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Can someone explain a technical issue I see with net neutrality? From a network engineering perspective, it seems sensible to me that CDN servers are located a

Can someone explain a technical issue I see with net neutrality? From a network engineering perspective, it seems sensible to me that CDN servers are located as close as possible to end users. So I assume that implies residing in whatever data centers the ISPs use at their edge. Is there some way to get the networking-efficiency benefits of those colo arrangements while still having net neutrality?

wmf 5y ago
Most definitions of net neutrality simply don't prevent ISPs from hosting CDN nodes (although it would be nice if ISPs treated all CDNs the same). Likewise net neutrality doesn't prohibit direct connections between broadband ISPs and content providers because such connections generally benefit everyone involved.
eikenberry 5y ago
> Is there some way to get the networking-efficiency benefits of those colo arrangements while still having net neutrality? Torrent-like algorithms do this. They localize the content while maintaining neutrality of services.
arjvik 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand - why is edge datacenter colocation incompatible with bet neutrality? Fairly confident it existed pre-Ajit Pai.
randrews 5y ago
I've been asking this exact question for years. I feel like most people got some well-meaning propaganda on this and see net neutrality as an anti-censorship thing (which, hooray for anti-censorship) without thinking through all the totally reasonable and useful things that would violate the letter of it.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  I don’t fully understand how anti-censorship is a virtue when defending Google and Netflix but then becomes a vice when defending regular people’s ability to not be arbitrarily banned on Twitter.
  - robonerd 5y ago
    Corporate media instills corporate values. Corporations being censored is bad for profit. But corporations not being allowed to censor regular people is also bad for profit.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    Because the Republicans were hypocrites on this issue. No more and no less. "But Twitter is a private platform" is entirely a way for Democrats to wave that in their face. Trump called Net Neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet" and gave Ajit Pai the power at the FCC to kill it. The GOP was all for "ISPs are private platforms" and "regulating ISPs violates their free speech" back then, when they thought they were on "their side". To their credit, they were, kind of. Twitter decided to give Trump special treatment under their World Leaders policy, allowing him to break rules[0] with minimal consequences. They did this because Trump[1] gave Twitter clout and relevance that they wanted. This all changed after Jan 6; when a mob of extreme-right Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Suddenly, big tech flip-flopped on Trump and decided they weren't going to serve extreme right-wingers anymore. Republicans had taken tech companies as public utility for granted, while at the same time they were hard at work ensuring there would be no legal basis for actually regulating tech companies as public utilities. Yes, there's a few right-libertarian arguments[2] against this kind of regulation, but that entire wing of the GOP has been a lame duck for half a decade by now[3]. As far as I can tell, Republicans saw that liberals had been screaming their heads off about Comcast censoring the net, and that was apparently good enough justification to oppose Net Neutrality. The Stupid-Partisan wing of American politics wins again. I'm not saying it's good that Twitter censors politicians that I don't like; of course. I'm saying that those politicians need to apologize and admit they were on the wrong side of the argument[4], because "censorship is OK when Comcast does it but not Twitter" is not a coherent argument. It's just self-dealing. [0] Most egregiously: Donald Trump was exempted from DMCA 512 takedown notices, so if he used your song in a video and posted it on Twitter, you couldn't take down the tweet for stealing your song. [1] More generally, any @POTUS account [2] e.g. "How does Comcast pay for better routers if they can't double-bill Netflix" [3] Source: I used to be deep into right-libertarianism back in college, during the "Ron Paul R[3vol]ution" days. As far as I can tell everyone involved either went alt-right, or left-libertarian. Or their name is Louis Rossman. If you're wondering, I still support Net Neutrality and I think large social media platforms should also be regulated under common-carrier rules. However, I don't think even that should get Trump back on Twitter. The World Leaders policy was itself a common-carrier violation. [4] https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/
