Net neutrality on it's way out?

[Callie Del Noire]

Or at the least.. companies like comcast will throttle their rivals @ apple, netflix, hulu and so on. I already have 'odd' timeouts and lags using my apple tv and/or netflix.

[Vekseid]

I think they will do just that. Likely what they will do is slow all traffic down, much like what Comcast did to Bittorrent traffic. They will then contact companies and say "if you want consumers to get your stuff faster it will cost $X." Amazon, Google, etc, will be able to afford it. Some of the hosting companies might be able to afford it as well. Some won't though and you'll see that traffic slow to a crawl which will kill new business start ups.

"Like what Comcast did to Bittorrent traffic."

No, not like that. When I switch Elliquiy to ssl-only, the only information Comcast has is
1) Originator IP, port
2) Destination IP, port
3) Packet flags
4) Amount of data transferred

One of those ports is going to be 443. Where does most small-scale traffic over SSL go to? In theory, Comcast could shut off all external ssl connections. In theory, the CEO and board could also take shotguns and fire them at their feet.

And for what? The ~3 mbps Elliquiy and similar sites use really warrants the attention of an individual router entry on every border router they own? Every single preferential policy has an added performance cost to it, and each preferential policy is its own entry. When Comcast shut off outgoing bittorrent traffic, bittorrent was responsible for something like 40% of all Internet traffic. It saved them a lot of money in comparison to the real cost of performing that filter.

Oh, and those companies that can afford the extra cost? They'll pass those costs on to the consumers. Hosting will cost more. Amazon Instant Video and Netflix streaming prices will go up. Most alarmingly in my opinion though is what will happen to innovation. At the moment the internet represents the one brightest spot for new companies to start and get a foothold. If Net Neutrality dies that is threatened.

Based on bandwidth.

I would be ecstatic if we passed 10mbps, sustained, much less 10gbps, which is the level of traffic Comcast whines about.

[WendySlaveGirl]

Well, all I'll say is I hope you're right and I, and lots of others like me are wrong. What I really hope is the FCC appeals or rewrites the rules to cover broadband or fixes how cable companies are classified so the rules cover them. Either that or the courts pull their heads out of their rear ends. Net neutrality is absolutely critical.

Oh, and what the cable companies would care about wouldn't be bandwidth. It'd be making all the other companies out their pony up the dough to get the fastest speeds to get to the consumers.

[Vekseid]

I'm not claiming this isn't something that needs to be resolved eventually. It should - but it's far from a doomsday scenario at the moment. Talk to your congresscritter or better, ask them about it during their primary - along with their opponents.

[CriminalMindsFan]

I hate the idea of only being able to access certain websites because certain ones are owned by company A, while others are owned by company B, C and ect.

[Valthazar]

Totally unrelated to this net neutrality issue: 

Without realizing it, almost all of the outlets we access on the internet, be it media content, businesses, forums, sites, etc. are the result of time (and often money) intensive marketing initiatives.  Even though we may like to think that we sought out E because of our interest in roleplaying, the reality is that E attracted us as roleplayers to join through Vekseid's marketing initiatives.  There could easily be another roleplaying forum out there that is far superior to this one, but they have failed in their overall effort because they did not devote sufficient time and resources for promotion. 

For example, those popular gaming channels on YouTube, and big prank channels like OwnagePranks and Roman Atwood, are the result of heavy promotional efforts (and in many cases, money).  Even those stories we hear of some random business or idea getting internet attention through reddit or another outlet are not entirely organic in nature - there's a clear marketing plan at play in accomplishing that, which frequently requires time and money.

So this net neutrality issue is simply another hurdle that the internet entrepreneurs will have to navigate around.  And trust me, the motivated self-starters will always find a way, that's just how it goes.

[gaggedLouise]

Actually, Elliquiy is EXACTLY the type of page that would be affected. The biggest downside to this ruling is that the ISPs can charge differently for different types of access both to the consumers and to the owners of websites.

Let's say they make it 3 tiers.

Tier 1 is the big boys - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. You get the same speeds you always got with them.
Tier 2 is the smaller companies - Local stores, smaller computer companies, game companies. They're slower than Tier 1 and it is noticeable but it is not slooooowwww.
Tier 3 are the independents. - Pages made by everyday people who have bought server space somewhere and that's about it. These will be lucky to load at dial up speeds.

The companies will charge website owners to move up Tiers. They will also charge consumers to have higher speeds on tier 2 and 3, basically you'd pay more to have what we have now.

