| HN Mirror

good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6txA3pI0xJI

short answer:

These rules are 2 years old and did nothing good for the internet. the solution is to dissolve municipal monopolies. they do this all the time - everytime they corruptly assign a monopoly to provide a service like electricity, water, etc.

The problem is too much government and the left just wants to pile on the beaurocracy and centralize the decision making regarding the global internet in washington. Stupid.

Why shouldn't a medical monitoring company negotiate peering and higher guaranteed bandwidth so doctors can remotely with live data to ensure the safety of critical patients? [hint: ALL companies do this, it is physically impossible not to]

Because the government is scaring stupid people with the thought of higher netflix prices to grab more control of the internet that they have been illegally surveiling already. Meanwhile, they also scramble to add idiotic things like netflix taxes because they are just too idiotic and greedy. Oh not to mention the government's backwards attempts to prosecute piracy and weaken/criminalize encryption.

technical answer if you're up for some reading:

As an engineer, net neutrality is a totally misguided and unattainable. Companies that provide things like realtime communication obviously need to negotiate and guarantee lower latencies. Anyways, just like with labor and healthcare, some people just want to pretend that internet service doesn't operate under economic laws. They're always looking for some savior/excuse to abolish free enterprise like internet, automation, altruism, etc.

I like how reddit user /u/natermer puts part of it (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldandBlack/comments/6mviva/whats_... ):

There are two major types of network traffic you tend to see on the internet. One is a 'elephant' type bulk transfers. These are big files, bittorrent, video streaming and such things. These types of things use a lot of the available bandwidth and can cause transfers that last many minutes to many hours. However they are latency sensitive.... It doesn't matter if it takes 1 or 10 or a 100 seconds for the packets to cross the internet just as long as you can move a LOT of packets at the same time.

The other type of data transfer you see are things that are very latency sensitive. Remote controlling of mechanics, remote monitoring, remote desktop, video conferencing, gaming, VoIP, and other types of latency sensitive protocols. These things use relatively little bandwidth compared to the 'elephants' but are extremely latency sensitive... meaning you want the transfer to go as quick as possible, but don't really need to transfer that much. The modern Internet works based on peering agreements. ISPs have multiple connections with other ISPs. many times these connections are almost ad-hoc as it depends on geography and other variables that makes some connections 'less then ideal'. These connections vary in quality, performance, latency, and cost.

If ISPs can route traffic based on protocol and provider then they can possibly save significant amount of money and improve performance for their customers. They can shuttle latency sensitive protocols over expensive links and allow bulk transfers to use massive amounts of cheap bandwidth to reduce their own and their customer's costs.

If you go 'full network neutrality' and treat each packet the same then you can have your VoIP call stuck in a FIFO buffer queue behind your Xbox's game download.. making it impossible to have phone calls.

For example: TCP/IP protocol is connection oriented and this is used for critical connections and there is a ack/nack response/reply conversation going on where clients validate and confirm packets. This means that every TCP/IP transfer is a two-way street... even if you are downloading you still have to upload some packets to confirm and continue the connection.

Bulk uploads from your home network can interfere with the acknowledgements and cause massive latency spikes and other issues unless you have a router that intellegently manages buffers and gives priority to different types of packets. You have a very fast network connected to a very slow uplink and your TCP/IP acks can get stuck behind a massive queue of bulk transfers.

This happens commonly when people are using bittorrent and they don't understand why they get fast downloads, then it throttles back to almost nothing, and then they get fast downloads again. This will continue in a saw-like fashion where you see fast performance, then massive latency spikes, and then slow performance, and then fast performance again.. repeating. Many people assume that this is caused by ISP throttling when in fact it's their own network equipment suffering from bad buffer/queue management. They will go out and buy new home routers only to see the problem get worse because the routers are as dumb as before, but now have even bigger queues and even more memory to (mis)manage. (there are VERY effective ways to fix this, btw)

I could go on and on.

Also keep in mind that the modern internet works through things called 'Content Delivery Networks' or CDNs for short. Bulk transfer of files from one side of the internet to the other side is expensive and high-latency. Co-located datacenters for webservers and small/medium business installations charge premium amounts for internet access and usage is metered on the server side. So most popular websites depend on CDNs to cache content and distribute it back out to the user in a way that is actually physically close to the user on the internet.

This can dramatically lower costs, increase availability, and improve performance and user experience.

One of the ways CDNs do this is by having private networks running in parrallel to the public internet. Sometimes they are logical networks like VPNs or they are entirely separate physical networks.

Youtube, for example, depends on Google's private Fiber network for content delivery. When you are streaming videos Google uses as little as the public internet as possible. They have connections as local to you as possible that (ideally) connect directly to your ISP's network and streams data to you.

Other CDNs depend on collocated servers in the ISP's datacenter to cache data, stream video, and other things. Thus if you take a very naive approach to network neutrality and try to say 'all packets are treated as equal' you not only possibly increase the costs for yourself and others, but also you destroy the suitability for the internet to be used for low-latency protocols AND you will do NOTHING to help start-ups be competitive with big names like Google.