- hedora 5y ago
  If locating the CDN node in the ISP network makes financial sense for the ISP (smaller lines to the internet backbone) or the CDN (lower egress charges / better latency), then one of those two businesses will seek out an arrangement. What does throttling traffic or charging customers different amounts for different sites have to do with whether the CDN machine will lower network operating costs? (Other than that the law makes it clear ISP's can't run a over congested line to the backbone in hopes of artifically forcing CDN deals.)
  - randrews 5y ago
    That's exactly my point: "seeking out an arrangement" is exactly what net neutrality outlaws, and while it's obviously bad to artificially slow someone down, NN proponents also say they're against artificially speeding some traffic up. That seems dangerous to me, like we could accidentally outlaw CDNs or something.
tempnow987 5y ago
Sure, it's likely they will continue. My guess, instead of charging netflix to place a CDN in their data center, they may offer youtube / netflix et all free CDN space/power, perhaps even PAYING youtube to put their stuff inside their network perimeter.
jwagenet 5y ago
My impression is net neutrality is oriented for the end user to preserve fair content deliverability, not necessarily the content provider, with the primary goal to prevent throttling any or all content based on who is willing to pay for no or less throttling. This is not incompatible with cdn colo at an isp. Colo is not akin to providers paying to not be throttled, but more like having a data center very close to the isp, which like the colo would still be subject to physical rent costs.
paxys 5y ago
To start, there's no single globally recognized definition of net neutrality. California enacted a law with a few specific provisions such as disallowing exemption of selected traffic from data caps and artificial throttling. Setting up CDNs doesn't go against that law. Of course you could say that prioritizing certain traffic means throttling the rest, but if those servers are physically close to the ISP then you can't really argue against physics doing its job.
gregmac 5y ago
It seems to me more about charging extra or artificially throttling. If a streaming provider has massive connection at a shared upstream peering location as an ISP, but their competitor doesn't, the result could likely be that the bandwidth is better to that provider, while it's congested going to anywhere else on the internet (including competitors). Is this a violation of net neutrality, and if so, by who? Some other situations I can think of that are less clear: "Sorry streaming service, we can't host your CDN appliance because we already have an appliance from your competitor and our agreement with them disallows it" "Sorry streaming service, we can't host your CDN appliance because we have no more physical space" "Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, if you pay $$,$$$,$$$ to cover the cost of expanding our datacenter" "Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, it will cost you $,$$$,$$$ per year" "Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, it will cost you $$ per month per client IP"
kmeisthax 5y ago
Net neutrality does not regulate the peering/colo end of the transaction. Though Mozilla argued that it should, after Comcast let their Level 3 link clog up to coerce Netflix into paying to peer with them directly. Even if we did have peering neutrality on the books, this wouldn't outlaw edge CDNs. It would just prohibit Comcast from charging Netflix more money for the same equipment or access to their network than, say, YouTube.
orev 5y ago
I’ve never seen any definition of Net Neutrality that mentions CDNs co-located in ISP data centers as a problem, so the issue you’re mentioning doesn’t exist. It would be an NN issue if ISPs were to try to charge customers a different price for content located on their CDNs, or prioritize traffic going to sites hosted in their data centers.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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imtringued 5y ago
Colocation neutrality would imply that ISPs must accept everyone's colocation boxes for the same price.

