4 ms·

Maybe I'm lone dissenter, but I don't understand the push back on this. People who read hacker news should be among the elite technologist, do we really all b

by pneill 9y ago

Maybe I'm lone dissenter, but I don't understand the push back on this. People who read hacker news should be among the elite technologist, do we really all believe that every packet should be treated the same? Should an E911 call or tele-surgery packets really be treated the same as Netflix? Net neutrality forces the ISP to do that and that seems like madness to me.

CodeCube 9y ago
It shouldn't be up to the individual and profit-seeking ISPs to decide that E911 and tele-surgery packets get priority. If there's a QoS concern for something, and it's deemed important enough, this is a perfectly rational place for regulation to step in and mandate it from every ISP equally.
- dfee 9y ago
  Oh, no! The point here is that regulating the internet is dangerous – Net Neutrality un-regulates it. We don't want every administration for the next 100 years to treat the internet as a victim of regulatory abuse, pushing it and pulling it towards their vision of "beautiful".
- pneill 9y ago
  How would you propose that packets be prioritized? I don't like the idea of the government telling me what packets should be prioritized. And saying that they all need to be treated the same is equally as bad. But the real issue here is that the need for net neutrality is a symptom and not the root disease. The disease that needs to be solved is a complete lack of competition in the ISP market. Service providers could differentiate themselves by QoS. You wouldn't need a net neutrality law if you had competition.
  - so33 9y ago
    >You wouldn't need a net neutrality law if you had competition I don’t buy this argument because you not only need competition, you need a market with perfect information. Net neutrality buzzes on in the sidelines. I would wager that the majority of customers would not care if their ISP limited certain types of packets and would not attempt to switch ISPs (that is, if they even can switch).
    - _justinfunk 9y ago
      If a majority of customers wouldn't even care if this happened, then why is it the internet doomsday? Seems like you can't have both sides of the argument. Unless I'm missing your point.
      - lovehashbrowns 9y ago
        This isn't something as basic as "the right to bear arms." There's a lot of information and this is a fairly dull subject, so the ISPs rely on that to gain support for this. So you can have net neutrality be removed, and nobody care that it was removed, but still be in a much worse position than before. Similarly, the PATRIOT act was passed, and "nobody" cared. That doesn't mean that nothing changed.
mmjaa 9y ago
Instead of a single source of censorship, against which the people can fight, there will be multiple sources of censorship, and fighting one won't solve the problem. And in your E911 example, there are already ways for this to be solved without requiring censorship or throttling of data on the public networks. You can already buy life-/safety-critical bandwidth that is "off-Internet bands", if you need it - the point is, this isn't lumped with the 'general public Internet'.
kbhn 9y ago
<This comment is unavailable, as kbhn's internet plan does not include forum discussion participation>
- DesiLurker 9y ago
  thats a good way to put it.
falcolas 9y ago
No, they shouldn't all be treated equally. But the packet's source or destination should also not matter. NN fully supports traffic QOS by packet purpose (i.e. VOIP over gaming over web over bittorrent), just not by origin or destination. And it's origin/destination that ISPs demonstrably want to prioritize by.
- Pilfer 9y ago
  >But the packet's source or destination should also not matter Why not? It costs my ISP more to deliver certain packets than others. Sending a packet from San Francisco to San Jose is far cheaper than sending one from San Francisco to Sydney. Internet traffic costs are not the same across the world. Transit pricing in Australia is probably the most expensive in the world - it's roughly 20x higher than in the US. Why should ISPs be forced to pretend all traffic costs the same, when in reality it doesn't?
  - falcolas 9y ago
    The ISP isn't directly paying that transit price. Level3 or other Tier 1 network providers are. And they set their prices according to their costs (and based on their own competition). Their prices are passed on to the ISPs, who pass it on to their customers. So, yeah, that transit cost is already accounted for in your monthly internet bill. Also, it's not productive to try and pretend that the prices levied by ISPs have anything to do with their costs; like all capitalism-born companies their prices are based on what the market will bear. Municipal broadband providers have proven that cost is nothing but a red herring used to justify prices and a lack of innovation.
    - Pilfer 9y ago
      >The ISP isn't directly paying that transit price Technically yes, but in many cases the ISPs are essentially the same company as the network provider. Xfinity is the ISP and Comcast is the network provider. Uverse is the ISP and AT&T is the network provider. Same with Fios and Verizon. Network providers do not want to be ISPs for legal benefits. >That transit cost is already accounted for in your monthly internet bill. While true, this doesn't address the issue I have with the current pricing model. The current internet pricing model is similar to an all-you-can-eat buffet, with a limit to the rate at which you can grab food, and how many pounds of food you can take per month. The issue is, a person who takes 5 pounds of pasta pays the same price as someone who takes 5 pounds of lobster. Under net neutrality, ISPs can't price based off food cost, and can only price based off weight. This leads to unfair pricing situations, as exampled above. It is possible to come up with more nonsensical examples with even larger cost discrepancies. Under your idea, should sending a packet across the street cost the same price as sending a packet to Mars? The first relies on $X0,000 of infrastructure costs, while the second relies on billions. The idea that 'pricing based off a packet's source or destination should not matter' makes sense in a world where all packets (or food in this example) are free, however, in the real world all packets have a cost associated with them.
