Having difficulty understanding "net neutrality"

[Rakanoth]

To me, "net neutrality" seems about about giants like Google and Netflix being able to use up the most bandwidth and infrastructure and claiming they shouldn’t have to pay more for it. Isn't this true?

[manikyath]

"net neutrality" means that an ISP is not allowed to differentiate between the data you use to access <for example> their own website, from the data you use to access google.

 

netflix and google already pay for the bandwidth they use, its just that ISPs have smelled money, and they claim that netflix is using "their network to access their customers", while it's really the other way around: their customers accessing google, and guess what, you already pay for that data.

 

the concept of net neutrality is simply that data is data, and it shouldnt matter who it comes from, or who it goes to, on your monthly bill. it's as simple as the top folks putting in backbones across the world, the big companies (google, netflix, fedex even) pay good money to plug directly into that infrastructure. then on the other end are internet service providers who also plug into this backbone (and pay for it in the same way google and netflix do) and then divide up the bandwidth they lease among their clients (you). in this construction, who is client of who (and who pays who) is already very clearly laid out, and in this concept there is no reason to seperate one type of data from another, other than filling up wallets. your ISP gives you X amount of data per month, if you decide to use that much data to look at weather forecasts, that is no different than using all of that to watch youtube or netflix, its just that these two are competitors of the TV plan the ISP also wants to sell you

[KarathKasun]

That is what it has become.

 

They support it because it helps their bottom line, this is what drives decisions in any large corporation.

 

IMHO there are multiple parts to net neutrality, one of which is the need to end upload and download discrimination.

[TetraSky]

Data is data, doesn't matter where it comes from or how much you consume from one place.
You're paying for your internet access.
The ISPs saying you can't access a website/service because they didn't pay extra to a particular ISP, is a bullshit argument because those services are also paying for their internet access.
But greedy ISPs want all the money.
 

It's not just big corporation. Without Net Neutrality, ISPs are free to throttle the access speed to websites (which they did to Netflix before NN was instated in the US, forcing Netflix to pay them large amount of money, lots of people are forgetting this), all while giving their own TV over the Internet services that they also offer, at blazing speed. Making an "internet a la carte" like cable TV is not in the realm of dreams, it's a real possibly that they can do without Net Neutrality.
 

No netneutrality let ISPs essentially do extortion/blackmail and only the big players would be able to stay in the game. Small services trying to make a name for themselves would basically be put down before ever growing. (Imagine if multiple scumbag ISPs they went after Floatplane, demanding ridiculous amount of money... LMG wouldn't be able to pay for it and Floatplane would essentially die because it cannot offer a service faster than dialup to its user base)

[KarathKasun]

6 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Data is data, doesn't matter where it comes from or how much you consume from one place.
You're paying for your internet access.
The ISPs saying you can't access a website/service because they didn't pay extra to a particular ISP, is a bullshit argument because those services are also paying for their internet access.
But greedy ISPs want all the money.
 

It's not just big corporation. Without Net Neutrality, ISPs are free to throttle the access speed to websites (which they did to Netflix before NN was instated in the US, forcing Netflix to pay them large amount of money, lots of people are forgetting this), all while giving their own TV over the Internet services that they also offer, at blazing speed. Making an "internet a la carte" like cable TV is not in the realm of dreams, it's a real possibly that they can do without Net Neutrality.
 

No netneutrality let ISPs essentially do extortion/blackmail and only the big players would be able to stay in the game. Small services trying to make a name for themselves would basically be put down before ever growing. (Imagine if multiple scumbag ISPs they went after Floatplane, demanding ridiculous amount of money... LMG wouldn't be able to pay for it and Floatplane would essentially die because it cannot offer a service faster than dialup to its user base)

Until you realize that ISP's do not have free access to bandwidth on the actual backbone in all cases.

 

I live in an area where the ISP is a third or fourth tier network provider.  They contract out backbone access through larger network owners like ATT and Comcast.

 

Local area access (city area) can be had at cost, while going into the internet proper requires utilizing an external network.  Staunch Net Neutrality proponents seem to think 100% of the network is run by the "big three" when it is not.

[TetraSky]

1 minute ago, KarathKasun said:

Until you realize that ISP's do not have free access to bandwidth on the actual backbone in all cases.

 

I live in an area where the ISP is a third or fourth tier network provider.  They contract out backbone access through larger network owners like ATT and Comcast.

