Protecting Net Neutrality and the Open Internet

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2014/05/05/protecting-net-neutrality-and-the-open-internet/

by sarreph • 12 years ago

159 54 12 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

dang• 12 years ago

Url changed from http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2014/05/06/mozill.... HN prefers original sources.

sarreph• 12 years ago

Thanks for the catch on this :)

themartorana• 12 years ago

It's not like this is novel. Every person with any knowledge of the situation (and no financial ties to ISPs) have been calling for the telecommunications services classification for years from the FCC. As I remember it, the FCC neutrality rule strike down would have been totally avoidable if they had set the classification to begin with.

Will Mozilla "officially" proposing this make any real waves? I guess as a large organization, maybe their example will at least open up the door for other companies to join Mozilla's proposal?

Edit: I get the "last mile" distinction in their proposal, but if the entire idea of Internet delivery was classified under common carrier laws, that would cover last-mile.

twoodfin• 12 years ago

Edit: I get the "last mile" distinction in their proposal, but if the entire idea of Internet delivery was classified under common carrier laws, that would cover last-mile.

"Common carrier" worked when we had a (true monopoly) telephone system where touchtone was considered a radical, once-in-a-decade technical advancement. What incentive does Comcast have to, say, push standard bandwidth to 100Mbit while being paid regulated, low margin rates as a dumb pipe provider?

Mozilla's proposal is interesting, but I think it's probably too clever by half: Even if the FCC wanted to get into the business of setting "fair" rates for "remote delivery", I think Congress would prefer they didn't, and that matters.

nightpool• 12 years ago

What incentive does Comcast have to, say, push standard bandwidth to 100Mbit while being paid regulated, low margin rates as a dumb pipe provider?

To be more explicit: Mozilla's proposal solves this. ISPs get to charge whatever prices they want to consumers, which covers the cost of 100mb bandwidth and technological innovation, but to companies they have to act like a dumb pipe and ensure equal access. This means Comcast has an incentive for innovation even in a monopolistic situation—They can charge users more money.

I'm not sure if this would solve the problem with BitTorrent though...

_greim_6• 12 years ago

I doubt we'll ever get the net neutrality we want until we swallow the pill of paying for what we use—like we do for other utilities—instead of some imaginary total capacity. How do we make sure transfer amounts are monitored fairly? How do we make sure our software is accessing the network only when we want it to? Those are technical challenges we'll need to solve. But if we want ISPs to play fair, then we must absorb the simple concept: If you stream Netflix all day, you should pay more than the lady next door who checks Facebook a couple times per week, even if the bits are flowing at the same rate.

existencebox2• 12 years ago

Honest question; if a very naive one (Since I haven't thought about it very hard...) But why wouldn't a very simplistic metering be acceptable by that definition?

I'd be totally fine having my internet metered, if the costs were commensurate to the service provided, and the service was as regular as other metered services (e.g. water/power)

I've heard why the common carrier argument isn't "the best solution", but I don't fully understand why metering hasn't been championed as a way to have the two sides (consumers and the companies) come to some common ground, or at least "call the bluff" of the companies using justifications like the above ("people use internet differently", "people will never use this amount"); so why not just see, and charge accordingly?

Solarsail• 12 years ago

Metering is used in Canada. Many have criticized the policy as backwards, unfair, and hampering creativity compared to other countries. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/a-metere...

Tho I do agree that, at a first glance, it seems to have extremely good correlation with the cost of the service provided.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

It's called the Insurance Effect. People are willing to pay more for flat rate, which includes "carrying" high volume users, to insure against bill shock if their usage patterns change. Humans are bad at estimating bandwidth use, and pricing that removes that requirement has real value.

_greim_6• 12 years ago

why wouldn't a very simplistic metering be acceptable by that definition?

It would be perfectly acceptable (assuming I've understood you). I think the reason nobody is championing it is twofold, ISPs don't like it because it would make them that much more utility-like, which they strenuously want to avoid. Active internet users don't like it because their bandwidth is largely subsidized by less-active subscribers, and leveling the playing field would be a net loss for them. To me it looks like pure selfishness on both accounts.

nitrogen4• 12 years ago

Most of the cost is in building infrastructure, not delivering bits. A sensible metering approach would still have a high monthly fee, with a very small additional charge for bandwidth.

Further, I don't want to live in a nickel-and-dime world where every single thing I do has the cognitive overhead of worrying about metered usage.

shasta• 12 years ago

Most of the cost is in building infrastructure, not delivering bits.

But there's significant cost in building infrastructure that can deliver more bits.

