5 ms·

Back in the old days, early 1990s Net Neutrality actually meant something, and was not an overloaded nebulous term like today. It was very simple, being a boile

Back in the old days, early 1990s Net Neutrality actually meant something, and was not an overloaded nebulous term like today. It was very simple, being a boiler-plate contract clause between Internet routers, such as universities that peered with eachother. In peering agreements there are several contractual clauses, and the net neutrality was simply sayign that each side of the agreement would forward packets without any interference. In some cases this causes one side to disproportionatly overload the other, but with increased peering the load would ballance out as time went. Many universities had this kidn of agreement with other universities they peered with back in the days of inter-academic networks. No reason to router over the internet when reasearchers can direectly access paperes on the backside, and everything was peachy... Net Neutrality meant something, and it was a very concrete idea. Transiting services changes things, those are not exactly peering agreements, it more like a company connecting one university to another, and that traffic was interfered with... usually to simply offload the packets/frames off the network as quickly as possibly, or in other cases to not impact other higher paying customers.... and those packets/frames would transit over a crappy legacy network to be dumpped on the other side with little care for quallity beyond the minimum agreement. This is why it's so weird for consumers to say they get to have Net Neutrality, because consumers are not normally peering with other consumers, or universities, or whatevery industry. Their just end nodes on the network, and there is fundamentally nothing to be neutral about. When it comes to netflix complaining about some ISP refusing to peer with them for free, it's also very strange, because there is no mandate to freely peer with anybody. And, when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure. So again, these net neutrality crusaders are very strange when looked at in perspeective of the OIG net neutrality. Should the internet be a common carrier, in my humble opinion probably yes. But that's orthogonal to the meaning of Net Neutrality. The point is it's an overloaded term that means nothing anymore.

