5 ms·

Well, there's got to be a way to avoid this by VPNing, and using DNS not owned by ISPs right?

by animex 9y ago

colejohnson66 9y ago
The ISP can still see you using a VPN and throttle all VPN traffic. The only way to avoid it is to use an ISP that doesn’t throttle.
- timmytokyo 9y ago
  The point of using a VPN is that your ISP can't see what web sites and IP addresses you're visiting, so they have very little privacy-violating information they can sell.
  - RandomInteger4 9y ago
    Correct, but they can see that you're using a VPN, which they can throttle if net neutrality rules are taken away by the current FCC.
  - csydas 9y ago
    Yes, but why does that matter when what the ISPs want is control and the ability to tax the content you're trying? If they can't milk your connection for data, then just throttle the connection type and call it a day. $25 a month for VPN access is probably more than they'd get on the small bit of private data they could extract from any non-secure connection to a website/service. So go ahead and use a VPN, but it won't matter when you're throttled to 50 kb/s
    - Jach 9y ago
      They won't throttle. Too many people use a VPN for work from home. If you have to pay extra, fine, but let's be clear that the only changes are monetary ones, not available QOS overall.
      - csydas 9y ago
        I'm sorry, I'm not sure I see the logic here or what you're trying to say. > If you have to pay extra, fine, but let's be clear that the only changes are monetary ones, Are you suggesting that they wouldn't throttle, they'd just block? I'm not sure how this is any better or changes the scenario; you still have to pay to use a service you currently can use just fine. Blocking, throttling, the end result is the same; you are unable to use the service because the ISP has decided they deserve to be paid for your use of this service. Whether it's a work VPN or a VPN service, there would be no distinguishing. Plus, we've already seen such muscling from ISPs as they wanted cuts of service profits with regards to the Netflix throttling. Comcast decided "we deserve some payment from Netflix", and forced a contract to be made, all the while consumers were unable to use a service because Comcast decided that "oh, we deserve a cut here." If VPN usage increased, I see no reason why the same wouldn't happen, regardless of the use. Since there's no singular entity to press on here (as was the case with Netflix), just press on the end-users by means of throttling, or cut it off all together. We have plenty of historical evidence that ISPs will do whatever they want if they can get away with it, including throttling.
        Jach 9y ago
        I'm saying, I currently pay for a quality of service, e.g. 30 Mbps up/down, certain monthly bandwidth, maybe 'boost' during non-peak, whatever. I also use a VPN when I work from home, I have to. One day I notice my VPN speed has dropped, the VPN is fine, but I'm not getting the level of service I'm paying for. A call to complain would fix it, either with them apologizing or them saying "oh, you have to pay $xx/mo to get on our business tier with no throttling." Note, Comcast actually does something like this already. If you get on their gigabit plan, their dumb monthly cap of 1 TB still applies, but you can pay more to remove that cap and go back to the unlimited it used to be.
        csydas 9y ago
        Okay, but I'm still not following the initial comment on "they won't throttle", when you just described a situation in which they throttle? What I'm missing is how the initial comment relates to the first, specifically they won't throttle or make any QOS changes because too many people use it. We've seen that Comcast in particular is more than happy to throttle services just because they can or want to, and in the case of Netflix, consumers didn't even have an option to pay more to make it work properly; Netflix just would be terrible for them no matter what. What I'm saying was a response to the idea that people can somehow just use a VPN to circumvent any restrictions, which makes no sense to me. Usage reports will clearly show a high level of traffic going over VPN, and the response will just be to make this part of a new tier of service as well; to recoup the value lost by people bypassing tier/package service with a VPN, the price will be adjusted accordingly. So I'm sorry, I guess I'm just being dense, but I'm not sure exactly why VPN services wouldn't be affected if VPNs became a means of circumventing the intended Tiering/Package offers.
- csydas 9y ago
  More or less this, yeah. I'm not sure how people think they can just work around it when their gateway out of the last mile will have free reign to do whatever with the packets in/out as they see fit, and this will be supported legally (Well aware that rogue or otherwise just crappy actors can still do this now, but there are legal repercussions to doing so at the moment). Basically your choice is to find someone who doesn't do this, and hope that the path from whatever service or site you're wanting doesn't go through the pipes of an ISP that does want to throttle on its way to you. It's going to be a mess once this has ramped up to the full vision of the ISPs.
  - briandear 9y ago
    And will competition result in more ISPs entering the market to serve customer desires? NN isn’t the issue — the issue is local governments that make deals with a single ISP to prevent competition. If ISP competition were possible, the NN becomes irrelevant because ISP’s want customers and customers would demand the services they want and shop around for an ISP that serves their need. We should be complaining about the lack of ISP competition, not NN. Remember the days when long distance phone calls actually cost a lot of money? That was the result of a Bell monopoly.
