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Again: that sounds good, until you think it through. What happens when an upstart wants to compete with Verizon on VoIP? Say they roll out an innovative new p

by roc 16y ago

Again: that sounds good, until you think it through. What happens when an upstart wants to compete with Verizon on VoIP? Say they roll out an innovative new protocol that offers far better quality in a still-reasonable footprint. Or offers some sideband feature that existing VoIP doesn't. (say, streaming file transfer, letting you send data bits during a call while on the call directly to the person you're talking to. no need to open a mail client or sftp and negotiate a second connection) Why wouldn't Verizon decide that this new competitor is a new flavor of VoIP that needs to be in its own QoS tier? It will have a different traffic profile, so you can't very well argue that they shouldn't be able to "optimize" it separately on technical grounds. But now it's a new "type" and Verizon is free to kick it into the QoS round-file tier to either blackmail payment or simply hamstring adoption. Maybe they only do that until they catch up and offer similar features. Or maybe they launch their own next-gen VoIP protocol in yet-another QoS tier, where the upstart is still not allowed. Once you open the door to QoS by type --and leave type classification in the hands of the ISPs who directly profit from how these largely arbitrary lines are drawn-- there's a vanishingly small difference between QoS by type and by source.

jonknee 16y ago
> But now it's a new "type" and Verizon is free to kick it into the QoS round-file tier to either blackmail payment or simply hamstring adoption. This is what Google's looking to make sure doesn't happen. No one should be able to pay for a QoS tier or kick a competitor into a lower tier. It's not perfect, but as an end user I'd rather have SIP traffic prioritized and take a chance that a non-prioritized upstart standard will take longer to catch on than my calls to drop. Obviously the best scenario is a dramatic increase in network capacity so QoS is a non-issue, but that's not realistic in the short term.
haberman 16y ago
Your example doesn't make any sense. For purely technical reasons there would be no reason to send a VoIP call along with the "sideband feature" over the same connection. Even if your VoIP application offers a feature like streaming file transfer, you wouldn't actually implement that by sending that data over the VoIP connection, because the VoIP data requires real-time performance (the call starts breaking up if packets are delayed) but your streaming file transfer does not. It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call. If you simply opened a second, non-VoIP connection for the file transfer, everything would work fine. Would Verizon have an incentive to cheat by favoring its own services? Maybe, but that seems to be what these Google talks are all about in the first place. I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply.
- bryanh 16y ago
  I think his point is that the examples are unforeseeable, not that his example is the one you should be worried about.
- roc 16y ago
  > "It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call." 1. I think it would be silly to assume a reasonable person would propose sending multi-gigabyte files down a VoIP connection. You might want to consider asking people if there was a miscommunication before assuming they're unreasonable or ignorant. 2. I thought the qualifier that it would remove the need to open a second app was sufficient to indicate that I was talking about opening a second app. Ergo "connection" meant the human-process of mapping a VoIP contact to a data-transfer app/credentials, opening second app, sending file, etc. 3. No, a second physical connection for the file stream doesn't necessarily mean "everything would work fine". Anything that requires a new protocol/extension would make classification of the product/feature/service game to be, well, gamed, by the ISP, for profit. As the VoIP connection itself would need to at least be modified to signal/establish the physical data connection, you'd necessarily have a protocol variant - even if the file transfer itself was, say, ftp. 4. The whole point of the example is just "New product that extends old protocol, thereby giving ISP chance to QoS-round-file new product rather than compete". Focusing on the example itself is just wasting our time. > "I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply." I think Google is doing nothing more than hedging against the possibility that legislation will undercut the FCC's net neutrality kick; particularly given legislative power being likely to tip back to the strongly pro-corporate side. I sincerely doubt they're negotiating with Verizon over treatment of any traffic that does not come from Google.
  - haberman 16y ago
    > You might want to consider asking people if there was a miscommunication before assuming they're unreasonable or ignorant. Your entire argument is based on the assumption that Google is being unreasonable or ignorant. You're posing completely trivial scenarios of Verizon gaming the system, and assuming that Google is negotiating an agreement that is vulnerable to such trivial gaming. Furthermore, your only evidence whatsoever about these non-public negotiations is an extremely vague and misleading NYT article, and a paragraph blurb from Eric Schmidt. You know next to nothing about these negotiations (as do I), but you're completely confident in asserting that it "completely falls apart upon examination." > I sincerely doubt they're negotiating with Verizon over treatment of any traffic that does not come from Google. Did you even read what Eric said? "What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another." If what they're negotiating only applied to Google, it would be the opposite of the principle Eric is describing.

