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Sounds entirely reasonable to me: > [T]he Commission also should bear in mind that a more flexible approach to prioritization may be warranted and may be benef

by apeace 9y ago

Sounds entirely reasonable to me: > [T]he Commission also should bear in mind that a more flexible approach to prioritization may be warranted and may be beneficial to the public. For example, a telepresence service tailored for the hearing impaired requires high-definition video that is of sufficiently reliable quality to permit users "to perceive subtle hand and finger motions" in real time. And paid prioritization may have other compelling applications in telemedicine. Likewise, for autonomous vehicles that may require instantaneous data transmission, black letter prohibitions on paid prioritization may actually stifle innovation instead of encouraging it. Commercial arrangements that entail prioritizing such traffic could ensure the low latency levels needed to achieve the high level of data quality necessary for such services to thrive. VoIP really needs low latency. Buffering a Youtube video or downloading a torrent doesn't. Selective prioritization could improve the former drastically, while having no noticeable effect on the latter. Note I'm not taking a stance on the issue either way. Maybe it would be better to keep Net Neutrality and add provisions for latency-sensitive applications. Maybe it's better to nuke it and let the markets figure it out. Either way, this is an important point and I'm surprised that the HN crowd doesn't discuss it more.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Analemma_ 9y ago
QoS is not net neutrality, and confusing the two is a common tactic of anti-NN shills who can’t make actual points.
- apeace 9y ago
  I'd love to hear more about the difference between QoS and "prioritization", as they are calling it.
  - pdabbadabba 9y ago
    The existing rules contain an exception to the no-throttling and no-blocking rules for "reasonable network management." Here is how the Commission has defined that term: > A network management practice is a practice that has a primarily technical network management justification, but does not include other business practices. A network management practice is reasonable if it is primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service. It's debatable what exactly this means, but providing higher QoS for traffic that needs it--in a way that does not discriminate between providers of those services--would seem to be a strong candidate.
    - rosser 9y ago
      > in a way that does not discriminate between providers of those service Exactly. Anti-NN (broadly) wants to be able to discriminate on the basis of provider, not service.
      - pishpash 9y ago
        "Provider" and "service" aren't always distinguishable.
        rosser 9y ago
        Does that excuse provider-based discrimination in the cases where they are distinguishable? I'm pretty sure those are the overwhelming majority.
    - pishpash 9y ago
      I take "legitimate network management purpose" to mean improving some metric of overall usage satisfaction. This is tricky, and already leaves a lot of room to maneuver.
  - nitrogen 9y ago
    QoS is decided by the user/service. Paid prioritization is decided by the ISP. Every connection can have a max high-priority bandwidth and a max best-effort bandwidth, so people won't benefit from just marking every connection as high-QoS.
    - dfox 9y ago
      Any sane ISP either ignores or replaces QoS tags on ingress to their network.
  - wmf 9y ago
    Currently, ISPs strip/normalize the TOS bits on incoming traffic. ISPs could enable DiffServ (especially at the CMTS/DSLAM) and charge content providers to respect their TOS bits, allowing traffic like VoIP and gaming to get lower latency/jitter. But they don't do that. Instead, ISPs are creating artificial congestion on their transit links (by leaving router ports unplugged) and then selling that bandwidth to content providers via paid peering to avoid the congestion. Basically "it would be a shame if massive packet loss were to happen... never mind, we already did it". So yeah, paid peering probably does have lower latency than congested and bufferbloated transit links, but it's not like ISPs are using any kind of QoS as the term is traditionally understood. ISPs always talk about low-latency applications (think of the deaf people!) but then they don't do anything that would actually reduce latency/jitter.
- pishpash 9y ago
  QoS can't be implemented without payments to authenticate intent, but the argument would hold more water if the fees are merely transfer payments between users and Comcast gets $0 out of it, or ... Comcast has competitors. Neither is true, so QoS basically should not be implemented and it's Comcast's own fault for being a rent-seeking monopoly.
gdulli 9y ago
People probably believe that the positive effects are on the more obscure or hypothetical side while the negative effects would be more severe and definite. Sorry to the hearing impaired community for not prioritizing your latency needs, but Fox News buying up all the ISPs and controlling the news is worse.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical. Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call. And yes, there's a whole list of individual token offenses ISPs have committed that people will spam out when you point this out, but it doesn't change the fact that the fears and horrors propping up this movement on a large scale do not exist.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical No they aren't; many of them are things that the FCC responded to in if years of enforcing net neutrality principles through case by case actions, such as mobile and fixed broadband ISPs blocking services that competed with their offerings, and blocking other lawful services or content, sometimes for political reasons. > Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call. “Fast lanes” have gotten blown out of proportion because of discussion of a possible weakness in an earlier draft of the 2015 order. They aren't actually a concern for the non-neutral net, they are a concern about a potential end-run around a net regulated for neutrality but with a loophole. Unfortunately, a popular distortion side that that draft was designed by enemies of neutrality rather than people trying to save it who might have designed the draft insufficiently tightly, and so “fast lanes” have become associated with the goals and plans of the anti-neutrality camp rather than just a potential weakness in a no-longer-relevant pro-neutrality draft regulation. I mostly blame John Oliver for that. Although, in point of fact, edge provider preference much like fast lanes exists in the form of zero rating, which is occurring in the mobile broadband space. It's not precisely the same thing, but had much the same issue.
