net neutrality scare

[FishingBuds]

It has now been nearly 7 years since the November 19, 2002 letter that started the net neutrality scare, and its getting closer.

 

[danmyersmn]

It has now been nearly 7 years since the November 19, 2002 letter that started the net neutrality scare, and its getting closer.

The FCC is having a meeting tomorrow to talk about this very issue. The instructor for a class in my masters program is a lawyer for the FCC and we talked about this very issue on Monday night.

 

[Loggerhead Mike]

what was the net neutrality scare?

 

[BassAddict]

what was the net neutrality scare?

this was copyied from https://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html

Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days. Indeed, it is this neutrality that has allowed many companies, including Google, to launch, grow, and innovate. Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online. Today, the neutrality of the Internet is at stake as the broadband carriers want Congress's permission to determine what content gets to you first and fastest. Put simply, this would fundamentally alter the openness of the Internet.

 

[danmyersmn]

Here is another explanation.

AT&T and Verizon, and...etc. own the fiber, copper and switching centers. Google and Yahoo do not.

AT&T say "we own the network we should be able to charge Google and Yahoo to use it" When a customer on one end of a Verizon fiber connects to Google then "google" is using Verizon's fiber. Verizon says Google should pay to use it.

The network was setup in this neutral mode from day one.

AT&T says to Verizon "we will connect our network to yours and allow your customers on our network if you allow our customers on yours. Maybe we can charge each others customers or something?"

Google and Yahoo say "no way, all you will do is slow down technology advances and limit progress".

Verizon says "fine you don't pay, we won't let your traffic on our network or we will slow it down and allow our traffice first"

Google says "come on guys, be neutral in this process, lets get along. we pay AT&T for our connection to the internet let our data pass"

Customer says "Hey I just want my email and my porn, knock it off"

Government said "We don't know how we can best make money by taxing google to use verizons fiber and we don't know any way we can tax verizon for allowing google to use the network so we will pass a law that says we won't do anything and try and figure out how best to make money off everyone."

now government is sitting around trying to figure out how best to make money and if that method is by allowing or denying network neutrality.

 

[russ010]

Dan - good explanation

 

[stinkynathan]

Dan - good explanation

eh. It's laced with a cynicism about government taxing the internet that is unwarranted. The government has paid providers BIG bucks for laying down the fiber that connects our country. How dare they try to collect on that investment when the ISPs haven't provided a fraction of the bandwidth that they agreed to when they took the money? :roll:

Dan, you're interchanging internet backbone and what is commonly referred to as the "last mile" infrastructure, which is what connects your home to your internet service provider. Yes, AT&T and Verizon both own parts of the internet backbone, as well as UUNET, Level 3, Qwest, Sprint, and IBM. But as far as I know, net neutrality is primarily concerned with last mile connections.

I'll use Netflix and myself as an example. Think of this: I pay $50 a month to connect to the internet from my home via the "last mile" owned by my ISP (Charter in this case). They provide me a connection at "5 megabits per second" and say, "Go forth, and use these resources." And it is good. They connect me to the data I want to download. (I use the word "downloading" on purpose because that's what you're really doing with every single thing you view on the internet.)

Netflex pays $100,000 (made up number) a month for their last mile connection which provides a lot more bandwidth, reliability and service. Their ISP says, "Go forth, and use these resources." And it is good.

All net neutrality says is this: Both Netflix and I have both payed for our internet connections. Charter can not charge a premium to Netflix because they providing using bandwidth-intensive files to their customers.

In my opinion, the acceptance of voice over IP and streaming content are what really brought this issue up. Vonage provides a VOIP service over the ISP's network and the ISP has to provide service AND is losing a customer. Likewise, Netflix is selling me movies that I can download on bandwidth that I (and Netflix) have already paid for...and my ISP isn't getting a cut.

The ISPs say, "Give us money for the premium content you are offering." And it isn't good. The ISPs think they aren't getting the huge cut of money that is "rightfully theirs"....except they ARE because both parties (me and Netflix) are already paying for our bandwidth.

Essentially, without net neutrality the internet could devolve into a network where you can only easily access information owned by companies who can afford to pay the premium. In my view, this could create a huge barrier to entry to providing content and services to the internet.

 

[danmyersmn]

eh. It's laced with a cynicism about government taxing the internet that is unwarranted. The government has paid providers BIG bucks for laying down the fiber that connects our country. How dare they try to collect on that investment when the ISPs haven't provided a fraction of the bandwidth that they agreed to when they took the money? :roll:

I understand the difference between backbone and last-mile. Last-mile not only refers to customer to ISP but it also refers to little ISP to big ISP. It is less common now but a few years ago many local ISP's where not directly on the backbone, they had a T1 connection to a backbone provider and they where reselling service. They didn't have multiple connections, run BGP4 routing, have guaranteed uptime, etc. When I was working for an ISP we had a ds3 connection to both Worldcom and NapNet. We ran our operation of of the basement of a building in Minneapolis with Worldcom(UUNET) on one side and NapNet on the other. Our "last mile" was literally feet in length. I didn't feel the need to break down what we are talking about as far as network infrastructure. Net Neutrality is in fact centred around the backbone and the last-mile. We already have examples of last-mile ISP's discriminating in service. AOL drops email from outside its network when it is lacking bandwidth to deliver it all. Comcast throttles heavy users and does not give them the full bandwidth the are paying for. Both of these are well documented and violations of net-neutrality.

