7 ms·

This is just one of the many fights surrounding net neutrality. We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation and b

This is just one of the many fights surrounding net neutrality. We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation and bandwidth (even latency/routing) guarantees. The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre. By any basic reasoning, an ISP that doesn't enable access to YouTube should be out of customers within a few months. That this doesn't happen is testament to the broken market surrounding internet access, and a bad sign for the fights that await us. (Google needs to start naming and shaming the ISPs that do not want to peer with them on reasonable conditions or with sufficient capacity when they detect bad performance on YouTube. They have been doing this locally, e.g. they delisted french news sites from Google News when these lobbied for protectionist laws, and they have been stating the parties that forbid them from showing copyrighted content, e.g. the GEMA in Germany.)

ams6110 13y ago
Providing internet service requires a lot of physical infrastructure, e.g. cables run to every home, all the attendant routing and switching gear, a fleet of trucks and maintenance workers available 24/7, etc. Right now the ISPs (phone and/or cable company) provides this. Are you saying that the physical infrastructure should be separated from the ISP function? Who owns the physical infrastructure then?
- kbar13 13y ago
  municipalities?
- zanny 13y ago
  The public (ie, local or state government). Like the roads. Like the sewers. Like (some) power lines. Like the phone and coax lines (depending on time period, they have passed between private and public owners, but were always state subsidized in their deployment).
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    Thanks, but no thanks. Have you seen the roads around here? They've been repaving / widening / narrowing / re-routing the main drag near my apartment for something like a year now and it still isn't done, and the design makes traffic far worse than it was before. No way do I want the same people who run the local highway department having anything (more than already) to do with my broadband access. It's not a perfect analogy, but as the old saying goes... "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in 5 years there would be a shortage of sand".
  - wyager 13y ago
    I'd rather deal with some shitty ISPs and some good ones than be forced to use a single shitty government ISP for the rest of my life.
    - zanny 13y ago
      Not a government ISP, you can have private routing centers. Just public wire in the dirt, so that one company can't own the only access to ones home and make it impossible to compete.
    - belorn 13y ago
      While that might have been true of the past, we do have countries like Sweden, where the state is currently rolling out 1Gb/s connections. Even the country side is having fiber rolled out.
  - justinmk 13y ago
    The "public" doesn't own anything. You can demonstrate that by trying to sell your share of the thing you supposedly own.
    - forsaken 13y ago
      Just because you own something doesn't mean its a liquid asset..
    - kibibu 13y ago
- belorn 13y ago
  Several different options are available: We could have a FRAND like situation, where backbone network entities has to sign a Reasonable and non-discriminatory agreement regarding traffic flows. FRAND like systems has it own set of issues, but it has also clear benefits. Government is the second obvious one. As with roads, government benefit greatly from improved infrastructure. All roads do not benefit from being toll-roads, especially when the traffic flow can radically change overnight. Who knows where the next youtube will be, or if google will move the servers suddenly after a SOPA directive is voted in. Lastly, government could loosen their total control of the electromagnetic spectrum. Doing so would enabled a true global mesh network to be built, giving anyone with a receiver/transmitter the ability to participated. So long government claims to own the communication layer in the air, I will hold them responsible for the current communication issues in the cables.
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    The FCC now dictates that all are ISPs must include a statement on their public websites detailing what types of filtering, rate-limiting, traffic shaping, etc., that they do (e.g. if they prioritize their own VoIP customers over Netflix or something), but I'm not sure that many providers do. Even most of the ones that do probably intentionally try to make it hard to find.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  In my perfect world, municipalities would only fiber that ran to every home and to a central facility but they would not manage any logical devices or infrastructure. Any carrier who wanted to have a presence in the facility could, for the same exact cost. Customers would then be able to pick and choose their carrier and carriers would be forced to compete based upon service. Not happy with ISP A? Call up ISP B, sign up, and they'll put in a ticket to a tech at the facility to patch you over from ISP A to ISP B instead. I realize, of course, that this a fantasy that will never happen.
  - gregsadetsky 13y ago
    Amsterdam seems to be a good example of what you're describing (FTTH installed by the city, Internet service provided by private companies). See: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was-wired-for-open-access-fiber/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was...
randomfool 13y ago
Your ISP wanting money to install caching servers for Netflix and YouTube is not something which has been covered ny net neutrality in the past. It would be great if there was a fixed colo fee for caching servers. That said, I pay my ISP for bandwidth and service. It's bullshit if they refuse free installation of caching servers which improves my service and frees up upstream bandwidth for others.
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  I can't believe ISPs would fight free caching servers. I was happy when I saw traffic coming from somehost.myisp.net while loading content from YouTube.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Streaming video competes with Comcast's original and probably much higher profit product.
- wmf 13y ago
  If an ISP thinks the bandwidth savings of caching servers don't outweigh the space and power that they consume, there's always peering. It sounds like major broadband ISPs are doing neither.