mikeash 9y ago
Prioritization is only necessary or useful when bandwidth is scarce and your endpoints would use more than you have if they could. The best solution for all of the applications listed is more capacity, not prioritization. What, then, does their eagerness for prioritization tell us? It tells us that these companies would like to stop investing so much in increasing capacity, and instead squeeze as much money as they can out of their existing infrastructure. They're going to make things worse (or let them gradually become worse over time) just so they can charge extra money to people who need something better. Beyond that, prioritization is not in conflict with net neutrality. If my ISP wants to offer me a premium subscription that prioritizes my traffic over normal subscribers, that's fine. Where we run into trouble is when they start doing this for other people who aren't their customers. If they want to charge me more for better service, that's fine. If they want to charge Netflix more to provide me with better service, that's not fine.
- andrewjl 9y ago
  Comcast has $5 billion USD on their balance sheet in cash. They can afford to add more capacity.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Of course. But they'd rather have even more cash if they can.
  - fancyfacebook 9y ago
    They also have about $120 billion USD in debt. Not exactly the healthiest company in the world financially speaking.
- apeace 9y ago
  > Prioritization is only necessary or useful when bandwidth is scarce and your endpoints would use more than you have if they could. The best solution for all of the applications listed is more capacity, not prioritization. This doesn't make sense to me. Sometimes there can be large spikes in network traffic. In theory, if your network has enough capacity to handle _all_ the traffic at low latency during normal load, then the prioritization has no effect anyways. It's only there for when you are low on capacity. I'd love for someone to correct my understanding here.
nawgszy 9y ago
>Either way, this is an important point and I'm surprised that the HN crowd doesn't discuss it more. But right now all latency-sensitive applications should be operating just fine. I regularly play online first person shooters, and that is a latency-sensitive application if there ever was one. So that strongly suggests, seeing how I'm on Comcast / Xfinity's cheapest plan, that all lanes are fast lanes right now. Accordingly, that means if you were to >nuke [net neutrality] and let the markets figure it out that's actually just letting a monopoly extract more profit from their network by intentionally degrading the quality of some connections unless paid more money. I don't really think I need to say more, if this was a fair and competitive market where giant ISPs weren't lawsuit-happy in order to keep out competition, or they weren't able to do that successfully, sure, maybe the market would figure it out, and eventually the ISPs that offer true net neutrality would probably have traffic because no consumer is interested in paying more to be able to use the internet in specific ways. As it stands, it's extortion being codified into law via bribery, disguised as 'the removal of heavy-handed Obama regulations in order to improve the network you've never had any issues with'.
- legitster 9y ago
  A lot of games are low latency specifically because they worked with ISPs to reduce latency, or worked with a server provider that did so: https://www.polygon.com/2016/2/17/11037220/league-of-legends-was-too-slow-so-riot-built-a-private-internet-to https://www.polygon.com/2016/2/17/11037220/league-of-legends... As I understand, the monopolies like Comcast and Time Warner have almost no incentive to actually improve their infrastructure unless they have the ability to shake down the services that want speedier connections when they need them.
  - dv_dt 9y ago
    And this exactly how lack of net neutrality (combined with lack of infrastructure competition) messes up market signaling. A game then inflates its price, and all customers of the game pay a little bit extra because in some areas the ISP is shaking them down. The pricing pressure lands on the game company to resolve, in part with costs to customers which only have an indirect link to the transaction, not on the ISP that could actually resolve the problem with the direct parties involved.
simion314 9y ago
It makes more sense if you promise me X Mb/s download speed then give that to me, if you are not able then don't promise that speed, I should decide for what I need the speed, I should not have horrible speed for X protocol/site/app that I use 99% of the time but you have great speed for Netflix but we both pay same price. I want things to be fair, customers, websites, apps to be treated the same.
nur0n 9y ago
I hope this is an exercise in playing devil's advocate and not true naivety. Do you really think telcos care about these issues? They are a business and not a socialist government. Other comments have stated their goal clearly: increase margins from existing infrastructure. If fair repartition of resources was their goal, why not make that an explicit part of the laws they want to introduce? Why do it in a roundabout way? Presenting a wall of 'possibilities' only serves to obfuscate their true goal. Would you let 'the markets figure out' your water supply?

