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Yes, this is true. This is why Netflix runs fast.com: it serves Netflix content from Netflix servers, so if ISPs want to prioritize fast.com content they'll hav

Yes, this is true. This is why Netflix runs fast.com: it serves Netflix content from Netflix servers, so if ISPs want to prioritize fast.com content they'll have to prioritize Netflix content as well. Of course, that doesn't help non-Netflix sites...

bzxcvbn 5y ago
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is important.
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  *should be an option that you can book at your ISP.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Please elaborate
  - WarChortle18 5y ago
    Given that I only have one ISP available to me. How would that work? This is a problem of their own making. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Comcast has a monopoly in my area for high speed internet. Every other option is 25mbps(on a good day) or below. Comcast has shut down all potential competition. So yea if they want to be a regional monopoly they might have some regulations placed on them they don't like.
- bmitc 5y ago
  It's also an example of how it's already been lost.
  - mnd999 5y ago
    That’s pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it. These regulations can just as easily be removed and replaced with proper net neutrality rules.
    - bmitc 5y ago
      I didn't say it couldn't be regained. But it will be an increasingly uphill battle. Regulators and politicians have been sold to the highest bidders.
    - jrockway 5y ago
      There is the cartel effect going on (lobbying against municipal broadband), but even in the absence of that, it's still tough to be an ISP. Think about how much money it costs to dig up a street and put cables under it, and then run them into each house along that street. People that want to use the Internet don't have enough money to do that, and that's why the business is tough. My experience from working at fiber ISPs is that the infrastructure is the hard part. Google Fiber got a good deal in its partner cities to run the fiber next to existing power lines (which not every city has, they're all underground here). When they ran out of easy install opportunities, expansion stopped. My experience was the same at a NYC-based ISP. If your building was on a street that already had open access tunnels, then we could serve you. If not, you were out of luck. If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I've seen proposal after proposal for trenching, microtrenching, nanotrenching, picotrenching, attotrenching... and none of these worked in the real world. (I might have made some of those up; I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Didn't try it, but I imagine it would irritate people with its intrinsic flakiness and ugliness.) The rest is simple, you can set up a full fledged fiber ISP for under $1000 in equipment! Figure out how to dig up the street profitably and you unlock a ton of wealth. (This, incidentally, is why people keep trying to sell wireless solutions. No streets to dig up. WiFi with pringles can antennas! 5G! A huge constellation of satellites! And honestly, it kind of works. But not so well that people are switching from their fiber connection to Starlink or whatever.)
      - JaimeThompson 5y ago
        >If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, The same way we got power to the homes which was government assistance and the private companies not expecting them to be totally profitable in a few years.
  - freemint 5y ago
    Compliance can be forced by law in a country which is capable of self regulation.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.) That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level departments with wide latitude to set regulations with the weight of law behind them but not the same high barrier of changing them as it takes to change a law. Technically this allows agencies to be more nimble, or as much as possible in any lumbering bureaucracy. On the other hand it means that very important pieces of public policy are even further removed from election accountability and subject to the whims of different administrations. Whether you're for or against it, the Keystone pipeline is a prime example of the insanity that results from this. It was approve & construction begun on one administration, a final portion for it put on hold by another, then opened again by a third, a fourth stopped it again resulting in its backers cancelling it (seemingly) once and for all. Forget about the difficulties of generation-long projects, this makes anything longer than 4 years highly uncertain.
    - serenitylater 5y ago
      You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        It's not about "half the country hates it", though. Plenty of projects have widespread support, but are only backed by one party (or no party). It's clearly a bug, as it causes undue preference for the status-quo above and beyond the popular will (and the common good).
