What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

Mon Apr 28 14:08:55 UTC 2014

On 4/27/2014 9:57 AM, Rick Astley wrote:
> I wish you would expand on that to help me understand where you are coming
> from but what I pay my ISP for is simply a pipe, I don't know how it would
> make sense logically to assume that every entity I communicate with on the
> Internet must be able to connect for free because I am covering the tab as
> a subscriber.
0)    No you're not. What you are covering is a percentage of the 
aggregate use model - the problem is what happens when you using 3% of 
your local end-node service capability run into the other 300 people who 
want to do the same.  The use fees dont cover the bulk transit that is 
generally controlled through backhaul agreements so...

>   I am not talking about JUST Netflix here as they are a large
> company more capable than some smaller ones at buying their own pipes out
> to the world.
1)       The pipe issue is that of the last mile providers and not 
Netflix. The issue is the failure of the IETF to put controls in place 
which address this.

> It would be sort of the same concept of my grandmother
> calling my cell phone yet we both need to pay for our individual phone
> lines to at least reach the carrier tasked with connecting our call. Even
> if my grandmother calls a business, that business have phone lines they pay
> for. Technically this would be double dipping but it's been the norm for a
> very long time.

How so? You are paying for the individual routing of data to that 
independent end node per the contract. If Grandma's cell and yours was 
covered under the same use contracts or shared minutes contract then 
that would make sense but otherwise they are independent services and 
whether that person is family or not they are a separate account - and 
billing. Hence 2 bills there.

2)    The idea pertains to the concept that "everyone has a digital 
persona and that persona is legally real", i.e. it has similar rights to 
their physical persona. In places like France this is now law.
>
> Now if we will lets talk about where this concept falls apart. Pretend I
> run a lemonade stand and my ISP offers to give it free Internet access, how
> generous of them! I then meet a businessman from town who is complaining
> about what it costs him to connect to the Internet because he has a lot of
> equipment that serves data to people all over the place. I see this as an
> opportunity to make more money and I say "hey, they don't charge me at all
> for Internet access I will make you a deal, I will connect your equipment
> to them for 1/3 what you are paying today". "Good deal" says the
> businessman. I eagerly ride my bicycle home, pick up my phone, call my ISP
> and tell them the news "Hey, thanks for the free service but I need you to
> upgrade my connection x5 because I decided to do content delivery for the
> businesses in town". "Oh hell no says my ISP, that was not at all the
> agreement, your lemonade stand is still free but if you want us to carry
> the extra traffic you have to buy more ports the same as everyone else".

3)    So the other issue is the Use Contract you have most likely has a 
no-commercial or minimum commercial use clause in the licensing 
agreement. Likely also a no-resale as a service as well in the same 
agreement so what they actually say is "How long have you been doing 
this?" and you reply you have been testing it for a month now. So they 
send you a bill and when  you as the Lemonade stand operator get it and 
choke, and then call them - they say "have you read the no resale clause 
in the contract?" and its over.
>   I
> didn't build a successful lemonade stand because I take being treated like
> this sitting down! Our now much larger volume of traffic is slow to the ISP
> and they are refusing to upgrade it for free, so I call up the media and
> have them run a story about how the ISP is intentionally limiting our
> traffic and they simply need to upgrade it for free.

4)    Yes you do - and you scream how this is also racial profiling 
because anyone who hates lemonade is unAmerican or un-something.
> People are already
> paying for the Internet, if they don't give me my free ride they are double
> dipping!

How so - how are people already paying for the service you are now 
talking about selling which you are taking from someone else in 
violation of their provisioning agreement?
>
> Public opinion is in, that mean ISP should be giving me my free access but
> the reality of the situation is perhaps a bit different. My lemonade stand
> pulled a coup when it became a content provider and demanded a free ride,
> and railroading my ISP for it in the media was probably a dishonest thing
> to do.

