tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798047.post1807938711714344825..comments2024-01-16T05:48:33.523-05:00Comments on Errata Security: This Vox NetNeutrality article is wrongDavid Maynorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09921229607193067441noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798047.post-9660661256476413452014-11-13T10:50:54.224-05:002014-11-13T10:50:54.224-05:00A few comments for Wheaties:
1 - I'm not sure ...A few comments for Wheaties:<br />1 - I'm not sure anybody can be "getting net neutrality wrong" when everybody seems to have a different definition of it. To some, it means that Comcast can't niggle around with Netflix's throughput during contract negotiations. To others, it means that ISP's can't let websites which are NOT their customers pay for faster throughput. For a simplistic example, suppose that all of Amazon's servers are connected to the internet through AT&T. Now, suppose that Amazon is able to pay Charter, Time-Warner, Comcast, Google-Fiber, whoever-else extra money to give preferential treatment to traffic to/from Amazon. This is something (first, because it is cost-prohibitive and, 2nd, because they don't have the resources to negotiate/maintain contracts with dozens of ISPs) which a mom-n-pop web store just won't be able to do. So, Amazon, simply because of their size, enjoys a competitive advantage which locks out the smaller guys. It's akin to BestBuy being able to add a special lane on all of the freeways reserved just for people going to BestBuy. If that's viewed as anti-competitive in the corporeal world, why isn't it considered the same in the virtual world?<br /><br />Lastly, your comment about "Fast lanes happen... it's about preventing slow lanes". They go hand-in-hand, since fast and slow are subjective. Compared to 10 years ago, everything, today, is fast. If everybody else has a "fast lane" and I don't, that's going to feel (to me and to anybody who connects to me) as being *slow*. In other words, allowing "fast lanes", necessarily, creates "slow(er) lanes".Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17559585922070303874noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798047.post-74769023514883078312014-11-13T10:50:41.026-05:002014-11-13T10:50:41.026-05:00A few comments for Wheaties:
1 - I'm not sure ...A few comments for Wheaties:<br />1 - I'm not sure anybody can be "getting net neutrality wrong" when everybody seems to have a different definition of it. To some, it means that Comcast can't niggle around with Netflix's throughput during contract negotiations. To others, it means that ISP's can't let websites which are NOT their customers pay for faster throughput. For a simplistic example, suppose that all of Amazon's servers are connected to the internet through AT&T. Now, suppose that Amazon is able to pay Charter, Time-Warner, Comcast, Google-Fiber, whoever-else extra money to give preferential treatment to traffic to/from Amazon. This is something (first, because it is cost-prohibitive and, 2nd, because they don't have the resources to negotiate/maintain contracts with dozens of ISPs) which a mom-n-pop web store just won't be able to do. So, Amazon, simply because of their size, enjoys a competitive advantage which locks out the smaller guys. It's akin to BestBuy being able to add a special lane on all of the freeways reserved just for people going to BestBuy. If that's viewed as anti-competitive in the corporeal world, why isn't it considered the same in the virtual world?<br /><br />Lastly, your comment about "Fast lanes happen... it's about preventing slow lanes". They go hand-in-hand, since fast and slow are subjective. Compared to 10 years ago, everything, today, is fast. If everybody else has a "fast lane" and I don't, that's going to feel (to me and to anybody who connects to me) as being *slow*. In other words, allowing "fast lanes", necessarily, creates "slow(er) lanes".Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17559585922070303874noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798047.post-78622740904715067732014-11-13T08:49:53.996-05:002014-11-13T08:49:53.996-05:00Where are you getting your asinine statement about...Where are you getting your asinine statement about Obama. I'm no fan of the guy but I read thoroughly through his press release and no where in there can any sane person come to this conclusion.<br /><br /><br />Overall very good article that touches on some very needed points. Most of the readers here are missing the points.<br /><br />1. Fast lanes happen, that is not what net neutrality is about. Its about preventing slow lanes.<br /><br />2. The US have a very large internet backbone and infrastructure. Its very difficult to get local municipalities to get permits to work and upgrade the lines in the ground. They are upgrading them, it just takes time. an Example is right here. I'm slated to move up to 150Mbps download early next year.