      - hackernewds 5y ago
        something half the country hates can be good for the whole country. think COVID vaccines and lockdowns
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  Only if you use the internet primarily for streaming. If you use the internet primarily for something else, with "net neutrality", you will be paying for the video streaming traffic (which makes up 60% of downstream traffic) even though you don't use it for that. If Netflix is required to pay the ISPs, Netflix just increases their prices and it doesn't affect internet users who don't primarily stream video.
  - beowulfey 5y ago
    Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality" too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have to subsidize their electricity use.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      Honest question: is there any place in the US where electricity is subsidized or has discriminatory pricing?
      - mpalczewski 5y ago
        California, sort of: They figure out what sort of place you own, pigeon hole it with other "similar" places and charge you more per kilowatt hour if you use more than they think you need. It's a procrustean bed approach.
      - JaimeThompson 5y ago
        Electricity is routinely subsidized for large companies building new factories such as the GigaFactory Tesla is building in Nevada. You can also look up "name of area / state" and search for electrical tariffs.
        rglullis 5y ago
        Ok, but these subsidies are not based on a specific group. Some might think to be bad to subsidize Tesla, but would there be such a thing as subsidies for weed farmers? The reason I am asking: unless there are such subsidies, it would mean that people pay proportional to their usage, so OP's joke about "electricity neutrality" would not only be wrong, it would be against net neutrality as well.
- ogurechny 5y ago
  It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Anywhere in the world there are local and global popular services that generate high volumes of traffic. Providers naturally care about getting shortest paths to them, plan in advance, join local exchanges, and so on, even if they don't have any direct agreements. For starters, it might lower your traffic costs. In some locations there are mid-tier ISPs offering just good connectivity with all locally popular networks; they offer the solution for low-tier ISPs for some extra coins. However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. > However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers. I think you need to work on your imagination. ISPs in the USA have already tried this (not sure if it is still happening).
    - User23 5y ago
      > Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. Categorically false. There’s no “net neutrality” legislation enacted or proposed that doesn’t have giant and vague QoS and general network operations carve-outs.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        The EFF was fairly happy with the FCC's Title II proposal back in 2015: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet-fcc-officially-embraces-title-ii https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet... In 2018 Markey and others proposed simply overturning Pai/Trump's overtuning of Title II. I don't know precisely what you're referring to ... the closest I could find was the EFF's objections to the FCC proposals from 2011 which had things like "vague QoS and general network operation carve outs": https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fcc-s-net-neutrality-rules-its https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fc... The EFF seemed much happier with the FCC proposals 4 years later. What am I missing?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hackernewds 5y ago
  Reminder that Netflix was a big proponent for axing net neutrality laws. Disagree with the premise though, Netflix has fast.com to make it transparent to customers that their NETFLIX volume is being throttled, and hence providers naturally do not throttle Netflix
  - landemva 5y ago
    >>> Reminder that Netflix was a big proponent for axing net neutrality No, I remember the opposite. Netflix argues for net neutrality because that forces last-mile internet providers to absorb the bandwidth costs of Netflix's business model. https://www.theregreview.org/2021/11/10/kim-can-netflix-win-neutrality/ https://www.theregreview.org/2021/11/10/kim-can-netflix-win-... ' In the original claim, Netflix v. SK Broadband, Netflix invoked a net neutrality argument—based on the idea that internet service providers should treat all content equally—and argued that SK Broadband would discriminate against Netflix by imposing high network usage fees. Netflix also argued that SK Broadband should cover the increased costs of network traffic since it has an obligation to provide internet services to its customers. '
aaomidi 5y ago
I mean, it's a bit of an odd choice because it's pretty easy to detect if a user has "opened fast.com in the past few minutes"
- stepanhruda 5y ago