This will have many effects. 1) It will drastically lower traffic at places like Elliquiy as people get tired of waiting for the page to load. It will also stifle the emergence of new businesses on the web because not only will you have all the traditional fees to deal with (credit card processing, LLC formation, legal fees, web server fees) but now if you want any chance at competing you'll have to pay more to the ISPs for them to load your page faster. Oh AND you'll have to pay to each ISP. Why do you think companies like Google, Amazon, and others are against this? They know that even for them it will drastically increase their cost of business.

The thought that’s been cropping up first to me, personally, about this – being mainly a ‘consumer’ and online poster/communicator, not a site manager, owner or moderator of any kind – is the risk of drift towards a cable-tv packaged internet. A system of walled gardens, sort of, where ISPs and their deals with site owners and companies would largely decide what the ordinary internet user in any local place would get to see for their monthly fee. And a much less transparent system than it is today.

Many people (and many companies and households) use a relatively limited array of websites and web functionalities. My parents don’t ever use chat/IM programs or chatrooms, almost never read personal blogs or dedicated discussion forums (or Facebook), don’t use gaming sites, dating sites or sex sites – in fact they barely ever use truly realtime interactive features beyond booking tickets or buying books and dvd’s at Amazon (or similar sites around here). For e-mail, they use locally installed programs like Outlook, not web-based mail. It’s 98% read-only, and reading (or occasionally watching) at well established sites, and they’re probably fairly typical of hundreds of millions of people over sixty. Even with a slightly wider use, I bet an ISP could easily sell a “standard package” giving quick and good access to the following groups of sites – and (in smaller print) much less speedy access or no access at al, to other kinds of sites beyond them – and supposing it was a U.S. ISP:

-   search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and their affiliated sites
-   major computing/phone companies like Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Dell,  Vodafone etc
-   a “wide selection” of newspapers, magazines and news sites” (including a hundred US newspapers and some foreign ones, plus many magazine titles, but still at the discretion of your ISP)
-   government and public sites: let’s say all .gov sites hosted within the US plus the main state sites of one other country, of your choice
-    major travel, vacation, booking, retail and entertainment sites (but excepting Netflix, Spotify and so on)
-                a number of tv and radio network web sites
-    a couple of leading gaming sites
-    Facebook, Hotmail and some other social sites and the like.

Access to anything beyond those would be severely slowed down or disappearing into a cloud of uncertainty (unless you pay thirty dollars more a month for the next tier). Or effectively cut off. I bet many people would be okay with that kind of package, and of course the ISP could argue that there was a trade-off between “luxury full access to the web for everyone” (what we have now) and the realities of clogged internet highways if everyone wants to watch Netflix or play EVE-online all the time, but it would also spell a major cut in the freedom of ordinary users to pick what they want, to roam freely – and the freedom to compete with your own unestablished site. Personally I don’t want anything from my ISP except the connection bandwidth itself plus assistance if there is trouble with the modem or the local network, it’s only that I pay them for when it comes to the web: no selection, nannying or cutting up of what I can access.

Maybe this is something that’s some way into the future in any case, but I think it’s a real concern, and it would bump solidly into the idea of the internet as an open-access space, a medium where it is fairly easy for the end user to get to see what one might find and for content providers and site owners to get in and show their stuff.

[Vekseid]

That's definitely a threat. At the moment, however, ISPs have to deal with the reality of managing the size of their routing tables, and it is orders of magnitude easier for them to only target a few problematic ASNs or protocols rather than attempt to provide special access based on the individual /24 or /56 that someone is in. Not only that, but there is also the issue of - if somehow Elliquiy gets its own subnet someday (say), and I pay their toll - they assume legal liability for their network connecting to me in a consistent fashion. Right now I can't sue Rogers or Time Warner when one of their routers fucks up, but if I'm paying them, then I am their 'customer' and if I am managing enough to justify owning an entire subnet, then I also have legal staff.

Just like every bank, law office, etc. also has legal representation. I'm not convinced that ISPs are keen on opening themselves up to that degree of legal and political culpability. It's an even bet that the first one that does it on the sort of scale that you mention is going to get slaughtered.

[Kythia]

Hmmm.  Before I start, here's a huge and necessary caveat:  I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Up until recently I had my tech savvy neighbour make buttons on my desktop that would take me to my frequently visited sites.  He still has an account on this computer for when I download something I shouldn't have and he needs to sort it out.  I'm as minimally technologically literate as I can be while still being able to reliably find and use this website.  A conversation I had in Elliquiy U inspired me to learn more and more, but I'm still at the bottom of the curve.