Further, I don't want to live in a nickel-and-dime world where every single thing I do has the cognitive overhead of worrying about metered usage.

So stop worrying about it. How much cognitive effort do you spend factoring in the cost of electricity, gas and water when you're making spaghetti?

mhurron• 12 years ago

until we swallow the pill of paying for what we use—like we do for other utilities

What other utility gets to charge the manufacturer of whatever you use consume their service for? What power company gets to charge Lenovo because I plugged a Lenovo laptop into an outlet?

You only touch on a portion of what the issue is. And quite frankly to deal with what you did mention, I pay for internet access, I expect internet access. Why should I be charged more because I then choose to use it? Why should I be penalized for the ISP oversubscribing and underestimating the usage.

I shouldn't because that's not how they sold their service.

saurik11• 12 years ago

That's the point: as users we have to pay for what we use in order to avoid carriers trying to bill website operators. If you aren't willing to pay more for using more bandwidth than your neighbor, because you use Netflix and your neighbor only haphazardly checks email, then the carrier is going to try to bill Netflix, and we don't want that to happen.

kumbasha• 12 years ago

Please tell me exactly what the person streaming Netflix is taking away from the little old lady checking Facebook.

_greim_6• 12 years ago

In many parts of the US, Netflix usage saturates neighborhood cable modem networks in the evenings, making things painfully slow for everyone.

anonymousab• 12 years ago

Sure. Then ISPs need to start listing what they can actually fulfill, under load, for all customers in a given area at any given time.

saurik11• 12 years ago

If they billed by the byte instead of by some nebulous concept of connectivity then it wouldn't matter what they "can actually fulfill, under load": if they weren't able to get you all the bytes you wanted, you would be paying them less, and they would make less money. The maximum amount of money they could make from their infrastructure per hour would then be exactly their per byte cost times the number of bytes they could move per hour, leading to obvious incentives to increase their capacity.

SilasX3• 12 years ago

The scarcity lies in apportionment of the pipe at any given moment, not in the total data transferred. Therefore, the only way that charging users (whether in money or some other form of opportunity cost) will alleviate scarcity is if it's assessed against he former (apportionment of the pipe), not the latter (total data transferred).

Simply charging per unit of data downloaded just makes people cut back on total use, without concern for when they cut back. This does nothing for what you really want to discourage, which is usage at peak times.

(My preferred solution is to reduce the fraction of the pipe that you get in proportion to how much you use at peak times. That way you have some incentive to cut back, but not in a way that forces you to eye your wallet.)

saurik11• 12 years ago

Usage during peak times is already discouraged by the network degrading during peak times: rather than charge more you simply get less value, which is equivalent. This causes traffic to naturally smooth out some over time. You thereby in fact do need some way to cut back on the total usage, as a bunch of people randomly using Netflix really does cost more than a bunch of people randomly browsing the web. The goal of the network is not to support the peak load: this seems to be a key misconception in these arguments :/. It just isn't economically efficient to build a system that can support the peak load. If people really do want to have a system that can stream Netflix to everyone's house at 7pm when the traffic throughout the rest of the day is nothing like that amount, then someone has to bear those costs: either Netflix needs to subsidize the weird bandwidth requirement, customers need to opt in to "supports Netflix" plans, or we have to give up entirely on pricing models that don't take into account usage in some way. You might disagree with how that usage is calculated, but right now the problem is that most people just want "lots and lots of bandwidth for a flat rate", and that is inherently incompatible with a demand for network neutrality :(.

joelthelion• 12 years ago

Could someone explain like I'm five? This is fairly technical for anyone not familiar with telecom regulations.

kokey• 12 years ago

I can't help but think this is one potential super cluster of potential unintended consequences, if it ever happens. Net neutrality implementation, or enforcement, has been in limbo for a very long time, and exploitation as a result of the lack of such action has been mostly theoretical. Then there are all these proposals that doesn't consider many things, like this one from Mozilla which excludes interconnects and peering, how would we deal with discrimination exercised through simply not peering or interconnecting? Or, if that gets to be 'made neutral', what's the point of a CDN apart from reducing latency? Then, if I run a video service from Seattle will an ISP in Miami be forced to make sure they have an adequately sized interconnects with me, or a provider one tier above them have to? Also, it's not like there is discrimination right now, how many domestic access providers allow outbound access on port 25, or multicast, or BGP? What about all the research with game theoretical models about this? What about other countries that has no neutrality legislation on the horizon? What about the fact that commercial internet started less neutral (before PPP/SLIP) with limited access to limited protocols and ended up more neutral over time without intervention apart from customer demand? What if the last mile is wireless and certain services would become viable only if it's restricted? What if I want to provide $1/month access to only Wikipedia? To me, personally, it sounds like the problem net neutrality is supposed to deal with is badly defined, or a symptom of another set of problems, and the solutions are defined even worse and has the potential to create even more problems.

