when the user was visiting a site that was paying for the service. Other ISPs had been running similar schemes for years, but it flew under the radar because it was only active when the user visited certain sites. Verizon fucked up and released a half-baked solution and people caught on. Other companies were better at it. > For home cable or fiber internet connections, the NAT usually happens on your device, on your local network (and under your control if you reject the ISP-provided cable modem and use your own, or put the FIOS router in bridge mode). Most ISPs are running a carrier-grade NAT solution of some sort. A lot more happens in the access layer than most people realize.
• gcb0 11y ago
  this is a very small consequence of something larger: false advertising. internet that is not internet. food that is not what is written on the package. cars that require tens of thousands over the displayed price to be like the displayed picture. software with bugs or emulated screens. ... the only thing that must be regulated is advertising. with the added benefit that if you screw too much, nothing of value was lost.