Yes, and they are paying access to this backbone with your monthly payment. They aren't losing any money here, they just want more of it by double dipping. (Charging you and charging the service you want access to)

[KarathKasun]

4 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Yes, and they are paying access to this backbone with your monthly payment. They aren't losing any money here, they just want more of it by double dipping. (Charging you and charging the service you want access to)

No, this is not true.  Local service access (or P2P) on their own network does not add to their total bandwidth cost.  External network access (stuff hosted outside of the city) does add to this cost.  The more data people pull from servers outside of the general local area, the higher their operating costs are.

 

You should try implementing a multiple physical domain network sometime.

[TetraSky]

4 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

 No, this is not true.  Local service access (or P2P) on their own network does not add to their total bandwidth cost.  External network access (stuff hosted outside of the city) does add to this cost.  The more data people pull from servers outside of the general local area, the higher their operating costs are.

 

You should try implementing a multiple physical domain network sometime.

You do realize that the prices you'd pay as a user, doesn't reflect what they pay for "external access", right?
This is also why many ISPs are implementing bandwidth caps(which we've always had in Canada), when you go above your "allocated" bandwidth(for which you pay monthly), you get charged extra for it per GB(a lot more than what the ISPs themselves are truly paying for that external access). It's all paid for.

You accessing data on an external network (which btw, the truly giant players in this, pay to have servers in your local ISP's network, no external access here), shouldn't cost you more when you're already paying to get access to it. That's the whole point of the internet.

Now I'd love to stay, but it's past 7am and I'm late already.

[KarathKasun]

22 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

You do realize that the prices you'd pay as a user, doesn't reflect what they pay for "external access", right?
This is also why many ISPs are implementing bandwidth caps(which we've always had in Canada), when you go above your "allocated" bandwidth(for which you pay monthly), you get charged extra for it per GB(a lot more than what the ISPs themselves are truly paying for that external access). It's all paid for.

You accessing data on an external network (which btw, the truly giant players in this, pay to have servers in your local ISP's network, no external access here), shouldn't cost you more when you're already paying to get access to it. That's the whole point of the internet.

Now I'd love to stay, but it's past 7am and I'm late already.

We do not have enforced data caps, we have relatively lower speeds compared to more urban areas (~500mbit at the top end).

 

Our local area is not large enough for servers to be installed here, they are one city over requiring a hop onto Comcast's fiber backhaul.

 

I believe pricing per mbit/s for the nearest IxP is something around $0.25 - $0.50.  With current BW packages, this accounts for ~50% of our consumer cost. (this may be a bit lower now, I have not checked on this pricing in a year or so)

[LAwLz]

At the end of the day, it all boils down to this.

Do you believe that your ISP should be allowed to charge you 10 dollars for 1GB of data if that data comes from Netflix, but only 5 dollars if the same amount (1GB) comes from Youtube.

Simple yes or no question.

If you say no, what matters should be the amount of data, not which service the data came from, then you're for net neutrality.

If you believe that for example 1GB of data should cost different amounts then you're against net neutrality.

 

 

Personally I am for it because loose rules surrounding this will inevitably (as it has done several times in the past) lead to extortion tactics, double or triple dipping and making certain services appear better by making competing service look worse. All of those things have happened without net neutrality, and all of them are very bad for consumers as well as the services which gets attacked (for example Netflix).

[KarathKasun]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

At the end of the day, it all boils down to this.

Do you believe that your ISP should be allowed to charge you 10 dollars for 1GB of data if that data comes from Netflix, but only 5 dollars if the same amount (1GB) comes from Youtube.

Simple yes or no question.

If you say no, what matters should be the amount of data, not which service the data came from, then you're for net neutrality.

If you believe that for example 1GB of data should cost different amounts then you're against net neutrality.

 

 

Personally I am for it because loose rules surrounding this will inevitably (as it has done several times in the past) lead to extortion tactics, double or triple dipping and making certain services appear better by making competing service look worse. All of those things have happened without net neutrality, and all of them are very bad for consumers as well as the services which gets attacked (for example Netflix).

Depending on the datacenter location, differential rates make sense.  Just saying company "A" and company "B" is disingenuous.  If the company "A" is paying for co-location services and company "B" is not, there is a tangible difference in cost to deliver on the back end.

 

Locality is a valid reason for rate differences.  "I don't like that company and their service" is not.

[manikyath]

9 hours ago, KarathKasun said:

Until you realize that ISP's do not have free access to bandwidth on the actual backbone in all cases.

literally, the business model of an ISP is to lease a big amount of bandwidth, and use their own network to divide that up to many small-time end users. in a sense they're like a supermarket buying potatoes per tonne from distributors, and selling them by the pound to customers, for a slight upmark. except in this case the potatoes are bandwidth.