AnthonyMouse3• 12 years ago

how would we deal with discrimination exercised through simply not peering or interconnecting?

The simple solution is to require last mile ISPs to do settlement-free peering with anyone who brings traffic for their customers into their facilities.

Or, if that gets to be 'made neutral', what's the point of a CDN apart from reducing latency?

The point of a CDN is that it's more efficient. By having facilities closer to the end users, a CDN has lower costs and could charge customers less to deliver the same amount of content than you would have to pay e.g. Level 3 for that amount of transit.

Then, if I run a video service from Seattle will an ISP in Miami be forced to make sure they have an adequately sized interconnects with me, or a provider one tier above them have to?

If you run a video service from Seattle then you still have to somehow bring your traffic to Miami before you could peer with an ISP in Miami. If you do that by paying a transit provider then obviously the transit provider will have to supply the amount of capacity you're paying them to get and they'll charge you accordingly.

Also, it's not like there is discrimination right now, how many domestic access providers allow outbound access on port 25, or multicast, or BGP?

Blocking port 25 by default is an anti-spam measure. In general if you call your ISP and ask them to unblock it, they will. They're not blocking it because they don't want you use it, they're blocking it because you want them to. BGP is pretty much the same deal. And requiring last mile ISPs to support multicast would probably be a good thing.

What about all the research with game theoretical models about this?

Such as?

What about other countries that has no neutrality legislation on the horizon?

If we had to do what everybody else is doing then we would have to have government-operated ISPs or local loop unbundling.

What about the fact that commercial internet started less neutral (before PPP/SLIP) with limited access to limited protocols and ended up more neutral over time without intervention apart from customer demand?

That happened in the dial up days when there was more competition between ISPs because the "last mile" was literally the phone network. It was a result of de facto local loop unbundling.

What if the last mile is wireless and certain services would become viable only if it's restricted?

What services would those be?

What if I want to provide $1/month access to only Wikipedia?

An enterprise that builds a last mile ISP solely to provide access to Wikipedia for $1/month is not a thing in any danger of occurring.

belorn• 12 years ago

CDN also do traffic spikes. If a MMO pushes a >100MB update to a several millions subscribers at the same time, no single network connection could handle it. CDN make it possible to push massive amount of information fast and it limits the risk of service disruptions.

The benefits of CDN's are thus mostly unaffected by Net Neutrality.

zackmorris• 12 years ago

I think the far distant future internet will distinguish between cached and uncached data, especially for international and interplanetary communication.

So any kind of data that can be easily hashed and disseminated over ad hoc networks will be basically free and unstoppable (BitTorrent and Netflix will be the same thing).

But data that has to be sent from scratch instead of referencing a hash will have to pay some kind of toll, albeit a small one.

It's simple to see the endgame of this: there will be an economic incentive to favor storage formats that reference existing data whenever possible. What’s really remarkable to me is that ISPs don’t seem to understand this, and by killing net neutrality they are hastening the demise of their own business model.

It’s going to be a little rough for 5-10 years, but when everyone’s cell phone has p2p gigabit wifi, I find it a little hard to imagine that ISPs will even exist as a business, outside of the government or things like banking where a hard line/low latency is desirable. So writing this out now, I see that latency is everything, so a few decades from now, what low latency industries are they hoping to capitalize on? Maybe gaming, surgery, telepresence, high frequency trading.. Netflix is just a cover story.

marincounty• 12 years ago

1. Someone needs to expain ths topic better. 2. There's too much confusion right now, and I think it's an important topic. 3. Right now--I don't trust Comcast in any senerio.

guelo2• 12 years ago

Plus, there's paid shills here on HN attempting to confuse the issue.

guelo2• 12 years ago

We need a revolt to protect the internet. Washington is overrun by money but if people raise enough of a ruckus they do somewhat listen, c.f SOPA. If net neutrality is too big of a leap for the so-called "libertarian", anti regulation crowd than we need to break up Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc. so we can have some actual last-mile competition.

Istof• 12 years ago

With this "fast lane", could I theoretically get "for free" 1gbps while paying for 1mbps?

EGreg• 12 years ago

Not to be tok contrarian here, but isn't there a massive moral hazard (eg one that Netflix takes advantage of) in enforcing Net Neutrality?

Protecting Net Neutrality and the Open Internet

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