<br /><br /><br />I'm not talking about you robert but im frankly very sick of "people in technology" getting net neutrality completely wrong.<br /><br />Sincerely, A ISP Network engineer<br />Wheatieshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06111122488765369993noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798047.post-61895595462662684712014-11-12T11:23:54.171-05:002014-11-12T11:23:54.171-05:00Your example of the GoGo inflight broadband doesn&...Your example of the GoGo inflight broadband doesn't hold water. GoGo isn't giving *preference* to their own video streams over the air-to-ground link. Rather, they're not *using* the air-to-ground link because they keep their servers on the *plane*. They don't need to *block* Netflix; they only need to give each user such a low bandwidth (or charge so much per MB) that streaming video from *anybody* over the link is just not feasible.<br /><br />I also see problems with your assertion that "the market immediately corrects" when companies do bad things. As exhibit A, look at the banks leading up to 2008. That's an example where: 1) the correction wasn't immediate, and 2) the correction was pretty painful. I think your faith in the free-market as a self-driving car which automatically picks the best route is unfounded. However, in this case, the assertion is even more outlandish. So, you want me to believe that, when the ISP's start monkeying with Netflix's throughput during contract negotiations, that entrepreneurs will spot this market opportunity and a new crop of nation-wide ISPs with billions of dollars of switching infrastructure will just "sprout up" to meet the demand? That isn't going to happen. The current crop of ISPs are the result of decades of mergers and acquisitions of smaller providers. The number of providers has gotten fewer, not larger. Nobody can just jump in and roll out a competing product. Even *Google*, with mountains of cash, is rolling out internet provision (via their fiber) at the rate of a few cities per year. The free market... doesn't. work. here.<br /><br />Regarding your point about "Re-architecting the Internet to make NetFlix work requires a lot of money"... Comcast shouldn't be bearing those costs to make *NetFlix* work. That's NetFlix's problem (which they can address with CDNs and whatnot). However, if the advent of NetFlix causes the *aggregate* of internet traffic traversing Comcast's networks to become too large, then that's Comcast's problem; Comcast has been selling a certain throughput of broadband service to its users, and now increasing numbers of those users are trying to use what they've paid for.<br /><br />The crux of net-neutrality, as I understand it, is that the ISP's are able to control the data flow of a lot of users, and they're able to use that as a bargaining chip. If they have, say, 10 million subscribers, they can go to NetFlix and say "Gosh, it'd be a *shame* if 10 million of your customers suddenly started having streaming issues... and only with *your* servers". In itself, that's bad enough. However, to make things worse, the customers can't easily punish Comcast for these actions against the users' interest (ie, the market can't correct) because the ISPs, effectively, have monopolies. A Comcast customer usually cannot switch to Time-Warner or Charter. In other words, the ISPs are able to control how the resources of millions of users are directed, and they're able to use that control to enrich themselves to the detriment of the users and the services they're trying to use.<br /><br />In this way, this scenario bears some resemblance to corruption in public-works projects. In those cases, a public official is controlling how the citizens spend their tax dollars to, say, build a bridge. The public official is able to solicit bribes or favors from the contractors in order to win the contract, but this is working against the best interests of the citizens and the contractor.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17559585922070303874noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798047.post-50037428532033363992014-11-11T15:39:12.041-05:002014-11-11T15:39:12.041-05:00Honestly, I think you both make good points. Inma...Honestly, I think you both make good points. Inman's main point (and similarly, John Oliver's from the much shared "Last Week Tonight" video) is that consumers want their ISPs to provide a dumb pipe of internet bandwidth, with little to no restrictions on where they go or what they do with it. The Netflix graph is certainly not a neutral source, and therefore should be taken with a decent dose of salt. However, there are several reports of Netflix performance improving when using some