  That's why we need DNS over HTTPS and Encrypted Client Hello to become widely used. Then there would be no way of knowing, as long as Netflix uses the same infrastructure to serve fast.com and netflix.com
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    "Need" is too strong. Without going into the arguments against DoH, we don't "need" it, because there is an alternative: run your own recursive DNS. That should be something that a consumer could switch on or off. A default install of Unbound, for example, seems to /just work/. Downside: if you have any kind of home network, running your own recursive DNS probably implies running your own DHCP, which isn't normally a consumer alternative (you could do it using settings on a domestic router, but not if it's crippled or locked-down). Also, DNS caching shouldn't be so effective (but I haven't noticed that effect). Upside: all kinds of problems resulting from relying on DNS servers controlled by others disappear. You're not relying on them any more.
    - DanAtC 5y ago
      Recursive DNS is still unencrypted and would be visible to your ISP
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        Yes, they can observe my queries to authoritative servers. But I didn't claim that running your own recursive DNS guaranteed privacy; I only claimed that it dispelled all problems arising from relying on someone else's DNS recursors. I happen to trust my ISP, BTW; I really just like running my own because I can observe what it's doing.
_moof 5y ago
Doesn't Netflix also provide hardware with caches to ISPs? Thought I saw that somewhere. (Not saying you're wrong; just mentioning what might be another factor.) EDIT: Here's what I was thinking of: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/
mrtksn 5y ago
Strangely, fast.com still reports faster connection speeds than my broadband is supposed to offer. No, my broadband is not faster than what I'm paying for, I can see that when monitoring actual transfers(including the transfers when doing the tests). They do offer about %95 of the promised speed, not %110 that fast.com or speedtest.net measures.
- kiwijamo 5y ago
  In New Zealand it is somewhat well known that our local fibre providers actually provisions each connection for slightly more than the agreed speed. E.g. 100mbits is usually provisioned at around 110mbits. So our speed tests are usually just over 100mbits (due to TCP etc overheads taking some of the overprovisoned parts). Wonder if that is what is happening to you.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    This seems to fall off at gigabit, but I’d love to test with 2, 4 or 8gbps which Orcon (and maybe others) are offering. My ONT only supports gigabit out, so I can’t test faster options. That said, fast.com has told me I’m getting 1.2gbps recently…
- aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
  You can't always saturate transfers to and from random servers (whose bandwith is) not controlled by you.
- notatoad 5y ago
  the common problem with speedtests is that they're all pretty brief. whether it's speedtest.net or fast.com, it's over in a few seconds so they're not necesarily measuring the sustained speed your ISP is giving you, just the burst speed. that being said, getting a higher burst speed still makes browsing the web a much more pleasant experience, so it's not like they're just gaming the speed tests.
brundolf 5y ago
I’m now imagining a consortium of software companies that all put most of their service requests behind a shared speed-test domain, to do the same thing as a common good Maybe this could even be a standalone service
kortilla 5y ago
This is not necessarily true. It’s trivial for an isp to exempt Speedtest.net traffic so it doesn’t get throttled while the rest of your traffic does. It’s unlikely they would do something more complex like lifting all traffic limits once a connection to Speedtest.net opens.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  I’m suspicious that what they’re saying is true. If so, a simple curl to the site would be all that is needed without running a full speed test. It’d be great if they could be more methodical and track down what’s really going on. I’d also wouldn’t be surprised to see an ISP doing something like this, but at the same time, it’s much more likely to be networking issues on the consumer’s side than a malicious ISP imho.
  - bb88 5y ago
    I'm not. This would not be the first time ISPs have lied to consumers about their service. https://stopthecap.com/ https://stopthecap.com/
- hedora 5y ago
  At least in the old days, they'd have to unthrottle everything to get decent speedtest numbers. The cable modems the ISP issued around here had FIFO network buffers capable of buffering 5-10 seconds of traffic. So, any slow connection would stop the entire household from having decent internet.
starwind 5y ago
I worked at a cable company for a while and the guy who sat behind me managed gigabit connection roll outs. He always told the techs in the field to use fast.com because it was the only one they could rely on. He knew the cable company prioritized connections to people who were checking their internet speed