With all that in mind, I simply don't understand the objections to net neutrality.  It's their wires, their infrastructure.  Why shouldn't they charge what they want for what goes through them - when I go to the time and effort of digging up your street to lay my cables I'll certainly be charging as much as I can get away with to send stuff over them.

I'm not talking about this high court ruling or that legal wrangling, I'm talking more fundamentally than that.  How is the statement that "Companies can charge what they like for using their infrastructure" not correct.  There are enough people who know what they're talking about saying its incorrect that I'm inclined to believe them, and that's fine.  I don't, however, understand the objection to it.

[Oniya]

This isn't so much about their ability to regulate their prices, but the ability to regulate the content.  Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.  (Thank you, Wikipedia.)  Would you want your ISP to be able to prevent you from accessing a site just because they didn't agree with what it had on it?

Suppose your ISP was owned by Rupert Murdoch, and he and his board decided to charge extra for the 'privilege' of accessing news from other sources.  Or if the owner of your ISP was a member of the WBC and decided to charge extra - or even completely restrict your ability - to access any sites that disagreed with their views.

[Kythia]

But...the TV news is owned by companies.  They show me what they want to show me (leaving aside the slightly special relationship of the BBC for the moment).  Newspapers are the same.  I get why its undesirable, but, well, "Suppose your ISP was owned by Rupert Murdoch, and he and his board decided to charge extra for the 'privilege' of accessing news from other sources" requires the internet to be different to every other medium I can think of. 

I should rephrase my question: why is the internet expected to be special in this way?  Is it simply that there is a feeling we now have a chance to make something so?  Because that seems kinda gross: screw you "majority of the world that don't have internet access" - we're writing off any medium you can access.

[Valthazar]

I should rephrase my question: why is the internet expected to be special in this way?  Is it simply that there is a feeling we now have a chance to make something so?  Because that seems kinda gross: screw you "majority of the world that don't have internet access" - we're writing off any medium you can access.

This is a very legitimate perspective I have also thought about, and one that I am also interested in knowing the answer to.

[Vekseid]

Hmmm.  Before I start, here's a huge and necessary caveat:  I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Up until recently I had my tech savvy neighbour make buttons on my desktop that would take me to my frequently visited sites.  He still has an account on this computer for when I download something I shouldn't have and he needs to sort it out.  I'm as minimally technologically literate as I can be while still being able to reliably find and use this website.  A conversation I had in Elliquiy U inspired me to learn more and more, but I'm still at the bottom of the curve.

With all that in mind, I simply don't understand the objections to net neutrality.  It's their wires, their infrastructure.  Why shouldn't they charge what they want for what goes through them - when I go to the time and effort of digging up your street to lay my cables I'll certainly be charging as much as I can get away with to send stuff over them.

I'm not talking about this high court ruling or that legal wrangling, I'm talking more fundamentally than that.  How is the statement that "Companies can charge what they like for using their infrastructure" not correct.  There are enough people who know what they're talking about saying its incorrect that I'm inclined to believe them, and that's fine.  I don't, however, understand the objection to it.

Why should an ISP be allowed to claim it is an ISP if it is not actually providing access to the Internet?

[gaggedLouise]

With all that in mind, I simply don't understand the objections to net neutrality.  It's their wires, their infrastructure.  Why shouldn't they charge what they want for what goes through them - when I go to the time and effort of digging up your street to lay my cables I'll certainly be charging as much as I can get away with to send stuff over them.

I'm not talking about this high court ruling or that legal wrangling, I'm talking more fundamentally than that.  How is the statement that "Companies can charge what they like for using their infrastructure" not correct.  There are enough people who know what they're talking about saying its incorrect that I'm inclined to believe them, and that's fine.  I don't, however, understand the objection to it.

A small number of major ISPs do own the bulk of the actual cables and telefibre networks in a particular area (or a country), the main grid. That will sometimes be the old national phone companies that are now turned ISPs and broadband providers, with every other ISP being sort of a "tenant" on their cable grid. Most ISPs only really own, or control, the stretch just at your wall and the "out" where you plug in plus their own system of routers, hubs and control lines along the way. If it's mobile and your signal goes through thin air, the situation is a bit different again of course, but the "hard owner" of most of the highways of the web tends to be state-owned fibre companies and phone providers. Anyway, there's no single owner of the entire network of course, any more than there's a single owner of the network of European (E) interstate highways.

I think my main argument against the idea that private companies have a right to charge what they want and the way they want for web access, as long as they can get people to pay, is that the web and its tech wasn't built by private businesses. In most places it has relied heavily on state spending, public-sponsored network/LAN building and state-funded technological development, research and education about computers and phone/network technology.