- wyager 13y ago
  >It would be great if there was a fixed colo fee for caching servers. Great for whom? Legally mandated fixed fee services are generally not the highest in customer satisfaction.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  FWIW, if Netflix agrees to install one of their appliances in your network, they do it completely free of charge. If you don't meet their requirements (which are based upon average aggregate traffic levels), you can't even pay them to get one. If your ISP meets the requirements and is refusing, well, it's their own damn fault -- they're simply wasting money. Personally, I am happy to peer with anyone with whom I share a presence, even if they're an "eyeball network" like me and we'd only be passing a few megabits of traffic.
beachstartup 13y ago
> The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre. why is this bizarre?
- ramblerman 13y ago
  Because given that practice continues, and is accepted, we could find ourselves in a position where making a website now requires a regional fee to the ISP guild.
  - Finster 13y ago
    Wat. It already happens. I don't get free hosting for my sites.
    - ramblerman 13y ago
      I think you're confused about the issue. you pay for hosting, yes, of course. You don't additionally pay individual ISPs to guarantee it's users access to your sites.
      - Finster 13y ago
        I don't? I honestly don't know that. If my hosting company does, I'm sure they would pass that additional cost directly to me. I don't see a problem here.
      - crazy1van 13y ago
        You don't pay it directly. But you are paying your hosting company who is several steps down the line paying a backbone provider to tie their network to the rest of the world's networks. So, yes, you really are paying to have other users be able to connect to your site.
saint-loup 13y ago
Google is publishing data on the quality of operators: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=e9krd11m38onf_&ctype=m&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_s=number_of_tests&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&met_c=download_throughput_lst&scale_c=lin&ind_c=false&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false&xMax=180&xMin=-180&yMax=-79.97571094413946&yMin=84.17339026552769&mapType=t&icfg&iconSize=0.5#!ctype=m&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_s=number_of_tests&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&met_c=download_throughput&scale_c=lin&ind_c=false&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=e9krd11m38onf_&... Besides, one nitpick: the Google News story was in Belgium, not in France.
- jeroen 13y ago
  Actually, both: Belgium http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-13/google-belgian-newspapers-settle-copyright-dispute-over-links.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-13/google-belgian-news... France http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21302168 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21302168
rlpb 13y ago
I don't see that net neutrality has much to do with it. I think that your other reason: monopolies: is the sole reason for these problems. I have never had any of the problems described in the article. I live in the UK, and use a small ISP that prides itself on giving me a high quality service. And I get it. Edit: downvoting? Really? If you disagree, then why not provide an actual explanation of why fixing the monopolies won't fix this problem on its own in a reply?
toast0 13y ago
From the article: "Instead, network operators can degrade traffic by failing to upgrade connections without severing them entirely. The public won't realize that's what's going on unless negotiations become so contentious that one party makes them public—or a government decides to investigate." I don't think the US government (or those of its several states) is competent enough to regulate the complex interconnections between networks. I predict that the major ISPs will be able to find new tools to degrade network conditions faster than regulators will be able to sanction them for it, should the government choose to go after this fight at all: the essential abandonment of the wholesale provisions of the Telecommunication Act of 1996 ended the possibility of reasonable widespread competition for broadband: lack of choices is why this is a problem in the first place.
jlgaddis 13y ago
> The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre. Some even go a step further, inspecting unencrypted HTTP traffic and replacing referrer IDs and such on advertisement links (e.g. links to Amazon).
johnward 13y ago
There are plenty of places (especially in the US) that you don't have a choice of ISP. Unless you count dialup as the alternative.
Finster 13y ago
So, the problem is that bandwidth is limited. There isn't infinite bandwidth available. You're dissatisfied with the way a monopolizing ISP is choosing to ration bandwidth. Your solution is to have the government, through legislation, control how bandwidth is rationed? Yes, by all means, instead of degraded YouTube performance, let's just cut everyone's bandwidth across the board to some idiotic bandwidth guarantee. As if the government would somehow magically be able to better ration bandwidth than the companies that, you know, actually provide it. A better solution might be to get rid of regulations and try to lower the barriers to entry, so that it's easier for smaller startups to get into the same space as the ISP's. "But limited infrastructure, blah blah, whaa whaa." Shut it. Google shouldn't be the only company with the ability to create new infrastructure (like inflatables). But since regulation around internet infrastructure has to be micro-managed by so many levels of government, it only makes things harder for the non-Googles.
brownbat 13y ago
> We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation I walked away from the article much more skeptical of the value of net neutrality rules. Are you going to have a law that requires someone maintain all their equipment? How will you know what's "maintained enough?" What about the companies that didn't deploy as much capacity as service providers wanted? How will you eliminate the appearance of favoritism in regulators enforcing something so vague? That said, I'm all for breaking up monopolies and punishing collusion though, that seems like an easier fix, something we have more experience enforcing.