muzani 5y ago
Does that mean that having Netflix streaming in a window would make my connection faster as well?
- deadbunny 5y ago
  Probably not, they would likely prioritize your packets to Netflix addresses but everything else would be subjected to any kind of traffic management.
jrochkind1 5y ago
This doesn't make sense to me as an explanation for OP reported behavior, that opening a speed test would make other content load faster than it was before opening the speed test. (Doesn't make sense to me whether or not the other content was netflix, but presumably it was not (all) netflix).
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Time Warner used to have a “turbo” mode where connections would temporarily speed up when you started a download. Pretty sure many ISPs do something like this - especially on mobile. If you have access to a prioritized phone, the side by side comparisons are pretty interesting.
zffr 5y ago
I’m not sure why, but I’m seeing 1mbps on fast.com, and 20mbps on speedtest.net. Weird how there’s such a huge difference
- azinman2 5y ago
  We’ll that would support the creation of fast.com — your ISP is either lying to you (prioritizing only speedtest), or they’re punishing Netflix. Or both.
- bb88 5y ago
  I would do a little further investigation. 1080p on Netflix is like 5MB/s. If you have a router that can give you real time feedback or maybe glasswire, that's probably how I would measure it. Also make sure nothing else is consuming your total upstream bandwidth. With asymmetrical bandwidth, TCP acknowledgements that get choked out or buffered will limit your downstream bandwidth too.
- 300bps 5y ago
  Are you on mobile? Some mobile providers limit streaming quality and they do this by limiting bandwidth to streaming providers. For example, Visible will never be faster than 2 Mbps to fast.com. You’ll get faster on Speedtest.net because it doesn’t throttle non-video related sites.
  - tssva 5y ago
    I almost forgot Visible limits video streaming. My phone has an always on Wireguard VPN connection to my home which prevents Visible from limiting streaming. Just tested. From my current location, which doesn't have the best signal, with the VPN on I get 66Mbps to fast.com and with it off 2.1Mbps.
  - zffr 5y ago
    Ah this is probably the explanation. I was using my phone as a hotspot for my laptop.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  T-Mobile and others offer “HD Video” as a premium. So they cap the connection to Netflix to force 720p video.
wanderingmind 5y ago
Is there a way to automate this speed test every few minutes to make sure the ISP prioritizy stays up all the time
- aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
  It's probably per-traffic, not a blanket speed boost, lol
eli 5y ago
Google does the same if you search “speed test” they have one that runs through the search results page. Cloudflare runs one too. https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/ Those are all harder to game than speedtest.net
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  The cloudflare one is the most accurate I've ever found. People often accuse it of "reading low" but after much experimentation I think it actually reads accurately and most of the others read fast. So much of the web is behind cloudflare that most ISPs are unwilling to prioritize traffic to it. It also loads a selection of dummy files of varying sizes which is a more realistic portrayal of normal internet usage than a single stream of data.
  - thayne 5y ago
    I just tried the cloudflare one and saw something interesting, while it was gathering data, the bandwidth doubled from below my advertised rate to above it, which kind of suggests my ISP recognized it was a speed test and increased the bandwidth...
  - vachina 5y ago
    I just tried the cloudflare Speedtest and it doesn’t read low, in fact it read higher than what’s possible. Monitoring the NIC rx is the most accurate in my experience.
    - LeoPanthera 5y ago
      > I just tried the cloudflare Speedtest and it doesn’t read low, in fact it read higher than what’s possible. Perhaps there is a confusion between megabytes, and megabits.
      - zinekeller 5y ago
        Unfortunately, no. I intentionally constrained an ethernet link at 10Mb (in the PHY layer, so any bugs in the network stack is irrelevant) and both Fast.com and Cloudflare misread the upload speeds up to 20 times (what should be 9.something Mbps became >200Mbps). Speedtest.net is immune to this, even using their browse client. I don't know what's causing this, but I've ruled out browser bugs. I haven't tested Google's though.
aryamaan 5y ago
Can't ISP just prioritize just fast.com based on its url? Or fast.com and netflix share the same IP
- gsich 5y ago
  Yes, they could just check if fast.com was resolved recently.
Abimelex 5y ago
That would explain why fast.com is slow and speedtest.net was fast. Wow, I thought just the servers of fast.com where just a bit overloaded, when I checked recently after the tariff-upgrade.