jpalawaga 2y ago
it means the same as it always did. net neutrality as you describe it didn't draw a distinction between "end nodes". Everything that has a wire connected to it is a node. The wires are the edges. Some nodes transmit or receive more than others, and some have different purposes. Some are even behind firewalls. In this context, the net is not neutral if traffic-shaping is applied to some packets and not others, which is the same as what you describe. Perhaps the circumstances for signing agreements are a lot more complicated than it used to be, but at its heart, it is the same problem.
thecrash 2y ago
> when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure. Why wouldn't the ISP refuse to peer with them, then? This is a genuine question, I don't understand the industry as well as you seem to. To my understanding, net neutrality doesn't mean "every ISP has to peer with anyone who asks". It just means "you can't treat packets differently based on where they came from". If it's really so terrible to deal with an ISP that dumps tons of Netflix traffic on to your network, then don't peer with them, problem solved, right? Seems like the reality is that ISPs *do* want to peer with Netflix's provider, they just also would like to have the right to demand additional money directly from Netflix for doing so. Obviously as operators of the network they have the technical ability to do this - the question is whether it's good for society / economy / etc for them to be allowed to.
- relaxing 2y ago
  Because the ISP is also a television service that competes with Netflix. It’s anticompetitive behavior.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Why wouldn't the ISP refuse to peer with them, then? This is a genuine question The sibling comment has the reason, but you might be interested in the details. In the old days, ISPs were more heterogeneous. Say you were ISP A in New York. You had residential customers and business customers. Your business customers would host their websites etc. on your service and some of their customers use ISP B, also in New York. Meanwhile some of ISP B's business customers have customers on ISP A. So ISPs A and B peer at an exchange in New York. Neither of them charges the other because they both need connectivity to the other's customers. (The traffic was often bidirectional but that doesn't really matter here, the one receiving more traffic than they send still has to satisfy their own customers' need to link with the system sending the traffic.) Meanwhile ISPs C and D are in California. They peer with each other, but they both still need to exchange traffic with ISPs A and B, so all four ISPs pay for transit. The transit company runs fiber across the country and connects them together, for a fee. Then it turns out that last mile ISPs are awful. Their residential customers are stuck with them, because what choice do they have? One other odious bureaucracy, if that. But not their business customers. You can host a server out of anywhere. So new companies like AWS came in and took the bulk of the business customers. Then those companies got big and built their own transit networks so they could peer with all the local ISPs themselves. The ISPs should be all good with this because then they themselves don't have to pay for wider transit links to carry that traffic. All they have to do is carry it over the last mile to their own customers who are paying them for exactly that. This is all still completely fine, except for one thing. The likes of AWS and Verizon are competitors. The ISPs want business customers to use their (slower, more expensive) service instead of a big cloud provider or CDN. And the ISPs run video services that compete with Netflix. Meanwhile they have a lock on their residential internet customers, many of which have zero other alternatives, or maybe one which can engage in the same behavior. So if they degrade Netflix or refuse to peer with enough capacity to carry the traffic their own customers request from Netflix, their customers can't switch to another ISP, and it allows the ISP to shake down the peer for money because there is no other way to pass traffic to the customers of that ISP. The ISPs have a monopoly/oligopoly on last mile internet service and are leveraging it against competitors, hence: > Because the ISP is also a television service that competes with Netflix. It’s anticompetitive behavior.
candiddevmike 2y ago
Most folks have 1, maybe 2 viable ISP options. For them, net neutrality is one of the only things keeping the carriers from completely screwing them over. We need far stricter laws around what it means to be an ISP, what minimum service guarantees should be, and how to provide more competition in the space, such as splitting line (physical cable going to your residence) and access (your IP provider).
- drdaeman 2y ago
  > We need far stricter laws around what it means to be an ISP I would argue different - we need those folks to have 4+ viable ISP options that will compete for them ferociously, rather than making double sure no one else (but another telco megacorp that can afford the compliance) comes and they're stuck with 1-2 greedy ISPs forever.
  - avery17 2y ago
    Well one of those things requires interpreting words and the other requires bootstrapping thousands of businesses against monopolies all over the country. Which one is easier to accomplish?
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      One actually accomplishes the desired outcome, the other creates another terribly run government mandated monopoly.
      - aaomidi 2y ago
        We can have the interpretation of the words AND competition actually
        brigadier132 2y ago
        It generally doesn't work out once the regulatory capture laws are written.
akira2501 2y ago
> some ISP refusing to peer with them for free The issue, as I remember it being presented decades ago, is that both the ISP and Netflix were using a common carrier or an internet exchange. The ISP is noticing that much of the inbound traffic from this peering point originates from Netflix. They approach Netflix and say "we are going to actively deprioritize your traffic unless you enter in to an exclusive direct peering agreement with us, where we set the terms, and you will pay extra to have all of this traffic delivered reliably on our network." Allowing this opens the door for the ISP to do this to anyone it thinks it extract extra fees from. Further, since many of these ISP networks also own content delivery networks and some eventually just became content producers themselves, all on top of a natural infrastructure monopoly, the arrangement were less likely to benefit consumers and more likely to create permanent illegal monopolies. We've tried to solve this problem in multiple ways. The peering "net neutrality" would be one. The forcing ISPs to act as "common carriers" and allow third parties to operate on top of their networks the way we did with DSL would be another. > But that's orthogonal to the meaning of Net Neutrality. Perhaps the original case was always just subset of the overall problem?
rsingel 2y ago
This is wrong on so many accounts. An ISP selling Internet access to regular folks sells access to the entire Internet. To do that the ISP connect its network to the rest of the internet via a transit connection. All your traffic goes through that unless you peer with other networks. When you peer with them you send less through your paid transit connection. So both parties benefit when they interconnect so long as they send a decent amount of traffic back and forth. There's no such thing as a bandwith hog network. Netflix sends traffic to your network because your users asked for it and they pay you to deliver that traffic. The notion that traffic ratios have anything to do with whether it makes sense to peer and whether someone should pay as long been debunked in the internet context. Those ideas are just remnants from the phone network which operates on a very different economic model, the one that make phone calls cost dollars per minute. Here's a very clear presentation from 2005 from a NANOG meeting explaining exactly why you're wrong. https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Ratios.html https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Rati... And you're also wrong but what neutrality is. It's simply the principle that the network that you pay to get online doesn't get to interfere with what you do online. That encompasses lots of behaviors including interconnection.
- thethirdone 2y ago
  You have not done a good job explaining/proving how they are wrong. Most of your response is only addressing a single paragraph that mentioned Netflix. > The notion that traffic ratios have anything to do with whether it makes sense to peer and whether someone should pay as long been debunked in the internet context. Do note how the comment does not mention peering ratios. An ISP being a "hog" does not need to be determined by the peering ratio. > https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Ratios.html https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Rati... This is a very good article, but it does not directly address the above. It is very specific to arguments about peering ratio. If you have no opinions on peering ratios, you have to read between the lines to get opinions on the original comment. In Argument #2 counter argument #1: "This is a valid observation ... This is not however an argument for using Peering traffic ratios to restrict Peering." > And you're also wrong but what neutrality is. Just saying they are wrong is not helpful. You provide no evidence that "Net Neutrality" has not shifted in meaning since the 90s.
shrimp_emoji 2y ago
My answer to all of this is that the way the Internet works now is wrong and bad and I don't care to accommodate it anymore than I would care to remind my jailor to take their heart medication every morning. Go net neutrality.
tqi 2y ago
Tldr: man on internet demands that everyone else adopt his obtuse interpretation of a commonly used term.

