New Network Neutrality Squad — Users Protecting the Net

Lauren Weinstein writes in to announce the new "Network Neutrality Squad" — NNSquad. Joining PFIR Co-Founders Peter G. Neumann and Weinstein in this announcement are Vinton G. Cerf, Keith Dawson (Slashdot.org), David J. Farber (Carnegie Mellon University), Bob Frankston, Phil Karn (Qualcomm), David P. Reed, Paul Saffo, and Bruce Schneier (BT Counterpane). The Network Neutrality Squad ("NNSquad") is an open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet's users to help keep the Internet's operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable restrictions. The project's focus includes detection, analysis, and incident reporting of any anticompetitive, discriminatory, or other restrictive actions on the part of Internet service Providers (ISPs) or affiliated entities, such as the blocking or disruptive manipulation of applications, protocols, transmissions, or bandwidth; or other similar behaviors not specifically requested by their customers.

Re:Great idea...

[d34thm0nk3y]

..awful name. I can't help but think of Geek Squad, and that doesn't make me happy.

We already understand the issues surrounding network neutrality (and Best Buy). To a normal person a name reminding them of the people who fixed their computer adds credibility.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[Pantero Blanco]

It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.

I have more money, and less time than most people to have to deal with the unwashed masses. I should have the option of paying for better QOS if I feel like it.

No. Different tiers of internet service are like having a first-class and business-class seating section. You pay for X downstream and Y upstream.

Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[DMUTPeregrine]

I think it's more like the airline charging the receiving hotel to take you. If they don't pay to get you off the plane, you sit there for eight hours.

Re:Too vague!

[Urza9814]

If one user's activity degrades the quality of another's connection, then the ISP is selling a product that they don't actually have. I should be able to use all the bandwidth that I pay for.

Re:Too vague!

[kebes]

I don't think you can neatly separate out "good" and "bad" behaviors like this.

Well, one metric could at least be that ISPs don't violate the contracts they have with customers. I.e.: they are not committing fraud. Fraud is "bad." Your hypotheticals are not nearly as gray as you make them out to be.

What if one customer "requests" that another customer's internet performance be hindered? Is that OK or not?

Not OK. Why should one customer be able to influence another customer's service?

Suppose the request comes about by the first customer hogging more than his share of bandwidth? Is that OK or not?

"More than his share"? The available bandwidth is stipulated in the contract you sign for the service. The ISP has to honor that contract and deliver that bandwidth. The customer is allowed to use the bandwidth they paid for (yes, even saturate it). For the ISP to do otherwise is fraud. If the ISP enters multiple contracts and it cannot fulfill them all (over-subscribes) that is fraud on the part of the ISP.

Suppose an ISP provides special low latency connections optimized for VOIP? Is that OK or not?

Sure, that's OK, as long as it doesn't degrade the performance of other customers.

Suppose they slow down large downloads? Is that OK or not?

No, that's not OK. (Unless the contract the customer signed explicitly said that this would happen.)

When the world is covered with a grid of network nodes every meter, when we are online 100% of the time everywhere we go, we are going to need a network infrastructure which is flexible and smart.

This vision of ubiquitous connectivity isn't going to happen if we allow the telecoms to make the rules: they will charge so much for every little service that it will be far too expensive to maintain the connectivity you mention. As for "infrastructure which is flexible and smart"--I believe that's part of what network neutrality is about. One of the issues with allowing ISPs to filter content based on type (and especially based on origin/destination) is that such a system inherently becomes inflexible. Moreover it isn't smart, because people will fight against the traffic shaping rules if they don't conform to the way people want to use the net (e.g. people will start encrypting everything or spoofing origin IP or hiding one kind of traffic inside another).

An "arms race" between the infrastructure and the users is neither flexible nor efficient. It is wasteful and frustrating. The genius of the Internet was that it was a simple system that would blindly pass packets to their destination. It was this generality and equality that allowed a whole slew of new applications to evolve. The point is that we can't imagine, today, what the next "killer app" of the net is going to be... but traffic shaping inherently says "these are the services that are important"--which means anything currently unimagined will remain unimplemented forever.

Where's the tools......?

[russ1337]

Its all great running around banging the drum and asking users to 'join the war on non-neutrality' but it's all for nothing if you cannot DETECT non-neutrality in the first place.

I recall some discussion a while ago here on /. where someone was writing an application to detect non-neutrality... but it went quiet very quickly. Now the way I see it is that the list contains people that have the skills, or know the people who could write an application that could aid in the DETECTION of unfair practices from the ISP's.

The application could be used by the volunteers, and test the various protocols to various hosts (Skype, Google, youtube, TPB) and between the users themselves with various traffic (p2p, ping, tcp/ip, udp etc...) and see if any 'delay' occurs specific to one type of traffic. If it contained an automated reporting tool (OMG Tinfoil hat!!), then the aggregators could see trends across the various providers and not rely solely on one or two users. Of course you're entering a war of cat and mouse....

