[jerkstate]

My understanding is that the technical implementation of net neutrality is a ban of traffic policing (dropping prior to complete congestion to signal senders to slow down) for purposes other than "reasonable network management"

So Comcast shaping Netflix when Cogent won't pay their share to upgrade their peering point is probably still legal, but they would probably have to go to court to prove that it was "reasonable network management" and depending on the technical prowess of the court, could easily go the other way. The outcome is that telcos lose a lot of negotiating power to content providers.

More last mile providers probably wouldn't solve this problem, because people pay money for what they actually want (streaming video) rather than what they say they want ("free speech") and an ISP that protected freedom of speech would be protecting nazis, white supremacists, fake news, etc.

[_red]

>My understanding is that the technical implementation of net neutrality is a ban of traffic policing (dropping prior to complete congestion to signal senders to slow down) for purposes other than "reasonable network management"

Thanks for the points. A few further thoughts.

1. There are two sides to every connection. Couldn't Netflix itself traffic shape?

2. Can I pay for QoS from an ISP for elevated service (for instance say I also have VOIP service for my office and want low-latency to trunk)? Doesn't my elevated status neccessitate shaping of others packets (for mine to arrive with lowest latency, others must be delayed)?

3. Lastly, given that all communications (everything from postal mail, to TV, cellphone, etc) relies on oversubscription, QoS traffic shaping is baked into the pie, there is no network access without shaping. Literally every single packet is shaped constantly along the way. Given this fact, QoS is the not optional. It is in fact the entire business process. Thereby, how could an ISP ever be shown to not be engaging in "reasonable network management"?

NOTE: I'm asking these questions somewhat rhetorically. My point always when NN discussions arise is to try to engage in actual technical discussion about the matter for the purposes of illustrating to others that its largely an undefined, impossible to enforce concept. In fact, the idea is impossible. To my repeated disappointment, few people - even on technical places like HN - bother to think about the technical aspects. To me this shows that NN is like a mind virus. Its the 2015 version of "won't someone think of the children" from the 80's. It is a crafty bit of wordsmith that makes it impossible for people not to support. Who could be for a "non-neutral" net? All of this is crafted for the politicians benefit, since they gain the power (and their monopoly lobbyist).

[DiThi]

Shaping is not a problem at all. The problem is how you decide that shaping. If you're client of a network and you pay more for more priority inside that network they can do that, but as soon as the packet leaves it, it should have the same priority as anything else. And in practice you should never need such a service, as long as there's enough capacity. QoS can prioritize VoIP traffic without having to look to the source, destination or content. There's many clues for that which don't rely on having a list of source/destination tables or content matching.

[jachee]

ISPs charge their customers for access. They should not be able to then restrict that access based on their business needs. Just because Netflix competes with Comcast (NBC) doesn't mean Comcast should be able to ignore their customers' desire to consume Netflix content. Because that's what it is.

It's not like Netflix is generating petabytes of unsolicited traffic. They're providing the traffic Comcast's (or verizon's, ATT's, or whose-ever) customers are requesting. Net Neutrality is Wheaton's Law, writ large:

Don't be a dick. (To your customers, or the content-providers who produce what your customers want.)

[jerkstate]

There used to be a time when content companies needed to carefully select their network transit partners in order to make sure the bits their customers were paying them for had the best chance of reaching them (see: the existence of the CDN industry). It seems that those times are over, and the internet will be legislated to be 100% reliable and capacious..

[jachee]

I don't think the internet should be any less-regulated than the power industry.

Westinghouse (e.g.) can't charge me more for power to run GE (e.g.) appliances. Comcast (e.g.) shouldn't be able to extort customers for access to (e.g.) Netflix.

[jerkstate]

False analogy. Westinghouse can either make their own power or buy it as a fungible commodity from anyone else who does. Comcast can't make Netflix packets.

[DiThi]

CDNs are definitely still a thing. Not so much because of "chance of reaching", but because you can't change the speed of light, and having the content closer to the clients is both faster and cheaper.

[jerkstate]

Given perfect reliability, faster (lower latency) doesn’t matter for streaming video because all of the traffic is pipelined (even for live, encoding lag would dominate the few hundred ms maximum delay from light speed). And the user already paid their ISP for the bandwidth, so why would distance factor into the cost?

[DiThi]

The user paid for internet access, but streaming video services pay too. The more distance there is, the more effort may be required to guarantee some minimum speed, and in some cases may not even be possible. Internet sea cables are not unlimited. Net Neutrality means you treat packets equally[0], not that you can put an unlimited amount of them.

But if the user can get a faster speed through a VPN than without (as it has happened with Netflix vs Verizon), the tubes are NOT the limit, but a clear violation of Net Neutrality.

[0] As in: if shaping is done, you don't look at the source, destination or content.

[bifrost]

CDNs are a neccesity for latency and distribution, little of it has to do with your origin provider's quality. There are still some pretty terrible providers out there, some of them are HUGE and have hundreds of thousands of satisfied customers.

[zzzeek]

> actual technical discussion about the matter for the purposes of illustrating to others that its largely an undefined, impossible to enforce concept. In fact, the idea is impossible

NN means an ISP cannot place artificial speed limits on packets that I send or receive, based on the contents of the packets; e.g. the protocol, the port, or the destination address.

NN rules have already existed for several years, for the full specification see http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015... . This is a widely accepted concept so if you want to support your argument that net neutrality is "impossible" you'd need to rebut what this actually says.

[freedomben]

This is illustrative of the main problem I've run into discussing NN. Everybody has a different definition of what it is, and many are not even close yet they both get the mental satisfaction of "being on the team for a free net"

To be clear, I don't disagree with your post. I just chose it as an outlet to vent my frustration that language and words are so hard.

[nitrogen]

By hijacking a thread that's about taking action to argue technicalities, you are kind of contributing to the problem by decreasing SNR. If you are just here to argue, you are wasting the time and brainpower of people who could actually be contributing to solutions.

At the very least, instead of saying "see, I told you it wasn't easy," why don't you summarize the responses you have received and formulate a set of rules that would satisfy as many as possible?

[bifrost]

"The outcome is that telcos lose a lot of negotiating power to content providers."

The percentage of content providers that deliver to telcos directly is almost zero. Netflix is one of the biggest notable ones, but even they don't always do it.

[jerkstate]

That's true. Content providers usually pay a (usually many) intermediary (usually a tier 1 or tier 2 backbone provider) to deliver the traffic to the ISP. In order to deliver the traffic from one network to the other, both companies need to have short and long haul cables, routers with high speed interfaces, and employees to manage and maintain those things. So there are costs of this traffic borne by both companies. They are both getting paid by their customers to deliver the traffic, but the "peering agreement" between them governs the cost sharing responsibility of that link between the two of them. If the intermediary fails to fulfill their obligations according to the peering agreement, it is opaque to the customer who is not living up to their end of the contract (and always blamed on the end-user's ISP)

[bifrost]

Its rarely opaque TBH. Its usually pretty obvious who's failing to hold up to their end of the bargain. Gamers figure this out on their own all the time.

[jerkstate]

I've seen a lot of cases where people think they figured it out but are wrong. Traceroutes are hard to interpret. Did you know that most paths on the Internet are asymmetric, and traceroute doesn't tell you what the reverse path is?

[bifrost]

Yes, I've actually run part of the internet for around 16 years.

[jerkstate]

great, maybe you can provide evidence to back up your claim that gamers can (accurately) determine which party is in breach of a peering agreement