    - csydas 9y ago
      I'm not sure how this is relevant; yes, more proper competition would be great, but we had that, for a long time, and the competition merged/consolidated. Merger after merger happened until cities were left with two competitors that made deals to stay off each other's sides of the tracks. The market naturally consolidated without government regulation allowing such things to occur. Besides, this is a tangential issue; it's related in someway, but such competition doesn't help consumers when it comes to what their ISP can and cannot do. Even without city contracts, it's really expensive in the US to start an ISP; we've seen countless stories about ISP start-ups here on HN which show the difficulty of such a venture, and it's why we don't see more of it. Heck, Google with its deep pockets could not make it work even in cities that were happy to bend over backwards for them. Even if we were to have more last mile ISPs, how does that help when the rest of the upstream is plagued with ISPs that are deprioritizing traffic based on their preferences? What good is it to have an ISP at the last mile in Seattle if the route to Seattle de-prioritizes this traffic? Net Neutrality is equally important to the striking down of the city-wide contracts ISPs have managed to get. This was a state by state thing and the story was the same each time; the ISPs promised far more than they delivered to the states, and the states just ate the bill while the ISPs fought in court each and every time. I don't believe for a moment that the ISPs should be able to use our Tax Payer money to have laid cable like this then bend us over a barrel for it. More competition would be great, but this alone doesn't solve the issue. How big of a price tag does a BenevolentISP have before it's an offer too good to refuse? Why even give them the power to use our money to screw us even further?
dantillberg 9y ago
Did future-you subscribe to the Comcast VPN Access package? I think it's only an extra $25/mo, and they let you choose from 20 vetted VPN providers. /s
- ericd 9y ago
  You can always VPN to a box you control over port 443 (the same as https). Sucks that you have to do that, but it's very easy to set up. I guess you could theoretically eventually get them using the same stuff China uses to block VPNs via more advanced heuristics, though.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    And what is to stop them from traffic shaping it? China's firewall demonstrates this stuff is very detectable.
    - tadfisher 9y ago
      And it can be defeated with an Android app, so I'm not so sure Comcast can win that rat-race.
      - davrosthedalek 9y ago
        It is so fricking trivial to implement. Slow down everything. Whitelist the IPs of paying parties. Done.
    - ericd 9y ago
      Did you not notice that I said exactly that in the second half of my comment?
Joeri 9y ago
Time to start researching how people circumvent the great firewall of china, because this uses the same technology.
- snowpanda 9y ago
  Shadowsocks + VPS still worked in September, not sure if it still does. It will just be a cat and mouse game though. Ending with people not taking the risk due to penalties. (ie. ISP blacklist of users who tried to circumvent the system)
- gcb0 9y ago
  the circumventing works because it is a black list. so you can change end points faster than they are blocked. without net neutrality, they can give you 2G speeds for everything and whitelist special sites. so you can only circumvent the speed limit if a whitelisted site gives you a vpn pipe and consequently foot the bill for you.... good luck with that. my guess is that hacking of the network of the basic services, such as sites owned by their parent company or dns or anything that the ISP give at full speed because it is too much work to limit or business interests for you to access at full throttle... those things will have more holes poked at them than they will have corrupt employees selling privileged access :(
losteric 9y ago
The way to avoid this is vigorously campaigning for better representatives, removing the sellouts from office
- drieddust 9y ago
  Absolutely but for some reason American are more interested in "keeping the markets regulation free". Natural monopolies like telecom need to be heavily regulated.
  - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
    Because they’ve been sold a bill of goods by people like the Koch brothers. https://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463565987/hidden-history-of-koch-brothers-traces-their-childhood-and-political-rise https://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463565987/hidden-history-of-k...
- animex 9y ago
  This will never happen because the education system of America has been dumbed-down on purpose so the elites control the government through subversion via advertising and lobbying/donations. I'm a big fan of Lawrence Lessig's idea: https://vimeo.com/76349568 https://vimeo.com/76349568 https://www.rootstrikers.org https://www.rootstrikers.org How you'll get any group of morally bankrupt politicians to vote for such a statute is unfathomable. Canada had it briefly but the big parties nixed it as soon as they got into power. They didn't like the idea that 3rd and 4th tier parties could actually earn money from votes and actually start to chip away at this 2-party flip-flopping that we have every 8-12 years.
- sgroppino 9y ago
  Or competition between ISPs?
tinus_hn 9y ago
Then the traffic is not in the approved categories and it will either be throttled or you will be charged.