bzxcvbn 5y ago

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is important.

WanderPanda 5y ago
*should be an option that you can book at your ISP.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Please elaborate
- WarChortle18 5y ago
  Given that I only have one ISP available to me. How would that work? This is a problem of their own making. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Comcast has a monopoly in my area for high speed internet. Every other option is 25mbps(on a good day) or below. Comcast has shut down all potential competition. So yea if they want to be a regional monopoly they might have some regulations placed on them they don't like.
bmitc 5y ago
It's also an example of how it's already been lost.
- mnd999 5y ago
  That’s pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it. These regulations can just as easily be removed and replaced with proper net neutrality rules.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    I didn't say it couldn't be regained. But it will be an increasingly uphill battle. Regulators and politicians have been sold to the highest bidders.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    There is the cartel effect going on (lobbying against municipal broadband), but even in the absence of that, it's still tough to be an ISP. Think about how much money it costs to dig up a street and put cables under it, and then run them into each house along that street. People that want to use the Internet don't have enough money to do that, and that's why the business is tough. My experience from working at fiber ISPs is that the infrastructure is the hard part. Google Fiber got a good deal in its partner cities to run the fiber next to existing power lines (which not every city has, they're all underground here). When they ran out of easy install opportunities, expansion stopped. My experience was the same at a NYC-based ISP. If your building was on a street that already had open access tunnels, then we could serve you. If not, you were out of luck. If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I've seen proposal after proposal for trenching, microtrenching, nanotrenching, picotrenching, attotrenching... and none of these worked in the real world. (I might have made some of those up; I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Didn't try it, but I imagine it would irritate people with its intrinsic flakiness and ugliness.) The rest is simple, you can set up a full fledged fiber ISP for under $1000 in equipment! Figure out how to dig up the street profitably and you unlock a ton of wealth. (This, incidentally, is why people keep trying to sell wireless solutions. No streets to dig up. WiFi with pringles can antennas! 5G! A huge constellation of satellites! And honestly, it kind of works. But not so well that people are switching from their fiber connection to Starlink or whatever.)
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      >If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, The same way we got power to the homes which was government assistance and the private companies not expecting them to be totally profitable in a few years.
- freemint 5y ago
  Compliance can be forced by law in a country which is capable of self regulation.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.) That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level departments with wide latitude to set regulations with the weight of law behind them but not the same high barrier of changing them as it takes to change a law. Technically this allows agencies to be more nimble, or as much as possible in any lumbering bureaucracy. On the other hand it means that very important pieces of public policy are even further removed from election accountability and subject to the whims of different administrations. Whether you're for or against it, the Keystone pipeline is a prime example of the insanity that results from this. It was approve & construction begun on one administration, a final portion for it put on hold by another, then opened again by a third, a fourth stopped it again resulting in its backers cancelling it (seemingly) once and for all. Forget about the difficulties of generation-long projects, this makes anything longer than 4 years highly uncertain.
  - serenitylater 5y ago
    You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      It's not about "half the country hates it", though. Plenty of projects have widespread support, but are only backed by one party (or no party). It's clearly a bug, as it causes undue preference for the status-quo above and beyond the popular will (and the common good).
    - hackernewds 5y ago
      something half the country hates can be good for the whole country. think COVID vaccines and lockdowns
ComradePhil 5y ago
Only if you use the internet primarily for streaming. If you use the internet primarily for something else, with "net neutrality", you will be paying for the video streaming traffic (which makes up 60% of downstream traffic) even though you don't use it for that. If Netflix is required to pay the ISPs, Netflix just increases their prices and it doesn't affect internet users who don't primarily stream video.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality" too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have to subsidize their electricity use.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Honest question: is there any place in the US where electricity is subsidized or has discriminatory pricing?
    - mpalczewski 5y ago
      California, sort of: They figure out what sort of place you own, pigeon hole it with other "similar" places and charge you more per kilowatt hour if you use more than they think you need. It's a procrustean bed approach.
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      Electricity is routinely subsidized for large companies building new factories such as the GigaFactory Tesla is building in Nevada. You can also look up "name of area / state" and search for electrical tariffs.
      - rglullis 5y ago
        Ok, but these subsidies are not based on a specific group. Some might think to be bad to subsidize Tesla, but would there be such a thing as subsidies for weed farmers? The reason I am asking: unless there are such subsidies, it would mean that people pay proportional to their usage, so OP's joke about "electricity neutrality" would not only be wrong, it would be against net neutrality as well.
ogurechny 5y ago
It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Anywhere in the world there are local and global popular services that generate high volumes of traffic. Providers naturally care about getting shortest paths to them, plan in advance, join local exchanges, and so on, even if they don't have any direct agreements. For starters, it might lower your traffic costs. In some locations there are mid-tier ISPs offering just good connectivity with all locally popular networks; they offer the solution for low-tier ISPs for some extra coins. However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. > However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers. I think you need to work on your imagination. ISPs in the USA have already tried this (not sure if it is still happening).
  - User23 5y ago
    > Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. Categorically false. There’s no “net neutrality” legislation enacted or proposed that doesn’t have giant and vague QoS and general network operations carve-outs.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      The EFF was fairly happy with the FCC's Title II proposal back in 2015: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet-fcc-officially-embraces-title-ii https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet... In 2018 Markey and others proposed simply overturning Pai/Trump's overtuning of Title II. I don't know precisely what you're referring to ... the closest I could find was the EFF's objections to the FCC proposals from 2011 which had things like "vague QoS and general network operation carve outs": https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fcc-s-net-neutrality-rules-its https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fc... The EFF seemed much happier with the FCC proposals 4 years later. What am I missing?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hackernewds 5y ago
Reminder that Netflix was a big proponent for axing net neutrality laws. Disagree with the premise though, Netflix has fast.com to make it transparent to customers that their NETFLIX volume is being throttled, and hence providers naturally do not throttle Netflix
- landemva 5y ago
  >>> Reminder that Netflix was a big proponent for axing net neutrality No, I remember the opposite. Netflix argues for net neutrality because that forces last-mile internet providers to absorb the bandwidth costs of Netflix's business model. https://www.theregreview.org/2021/11/10/kim-can-netflix-win-neutrality/ https://www.theregreview.org/2021/11/10/kim-can-netflix-win-... ' In the original claim, Netflix v. SK Broadband, Netflix invoked a net neutrality argument—based on the idea that internet service providers should treat all content equally—and argued that SK Broadband would discriminate against Netflix by imposing high network usage fees. Netflix also argued that SK Broadband should cover the increased costs of network traffic since it has an obligation to provide internet services to its customers. '