jpalawaga 2y ago

it means the same as it always did. net neutrality as you describe it didn't draw a distinction between "end nodes". Everything that has a wire connected to it is a node. The wires are the edges. Some nodes transmit or receive more than others, and some have different purposes. Some are even behind firewalls. In this context, the net is not neutral if traffic-shaping is applied to some packets and not others, which is the same as what you describe. Perhaps the circumstances for signing agreements are a lot more complicated than it used to be, but at its heart, it is the same problem.

thecrash 2y ago

> when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure. Why wouldn't the ISP refuse to peer with them, then? This is a genuine question, I don't understand the industry as well as you seem to. To my understanding, net neutrality doesn't mean "every ISP has to peer with anyone who asks". It just means "you can't treat packets differently based on where they came from". If it's really so terrible to deal with an ISP that dumps tons of Netflix traffic on to your network, then don't peer with them, problem solved, right? Seems like the reality is that ISPs *do* want to peer with Netflix's provider, they just also would like to have the right to demand additional money directly from Netflix for doing so. Obviously as operators of the network they have the technical ability to do this - the question is whether it's good for society / economy / etc for them to be allowed to.

relaxing 2y ago
Because the ISP is also a television service that competes with Netflix. It’s anticompetitive behavior.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Why wouldn't the ISP refuse to peer with them, then? This is a genuine question The sibling comment has the reason, but you might be interested in the details. In the old days, ISPs were more heterogeneous. Say you were ISP A in New York. You had residential customers and business customers. Your business customers would host their websites etc. on your service and some of their customers use ISP B, also in New York. Meanwhile some of ISP B's business customers have customers on ISP A. So ISPs A and B peer at an exchange in New York. Neither of them charges the other because they both need connectivity to the other's customers. (The traffic was often bidirectional but that doesn't really matter here, the one receiving more traffic than they send still has to satisfy their own customers' need to link with the system sending the traffic.) Meanwhile ISPs C and D are in California. They peer with each other, but they both still need to exchange traffic with ISPs A and B, so all four ISPs pay for transit. The transit company runs fiber across the country and connects them together, for a fee. Then it turns out that last mile ISPs are awful. Their residential customers are stuck with them, because what choice do they have? One other odious bureaucracy, if that. But not their business customers. You can host a server out of anywhere. So new companies like AWS came in and took the bulk of the business customers. Then those companies got big and built their own transit networks so they could peer with all the local ISPs themselves. The ISPs should be all good with this because then they themselves don't have to pay for wider transit links to carry that traffic. All they have to do is carry it over the last mile to their own customers who are paying them for exactly that. This is all still completely fine, except for one thing. The likes of AWS and Verizon are competitors. The ISPs want business customers to use their (slower, more expensive) service instead of a big cloud provider or CDN. And the ISPs run video services that compete with Netflix. Meanwhile they have a lock on their residential internet customers, many of which have zero other alternatives, or maybe one which can engage in the same behavior. So if they degrade Netflix or refuse to peer with enough capacity to carry the traffic their own customers request from Netflix, their customers can't switch to another ISP, and it allows the ISP to shake down the peer for money because there is no other way to pass traffic to the customers of that ISP. The ISPs have a monopoly/oligopoly on last mile internet service and are leveraging it against competitors, hence: > Because the ISP is also a television service that competes with Netflix. It’s anticompetitive behavior.