DesiLurker 9y ago
so the issue you bring up is good because there is difference between origin neutrality and content neutrality. unfortunately (IMO) its rather naive to think that comcast has your best interests and will do the 'right thing' when they have power to distort the traffic and make so much money while they are at it. This action effectively allows them to double dip into any internet startups profits and worse yet pick out winners and losers based on their whim. Oh well .. that's the america we live in now.
slouch 9y ago
So, why does the hospital next to my house deserve cleaner water? Isn't this the same argument?
qaq 9y ago
Yes Comcast is spending a ton of money lobbying this because they want to prioritize E911 traffic.
Crespyl 9y ago
Quality-of-Service controls for different classes of traffic are already an important part of how the internet works, but is entirely separate from Net Neutrality. An operator like Verizon, for example, that runs phone service (including emergency calls) over the same lines as their standard internet service pretty much has to prioritize packet types differently. This is expected and understood by all parties. The Net Neutrality that people are up in arms about is related to limiting traffic of the same class based on which endpoints are involved. For example, Verizon cannot throttle (or worse, outright block) HTTP traffic to Netflix/Hulu/Youtube to 1KB/s to drive users to their own competing service.
- pneill 9y ago
  Good point, but if there was real competition in the ISP market, you could switch providers that do this. Don't fight for net neutrality. Fight for ISP marketplace
  - Crespyl 9y ago
    Should I also fight for the road and sewage pipe market places while I'm at it? There are some pieces of infrastructure that only make sense as natural monopolies. I recently moved to Texas and was surprised and rather impressed at their two-layered electrical market. There is one "power distribution company" for an entire region, regulated (I assume) by the state/county. I never do business with them, but they hook my building up to the grid and maintain the lines. Then I choose a power generating company from a wealth of plans and providers, based on whatever criteria I care about. Doing something similar for internet service would be fantastic, but still requires neutrality from the last-mile infrastructure. Apparently in the UK they've managed something like this through something called local-loop unbundling, which I assume is part of why we don't hear so much about NN from over there. I would love to see something like that in the US; ISPs will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
rsynnott 9y ago
If you're doing telesurgery over the public internet, then this is way down your list of problems.
plandis 9y ago
In the US ISPs have local monopolies / duopolies. They can litterally throttle what every they want without worrying about their customers. You need regulation in markets like.
Individualist 9y ago
"...'selfish routing' approach has a price of anarchy that’s a mere 4/3. That is, a free-for-all is only 33% worse than perfect top-down coordination." - Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions So in effect these messages would only arrive 33% faster. Not to mention the cost of having to monitor traffic and the additional charge to do so on the consumer in comparison to the "anarchic" TCP model we have now. The last time we bad this conversation when Verizon first sued for the rules to be dropped. Level 3 showed that the apparent need to create these fast lanes were due to an artificial bottleneck created by isps to throttle Netflix. When the new rules passed, the version that went in still allowed for these fast lanes to be created, but only through the supervision of the chairman. Whichb was a win for isms, despite the internet community cheering. Also included I the original title 2 is that you would not have a data cap and yo u would be charged for the internet you use versus a bulk sum every month. Articles around this time showed that after subsidies and tax credits to build infrastructure. It took TWC only a $1.24 to supply a custoomer internet access in which they charged $49.99. This included all operating costs.
- Pilfer 9y ago
  >So in effect these messages would only arrive 33% faster On average, yes, but in the event where a malicious attacker completely DoSes the network with packets, the prioritized packets would be more than 33% faster than average.
StillBored 9y ago
This sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding of most of the IP stack. The way TCP works is that bandwidth over consumption is signaled by dropping packets. Back in the mid 2000s "deep packet inspection" was the buzzword of the day, but frankly was mostly BS because you can't inspect encrypted traffic. So what happens, is that the traffic shaping is chosen by endpoint/route. Which means that the ISP might prioritize VOIP calls which terminate in their VOIP service, but they likely won't be able to detect my tunneled VOIP packets utilizing a small no name service that charges $2 a month (my ISP wants to charge/bundle the voice service for an additional $15-25/month depending on which "deal" you get). The problems here come from ISP's that won't upgrade their infrastructure to support the demand, because they are trying to maximize profits, and see advantages to being able to charge/extort fees from actors they think can afford it (netflix for example) or they feel are competing with their own offerings.