Before we can go accusing ISP's on non-neutrality, we need the tools to detect unfair play in the first place... anyone know of any?

Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[DragonHawk]

Let's drop all the bad analogies for a minute (pretend I'm new here) and actually look at the situation.

Net Neutrality is an issue I'm concerned with. However, the only information I get from the Net Neutrality camp seems to be "the-sky-is-falling" sensationalist propaganda. So while I want to support NN, my rational mind says "Hold the phone. This is just an ad-hominem rant, not a rational argument."

Say I'm a network operator. (I am, actually. I have more than one PC at home. And quite a few I'm in charge of at work. But let's also say I'm in the business of renting access to my network -- an "ISP" as we all say.) So I've got a bunch of subscribers paying me a fee for a connection my network. I've also got connections to other operators. Some of those are transit I pay for, some are peering agreements. My customers use those connections indirectly, of course.

Now let's say I'm looking at my traffic logs, and I see that a ton of traffic is going to and from YouTube. So much so that I have to buy more transit to operators connected closer to YouTube. So now I have a bigger bill. And that cost has to be covered (TANSTAAFL).

I could raise rates for my subscribers. Or I could say to YouTube, "Hey, guys, you're a hot ticket. If you give me some more money, I'll buy a faster pipe to you guys. If not, well, you're going to be stuck on an overloaded transit line."

While I do have concerns with the above scenario, it does not make me want to take to the streets with a torch and pitchfork. Can someone explain what is so evil in the above?

If you want to propose scenarios that involve abuse, censorship, wire-tapping, giant insect overlords, etc., that's fine, but please also address plain old business scenarios like the above.

Analogies suck

[SiliconEntity]

It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.

No,

Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

No,

Net neutrality is like using a vacuum cleaner to pick up lawn clippings, while a dwarf follows behind you with a rake.

Aren't analogies helpful? Everyone always tries to come up with analogies to deal with things, but most of the time they are misleading and even manipulative. Everyone tries to find an analogy which makes their position look best.

I would say, instead, that issues should be analyzed from first principles. If net neutrality is good or bad, just say so, and say why. Don't say it's like a chicken with eyeglasses or a frog jumping out of a pot. That doesn't help.

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[darjen]

The question is not irrelevant. They are selling a service that is only possible to provide on the communications gear that *they purchased*. If you are willing to argue that they don't really own the stuff they provide that service with, then who does? Society? The problem with this for property advocates such as myself is that it is a very slippery slope. Who knows what other rulings against property will come of it - or how courts may use this precedent to justify taking others property for some kind of "common good". If you favor net neutrality, you should start your own telco without charging content providers extra for what bandwidth they use, rather than using the saw to prevent others from using property that they legally purchased.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[Dragonslicer]

Now let's say I'm looking at my traffic logs, and I see that a ton of traffic is going to and from YouTube. So much so that I have to buy more transit to operators connected closer to YouTube. So now I have a bigger bill. And that cost has to be covered (TANSTAAFL). I could raise rates for my subscribers. Or I could say to YouTube, "Hey, guys, you're a hot ticket. If you give me some more money, I'll buy a faster pipe to you guys. If not, well, you're going to be stuck on an overloaded transit line."

There's nothing wrong with that scenario. YouTube pays you a specific amount of money for a specific amount of bandwidth. If YouTube is getting more traffic than the bandwidth can support, transfer speeds will be lower because traffic has to be throttled. This is a purely physical issue; a connection cannot carry more data than its bandwidth will allow. Additionally, if YouTube wants to increase their bandwidth, they can simply pay you more money, with the cost increasing approximately linearly with the amount of bandwidth you're buying.

What Net Neutrality is about is making sure that traffic to YouTube is not throttled solely because they aren't Yahoo and that YouTube can buy more bandwidth at the same rate as Yahoo.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[superflyguy]