wmf 5y ago

Most definitions of net neutrality simply don't prevent ISPs from hosting CDN nodes (although it would be nice if ISPs treated all CDNs the same). Likewise net neutrality doesn't prohibit direct connections between broadband ISPs and content providers because such connections generally benefit everyone involved.

eikenberry 5y ago

> Is there some way to get the networking-efficiency benefits of those colo arrangements while still having net neutrality? Torrent-like algorithms do this. They localize the content while maintaining neutrality of services.

arjvik 5y ago

I'm not sure I understand - why is edge datacenter colocation incompatible with bet neutrality? Fairly confident it existed pre-Ajit Pai.

randrews 5y ago

I've been asking this exact question for years. I feel like most people got some well-meaning propaganda on this and see net neutrality as an anti-censorship thing (which, hooray for anti-censorship) without thinking through all the totally reasonable and useful things that would violate the letter of it.

CyberRabbi 5y ago
I don’t fully understand how anti-censorship is a virtue when defending Google and Netflix but then becomes a vice when defending regular people’s ability to not be arbitrarily banned on Twitter.
- robonerd 5y ago
  Corporate media instills corporate values. Corporations being censored is bad for profit. But corporations not being allowed to censor regular people is also bad for profit.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  Because the Republicans were hypocrites on this issue. No more and no less. "But Twitter is a private platform" is entirely a way for Democrats to wave that in their face. Trump called Net Neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet" and gave Ajit Pai the power at the FCC to kill it. The GOP was all for "ISPs are private platforms" and "regulating ISPs violates their free speech" back then, when they thought they were on "their side". To their credit, they were, kind of. Twitter decided to give Trump special treatment under their World Leaders policy, allowing him to break rules[0] with minimal consequences. They did this because Trump[1] gave Twitter clout and relevance that they wanted. This all changed after Jan 6; when a mob of extreme-right Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Suddenly, big tech flip-flopped on Trump and decided they weren't going to serve extreme right-wingers anymore. Republicans had taken tech companies as public utility for granted, while at the same time they were hard at work ensuring there would be no legal basis for actually regulating tech companies as public utilities. Yes, there's a few right-libertarian arguments[2] against this kind of regulation, but that entire wing of the GOP has been a lame duck for half a decade by now[3]. As far as I can tell, Republicans saw that liberals had been screaming their heads off about Comcast censoring the net, and that was apparently good enough justification to oppose Net Neutrality. The Stupid-Partisan wing of American politics wins again. I'm not saying it's good that Twitter censors politicians that I don't like; of course. I'm saying that those politicians need to apologize and admit they were on the wrong side of the argument[4], because "censorship is OK when Comcast does it but not Twitter" is not a coherent argument. It's just self-dealing. [0] Most egregiously: Donald Trump was exempted from DMCA 512 takedown notices, so if he used your song in a video and posted it on Twitter, you couldn't take down the tweet for stealing your song. [1] More generally, any @POTUS account [2] e.g. "How does Comcast pay for better routers if they can't double-bill Netflix" [3] Source: I used to be deep into right-libertarianism back in college, during the "Ron Paul R[3vol]ution" days. As far as I can tell everyone involved either went alt-right, or left-libertarian. Or their name is Louis Rossman. If you're wondering, I still support Net Neutrality and I think large social media platforms should also be regulated under common-carrier rules. However, I don't think even that should get Trump back on Twitter. The World Leaders policy was itself a common-carrier violation. [4] https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/
hedora 5y ago
If locating the CDN node in the ISP network makes financial sense for the ISP (smaller lines to the internet backbone) or the CDN (lower egress charges / better latency), then one of those two businesses will seek out an arrangement. What does throttling traffic or charging customers different amounts for different sites have to do with whether the CDN machine will lower network operating costs? (Other than that the law makes it clear ISP's can't run a over congested line to the backbone in hopes of artifically forcing CDN deals.)
- randrews 5y ago
  That's exactly my point: "seeking out an arrangement" is exactly what net neutrality outlaws, and while it's obviously bad to artificially slow someone down, NN proponents also say they're against artificially speeding some traffic up. That seems dangerous to me, like we could accidentally outlaw CDNs or something.

tempnow987 5y ago

Sure, it's likely they will continue. My guess, instead of charging netflix to place a CDN in their data center, they may offer youtube / netflix et all free CDN space/power, perhaps even PAYING youtube to put their stuff inside their network perimeter.

jwagenet 5y ago

My impression is net neutrality is oriented for the end user to preserve fair content deliverability, not necessarily the content provider, with the primary goal to prevent throttling any or all content based on who is willing to pay for no or less throttling. This is not incompatible with cdn colo at an isp. Colo is not akin to providers paying to not be throttled, but more like having a data center very close to the isp, which like the colo would still be subject to physical rent costs.

paxys 5y ago

To start, there's no single globally recognized definition of net neutrality. California enacted a law with a few specific provisions such as disallowing exemption of selected traffic from data caps and artificial throttling. Setting up CDNs doesn't go against that law. Of course you could say that prioritizing certain traffic means throttling the rest, but if those servers are physically close to the ISP then you can't really argue against physics doing its job.

gregmac 5y ago

It seems to me more about charging extra or artificially throttling. If a streaming provider has massive connection at a shared upstream peering location as an ISP, but their competitor doesn't, the result could likely be that the bandwidth is better to that provider, while it's congested going to anywhere else on the internet (including competitors). Is this a violation of net neutrality, and if so, by who? Some other situations I can think of that are less clear: "Sorry streaming service, we can't host your CDN appliance because we already have an appliance from your competitor and our agreement with them disallows it" "Sorry streaming service, we can't host your CDN appliance because we have no more physical space" "Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, if you pay $$,$$$,$$$ to cover the cost of expanding our datacenter" "Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, it will cost you $,$$$,$$$ per year" "Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, it will cost you $$ per month per client IP"

kmeisthax 5y ago

Net neutrality does not regulate the peering/colo end of the transaction. Though Mozilla argued that it should, after Comcast let their Level 3 link clog up to coerce Netflix into paying to peer with them directly. Even if we did have peering neutrality on the books, this wouldn't outlaw edge CDNs. It would just prohibit Comcast from charging Netflix more money for the same equipment or access to their network than, say, YouTube.

orev 5y ago

I’ve never seen any definition of Net Neutrality that mentions CDNs co-located in ISP data centers as a problem, so the issue you’re mentioning doesn’t exist. It would be an NN issue if ISPs were to try to charge customers a different price for content located on their CDNs, or prioritize traffic going to sites hosted in their data centers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

imtringued 5y ago

Colocation neutrality would imply that ISPs must accept everyone's colocation boxes for the same price.