by pneill 9y ago

CodeCube 9y ago

It shouldn't be up to the individual and profit-seeking ISPs to decide that E911 and tele-surgery packets get priority. If there's a QoS concern for something, and it's deemed important enough, this is a perfectly rational place for regulation to step in and mandate it from every ISP equally.

dfee 9y ago
Oh, no! The point here is that regulating the internet is dangerous – Net Neutrality un-regulates it. We don't want every administration for the next 100 years to treat the internet as a victim of regulatory abuse, pushing it and pulling it towards their vision of "beautiful".
pneill 9y ago
How would you propose that packets be prioritized? I don't like the idea of the government telling me what packets should be prioritized. And saying that they all need to be treated the same is equally as bad. But the real issue here is that the need for net neutrality is a symptom and not the root disease. The disease that needs to be solved is a complete lack of competition in the ISP market. Service providers could differentiate themselves by QoS. You wouldn't need a net neutrality law if you had competition.
- so33 9y ago
  >You wouldn't need a net neutrality law if you had competition I don’t buy this argument because you not only need competition, you need a market with perfect information. Net neutrality buzzes on in the sidelines. I would wager that the majority of customers would not care if their ISP limited certain types of packets and would not attempt to switch ISPs (that is, if they even can switch).
  - _justinfunk 9y ago
    If a majority of customers wouldn't even care if this happened, then why is it the internet doomsday? Seems like you can't have both sides of the argument. Unless I'm missing your point.
    - lovehashbrowns 9y ago
      This isn't something as basic as "the right to bear arms." There's a lot of information and this is a fairly dull subject, so the ISPs rely on that to gain support for this. So you can have net neutrality be removed, and nobody care that it was removed, but still be in a much worse position than before. Similarly, the PATRIOT act was passed, and "nobody" cared. That doesn't mean that nothing changed.

mmjaa 9y ago

Instead of a single source of censorship, against which the people can fight, there will be multiple sources of censorship, and fighting one won't solve the problem. And in your E911 example, there are already ways for this to be solved without requiring censorship or throttling of data on the public networks. You can already buy life-/safety-critical bandwidth that is "off-Internet bands", if you need it - the point is, this isn't lumped with the 'general public Internet'.

kbhn 9y ago

DesiLurker 9y ago
thats a good way to put it.

falcolas 9y ago

No, they shouldn't all be treated equally. But the packet's source or destination should also not matter. NN fully supports traffic QOS by packet purpose (i.e. VOIP over gaming over web over bittorrent), just not by origin or destination. And it's origin/destination that ISPs demonstrably want to prioritize by.

Pilfer 9y ago
>But the packet's source or destination should also not matter Why not? It costs my ISP more to deliver certain packets than others. Sending a packet from San Francisco to San Jose is far cheaper than sending one from San Francisco to Sydney. Internet traffic costs are not the same across the world. Transit pricing in Australia is probably the most expensive in the world - it's roughly 20x higher than in the US. Why should ISPs be forced to pretend all traffic costs the same, when in reality it doesn't?
- falcolas 9y ago
  The ISP isn't directly paying that transit price. Level3 or other Tier 1 network providers are. And they set their prices according to their costs (and based on their own competition). Their prices are passed on to the ISPs, who pass it on to their customers. So, yeah, that transit cost is already accounted for in your monthly internet bill. Also, it's not productive to try and pretend that the prices levied by ISPs have anything to do with their costs; like all capitalism-born companies their prices are based on what the market will bear. Municipal broadband providers have proven that cost is nothing but a red herring used to justify prices and a lack of innovation.
  - Pilfer 9y ago
    >The ISP isn't directly paying that transit price Technically yes, but in many cases the ISPs are essentially the same company as the network provider. Xfinity is the ISP and Comcast is the network provider. Uverse is the ISP and AT&T is the network provider. Same with Fios and Verizon. Network providers do not want to be ISPs for legal benefits. >That transit cost is already accounted for in your monthly internet bill. While true, this doesn't address the issue I have with the current pricing model. The current internet pricing model is similar to an all-you-can-eat buffet, with a limit to the rate at which you can grab food, and how many pounds of food you can take per month. The issue is, a person who takes 5 pounds of pasta pays the same price as someone who takes 5 pounds of lobster. Under net neutrality, ISPs can't price based off food cost, and can only price based off weight. This leads to unfair pricing situations, as exampled above. It is possible to come up with more nonsensical examples with even larger cost discrepancies. Under your idea, should sending a packet across the street cost the same price as sending a packet to Mars? The first relies on $X0,000 of infrastructure costs, while the second relies on billions. The idea that 'pricing based off a packet's source or destination should not matter' makes sense in a world where all packets (or food in this example) are free, however, in the real world all packets have a cost associated with them.