by roc 16y ago

jonknee 16y ago

> But now it's a new "type" and Verizon is free to kick it into the QoS round-file tier to either blackmail payment or simply hamstring adoption. This is what Google's looking to make sure doesn't happen. No one should be able to pay for a QoS tier or kick a competitor into a lower tier. It's not perfect, but as an end user I'd rather have SIP traffic prioritized and take a chance that a non-prioritized upstart standard will take longer to catch on than my calls to drop. Obviously the best scenario is a dramatic increase in network capacity so QoS is a non-issue, but that's not realistic in the short term.

haberman 16y ago

Your example doesn't make any sense. For purely technical reasons there would be no reason to send a VoIP call along with the "sideband feature" over the same connection. Even if your VoIP application offers a feature like streaming file transfer, you wouldn't actually implement that by sending that data over the VoIP connection, because the VoIP data requires real-time performance (the call starts breaking up if packets are delayed) but your streaming file transfer does not. It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call. If you simply opened a second, non-VoIP connection for the file transfer, everything would work fine. Would Verizon have an incentive to cheat by favoring its own services? Maybe, but that seems to be what these Google talks are all about in the first place. I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply.

bryanh 16y ago
I think his point is that the examples are unforeseeable, not that his example is the one you should be worried about.
roc 16y ago
> "It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call." 1. I think it would be silly to assume a reasonable person would propose sending multi-gigabyte files down a VoIP connection. You might want to consider asking people if there was a miscommunication before assuming they're unreasonable or ignorant. 2. I thought the qualifier that it would remove the need to open a second app was sufficient to indicate that I was talking about opening a second app. Ergo "connection" meant the human-process of mapping a VoIP contact to a data-transfer app/credentials, opening second app, sending file, etc. 3. No, a second physical connection for the file stream doesn't necessarily mean "everything would work fine". Anything that requires a new protocol/extension would make classification of the product/feature/service game to be, well, gamed, by the ISP, for profit. As the VoIP connection itself would need to at least be modified to signal/establish the physical data connection, you'd necessarily have a protocol variant - even if the file transfer itself was, say, ftp. 4. The whole point of the example is just "New product that extends old protocol, thereby giving ISP chance to QoS-round-file new product rather than compete". Focusing on the example itself is just wasting our time. > "I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply." I think Google is doing nothing more than hedging against the possibility that legislation will undercut the FCC's net neutrality kick; particularly given legislative power being likely to tip back to the strongly pro-corporate side. I sincerely doubt they're negotiating with Verizon over treatment of any traffic that does not come from Google.
- haberman 16y ago
  > You might want to consider asking people if there was a miscommunication before assuming they're unreasonable or ignorant. Your entire argument is based on the assumption that Google is being unreasonable or ignorant. You're posing completely trivial scenarios of Verizon gaming the system, and assuming that Google is negotiating an agreement that is vulnerable to such trivial gaming. Furthermore, your only evidence whatsoever about these non-public negotiations is an extremely vague and misleading NYT article, and a paragraph blurb from Eric Schmidt. You know next to nothing about these negotiations (as do I), but you're completely confident in asserting that it "completely falls apart upon examination." > I sincerely doubt they're negotiating with Verizon over treatment of any traffic that does not come from Google. Did you even read what Eric said? "What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another." If what they're negotiating only applied to Google, it would be the opposite of the principle Eric is describing.