[KarathKasun]

3 hours ago, manikyath said:

literally, the business model of an ISP is to lease a big amount of bandwidth, and use their own network to divide that up to many small-time end users. in a sense they're like a supermarket buying potatoes per tonne from distributors, and selling them by the pound to customers, for a slight upmark. except in this case the potatoes are bandwidth.

Depends on weather or not the ISP also owns the potato farm.

[manikyath]

4 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Depends on weather or not the ISP also owns the potato farm.

they dont. the ISP never owns the potato farm. all they are is a middle man between the potato farm who insists on selling by the truckload because bags of potatoes really arent their market, and soccer moms buying potatoes for a sundar dinner because truckloads really arent their market.

 

and still, the data requests are coming from the ISP's customers, not from google. google's not actively shoving youtube videos into your face. so whichever way you spin it, the whole hot garbage about who has to pay for the peering ends up in the face of ISPs, because in the argument they have gotten so high from sniffing cash they quite literally forgotten their place in the market.

 

*ALL* the fight for or against net neutrality is, is ISPs who also want to sell their TV plan, and see people who actually use the data they pay for cut into their margins. all that the concept of net neutrality is, is to ban the concept that one type of data somehow costs the ISP more than another type of data, while it is literally, factually, the same. the only difference is the amount of data they use, and guess what, you already pay for that

[KarathKasun]

21 minutes ago, manikyath said:

they dont. the ISP never owns the potato farm. all they are is a middle man between the potato farm who insists on selling by the truckload because bags of potatoes really arent their market, and soccer moms buying potatoes for a sundar dinner because truckloads really arent their market.

 

and still, the data requests are coming from the ISP's customers, not from google. google's not actively shoving youtube videos into your face. so whichever way you spin it, the whole hot garbage about who has to pay for the peering ends up in the face of ISPs, because in the argument they have gotten so high from sniffing cash they quite literally forgotten their place in the market.

 

*ALL* the fight for or against net neutrality is, is ISPs who also want to sell their TV plan, and see people who actually use the data they pay for cut into their margins. all that the concept of net neutrality is, is to ban the concept that one type of data somehow costs the ISP more than another type of data, while it is literally, factually, the same. the only difference is the amount of data they use, and guess what, you already pay for that

Blatantly false.

 

Comcast owns HUGE portions of the potato farm.  Same goes for ATT/Bell and Verizon.

[manikyath]

23 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Blatantly false.

 

Comcast owns HUGE portions of the potato farm.  Same goes for ATT/Bell and Verizon.

32 minutes ago, manikyath said:

and still, the data requests are coming from the ISP's customers, not from google. google's not actively shoving youtube videos into your face. so whichever way you spin it, the whole hot garbage about who has to pay for the peering ends up in the face of ISPs

i feel no need to expand on this.

[KarathKasun]

9 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i feel no need to expand on this.

You are missing the whole point then.  Big ISP's owning backhaul is part of the reason that the ISP market is so stagnant.  And if they own the backhaul they pay less for the same network service.

 

Vertical integration has its benefits.

[mr moose]

9 hours ago, KarathKasun said:

You are missing the whole point then.  Big ISP's owning backhaul is part of the reason that the ISP market is so stagnant.  And if they own the backhaul they pay less for the same network service.

 

Vertical integration has its benefits.

I don't think manijyath was referring to the backhaul as the potato farms.   Potato farms are the services offered on the internet like youtube and netflix, not the network between them and the end user.

 

 

Personally I think it's not good enough to let ISP simple charge more for specific data under the guise that it costs more.  The end consumer (and even consumer watchdogs) have no real way to fact check the legitimacy of such claims. 

 

[KarathKasun]

4 hours ago, mr moose said:

I don't think manijyath was referring to the backhaul as the potato farms.   Potato farms are the services offered on the internet like youtube and netflix, not the network between them and the end user.

 

 

Personally I think it's not good enough to let ISP simple charge more for specific data under the guise that it costs more.  The end consumer (and even consumer watchdogs) have no real way to fact check the legitimacy of such claims. 

 

Honestly I think ISPs should be treated as non-profits, in that their network access contracts should be publicly available.  Its not like there is anything to lose from competition.

[mr moose]

6 hours ago, KarathKasun said:

Honestly I think ISPs should be treated as non-profits, in that their network access contracts should be publicly available.  Its not like there is anything to lose from competition.