aaomidi 5y ago

I mean, it's a bit of an odd choice because it's pretty easy to detect if a user has "opened fast.com in the past few minutes"

stepanhruda 5y ago
That's why we need DNS over HTTPS and Encrypted Client Hello to become widely used. Then there would be no way of knowing, as long as Netflix uses the same infrastructure to serve fast.com and netflix.com
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  "Need" is too strong. Without going into the arguments against DoH, we don't "need" it, because there is an alternative: run your own recursive DNS. That should be something that a consumer could switch on or off. A default install of Unbound, for example, seems to /just work/. Downside: if you have any kind of home network, running your own recursive DNS probably implies running your own DHCP, which isn't normally a consumer alternative (you could do it using settings on a domestic router, but not if it's crippled or locked-down). Also, DNS caching shouldn't be so effective (but I haven't noticed that effect). Upside: all kinds of problems resulting from relying on DNS servers controlled by others disappear. You're not relying on them any more.
  - DanAtC 5y ago
    Recursive DNS is still unencrypted and would be visible to your ISP
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      Yes, they can observe my queries to authoritative servers. But I didn't claim that running your own recursive DNS guaranteed privacy; I only claimed that it dispelled all problems arising from relying on someone else's DNS recursors. I happen to trust my ISP, BTW; I really just like running my own because I can observe what it's doing.