candiddevmike 2y ago

Most folks have 1, maybe 2 viable ISP options. For them, net neutrality is one of the only things keeping the carriers from completely screwing them over. We need far stricter laws around what it means to be an ISP, what minimum service guarantees should be, and how to provide more competition in the space, such as splitting line (physical cable going to your residence) and access (your IP provider).

drdaeman 2y ago
> We need far stricter laws around what it means to be an ISP I would argue different - we need those folks to have 4+ viable ISP options that will compete for them ferociously, rather than making double sure no one else (but another telco megacorp that can afford the compliance) comes and they're stuck with 1-2 greedy ISPs forever.
- avery17 2y ago
  Well one of those things requires interpreting words and the other requires bootstrapping thousands of businesses against monopolies all over the country. Which one is easier to accomplish?
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    One actually accomplishes the desired outcome, the other creates another terribly run government mandated monopoly.
    - aaomidi 2y ago
      We can have the interpretation of the words AND competition actually
      - brigadier132 2y ago
        It generally doesn't work out once the regulatory capture laws are written.

akira2501 2y ago

> some ISP refusing to peer with them for free The issue, as I remember it being presented decades ago, is that both the ISP and Netflix were using a common carrier or an internet exchange. The ISP is noticing that much of the inbound traffic from this peering point originates from Netflix. They approach Netflix and say "we are going to actively deprioritize your traffic unless you enter in to an exclusive direct peering agreement with us, where we set the terms, and you will pay extra to have all of this traffic delivered reliably on our network." Allowing this opens the door for the ISP to do this to anyone it thinks it extract extra fees from. Further, since many of these ISP networks also own content delivery networks and some eventually just became content producers themselves, all on top of a natural infrastructure monopoly, the arrangement were less likely to benefit consumers and more likely to create permanent illegal monopolies. We've tried to solve this problem in multiple ways. The peering "net neutrality" would be one. The forcing ISPs to act as "common carriers" and allow third parties to operate on top of their networks the way we did with DSL would be another. > But that's orthogonal to the meaning of Net Neutrality. Perhaps the original case was always just subset of the overall problem?

rsingel 2y ago

This is wrong on so many accounts. An ISP selling Internet access to regular folks sells access to the entire Internet. To do that the ISP connect its network to the rest of the internet via a transit connection. All your traffic goes through that unless you peer with other networks. When you peer with them you send less through your paid transit connection. So both parties benefit when they interconnect so long as they send a decent amount of traffic back and forth. There's no such thing as a bandwith hog network. Netflix sends traffic to your network because your users asked for it and they pay you to deliver that traffic. The notion that traffic ratios have anything to do with whether it makes sense to peer and whether someone should pay as long been debunked in the internet context. Those ideas are just remnants from the phone network which operates on a very different economic model, the one that make phone calls cost dollars per minute. Here's a very clear presentation from 2005 from a NANOG meeting explaining exactly why you're wrong. https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Ratios.html https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Rati... And you're also wrong but what neutrality is. It's simply the principle that the network that you pay to get online doesn't get to interfere with what you do online. That encompasses lots of behaviors including interconnection.

thethirdone 2y ago
You have not done a good job explaining/proving how they are wrong. Most of your response is only addressing a single paragraph that mentioned Netflix. > The notion that traffic ratios have anything to do with whether it makes sense to peer and whether someone should pay as long been debunked in the internet context. Do note how the comment does not mention peering ratios. An ISP being a "hog" does not need to be determined by the peering ratio. > https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Ratios.html https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Rati... This is a very good article, but it does not directly address the above. It is very specific to arguments about peering ratio. If you have no opinions on peering ratios, you have to read between the lines to get opinions on the original comment. In Argument #2 counter argument #1: "This is a valid observation ... This is not however an argument for using Peering traffic ratios to restrict Peering." > And you're also wrong but what neutrality is. Just saying they are wrong is not helpful. You provide no evidence that "Net Neutrality" has not shifted in meaning since the 90s.

shrimp_emoji 2y ago

My answer to all of this is that the way the Internet works now is wrong and bad and I don't care to accommodate it anymore than I would care to remind my jailor to take their heart medication every morning. Go net neutrality.

tqi 2y ago

Tldr: man on internet demands that everyone else adopt his obtuse interpretation of a commonly used term.