DesiLurker 9y ago

so the issue you bring up is good because there is difference between origin neutrality and content neutrality. unfortunately (IMO) its rather naive to think that comcast has your best interests and will do the 'right thing' when they have power to distort the traffic and make so much money while they are at it. This action effectively allows them to double dip into any internet startups profits and worse yet pick out winners and losers based on their whim. Oh well .. that's the america we live in now.

slouch 9y ago

So, why does the hospital next to my house deserve cleaner water? Isn't this the same argument?

qaq 9y ago

Yes Comcast is spending a ton of money lobbying this because they want to prioritize E911 traffic.

Crespyl 9y ago

Quality-of-Service controls for different classes of traffic are already an important part of how the internet works, but is entirely separate from Net Neutrality. An operator like Verizon, for example, that runs phone service (including emergency calls) over the same lines as their standard internet service pretty much has to prioritize packet types differently. This is expected and understood by all parties. The Net Neutrality that people are up in arms about is related to limiting traffic of the same class based on which endpoints are involved. For example, Verizon cannot throttle (or worse, outright block) HTTP traffic to Netflix/Hulu/Youtube to 1KB/s to drive users to their own competing service.

pneill 9y ago
Good point, but if there was real competition in the ISP market, you could switch providers that do this. Don't fight for net neutrality. Fight for ISP marketplace
- Crespyl 9y ago
  Should I also fight for the road and sewage pipe market places while I'm at it? There are some pieces of infrastructure that only make sense as natural monopolies. I recently moved to Texas and was surprised and rather impressed at their two-layered electrical market. There is one "power distribution company" for an entire region, regulated (I assume) by the state/county. I never do business with them, but they hook my building up to the grid and maintain the lines. Then I choose a power generating company from a wealth of plans and providers, based on whatever criteria I care about. Doing something similar for internet service would be fantastic, but still requires neutrality from the last-mile infrastructure. Apparently in the UK they've managed something like this through something called local-loop unbundling, which I assume is part of why we don't hear so much about NN from over there. I would love to see something like that in the US; ISPs will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.

rsynnott 9y ago

If you're doing telesurgery over the public internet, then this is way down your list of problems.

plandis 9y ago

In the US ISPs have local monopolies / duopolies. They can litterally throttle what every they want without worrying about their customers. You need regulation in markets like.

Individualist 9y ago

"...'selfish routing' approach has a price of anarchy that’s a mere 4/3. That is, a free-for-all is only 33% worse than perfect top-down coordination." - Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions So in effect these messages would only arrive 33% faster. Not to mention the cost of having to monitor traffic and the additional charge to do so on the consumer in comparison to the "anarchic" TCP model we have now. The last time we bad this conversation when Verizon first sued for the rules to be dropped. Level 3 showed that the apparent need to create these fast lanes were due to an artificial bottleneck created by isps to throttle Netflix. When the new rules passed, the version that went in still allowed for these fast lanes to be created, but only through the supervision of the chairman. Whichb was a win for isms, despite the internet community cheering. Also included I the original title 2 is that you would not have a data cap and yo u would be charged for the internet you use versus a bulk sum every month. Articles around this time showed that after subsidies and tax credits to build infrastructure. It took TWC only a $1.24 to supply a custoomer internet access in which they charged $49.99. This included all operating costs.

Pilfer 9y ago
>So in effect these messages would only arrive 33% faster On average, yes, but in the event where a malicious attacker completely DoSes the network with packets, the prioritized packets would be more than 33% faster than average.

StillBored 9y ago

This sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding of most of the IP stack. The way TCP works is that bandwidth over consumption is signaled by dropping packets. Back in the mid 2000s "deep packet inspection" was the buzzword of the day, but frankly was mostly BS because you can't inspect encrypted traffic. So what happens, is that the traffic shaping is chosen by endpoint/route. Which means that the ISP might prioritize VOIP calls which terminate in their VOIP service, but they likely won't be able to detect my tunneled VOIP packets utilizing a small no name service that charges $2 a month (my ISP wants to charge/bundle the voice service for an additional $15-25/month depending on which "deal" you get). The problems here come from ISP's that won't upgrade their infrastructure to support the demand, because they are trying to maximize profits, and see advantages to being able to charge/extort fees from actors they think can afford it (netflix for example) or they feel are competing with their own offerings.