_moof 5y ago

Doesn't Netflix also provide hardware with caches to ISPs? Thought I saw that somewhere. (Not saying you're wrong; just mentioning what might be another factor.) EDIT: Here's what I was thinking of: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/

mrtksn 5y ago

Strangely, fast.com still reports faster connection speeds than my broadband is supposed to offer. No, my broadband is not faster than what I'm paying for, I can see that when monitoring actual transfers(including the transfers when doing the tests). They do offer about %95 of the promised speed, not %110 that fast.com or speedtest.net measures.

kiwijamo 5y ago
In New Zealand it is somewhat well known that our local fibre providers actually provisions each connection for slightly more than the agreed speed. E.g. 100mbits is usually provisioned at around 110mbits. So our speed tests are usually just over 100mbits (due to TCP etc overheads taking some of the overprovisoned parts). Wonder if that is what is happening to you.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  This seems to fall off at gigabit, but I’d love to test with 2, 4 or 8gbps which Orcon (and maybe others) are offering. My ONT only supports gigabit out, so I can’t test faster options. That said, fast.com has told me I’m getting 1.2gbps recently…
aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
You can't always saturate transfers to and from random servers (whose bandwith is) not controlled by you.
notatoad 5y ago
the common problem with speedtests is that they're all pretty brief. whether it's speedtest.net or fast.com, it's over in a few seconds so they're not necesarily measuring the sustained speed your ISP is giving you, just the burst speed. that being said, getting a higher burst speed still makes browsing the web a much more pleasant experience, so it's not like they're just gaming the speed tests.

brundolf 5y ago

I’m now imagining a consortium of software companies that all put most of their service requests behind a shared speed-test domain, to do the same thing as a common good Maybe this could even be a standalone service

kortilla 5y ago

This is not necessarily true. It’s trivial for an isp to exempt Speedtest.net traffic so it doesn’t get throttled while the rest of your traffic does. It’s unlikely they would do something more complex like lifting all traffic limits once a connection to Speedtest.net opens.

withinboredom 5y ago
I’m suspicious that what they’re saying is true. If so, a simple curl to the site would be all that is needed without running a full speed test. It’d be great if they could be more methodical and track down what’s really going on. I’d also wouldn’t be surprised to see an ISP doing something like this, but at the same time, it’s much more likely to be networking issues on the consumer’s side than a malicious ISP imho.
- bb88 5y ago
  I'm not. This would not be the first time ISPs have lied to consumers about their service. https://stopthecap.com/ https://stopthecap.com/
hedora 5y ago
At least in the old days, they'd have to unthrottle everything to get decent speedtest numbers. The cable modems the ISP issued around here had FIFO network buffers capable of buffering 5-10 seconds of traffic. So, any slow connection would stop the entire household from having decent internet.

starwind 5y ago

I worked at a cable company for a while and the guy who sat behind me managed gigabit connection roll outs. He always told the techs in the field to use fast.com because it was the only one they could rely on. He knew the cable company prioritized connections to people who were checking their internet speed

muzani 5y ago

Does that mean that having Netflix streaming in a window would make my connection faster as well?

deadbunny 5y ago
Probably not, they would likely prioritize your packets to Netflix addresses but everything else would be subjected to any kind of traffic management.

jrochkind1 5y ago

This doesn't make sense to me as an explanation for OP reported behavior, that opening a speed test would make other content load faster than it was before opening the speed test. (Doesn't make sense to me whether or not the other content was netflix, but presumably it was not (all) netflix).