That would solve a lot of problems and allow them to justify charging more for certain traffic if peering issues are genuine.

 

My ISP (actually an RSP in Australia) publishes the bandwidth they pay for and the bandwidth their customers a are using.  But our system is a little bit different with the NBN so I don't think (happy to be corrected) that peering is an issue.   

 

 

[Sovek]

My problem on this outcry is..... this hasn't been an issue before, at least in the states, I can't help but feel that this is chicken little situation trying to cause a panic where none exists. Before NN I've always paid a flat rate for my internet, and never dealt with data caps outside of the cell phones. These companies were regulated the FTC, not the FCC. And cell phones ARE regulated by the FCC but still doesnt stop them from causing major issues, I believe Verizon got into a crap ton of trouble during a recent wildfire. 

 

I'd recommend a watch of Razorfists video on net neutrality, he's done some research into the subject and is entertaining to watch as well, much like Yahtzee  and games.

[RasmusDC]

in my mind, removing net neutrality is kinda accepting bribery as a business model.

 

what you end up having, especially in the US, where you have access to very few suppliers of internet in areas.. they will have the legal possibility of f.ex. saying to netflix.

i you want our customer base to have access to your streaming services, at full speed, then pay us, that is extortion in my book.

 

so the larger ISP will just gang up in cartels, to ensure that the customer has no choice.

 

the next issue is that many ISP´s have there own stream services, so they can in theory block data completely to the speed that are non usable, to ensure that their service will be the preferred.

 

i hate that you gave companies that possibility, because they will use it for the profitmargins. it really sucks. 

 

and things like trump did with facebook to get elected, will also be easier, since you can limit access to information, since you can throttle it to death. 

[KarathKasun]

33 minutes ago, RasmusDC said:

and things like trump did with facebook to get elected, will also be easier, since you can limit access to information, since you can throttle it to death. 

Yo mean like every political candidate has done with any form of media in this new world of social media?

 

Obama used and abused these platforms as well, publicly.  I still have yet to see any evidence that the Trump stuff wasn't more than paid trolls on the internet, not to mention the same people were running Hillary content as well.  This last round looks more like a foreign psy-op to make people distrust the whole system more than explicitly trying to get anyone elected.  Looks like it worked on some people, quite a few actually.

[straight_stewie]

Net Neutrality was primarily designed to make sure that ISPs make it equally easy for you to access all sites. Or, in other words:

• ISPs won't slow down sites that don't pay them extra
• ISPs won't censor sites that they don't like, agree with, or couldn't bully around.
• ISPs won't charge you extra money to access certain sites.

However, there are three big problems with "Net Neutrality" as proposed in the US that are large enough for me to be entirely against it:

1. The text of the "bill" is thousands of pages long. This means that it's realistically impossible to know what it actually does, and means that we have to rely on what politicians and business owners tell us it does. Those people are not known for their unbiased truthfulness.
2. It creates an opening for strong government regulation of internet, something that history has shown is inherently a bad idea: Throughout history governments have always increased the amount of law and regulation they impose on their constituents, and seldom reduce it.
3. It was a law that was not to be passed by any of the constructs which we have for passing law. The passing of net neutrality in the way it was attempted would further strengthen a dangerous precedent where government agencies are starting to go around writing their own laws, without any action from our legislature.

[LAwLz]

On 3/13/2019 at 10:42 AM, mr moose said:

Personally I think it's not good enough to let ISP simple charge more for specific data under the guise that it costs more.  The end consumer (and even consumer watchdogs) have no real way to fact check the legitimacy of such claims.  

Not to mention that companies like Netflix has installed data centers inside ISP networks such as Verizon to cut down on the load, and Verizon still throttled them for no reason other than to make a competing service worse to make their own more appealing.

 

It even goes further than that. Netflix used to (still does?) use Level 3 as their ISP. Level 3 is a tier 1 network operator, which is to say they run the networks a lot of other ISPs use to connect with each other. In a blog post from Level 3, they describe how on at least one occasion, Verizon has refused Level 3's offers to upgrade their interconnect, for free. Level 3 has offered to not only buy equipment for Verizon, but to install it too, but Verizon has refused.

 

 

 

I'm posting the entire blog post here as a future reference. Level 3 got bought by CentryLink and as a result of that, their blog posts were pulled down (hence the Archive link).