by apeace 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Analemma_ 9y ago

QoS is not net neutrality, and confusing the two is a common tactic of anti-NN shills who can’t make actual points.

apeace 9y ago
I'd love to hear more about the difference between QoS and "prioritization", as they are calling it.
- pdabbadabba 9y ago
  The existing rules contain an exception to the no-throttling and no-blocking rules for "reasonable network management." Here is how the Commission has defined that term: > A network management practice is a practice that has a primarily technical network management justification, but does not include other business practices. A network management practice is reasonable if it is primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service. It's debatable what exactly this means, but providing higher QoS for traffic that needs it--in a way that does not discriminate between providers of those services--would seem to be a strong candidate.
  - rosser 9y ago
    > in a way that does not discriminate between providers of those service Exactly. Anti-NN (broadly) wants to be able to discriminate on the basis of provider, not service.
    - pishpash 9y ago
      "Provider" and "service" aren't always distinguishable.
      - rosser 9y ago
        Does that excuse provider-based discrimination in the cases where they are distinguishable? I'm pretty sure those are the overwhelming majority.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    I take "legitimate network management purpose" to mean improving some metric of overall usage satisfaction. This is tricky, and already leaves a lot of room to maneuver.
- nitrogen 9y ago
  QoS is decided by the user/service. Paid prioritization is decided by the ISP. Every connection can have a max high-priority bandwidth and a max best-effort bandwidth, so people won't benefit from just marking every connection as high-QoS.
  - dfox 9y ago
    Any sane ISP either ignores or replaces QoS tags on ingress to their network.
- wmf 9y ago
  Currently, ISPs strip/normalize the TOS bits on incoming traffic. ISPs could enable DiffServ (especially at the CMTS/DSLAM) and charge content providers to respect their TOS bits, allowing traffic like VoIP and gaming to get lower latency/jitter. But they don't do that. Instead, ISPs are creating artificial congestion on their transit links (by leaving router ports unplugged) and then selling that bandwidth to content providers via paid peering to avoid the congestion. Basically "it would be a shame if massive packet loss were to happen... never mind, we already did it". So yeah, paid peering probably does have lower latency than congested and bufferbloated transit links, but it's not like ISPs are using any kind of QoS as the term is traditionally understood. ISPs always talk about low-latency applications (think of the deaf people!) but then they don't do anything that would actually reduce latency/jitter.
pishpash 9y ago
QoS can't be implemented without payments to authenticate intent, but the argument would hold more water if the fees are merely transfer payments between users and Comcast gets $0 out of it, or ... Comcast has competitors. Neither is true, so QoS basically should not be implemented and it's Comcast's own fault for being a rent-seeking monopoly.

gdulli 9y ago

People probably believe that the positive effects are on the more obscure or hypothetical side while the negative effects would be more severe and definite. Sorry to the hearing impaired community for not prioritizing your latency needs, but Fox News buying up all the ISPs and controlling the news is worse.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical. Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call. And yes, there's a whole list of individual token offenses ISPs have committed that people will spam out when you point this out, but it doesn't change the fact that the fears and horrors propping up this movement on a large scale do not exist.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical No they aren't; many of them are things that the FCC responded to in if years of enforcing net neutrality principles through case by case actions, such as mobile and fixed broadband ISPs blocking services that competed with their offerings, and blocking other lawful services or content, sometimes for political reasons. > Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call. “Fast lanes” have gotten blown out of proportion because of discussion of a possible weakness in an earlier draft of the 2015 order. They aren't actually a concern for the non-neutral net, they are a concern about a potential end-run around a net regulated for neutrality but with a loophole. Unfortunately, a popular distortion side that that draft was designed by enemies of neutrality rather than people trying to save it who might have designed the draft insufficiently tightly, and so “fast lanes” have become associated with the goals and plans of the anti-neutrality camp rather than just a potential weakness in a no-longer-relevant pro-neutrality draft regulation. I mostly blame John Oliver for that. Although, in point of fact, edge provider preference much like fast lanes exists in the form of zero rating, which is occurring in the mobile broadband space. It's not precisely the same thing, but had much the same issue.