kind of VPN tunnel service out there. Likewise for Youtube and other streaming services at various points in the past. All those stories point to common theme. ISP's degrading services they don't like, in favor of ones they do. In a truly competitive market, consumers would just migrate away from the ISPs that did this to ones that didn't. Unfortunately, in most parts of the US, this isn't an option. When consumers don't have a market option, they turn to government to step in. <br /><br />Your technical points are correct, and I agree with most of your interpretations. Your point about GoGo inflight internet is an especially salient one. That's one of the major problems with any legislation around this problem is all the edge cases. In-flight internet is a good case. Hotel internet has also popped up recently as preventing certain traffic (VPN's mainly). Another one I haven't seen discussed is public Wifi a la coffee shops and such. Who decides what traffic travels over "their" network? What constitutes an "ISP" for Net Neutrality's sake?Scotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00739592862195074533noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798047.post-44861032913726215682014-11-11T12:37:55.475-05:002014-11-11T12:37:55.475-05:00Evan -- I'm going to guess it has to do with 3...Evan -- I'm going to guess it has to do with 3 things:<br /><br />1. distances -- I mean, there are physical distance limits to wires/etc.. I'm not sure why people think wires are magic and have no energy loss. The US is huge. That has to have some effect? Maybe I'm just obsessed with wires these days.<br /><br />2. No competition. In the US you frequently have the choice of maybe 1-3 content providers, so they don't need to do much to make themselves slightly better. <br /><br />Because:<br />3. Local loop -- the UK forced the local loop to be shared, if I recall? I think it was for a while in the US (Mid 90s to mid 00s?), but it no longer is. After that happened, our choices went from dozens to that 1-3 we have now. No competition, because only one company owns the last mile.<br /><br />Stop me if I'm wrong, but when the idea of "net neutrality" was coined, it was about the local loop, not about QoS.<br />Katiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07041567401256534361noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798047.post-81416493594767790572014-11-11T05:46:17.141-05:002014-11-11T05:46:17.141-05:00Net Neutrality or not, the more important point be...Net Neutrality or not, the more important point being missed is the overall state of Internet quality in the U.S. I live in the UK and I get 120mb down via Virgin Cable. That's 15 megabytes a second. Wifi is typically the bottleneck in parts of my house. I get at least 90% of that as usable bandwidth during peak hours. All of my friends in the U.S. don't see close to those levels of service. Why is that? Is it ISP monopoly in most of the U.S.? Is it the "socialist" UK government forcing companies to improve their networks? Why do the "inventors" of the Internet lag so far behind the rest of the civilized world in terms of Internet speed and cost to consumers? I have no answers on Net Neutrality, but the idea that there is "nothing wrong" with the way things are in the U.S. today seems inaccurate from this side of the world. Good luck to those of you suffering with the Comcasts and Time Warners of the world. I've been there and it was miserable.Evanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06480783239168219882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798047.post-1851318878507480692014-11-10T20:44:35.820-05:002014-11-10T20:44:35.820-05:00There is no such thing as a 'fast lane' on...There is no such thing as a 'fast lane' on the Internet (or on private networks, for that matter); you can't make traffic go <i>faster</i>.<br /><br />What you can do is to use QoS to rate-limit traffic based upon various layer-4 characteristics.<br /><br />So, you can police down some traffic, whilst not policing down other traffic. I guess you could call it a 'fast lane via negation', but what you're really doing is simply giving some traffic priority over other types of traffic within the context of finite network bandwidth available via a given network link/path of links.<br /><br />This illustrates one of the many ways that the brouhaha over 'net neutrality' is partially the result of an incorrect understanding of how the Internet works. Couple that with non-technical political motivations on all sides of the debate (such as it is), and you end up with people who don't know what they're talking about making policy recommendations which will have unexpected (to them) negative consequences.Roland Dobbinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06517186494484977438noreply@blogger.com