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Some organizations such as the Wikimedia Foundation, Google, and Facebook believe that their services are more important than others. As such, they consider the

by dllu 9y ago

Some organizations such as the Wikimedia Foundation, Google, and Facebook believe that their services are more important than others. As such, they consider themselves deserving of cheaper, free, or the "fast lane" internet, especially in less developed areas without sufficient infrastructure to serve all websites. The rationale is that providing a limited set of websites for free is better than if those areas have no access to internet at all. Note: The views of the mentioned organizations do not necessarily reflect my own views. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics [1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutrality-protecting-the-internet/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net...

komali2 9y ago
I want to understand this better, but I can't grasp the concept of a "fast lane" in anything but an artificial sense - how can an ISP create a "fast lane" for a website - can't they only create "slow lanes" for everything BUT "fast laned" websites?
- amake 9y ago
  Yes.
- grahamburger 9y ago
  Kind of. Say an ISP cuts a deal with Google to make all Google's traffic higher priority than other traffic. When customers are using less than the network's full capacity nothing changes - all traffic goes through at full line speed. But as soon as any buffer starts to fill up on any device on the ISP network (because of network congestion) the network devices will pull Google's packets from the buffer more often than other traffic until the buffer is empty. Then it's back to line speed for everything.
- wanderingbort 9y ago
  The internet is not a single "connection" for an ISP that fans out to all the customers, unless your ISP is only able to get transport from a single peer/provider. The big ones back-haul to a major hub and then enter in to several peering agreements. Depending on what service/site you use the "best" path will be over one of those peers. However, this means that there is usually a middle-man-network in between you and the service you want and neither you, your ISP, nor the service can directly control the quality or speed of that network. If Netflix, Hulu and Google all end up with a "best" path on a single peer its going to be bad during prime time even though other services connected on other peers may operate normally. One version of a "fast lane" (like the one that Comcast and Netflix negotiated) is to remove that middle man and directly peer with the service. This is only available to large services because they need a presence in these major hubs as it usually requires a direct physical connection between edge routers. Now, no matter how congested their peers get, the "fast lane" service is working well. They have probably also agreed not to charge the actual "market" rate on that link's bandwidth as it is mutually beneficial and the ISP should pass those savings to its users by not counting the service against any data caps etc. From the outside, this looks like extortion. The reality though is that both sides pursue these kinds of deals all the time because it benefits their customers and therefore their bottom-lines. ISPs push harder for them because services, like Netflix, are incentivized to find the lowest cost transport peer which is usually not the highest quality. When that peering link is bad, customers blame the ISPs not Netflix. Netflix used to brag about how cheap and cut-rate their cost per gigabyte was. How do you think they got such a good deal? It wasn't by purchasing the best connection to their customers. It was become some sales exec at a tier 1/2 internet transport provider oversold their poor service. We should be just as upset with the overselling of transport over peers as we are about ISPs throttling but, most of the internet citizens don't understand how that works. Another note, most of the times when people use VPNs to "prove" that their ISP is throttling network capacity for a service, they are simply routing over a different peer (the one that connects to their VPN). In ideal circumstances this is traveling over a sub-optimal path and should suffer a little bit. However, in times of heavy congestion it is like being routed around a traffic jam. It is "very hard" with current routing protocols on the backbone to do this kind of "flow around" for congested paths in real-time for everyone. Single users are manually implementing it by hitting VPNs.
bduerst 9y ago
Isn't Google's project loon open internet, compared to Facebooks free basics?
- dllu 9y ago
  Google tried a similar thing to Free Basics with the Google Free Zone [0][1]. It launched in 2012 and disappeared from most places by 2013. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Free_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Free_Zone [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20130704133456/http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/landing/freezone/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130704133456/http://www.google....
  - bduerst 9y ago
    But Fiber doesn't do this now, correct? Neither does Loon?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
oever 9y ago
[1] has this quote "Net neutrality serves all Internet users – rich as poor – by providing equal access to diverse content online. We support net neutrality, and believe it is crucial for a healthy, free, and open Internet." and "The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open Internet." But the offering of Wikipedia Zero clashes with the idea of net neutrality.

by dllu 9y ago

komali2 9y ago

I want to understand this better, but I can't grasp the concept of a "fast lane" in anything but an artificial sense - how can an ISP create a "fast lane" for a website - can't they only create "slow lanes" for everything BUT "fast laned" websites?

amake 9y ago
Yes.
grahamburger 9y ago
Kind of. Say an ISP cuts a deal with Google to make all Google's traffic higher priority than other traffic. When customers are using less than the network's full capacity nothing changes - all traffic goes through at full line speed. But as soon as any buffer starts to fill up on any device on the ISP network (because of network congestion) the network devices will pull Google's packets from the buffer more often than other traffic until the buffer is empty. Then it's back to line speed for everything.
wanderingbort 9y ago
The internet is not a single "connection" for an ISP that fans out to all the customers, unless your ISP is only able to get transport from a single peer/provider. The big ones back-haul to a major hub and then enter in to several peering agreements. Depending on what service/site you use the "best" path will be over one of those peers. However, this means that there is usually a middle-man-network in between you and the service you want and neither you, your ISP, nor the service can directly control the quality or speed of that network. If Netflix, Hulu and Google all end up with a "best" path on a single peer its going to be bad during prime time even though other services connected on other peers may operate normally. One version of a "fast lane" (like the one that Comcast and Netflix negotiated) is to remove that middle man and directly peer with the service. This is only available to large services because they need a presence in these major hubs as it usually requires a direct physical connection between edge routers. Now, no matter how congested their peers get, the "fast lane" service is working well. They have probably also agreed not to charge the actual "market" rate on that link's bandwidth as it is mutually beneficial and the ISP should pass those savings to its users by not counting the service against any data caps etc. From the outside, this looks like extortion. The reality though is that both sides pursue these kinds of deals all the time because it benefits their customers and therefore their bottom-lines. ISPs push harder for them because services, like Netflix, are incentivized to find the lowest cost transport peer which is usually not the highest quality. When that peering link is bad, customers blame the ISPs not Netflix. Netflix used to brag about how cheap and cut-rate their cost per gigabyte was. How do you think they got such a good deal? It wasn't by purchasing the best connection to their customers. It was become some sales exec at a tier 1/2 internet transport provider oversold their poor service. We should be just as upset with the overselling of transport over peers as we are about ISPs throttling but, most of the internet citizens don't understand how that works. Another note, most of the times when people use VPNs to "prove" that their ISP is throttling network capacity for a service, they are simply routing over a different peer (the one that connects to their VPN). In ideal circumstances this is traveling over a sub-optimal path and should suffer a little bit. However, in times of heavy congestion it is like being routed around a traffic jam. It is "very hard" with current routing protocols on the backbone to do this kind of "flow around" for congested paths in real-time for everyone. Single users are manually implementing it by hitting VPNs.

bduerst 9y ago

Isn't Google's project loon open internet, compared to Facebooks free basics?

dllu 9y ago
Google tried a similar thing to Free Basics with the Google Free Zone [0][1]. It launched in 2012 and disappeared from most places by 2013. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Free_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Free_Zone [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20130704133456/http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/landing/freezone/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130704133456/http://www.google....
- bduerst 9y ago
  But Fiber doesn't do this now, correct? Neither does Loon?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

oever 9y ago

[1] has this quote "Net neutrality serves all Internet users – rich as poor – by providing equal access to diverse content online. We support net neutrality, and believe it is crucial for a healthy, free, and open Internet." and "The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open Internet." But the offering of Wikipedia Zero clashes with the idea of net neutrality.