What we are talking about here is not only removing an ISP's ability conduct business this way, but also such things as:

Prevent AT&T or Verizon or other Telco's from slowing down VOIP packets or bouncing them around various network hops to demonstrate their home-grown VOIP service is superior.

Prevent companies such as Comcast from slowing down peer-to-peer traffic or your streaming movie from netflix so that they can offer you the same movie at a faster download (with a slight sur-charge of course).

Prevent an ISP (a backbone or a last mile) that offers DNS service to its customers from altering DNS from returning a "domain doesnt exist" error to remaping the domain to a ISP run search engine (verizon is/was doing this).

We ran our own DNS server and we used DNS from UUNET as our secondary and NapNet as are tertiary. If either of them would of altered the DNS service they provided us in the same manor that verizon did they would of been violating the tenats of "neutrality" and they would have been doing so at a backbone level.

Delay packets destine to TCP port 25 from specific ip ranges, deny all port 1723 packets from competing security firms, etc. etc. etc.

The simple explanation is this:
The idea of net neutrality is that all packets regardless of source, destination or contents are treated the same when the arrive and leave our network regardless of if we are a small ISP, national corporate media conglomerate or large telco running a portion of the backbone. If we control a portion of the network the packets will come and go all the same so that your customer can get his email and his porn.


You're right I also misquoted about government and taxes.

Follow the money and it always leads back to the "correct" decision. I shouldn't have said taxes I should have said campaign contributions. The final decision will be based 100% on what politicians have the most power and what companies gave them the most money-the outcome of this issue will be the same as every other issue.

 

[stinkynathan]

eh. It's laced with a cynicism about government taxing the internet that is unwarranted. The government has paid providers BIG bucks for laying down the fiber that connects our country. How dare they try to collect on that investment when the ISPs haven't provided a fraction of the bandwidth that they agreed to when they took the money? :roll:

I understand the difference between backbone and last-mile. Last-mile not only refers to customer to ISP but it also refers to little ISP to big ISP. It is less common now but a few years ago many local ISP's where not directly on the backbone, they had a T1 connection to a backbone provider and they where reselling service. They didn't have multiple connections, run BGP4 routing, have guaranteed uptime, etc. When I was working for an ISP we had a ds3 connection to both Worldcom and NapNet. We ran our operation of of the basement of a building in Minneapolis with Worldcom(UUNET) on one side and NapNet on the other. Our "last mile" was literally feet in length. I didn't feel the need to break down what we are talking about as far as network infrastructure. Net Neutrality is in fact centred around the backbone and the last-mile. We already have examples of last-mile ISP's discriminating in service. AOL drops email from outside its network when it is lacking bandwidth to deliver it all. Comcast throttles heavy users and does not give them the full bandwidth the are paying for. Both of these are well documented and violations of net-neutrality.

What we are talking about here is not only removing an ISP's ability conduct business this way, but also such things as:

Prevent AT&T or Verizon or other Telco's from slowing down VOIP packets or bouncing them around various network hops to demonstrate their home-grown VOIP service is superior.

Prevent companies such as Comcast from slowing down peer-to-peer traffic or your streaming movie from netflix so that they can offer you the same movie at a faster download (with a slight sur-charge of course).

Prevent an ISP (a backbone or a last mile) that offers DNS service to its customers from altering DNS from returning a "domain doesnt exist" error to remaping the domain to a ISP run search engine (verizon is/was doing this).

We ran our own DNS server and we used DNS from UUNET as our secondary and NapNet as are tertiary. If either of them would of altered the DNS service they provided us in the same manor that verizon did they would of been violating the tenats of "neutrality" and they would have been doing so at a backbone level.

Delay packets destine to TCP port 25 from specific ip ranges, deny all port 1723 packets from competing security firms, etc. etc. etc.

The simple explanation is this:
The idea of net neutrality is that all packets regardless of source, destination or contents are treated the same when the arrive and leave our network regardless of if we are a small ISP, national corporate media conglomerate or large telco running a portion of the backbone. If we control a portion of the network the packets will come and go all the same so that your customer can get his email and his porn.


You're right I also misquoted about government and taxes.

Follow the money and it always leads back to the "correct" decision. I shouldn't have said taxes I should have said campaign contributions. The final decision will be based 100% on what politicians have the most power and what companies gave them the most money-the outcome of this issue will be the same as every other issue.

Now THAT is a good explanation.

I realize that, historically, decisions have been made by people with a huge conflict of interest caused by campaign contributions. I'm hoping, and thinking, that this will be a case where there's enough momentum behind neutrality that it will win in the end.

It would also be nice to get the common carrier status mandated on ISPs. Hopefully it would force them to actually provide the service that the government and customers are paying for: upgraded infrastructure, no more oversold lines, as well as rid of us of their meddling with traffic.