How so? Again - your stand is a bandwidth thief and your business is 
breaking the terms of its end-user agreement with the ISP as well.
>   I reluctantly agree to pay them for ports for content I am
> delivering but "local businessman" from my town has tasted blood and he's
> not done yet "Who else has a lemonade stand with free Internet?!" he
> proclaims.
>
> I changed some names to protect the Innocent :)
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Nick B <nick at pelagiris.org> wrote:
>
>> The current scandal is not about peering, it is last mile ISP double
>> dipping.
>> Nick
>> On Apr 27, 2014 2:05 AM, "Rick Astley" <jnanog at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Without the actual proposal being published for review its hard to know
>>> the
>>> specifics but it appears that it prohibits blocking and last mile
>>> tinkering
>>> of traffic (#1). What this means to me is ISP's can't block access to a
>>> specific website like alibaba and demand ransom from subscribers to access
>>> it again. I do not know if this provision would also include prohibiting
>>> intentionally throttling traffic on a home by home basis (#2) and holding
>>> services to the same kind of random is also prohibited but I think this
>>> too
>>> would be a far practice to prohibit. Bits are bits.
>>>
>>>  From the routers article (
>>>
>>> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/23/us-usa-fcc-internet-idUSBREA3M1H020140423
>>> )
>>> and elsewhere it seems what the proposal does not outlaw is paid
>>> peering
>>> and perhaps use of QoS on networks.
>>>
>>> #3 On paid peering:
>>> I think this is where people start to disagree but I don't see what should
>>> be criminal about paid peering agreements. More specifically, I see
>>> serious
>>> problems once you outlaw paid peering and then look at the potential
>>> repercussions that would have. Clearly it would not be fair to for only
>>> the
>>> largest content providers to be legally mandated as settlement free peers
>>> because that would leave smaller competitors out in the cold. The only
>>> fair
>>> way to outlaw paid peering would be to do it across the board for all
>>> companies big and small. This would be everyone from major content
>>> providers to my uncle to sells hand runs a website to sell hand crafted
>>> chairs. This would have major sweeping repercussions for the Internet as
>>> we
>>> know it over night.
>>>
>>> I think it makes sense to allow companies to work it out as long as the
>>> prices charged aren't unreasonably high based on market prices for data.
>>> This means if 2 ISP's with similar networks want to be settlement free
>>> they
>>> can. If ISP's want to charge for transit they can, and if ISP's want to
>>> charge CDN's to deliver data they can. Typically the company with the
>>> disproportional amount of costs of carrying the traffic would charge the
>>> other company but really it should be up to the companies involved to
>>> decide. Based on the post by Tom Wheeler from the FCC (
>>> http://www.fcc.gov/blog/setting-record-straight-fcc-s-open-internet-rules)
>>> it sounds like if this pricing is "commercially unreasonable" (ie
>>> extortion) they will step in. Again I think this is fair.
>>>
>>>
>>> #4 On QoS (ie fast lane?):
>>> In some of the articles I skimmed there was a lot of talk about fast lane
>>> traffic but what this sounds like today would be known as QoS and
>>> classification marking that would really only become a factor under
>>> instances of congestion. The tech bloggers and journalists all seems to be
>>> unanimously opposed to this but I admit I am sort of scratching my head at
>>> the outrage over something that has been in prevalent use on many major
>>> networks for several years. I don't see this as the end of the Internet as
>>> we know it that now seems to essentially be popular opinion on the issue.
>>> Numerous businesses are using QoS to protect things like voice traffic and
>>> business critical or emergency traffic from being impacted in a failure
>>> scenario. In modern day hyper converged networks where pretty soon even
>>> mobile voice traffic could be VoIP over a data network prohibiting the use
>>> of all QoS seems irresponsible.
>>>
>>> The larger question is, is it fair for ISP's to charge people to be in a
>>> priority other than "best effort"?  To answer a question with a question,
>>> if an ISP is using a priority other than "best effort" for some of its own
>>> traffic is it fair if a peer with a competing service is only best effort
>>> delivery? This is sort of akin to Comcast not counting its own video
>>> service against the ~250G/month cap of subscribers but counting off
>>> network
>>> traffic against it. In theory if some of an ISP's own services are able to
>>> use higher than best effort priority the same should be available to the
>>> business they are selling service to. If they go completely out of their
>>> way to intentionally congest the network to force people into needing a
>>> higher than best effort classification I would think it should fall into
>>> what the FCC calls "commercially unreasonable" and thus be considered a
>>> violation. So again, I think this is fair.
>>>
>>> I have numbered the items I mentioned from 1-4 being
>>> #1. Blocking
>>> #2. per household (last mile) rate limiting of a service (though rate
>>> limiting at all anywhere should probably be up for discussion so #2.5)
>>> #3. The legality of paid peering
>>> #4. The legality of QoS (unless fast lane is something else I don't
>>> understand).
>>>
>>> Feel free to augment the list.
>>>
>
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