mikeash 9y ago

Prioritization is only necessary or useful when bandwidth is scarce and your endpoints would use more than you have if they could. The best solution for all of the applications listed is more capacity, not prioritization. What, then, does their eagerness for prioritization tell us? It tells us that these companies would like to stop investing so much in increasing capacity, and instead squeeze as much money as they can out of their existing infrastructure. They're going to make things worse (or let them gradually become worse over time) just so they can charge extra money to people who need something better. Beyond that, prioritization is not in conflict with net neutrality. If my ISP wants to offer me a premium subscription that prioritizes my traffic over normal subscribers, that's fine. Where we run into trouble is when they start doing this for other people who aren't their customers. If they want to charge me more for better service, that's fine. If they want to charge Netflix more to provide me with better service, that's not fine.

andrewjl 9y ago
Comcast has $5 billion USD on their balance sheet in cash. They can afford to add more capacity.
- mikeash 9y ago
  Of course. But they'd rather have even more cash if they can.
- fancyfacebook 9y ago
  They also have about $120 billion USD in debt. Not exactly the healthiest company in the world financially speaking.
apeace 9y ago
> Prioritization is only necessary or useful when bandwidth is scarce and your endpoints would use more than you have if they could. The best solution for all of the applications listed is more capacity, not prioritization. This doesn't make sense to me. Sometimes there can be large spikes in network traffic. In theory, if your network has enough capacity to handle _all_ the traffic at low latency during normal load, then the prioritization has no effect anyways. It's only there for when you are low on capacity. I'd love for someone to correct my understanding here.

nawgszy 9y ago

>Either way, this is an important point and I'm surprised that the HN crowd doesn't discuss it more. But right now all latency-sensitive applications should be operating just fine. I regularly play online first person shooters, and that is a latency-sensitive application if there ever was one. So that strongly suggests, seeing how I'm on Comcast / Xfinity's cheapest plan, that all lanes are fast lanes right now. Accordingly, that means if you were to >nuke [net neutrality] and let the markets figure it out that's actually just letting a monopoly extract more profit from their network by intentionally degrading the quality of some connections unless paid more money. I don't really think I need to say more, if this was a fair and competitive market where giant ISPs weren't lawsuit-happy in order to keep out competition, or they weren't able to do that successfully, sure, maybe the market would figure it out, and eventually the ISPs that offer true net neutrality would probably have traffic because no consumer is interested in paying more to be able to use the internet in specific ways. As it stands, it's extortion being codified into law via bribery, disguised as 'the removal of heavy-handed Obama regulations in order to improve the network you've never had any issues with'.

legitster 9y ago
A lot of games are low latency specifically because they worked with ISPs to reduce latency, or worked with a server provider that did so: https://www.polygon.com/2016/2/17/11037220/league-of-legends-was-too-slow-so-riot-built-a-private-internet-to https://www.polygon.com/2016/2/17/11037220/league-of-legends... As I understand, the monopolies like Comcast and Time Warner have almost no incentive to actually improve their infrastructure unless they have the ability to shake down the services that want speedier connections when they need them.
- dv_dt 9y ago
  And this exactly how lack of net neutrality (combined with lack of infrastructure competition) messes up market signaling. A game then inflates its price, and all customers of the game pay a little bit extra because in some areas the ISP is shaking them down. The pricing pressure lands on the game company to resolve, in part with costs to customers which only have an indirect link to the transaction, not on the ISP that could actually resolve the problem with the direct parties involved.

simion314 9y ago

It makes more sense if you promise me X Mb/s download speed then give that to me, if you are not able then don't promise that speed, I should decide for what I need the speed, I should not have horrible speed for X protocol/site/app that I use 99% of the time but you have great speed for Netflix but we both pay same price. I want things to be fair, customers, websites, apps to be treated the same.

nur0n 9y ago

I hope this is an exercise in playing devil's advocate and not true naivety. Do you really think telcos care about these issues? They are a business and not a socialist government. Other comments have stated their goal clearly: increase margins from existing infrastructure. If fair repartition of resources was their goal, why not make that an explicit part of the laws they want to introduce? Why do it in a roundabout way? Presenting a wall of 'possibilities' only serves to obfuscate their true goal. Would you let 'the markets figure out' your water supply?