I have no problem with what you described. The only problems are that that doesn't describe what Net Neutrality is fighting, and it's based on a flawed idea of how the internet works. What the network operators want to do that net neutrality is fighting is artificially reduce YouTube's bandwidth unless they pay. So YouTube actually gets a smaller proportion of the network bandwidth than the proportion of data that's requested from them, despite the fact that YouTube paid for enough bandwidth from it's ISP and the end-users all paid for enough bandwidth to recieve it. Imagine if YouTube's ISP tried to bill you for accessing YouTube. YouTube paid for the bandwidth. The ISP has peering agreements to pass the data along to other network operators closer to you. Your ISP has peering agreements so the data can get to it. And you already paid to download the data. At what part of this process of transferring the data is everything NOT already paid for? So YouTube's ISP is trying to charge you for a service that has already been paid for. So if AT&T wants to charge Google for data that AT&T's users request, the users have already paid for service. AT&T has made deals so that it gets bandwidth on other people's routers in exchange for giving them bandwidth on AT&T routers, so that's basically free except for maintaining their own routers and connections. Which their users have paid for. At no point do AT&T and Google actually conduct business, but Google's bandwidth is passed along because AT&T is obligated by it's peering agreements and has contracts with it's users. Since AT&T is obligated to pass along the packets, how can it refuse to unless it's paid? Also, with the way the internet works, you buy faster connections between one point and another. It's either a faster connection between a two routers or between a router and a client. If it's between a router and a client (direct connection between network-operator's-router and YouTube), and YouTube pays for it, we call that "YouTube buying internet access from the network operator", which is perfectly legit. If it's between two routers, however, in practical terms it's not especially likely to provide a major performance boost, because any traffic can be routed over it, not just YouTube's, and there's no guarantee that YouTube's will be routed over it. If it's that much more efficient of a way to connect two points there will be such a glut of traffic from other sites that the capacity for YouTube's packets is limited. It also usually happens to be more cost-effective to improve connections to nearby routers than lay an OC48 connection across a continent, and if you're building an OC48, the money for it is probably going to come from other service providers buying bandwidth on it, and not YouTube individually. Also, if you ever tracert a large variety of ip's, you'll discover that it usually takes an astonishingly similar number of hops no matter where you are and where you're trying to get, and that the number of hops really has minimal effect compared to the bandwidth at each end, because the internet's designed so that hops are relatively irrelevant. Yes they increase latency, but once the initial connection's made, the data flows at the maximum rate that the slower of the two ends can handle it. So the "plain old business scenerio" you suggest really doesn't exist, unless network operator is selling bandwidth network operator doesn't have, which is fraudulent. Only if network operator doesn't have what network operator is selling does network operator need to build infrastructure to handle YouTube's traffic. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, but There's Such A Thing As A Lunch That Has Already Been Paid For, and lunches that were paid for don't need to be paid for again by the lunch meat company.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[AeroIllini]

Here's the evil:

Let's say you implemented the scheme you proposed to YouTube, and the content providers are happily paying you more money for faster pipes. The money is rolling in, and your profits are at an all-time high. Your shareholders rejoice. Champagne and caviar for everyone!

Then Joe Schmoe (a USC grad) starts a website with The Next New Thing. Joe is strapped for cash, so he can't pay you for the same fat pipes that the other websites can, so his website crawls along. Your ISP customers who try to visit Joe's site can't, because it takes 25 seconds to load. But the Microsoft site, which has a similar but inferior offering, loads almost instantly because Microsoft bought your fat pipe.

Joe could have been the next Larry/Sergey, but he was never given the chance. Suddenly, internet access is only the domain of the rich and powerful, and the little guy (who actually innovates, you understand) is squeezed out of the picture. The forces of market competition have given way to artificially high barriers to entry.

(Keep in mind, this is totally different from tiered service, which has "classes" of service based on datatype, not based on provider. So, for example, VOIP packets would be given a much higher priority than streaming video packets, which would be given a higher priority than HTTP packets. However, *everyone's* VOIP packets would get higher priority, not just Skype. And *everyone's* HTTP packets would be lower priority, instead of Everyone Except Yahoo and YouTube.)

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[AeroIllini]

Yeah, they sure did purchase that property legally.

With a government-granted monopoly over a municipality, and with government-granted rights to bury their legally-purchased property under other people's legally-purchased property.

I think if you are going to be given special rights by the government, then your responsibilities to that government (and ultimately to the people who are governed) are much higher than someone in a standard free-market scenario. It seems that the politicians have forgotten that little point, choosing instead to champion The Almighty Free Market, when in this market there is no such thing.

If the ISPs want to buy all the land their fiber is buried under, and the local government wants to allow more than one provider to do the same in the area, then they have a right to say "we can do whatever the hell we please with our property". I will just give them the heave-ho and move to a provider that gives me what I want. But since there is no competition, the telcos have a much higher responsibility to society than someone without a government-granted monopoly.

If you want to look at it from a backbone perspective, consider this: all of these major telcos are interconnected in a giant mesh, and it is impossible to get access to "The Internet" without crossing over between these providers. The internet is an end-to-end network; the stuff in the middle shouldn't be providing much other than access. So if Google is hooked up to Comcast, and has paid Comcast for fast access, but you're hooked up to Quest, and Google has not paid Quest, then Google will still be slow for you, which is unacceptable. And if we make sure that everyone pays everyone else for every connection, then it's just a giant payola clusterfuck where all the money ends up in the middle, and the little guy is squeezed out of the market.