Well, there's got to be a way to avoid this by VPNing, and using DNS not owned by ISPs right?

by animex 9y ago

Well, there's got to be a way to avoid this by VPNing, and using DNS not owned by ISPs right?

The ISP can still see you using a VPN and throttle all VPN traffic. The only way to avoid it is to use an ISP that doesn’t throttle.

timmytokyo 9y ago
The point of using a VPN is that your ISP can't see what web sites and IP addresses you're visiting, so they have very little privacy-violating information they can sell.
- RandomInteger4 9y ago
  Correct, but they can see that you're using a VPN, which they can throttle if net neutrality rules are taken away by the current FCC.
- csydas 9y ago
  Yes, but why does that matter when what the ISPs want is control and the ability to tax the content you're trying? If they can't milk your connection for data, then just throttle the connection type and call it a day. $25 a month for VPN access is probably more than they'd get on the small bit of private data they could extract from any non-secure connection to a website/service. So go ahead and use a VPN, but it won't matter when you're throttled to 50 kb/s
  - Jach 9y ago
    They won't throttle. Too many people use a VPN for work from home. If you have to pay extra, fine, but let's be clear that the only changes are monetary ones, not available QOS overall.
    - csydas 9y ago
      I'm sorry, I'm not sure I see the logic here or what you're trying to say. > If you have to pay extra, fine, but let's be clear that the only changes are monetary ones, Are you suggesting that they wouldn't throttle, they'd just block? I'm not sure how this is any better or changes the scenario; you still have to pay to use a service you currently can use just fine. Blocking, throttling, the end result is the same; you are unable to use the service because the ISP has decided they deserve to be paid for your use of this service. Whether it's a work VPN or a VPN service, there would be no distinguishing. Plus, we've already seen such muscling from ISPs as they wanted cuts of service profits with regards to the Netflix throttling. Comcast decided "we deserve some payment from Netflix", and forced a contract to be made, all the while consumers were unable to use a service because Comcast decided that "oh, we deserve a cut here." If VPN usage increased, I see no reason why the same wouldn't happen, regardless of the use. Since there's no singular entity to press on here (as was the case with Netflix), just press on the end-users by means of throttling, or cut it off all together. We have plenty of historical evidence that ISPs will do whatever they want if they can get away with it, including throttling.
      - Jach 9y ago
        I'm saying, I currently pay for a quality of service, e.g. 30 Mbps up/down, certain monthly bandwidth, maybe 'boost' during non-peak, whatever. I also use a VPN when I work from home, I have to. One day I notice my VPN speed has dropped, the VPN is fine, but I'm not getting the level of service I'm paying for. A call to complain would fix it, either with them apologizing or them saying "oh, you have to pay $xx/mo to get on our business tier with no throttling." Note, Comcast actually does something like this already. If you get on their gigabit plan, their dumb monthly cap of 1 TB still applies, but you can pay more to remove that cap and go back to the unlimited it used to be.
        csydas 9y ago
        Okay, but I'm still not following the initial comment on "they won't throttle", when you just described a situation in which they throttle? What I'm missing is how the initial comment relates to the first, specifically they won't throttle or make any QOS changes because too many people use it. We've seen that Comcast in particular is more than happy to throttle services just because they can or want to, and in the case of Netflix, consumers didn't even have an option to pay more to make it work properly; Netflix just would be terrible for them no matter what. What I'm saying was a response to the idea that people can somehow just use a VPN to circumvent any restrictions, which makes no sense to me. Usage reports will clearly show a high level of traffic going over VPN, and the response will just be to make this part of a new tier of service as well; to recoup the value lost by people bypassing tier/package service with a VPN, the price will be adjusted accordingly. So I'm sorry, I guess I'm just being dense, but I'm not sure exactly why VPN services wouldn't be affected if VPNs became a means of circumventing the intended Tiering/Package offers.
csydas 9y ago
More or less this, yeah. I'm not sure how people think they can just work around it when their gateway out of the last mile will have free reign to do whatever with the packets in/out as they see fit, and this will be supported legally (Well aware that rogue or otherwise just crappy actors can still do this now, but there are legal repercussions to doing so at the moment). Basically your choice is to find someone who doesn't do this, and hope that the path from whatever service or site you're wanting doesn't go through the pipes of an ISP that does want to throttle on its way to you. It's going to be a mess once this has ramped up to the full vision of the ISPs.
- briandear 9y ago
  And will competition result in more ISPs entering the market to serve customer desires? NN isn’t the issue — the issue is local governments that make deals with a single ISP to prevent competition. If ISP competition were possible, the NN becomes irrelevant because ISP’s want customers and customers would demand the services they want and shop around for an ISP that serves their need. We should be complaining about the lack of ISP competition, not NN. Remember the days when long distance phone calls actually cost a lot of money? That was the result of a Bell monopoly.
  - csydas 9y ago
    I'm not sure how this is relevant; yes, more proper competition would be great, but we had that, for a long time, and the competition merged/consolidated. Merger after merger happened until cities were left with two competitors that made deals to stay off each other's sides of the tracks. The market naturally consolidated without government regulation allowing such things to occur. Besides, this is a tangential issue; it's related in someway, but such competition doesn't help consumers when it comes to what their ISP can and cannot do. Even without city contracts, it's really expensive in the US to start an ISP; we've seen countless stories about ISP start-ups here on HN which show the difficulty of such a venture, and it's why we don't see more of it. Heck, Google with its deep pockets could not make it work even in cities that were happy to bend over backwards for them. Even if we were to have more last mile ISPs, how does that help when the rest of the upstream is plagued with ISPs that are deprioritizing traffic based on their preferences? What good is it to have an ISP at the last mile in Seattle if the route to Seattle de-prioritizes this traffic? Net Neutrality is equally important to the striking down of the city-wide contracts ISPs have managed to get. This was a state by state thing and the story was the same each time; the ISPs promised far more than they delivered to the states, and the states just ate the bill while the ISPs fought in court each and every time. I don't believe for a moment that the ISPs should be able to use our Tax Payer money to have laid cable like this then bend us over a barrel for it. More competition would be great, but this alone doesn't solve the issue. How big of a price tag does a BenevolentISP have before it's an offer too good to refuse? Why even give them the power to use our money to screw us even further?