Spoiler

Verizon’s Accidental Mea Culpa

Mark Taylor / July 17, 2014

David Young, Vice President, Verizon Regulatory Affairs recently published a blog post suggesting that Netflix themselves are responsible for the streaming slowdowns Netflix’s customers have been seeing. But his attempt at deception has backfired. He has clearly admitted that Verizon is deliberately constraining capacity from network providers like Level 3 who were chosen by Netflix to deliver video content requested by Verizon’s own paying broadband consumers.

 

His explanation for Netflix’s on-screen congestion messages contains a nice little diagram. The diagram shows a lovely uncongested Verizon network, conveniently color-coded in green. It shows a network that has lots of unused capacity at the most busy time of the day. Think about that for a moment: Lots of unused capacity. So point number one is that Verizon has freely admitted that is has the ability to deliver lots of Netflix streams to broadband customers requesting them, at no extra cost. But, for some reason, Verizon has decided that it prefers not to deliver these streams, even though its subscribers have paid it to do so.

 

The diagram then shows this one little bar, suggestively color-coded in red so you know it’s bad. And that is meant to be Level 3 and several other network operators. That bar actually represents a very large global network, and it should be shown in green, since, as we will discuss in a moment, our network has plenty of available capacity as well. In my last blog post, I gave details about how much fiber and how much equipment we deployed to build that network and how many cities around the globe it connects. If the Verizon diagram was to scale, our little red bar is probably bigger than their green network.

 

But here’s the thing. The utilization of all of those thousands of links across the Level 3 network is much the same as Verizon’s depiction of their own network. We engineer it that way. We have to maintain adequate headroom because that’s what we sell to customers. They buy high quality uncongested bandwidth. And in fact, Verizon admits as much because they conveniently show one direction across our network with a peak utilization of 34%; almost exactly what I explained in my last blog post. I can confirm once again that all of those thousands of links on the Level 3 network are managed carefully so that the peak utilizations look very similar to those Verizon show for their own network – IN BOTH DIRECTIONS.

 

So why does Verizon show this red bar? And why do they blame Level 3 and the other network operators contracted by Netflix?

 

Well, as I explained in my last blog post, the bit that is congested is the place where the Level 3 and Verizon networks interconnect. Level 3’s network interconnects with Verizon’s in ten cities; three in Europe and seven in the United States. The aggregate utilization of those interconnections in Europe on July 8, 2014 was 18% (a region where Verizon does NOT sell broadband to its customers). The utilization of those interconnections in the United States (where Verizon sells broadband to its customers and sees Level 3 and online video providers such as Netflix as competitors to its own CDN and pay TV businesses) was about 100%. And to be more specific, as Mr. Young pointed out, that was 100% utilization in the direction of flow from the Level 3 network to the Verizon network.

 

So let’s look at what that means in one of those locations. The one Verizon picked in its diagram: Los Angeles. All of the Verizon FiOS customers in Southern California likely get some of their content through this interconnection location. It is in a single building. And boils down to a router Level 3 owns, a router Verizon owns and four 10Gbps Ethernet ports on each router. A small cable runs between each of those ports to connect them together. This diagram is far simpler than the Verizon diagram and shows exactly where the congestion exists.

 

 

Verizon has confirmed that everything between that router in their network and their subscribers is uncongested – in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used. Above, I confirmed exactly the same thing for the Level 3 network. So in fact, we could fix this congestion in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10Gbps ports on those routers. Simple. Something we’ve been asking Verizon to do for many, many months, and something other providers regularly do in similar circumstances. But Verizon has refused. So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion. Why is that? Maybe they can’t afford a new port card because they’ve run out – even though these cards are very cheap, just a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it.

 

But, here’s the other interesting thing also shown in the Verizon diagram. This congestion only takes place between Verizon and network providers chosen by Netflix. The providers that Netflix does not use do not experience the same problem. Why is that? Could it be that Verizon does not want its customers to actually use the higher-speed services it sells to them? Could it be that Verizon wants to extract a pound of flesh from its competitors, using the monopoly it has over the only connection to its end-users to raise its competitors’ costs?

 

To summarize: All of the networks have ample capacity and congestion only occurs in a small number of locations, locations where networks interconnect with some last mile ISPs like Verizon. The cost of removing that congestion is absolutely trivial. It takes two parties to remove congestion at an interconnect point. I can confirm that Level 3 is not the party refusing to add that capacity. In fact, Level 3 has asked Verizon for a long time to add interconnection capacity and to deliver the traffic its customers are requesting from our customers, but Verizon refuses.

 

Why might that be? Maybe we should ask David Young.