ams6110 13y ago

Providing internet service requires a lot of physical infrastructure, e.g. cables run to every home, all the attendant routing and switching gear, a fleet of trucks and maintenance workers available 24/7, etc. Right now the ISPs (phone and/or cable company) provides this. Are you saying that the physical infrastructure should be separated from the ISP function? Who owns the physical infrastructure then?

kbar13 13y ago
municipalities?
zanny 13y ago
The public (ie, local or state government). Like the roads. Like the sewers. Like (some) power lines. Like the phone and coax lines (depending on time period, they have passed between private and public owners, but were always state subsidized in their deployment).
- mindcrime 13y ago
  Thanks, but no thanks. Have you seen the roads around here? They've been repaving / widening / narrowing / re-routing the main drag near my apartment for something like a year now and it still isn't done, and the design makes traffic far worse than it was before. No way do I want the same people who run the local highway department having anything (more than already) to do with my broadband access. It's not a perfect analogy, but as the old saying goes... "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in 5 years there would be a shortage of sand".
- wyager 13y ago
  I'd rather deal with some shitty ISPs and some good ones than be forced to use a single shitty government ISP for the rest of my life.
  - zanny 13y ago
    Not a government ISP, you can have private routing centers. Just public wire in the dirt, so that one company can't own the only access to ones home and make it impossible to compete.
  - belorn 13y ago
    While that might have been true of the past, we do have countries like Sweden, where the state is currently rolling out 1Gb/s connections. Even the country side is having fiber rolled out.
- justinmk 13y ago
  The "public" doesn't own anything. You can demonstrate that by trying to sell your share of the thing you supposedly own.
  - forsaken 13y ago
    Just because you own something doesn't mean its a liquid asset..
  - kibibu 13y ago
belorn 13y ago
Several different options are available: We could have a FRAND like situation, where backbone network entities has to sign a Reasonable and non-discriminatory agreement regarding traffic flows. FRAND like systems has it own set of issues, but it has also clear benefits. Government is the second obvious one. As with roads, government benefit greatly from improved infrastructure. All roads do not benefit from being toll-roads, especially when the traffic flow can radically change overnight. Who knows where the next youtube will be, or if google will move the servers suddenly after a SOPA directive is voted in. Lastly, government could loosen their total control of the electromagnetic spectrum. Doing so would enabled a true global mesh network to be built, giving anyone with a receiver/transmitter the ability to participated. So long government claims to own the communication layer in the air, I will hold them responsible for the current communication issues in the cables.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  The FCC now dictates that all are ISPs must include a statement on their public websites detailing what types of filtering, rate-limiting, traffic shaping, etc., that they do (e.g. if they prioritize their own VoIP customers over Netflix or something), but I'm not sure that many providers do. Even most of the ones that do probably intentionally try to make it hard to find.
jlgaddis 13y ago
In my perfect world, municipalities would only fiber that ran to every home and to a central facility but they would not manage any logical devices or infrastructure. Any carrier who wanted to have a presence in the facility could, for the same exact cost. Customers would then be able to pick and choose their carrier and carriers would be forced to compete based upon service. Not happy with ISP A? Call up ISP B, sign up, and they'll put in a ticket to a tech at the facility to patch you over from ISP A to ISP B instead. I realize, of course, that this a fantasy that will never happen.
- gregsadetsky 13y ago
  Amsterdam seems to be a good example of what you're describing (FTTH installed by the city, Internet service provided by private companies). See: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was-wired-for-open-access-fiber/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was...

randomfool 13y ago

Your ISP wanting money to install caching servers for Netflix and YouTube is not something which has been covered ny net neutrality in the past. It would be great if there was a fixed colo fee for caching servers. That said, I pay my ISP for bandwidth and service. It's bullshit if they refuse free installation of caching servers which improves my service and frees up upstream bandwidth for others.

voltagex_ 13y ago
I can't believe ISPs would fight free caching servers. I was happy when I saw traffic coming from somehost.myisp.net while loading content from YouTube.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  Streaming video competes with Comcast's original and probably much higher profit product.
wmf 13y ago
If an ISP thinks the bandwidth savings of caching servers don't outweigh the space and power that they consume, there's always peering. It sounds like major broadband ISPs are doing neither.
wyager 13y ago
>It would be great if there was a fixed colo fee for caching servers. Great for whom? Legally mandated fixed fee services are generally not the highest in customer satisfaction.
jlgaddis 13y ago
FWIW, if Netflix agrees to install one of their appliances in your network, they do it completely free of charge. If you don't meet their requirements (which are based upon average aggregate traffic levels), you can't even pay them to get one. If your ISP meets the requirements and is refusing, well, it's their own damn fault -- they're simply wasting money. Personally, I am happy to peer with anyone with whom I share a presence, even if they're an "eyeball network" like me and we'd only be passing a few megabits of traffic.