dantillberg 9y ago

Did future-you subscribe to the Comcast VPN Access package? I think it's only an extra $25/mo, and they let you choose from 20 vetted VPN providers. /s

ericd 9y ago
You can always VPN to a box you control over port 443 (the same as https). Sucks that you have to do that, but it's very easy to set up. I guess you could theoretically eventually get them using the same stuff China uses to block VPNs via more advanced heuristics, though.
- x0x0 9y ago
  And what is to stop them from traffic shaping it? China's firewall demonstrates this stuff is very detectable.
  - tadfisher 9y ago
    And it can be defeated with an Android app, so I'm not so sure Comcast can win that rat-race.
    - davrosthedalek 9y ago
      It is so fricking trivial to implement. Slow down everything. Whitelist the IPs of paying parties. Done.
  - ericd 9y ago
    Did you not notice that I said exactly that in the second half of my comment?

Joeri 9y ago

Time to start researching how people circumvent the great firewall of china, because this uses the same technology.

snowpanda 9y ago
Shadowsocks + VPS still worked in September, not sure if it still does. It will just be a cat and mouse game though. Ending with people not taking the risk due to penalties. (ie. ISP blacklist of users who tried to circumvent the system)
gcb0 9y ago
the circumventing works because it is a black list. so you can change end points faster than they are blocked. without net neutrality, they can give you 2G speeds for everything and whitelist special sites. so you can only circumvent the speed limit if a whitelisted site gives you a vpn pipe and consequently foot the bill for you.... good luck with that. my guess is that hacking of the network of the basic services, such as sites owned by their parent company or dns or anything that the ISP give at full speed because it is too much work to limit or business interests for you to access at full throttle... those things will have more holes poked at them than they will have corrupt employees selling privileged access :(

losteric 9y ago

The way to avoid this is vigorously campaigning for better representatives, removing the sellouts from office

drieddust 9y ago
Absolutely but for some reason American are more interested in "keeping the markets regulation free". Natural monopolies like telecom need to be heavily regulated.
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  Because they’ve been sold a bill of goods by people like the Koch brothers. https://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463565987/hidden-history-of-koch-brothers-traces-their-childhood-and-political-rise https://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463565987/hidden-history-of-k...
animex 9y ago
This will never happen because the education system of America has been dumbed-down on purpose so the elites control the government through subversion via advertising and lobbying/donations. I'm a big fan of Lawrence Lessig's idea: https://vimeo.com/76349568 https://vimeo.com/76349568 https://www.rootstrikers.org https://www.rootstrikers.org How you'll get any group of morally bankrupt politicians to vote for such a statute is unfathomable. Canada had it briefly but the big parties nixed it as soon as they got into power. They didn't like the idea that 3rd and 4th tier parties could actually earn money from votes and actually start to chip away at this 2-party flip-flopping that we have every 8-12 years.
sgroppino 9y ago
Or competition between ISPs?

tinus_hn 9y ago

Then the traffic is not in the approved categories and it will either be throttled or you will be charged.