Spooky23 5y ago
Time Warner used to have a “turbo” mode where connections would temporarily speed up when you started a download. Pretty sure many ISPs do something like this - especially on mobile. If you have access to a prioritized phone, the side by side comparisons are pretty interesting.

zffr 5y ago

I’m not sure why, but I’m seeing 1mbps on fast.com, and 20mbps on speedtest.net. Weird how there’s such a huge difference

azinman2 5y ago
We’ll that would support the creation of fast.com — your ISP is either lying to you (prioritizing only speedtest), or they’re punishing Netflix. Or both.
bb88 5y ago
I would do a little further investigation. 1080p on Netflix is like 5MB/s. If you have a router that can give you real time feedback or maybe glasswire, that's probably how I would measure it. Also make sure nothing else is consuming your total upstream bandwidth. With asymmetrical bandwidth, TCP acknowledgements that get choked out or buffered will limit your downstream bandwidth too.
300bps 5y ago
Are you on mobile? Some mobile providers limit streaming quality and they do this by limiting bandwidth to streaming providers. For example, Visible will never be faster than 2 Mbps to fast.com. You’ll get faster on Speedtest.net because it doesn’t throttle non-video related sites.
- tssva 5y ago
  I almost forgot Visible limits video streaming. My phone has an always on Wireguard VPN connection to my home which prevents Visible from limiting streaming. Just tested. From my current location, which doesn't have the best signal, with the VPN on I get 66Mbps to fast.com and with it off 2.1Mbps.
- zffr 5y ago
  Ah this is probably the explanation. I was using my phone as a hotspot for my laptop.
Spooky23 5y ago
T-Mobile and others offer “HD Video” as a premium. So they cap the connection to Netflix to force 720p video.

wanderingmind 5y ago

Is there a way to automate this speed test every few minutes to make sure the ISP prioritizy stays up all the time

aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
It's probably per-traffic, not a blanket speed boost, lol

eli 5y ago

Google does the same if you search “speed test” they have one that runs through the search results page. Cloudflare runs one too. https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/ Those are all harder to game than speedtest.net

LeoPanthera 5y ago
The cloudflare one is the most accurate I've ever found. People often accuse it of "reading low" but after much experimentation I think it actually reads accurately and most of the others read fast. So much of the web is behind cloudflare that most ISPs are unwilling to prioritize traffic to it. It also loads a selection of dummy files of varying sizes which is a more realistic portrayal of normal internet usage than a single stream of data.
- thayne 5y ago
  I just tried the cloudflare one and saw something interesting, while it was gathering data, the bandwidth doubled from below my advertised rate to above it, which kind of suggests my ISP recognized it was a speed test and increased the bandwidth...
- vachina 5y ago
  I just tried the cloudflare Speedtest and it doesn’t read low, in fact it read higher than what’s possible. Monitoring the NIC rx is the most accurate in my experience.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    > I just tried the cloudflare Speedtest and it doesn’t read low, in fact it read higher than what’s possible. Perhaps there is a confusion between megabytes, and megabits.
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      Unfortunately, no. I intentionally constrained an ethernet link at 10Mb (in the PHY layer, so any bugs in the network stack is irrelevant) and both Fast.com and Cloudflare misread the upload speeds up to 20 times (what should be 9.something Mbps became >200Mbps). Speedtest.net is immune to this, even using their browse client. I don't know what's causing this, but I've ruled out browser bugs. I haven't tested Google's though.

aryamaan 5y ago

Can't ISP just prioritize just fast.com based on its url? Or fast.com and netflix share the same IP

gsich 5y ago
Yes, they could just check if fast.com was resolved recently.

Abimelex 5y ago

That would explain why fast.com is slow and speedtest.net was fast. Wow, I thought just the servers of fast.com where just a bit overloaded, when I checked recently after the tariff-upgrade.