Much of the basic technology and concepts - methods of routing, automated data modulation and translation, wireless methods of control, better and faster circuits, satellites etc - are legacies of the '60s and '70s space race which was massively funded by the US government. The early networks in many countries were built by universities or by the military, with lots of support by the state. The fibre networks, or the cables that used to do the job on the same stretches. are essentially the old national phone grids. The merging of a lot of scattered small networks, which were often only giving access to researchers or officers with special permit, into a wide, open and tightly-knit international network that carpets all of our lives, has been heavily pushed by states, not just by private corporations. If it had been left to the companies and local civic initioatives, we would never have had the kind of internet rollout we have seen over the last quarter of a century, nor would there have been this kind of raising of broadband speeds, because there wouldn't have been any demand for them. Maybe something like the tight web as we know it would have existed in a few regions, like California, southern England, some Chinese and Japanese urban areas and so on, but in most parts of the world it would have been much, much sparser. In my view that goes a long way to motivating why the web should be seen as a public and open utility, a medium which should stay open and without arbitrary barriers to its entry and use by all of us, just like no one would accept if some highways were only open to people who could tell the highway officers where they were going, who could show a proof of income above a certain level for last year or who were citizens in the country (that many motorways are payroads is an entirely different matter).

I should rephrase my question: why is the internet expected to be special in this way?  Is it simply that there is a feeling we now have a chance to make something so?  Because that seems kinda gross: screw you "majority of the world that don't have internet access" - we're writing off any medium you can access

Because the web has now become so pervasive, the managing and handling of so much that used to be done "the analog way" has been moved online, that it's become undoable to handle everyday things and get ahead in life without steady web access on your own terms. If I'm to order train or plane tickets these days, I need to do it online, same with managing my daily bank business and bills - doing it on the phone /edit: I mean making an old-style voice call for railway or airplane tickets, not doing it with your smartphone screen, of course/ or (still worse) going to the bank and paying or cashing in a bill or a money order over the counter takes an impossible amount of time, not the time of dialling a number or riding to the bank but the time you'll be kept waiting. That kind of service has been winded down to the point of discontinuing, and many bank offices in this country don't even handle cash over the counter anymore. For several years before that, they took out extortionate fees if you wanted to send or cash in a money order on paper or settle a bill there - it was very clearly about "educating" everyone that you do it at home or not at all...

If I'm looking for a new job or even checking up on a particular job offer I've heard of, checking out what's on at the movies or on the tv, looking for somebody's phone number and address*, if you're communicating with school about the children's latest projects and homework or their grades, then you need to do it online and you need to be able to do it on your own terms and when you have the time - a public library or internet café pc in the daytime often won't do. If you've got kids, they need the computer and the web to prove themselves through their homework and their studies, many schools these days take it for granted that every kid has broadband at home. I could go on and on, but I guess the point has been made: the broadband era is here - it's been here for a long time - the old analog ways of doing things have often been discontinued (remember when post offices and banks were packed with people on many afternoons and especially during the weeks before Christmas? Remember when we bought most of our books and music in actual book stores and record shops?). You need web access just about every day now and while it's okay if you've got the hardware and the highway at home, as a state of affairs it's not something where most of us have had the choice whether we could stay outside and do things the old way.


*Phone books on paper were discontinued in Sweden in 2012, and had been much more unreliable and incomplete than the online variety for several years.

[gaggedLouise]

Just for the record after this outline of the broadband-borne society, I do think there should be a bit more active planning for backup systems to use if there's a large and lengthy network blackout or a wipe-out of data from servers, for whatever reason (terrorism? war? extreme solar storms? weather or climate disasters? a kind of reversal of the original goal of Arpanet, the forerunner of the internet...) Or if old data have become unreadable on current devices and systems - that one's a problem that's sure to grow in the future, for every new change of platforms, programs and tech standards: a huge challenge for libraries, education and archives of all kinds.

There needs to be some systems to fall back on even during a temporary downtime when we've become this dependent on the online sphere. But unfortunately, making plans for events that might happen once every ten years or even less often in a given area, and implementing those plans to stay safe, isn't a hot priority in today's world.

[gaggedLouise]

One more reason why the internet is not comparable to tv networks or newspapers and their right to charge what they want and choose the kind of content they want to publish. Most people, companies, homes or schools only have one ISP - at most, you might have one for the stationary computer and one for mobile broadband, but that's rather rare and having two different ISPs wired to your wall connection is impossible in most homes or offices, given how the fibre/cable network is set up, just like you can't have two different electricity providers for the same home/single-user building unit. With newspapers and magazines, we're free to balance out their bias by holding or reading a couple of different titles on a daily basis, that option doesn't really exist with broadband providers without prohibitive costs and efforts. That's a strong reason why ISPs should be seen as having a kind of public duty, and should be required not to give privileges to one group of sites, or to some kinds of content, or to bleep out some sites from what their customers might access.