beachstartup 13y ago

> The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre. why is this bizarre?

ramblerman 13y ago
Because given that practice continues, and is accepted, we could find ourselves in a position where making a website now requires a regional fee to the ISP guild.
- Finster 13y ago
  Wat. It already happens. I don't get free hosting for my sites.
  - ramblerman 13y ago
    I think you're confused about the issue. you pay for hosting, yes, of course. You don't additionally pay individual ISPs to guarantee it's users access to your sites.
    - Finster 13y ago
      I don't? I honestly don't know that. If my hosting company does, I'm sure they would pass that additional cost directly to me. I don't see a problem here.
    - crazy1van 13y ago
      You don't pay it directly. But you are paying your hosting company who is several steps down the line paying a backbone provider to tie their network to the rest of the world's networks. So, yes, you really are paying to have other users be able to connect to your site.

saint-loup 13y ago

Google is publishing data on the quality of operators: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=e9krd11m38onf_&ctype=m&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_s=number_of_tests&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&met_c=download_throughput_lst&scale_c=lin&ind_c=false&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false&xMax=180&xMin=-180&yMax=-79.97571094413946&yMin=84.17339026552769&mapType=t&icfg&iconSize=0.5#!ctype=m&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_s=number_of_tests&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&met_c=download_throughput&scale_c=lin&ind_c=false&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=e9krd11m38onf_&... Besides, one nitpick: the Google News story was in Belgium, not in France.

jeroen 13y ago
Actually, both: Belgium http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-13/google-belgian-newspapers-settle-copyright-dispute-over-links.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-13/google-belgian-news... France http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21302168 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21302168

rlpb 13y ago

I don't see that net neutrality has much to do with it. I think that your other reason: monopolies: is the sole reason for these problems. I have never had any of the problems described in the article. I live in the UK, and use a small ISP that prides itself on giving me a high quality service. And I get it. Edit: downvoting? Really? If you disagree, then why not provide an actual explanation of why fixing the monopolies won't fix this problem on its own in a reply?

toast0 13y ago

From the article: "Instead, network operators can degrade traffic by failing to upgrade connections without severing them entirely. The public won't realize that's what's going on unless negotiations become so contentious that one party makes them public—or a government decides to investigate." I don't think the US government (or those of its several states) is competent enough to regulate the complex interconnections between networks. I predict that the major ISPs will be able to find new tools to degrade network conditions faster than regulators will be able to sanction them for it, should the government choose to go after this fight at all: the essential abandonment of the wholesale provisions of the Telecommunication Act of 1996 ended the possibility of reasonable widespread competition for broadband: lack of choices is why this is a problem in the first place.

jlgaddis 13y ago

> The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre. Some even go a step further, inspecting unencrypted HTTP traffic and replacing referrer IDs and such on advertisement links (e.g. links to Amazon).

johnward 13y ago

There are plenty of places (especially in the US) that you don't have a choice of ISP. Unless you count dialup as the alternative.

Finster 13y ago

So, the problem is that bandwidth is limited. There isn't infinite bandwidth available. You're dissatisfied with the way a monopolizing ISP is choosing to ration bandwidth. Your solution is to have the government, through legislation, control how bandwidth is rationed? Yes, by all means, instead of degraded YouTube performance, let's just cut everyone's bandwidth across the board to some idiotic bandwidth guarantee. As if the government would somehow magically be able to better ration bandwidth than the companies that, you know, actually provide it. A better solution might be to get rid of regulations and try to lower the barriers to entry, so that it's easier for smaller startups to get into the same space as the ISP's. "But limited infrastructure, blah blah, whaa whaa." Shut it. Google shouldn't be the only company with the ability to create new infrastructure (like inflatables). But since regulation around internet infrastructure has to be micro-managed by so many levels of government, it only makes things harder for the non-Googles.

brownbat 13y ago

> We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation I walked away from the article much more skeptical of the value of net neutrality rules. Are you going to have a law that requires someone maintain all their equipment? How will you know what's "maintained enough?" What about the companies that didn't deploy as much capacity as service providers wanted? How will you eliminate the appearance of favoritism in regulators enforcing something so vague? That said, I'm all for breaking up monopolies and punishing collusion though, that seems like an easier fix, something we have more experience enforcing.