[Kythia]

That makes a whole load of sense, thanks for taking the time to explain that, Louise.

Next question:  There are five or six websites I visit regularly.  If the rest of the internet was cut off from me it might well take me a few weeks to even notice.  Is it not easier for my internet guys to say "Oh, Kythia is looking for a website.  Probably either Elliquiy or Jezebel", speed that up with a corresponding slowdown in everything else?  And would that ease not translate into cheaper fees for my wifi?  Sort of like the packages you, Louise, mentioned above.

[gaggedLouise]

That makes a whole load of sense, thanks for taking the time to explain that, Louise.

Next question:  There are five or six websites I visit regularly.  If the rest of the internet was cut off from me it might well take me a few weeks to even notice.  Is it not easier for my internet guys to say "Oh, Kythia is looking for a website.  Probably either Elliquiy or Jezebel", speed that up with a corresponding slowdown in everything else?  And would that ease not translate into cheaper fees for my wifi?  Sort of like the packages you, Louise, mentioned above.

Yes, possibly, but I'd say it would set a bad precedent of customer relations. ISPs run, I suppose, to some extent on what they judge they can get away with versus customers, web site owners and other operators and agents on the web. If "pick twenty web sites that you'll have access to and we'll speed those up for you, and slow down or block all others" became a permitted and current alternative, it would inevitaböly pull the corollary that everyone else would have to pay more if they wanted wider web access, or free and indiscriminate access, because that's how marketing works these days. So you'd get those sites, but a rapidly growing number of other people would be threatened by rising costs without any improved service, even by other ISPs than the one you're dealing with, and they would most likely also think this new scheme was

-intrusive: we don't want to have to spell out to our ISPs or any other general businessmen that we frequent Elliquiy, various sex-related sites or let's say read underground comics or Batman fanfic. Not because it's shameful but 'cause it's private.

-difficult if there are more than one person using the pc or smartphone regularly.

-a downgrading of the entire idea of searching things and options freely, without having to know in advance who you're going to ask or what you're going to end up reading or buying.

[TheGlyphstone]

That makes a whole load of sense, thanks for taking the time to explain that, Louise.

Next question:  There are five or six websites I visit regularly.  If the rest of the internet was cut off from me it might well take me a few weeks to even notice.  Is it not easier for my internet guys to say "Oh, Kythia is looking for a website.  Probably either Elliquiy or Jezebel", speed that up with a corresponding slowdown in everything else?  And would that ease not translate into cheaper fees for my wifi?  Sort of like the packages you, Louise, mentioned above.

I think the problem is that if they are paying that much attention to you individually in the first place, they could do what you suggest or instead cut your speed for everything and offer a 'personalized package' that restores speedy access to the websites you frequent most often. One of these two options gives them more money.

[Vekseid]

That makes a whole load of sense, thanks for taking the time to explain that, Louise.

Next question:  There are five or six websites I visit regularly.  If the rest of the internet was cut off from me it might well take me a few weeks to even notice.  Is it not easier for my internet guys to say "Oh, Kythia is looking for a website.  Probably either Elliquiy or Jezebel", speed that up with a corresponding slowdown in everything else?  And would that ease not translate into cheaper fees for my wifi?  Sort of like the packages you, Louise, mentioned above.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'speed up'. Unless something is seriously wrong, you make a request to E's server, and it fires off a set of packets containing a ~quarter-megabyte or so of data to you. In most cases, Elliquiy can't feasibly be made 'faster' on your end, unless you have your own local cache turned off or somesuch, and most cases of hosts making E faster 'normally' (imposing their own cache) tends to fuck more up than it solves - thus my planned move to https.

The ~100-200 packets per request Elliquiy sends is not a particularly noticeable in terms of overall routing - they get to you as fast as they can. Blocks on E would not be based on QoS, but rather on politics (movements to ban adult content, for example). Moreover, accessing Elliquiy involves you sending a lot of data to E (polling and such), so Elliquiy is a much more 'bandwidth-neutral' site than say, Youtube is (by some orders of magnitude).

This complicates arguments for the sort of NN violations currently being discussed - it would be more likely for your ISP to just block access to E altogether, but if we're on https, we look more like a bank than a porn site