Net Neutrality, Google, and Geekiness,

[boppers]

I was asked by a poster to share my thoughts on Network Neutrality as an OP, so here goes.

First of all, my credentials and perspective: I've been a router monkey since 1994, been writing internet scripting languages (among other things) since 2000 (including the language that runs this very site, a language called PHP), and have been writing software since 1980. I do not come at this issue from the internet of the 1970's-80's (when most folks hadn't heard of it), but from the boom, when everything changed. I was on the internet before web pages existed, and I watched in horror when people began to *advertise* on the internet, as if it was seeing my teenage daughter come home a little too giddy, if a bit tired and walking funny, knowing that everything had changed. My smallest decisions affected nobody, my biggest (to date) directly affected 6.2 million people.

Geekiness:
1. Obama has surrounded himself by some very geeky people, and by "geeky", I mean that in the sense that it is an earned title, an honorary, to be called a geek, not a term of slander or discrimination. These are people who can talk for hours about the faults of BGP, or the never-ending IPV6 rollout, or how CIDR was a dumb idea, but the best solution, or any number of topics that most folks don't understand. These are people who have read more about RFC's (and written RFC's themselves). If all of those acronyms annoy you, the probably annoy Obama as well. That's why he has folks who can speak geek, and break it down for him. Same as the geeks at the FCC.

Google:
2. Obama campaigned at Google, and took questions (including one about a bubble sort). He's well aware of the power of the internet. When Google was just a start-up, they could have been crushed by Altavista, Yahoo, or any number of other companies. What made them strong was that anybody could use them. What made them weak was that they lacked manpower, bandwidth, and facilities.

Net Neutrality:
3. Let's start with dispelling the myth that the net was *ever* neutral. It never has been. Before DiffServ, there was ToS. Before that, there was RST (and other) packets. Since I'm writing for a general audience, let me explain: back in 1981 (yes, 1981), folks realized that, oh, a message from the CTO to all employees might be more important than sending a cute picture of your cat. So, a "fast lane" was created, so every "very important message" could get there quickly. This, by the way, pre-dates websites. In 1998, they updated the prior standard, and created DiffServ, because while an email fro a CTO might be important, his streaming video might be even *more* important. Content has been categorized and prioritized since before most of you knew what a web browser even was (because, well, the web didn't exist yet). In addition, companies, corporations, etc. with large amounts of money could peer (exchange with each other) to a large amounts of other networks. This gave them a fast lane. Since a message might go across a lot of networks they could choose to buy a lot of fast lanes, or not.

Here's where it gets interesting.

The vast majority chose *not* to buy fast lanes. The lanes exist, they always have. If you want to spend extra money, and get stuff delivered, you can.

Let me repeat that:
Content has been categorized and prioritized since before most of you knew what a web browser even was.

So, now we enter the modern era, post 2000.

Things were fairly peachy, people were paying super-cheap for huge amounts of burstable bandwidth, because the theory was that nobody would swamp the "tubes" by using up all that bandwidth... but then some folks noticed that their torrents were slowing down. An aside on torrents: It has nothing, whatsoever, to do with the web. It's a way of sharing large files, where users share file with each other. If you play World of Warcraft, you are a torrent user. If you are grabbing a large movie, chances are it's a torrent. Back to the topic, Comcast realized their network was swamped with torrents, and tried to slow it down.

That was the birth of Net Neutrality. It wasn't slowing down web pages, it was slowing down movie and gaming downloads (and other large files). Nobody was filtering based on politics, what movie was involved, what game was involved.... they were filtering on torrents being huge users of bandwidth.

The users of networks who got their bandwidth paid by rare users screamed that they weren't getting service invented a bunch of myths about "pay to play", did not offer to pay for their own play, and now we have folks screaming about their blog not ranking, or clickable in google.... because torrent users weren't getting 10mbs for 60 bucks a month, and decided that such things meant that they were being censored, and/or charged.

[Tunkamerica]

1. I was with you till the last two lines.

What now?

[boppers]

2. The last two lines were a frustrated summary.

The issue has been co-opted by folks who have never configured a router.

My apologies for that.

[newthinking]

3. The folks on this site fighting Net Neutrality would have fought the rural phone act

And that was an incredible success. Net Neutrality is simple compared to that effort and others like it.

What the hell has happened to our people?

[boppers]

5. Well the phone acts were a tad different.

The phone acts were about getting minimal service to everyone.

This is about getting a much larger level of services to everyone, and is complicated by using private networks.

The HCR similarities are not lost on me.

[vaberella]

4. Thanks for posting this, I'm know I was looking for insight. n/t

[boppers]

6. Hey, nothing brings insight like many opinions.

Good luck.

[vaberella]

15. I like insight backed up by credentials which you have. Thanks again. n/t

[joshcryer]

7. The bittorrent thing isn't entirely the full story.

At one point BitTorrent (and P2P) was 2/3rds of all internet traffic, this was before YouTube (or while YouTube was in an infancy stage), before Hulu, before NetFlix streaming. What happened was, all of those users who complained that BitTorrent traffic shaping were really pointing out an issue that was to arise with actual pay-for services, such as video and audio.



Net neutrality is merely the desire to have internet behave as telephony common carriers. No one is against traffic shaping. I do agree that it's somewhat overblown, though. The internet will adapt to anything that comes of this or any bullshit monopolistic practices that the corporations want to attempt.

[boppers]

9. "an issue that was to arise"?

That sounds an awful lot like a paper tiger, legislation for something that might happen, not something that was already happening.

As far as making the internet behave like a common carrier, I'm sure you probably realize that there are costs with that model... as a matter of fact, before we had fiber and cable connections, that's what most internet consumers had (and can still purchase, if they want). It's vastly more expensive than shared connections, though, because people pay based on expected peak use (or pay only the minimal costs, and only get a 56K dedicated pipe). That's modem/frame relay days, been there, done that.

Interesting chart, though, is there a source document that details the methodology and data behind it?

[ElsewheresDaughter]

11. fucking E-Smog

[Eric J in MN]

8. Are you saying that the ideal is no Net Neutrality laws...

...just let AT&T/Verizon/Comcast sell whatever service they want?

[boppers]

10. I'm saying that the foundation of the internet was premised on *exactly* that.

AOL (remember them?) tried to direct people to their services, not others. Compuserve did the same. Same with Netscape. Same with @Home, Netscape, Earthlink.....

Where are they now? They are all shells of their former existences, because once people found other providers that *weren't* trying to lock them in, their customer base vanished quite quickly. It wasn't a matter of legislation, it was the brutality of the marketplace... people wanted an internet link, not an AOL link.

In 2010 terms, if Comcast wants to commit financial suicide, and sell a Comcast link with anything less than full internet access, let them. They can go the way of AOL, as their competitors realize that such a thing is an exploitable weakness.

[Eric J in MN]

18. Suppose the State Dept asks ISPs to block the Wikileaks website

...like the State Dept asked PayPal/Mastercard/Visa to block payments, all of whom did so.

Most people only have two choices for broadband. Where I live in MN, it's Qwest for DSL or Comcast for cable.

If Qwest & Comcast both block the Wikileaks website, then I can't choose another broadband provider.

[boppers]

19. There are already 1,426 different wikileaks websites.

http://213.251.145.96/Mirrors.html

...let alone the many thousands of proxy sites, where an ISP thinks you're surfing one site, but are really surfing another.

Any additional attempts at blocking would only increase this number, that's how the game works when trying to censor the internet. It just makes the mirror situation stronger, and more complex.

As far as "broadband choices", they want you to *think* you only have two choices. If you're in twin cities (as your profile suggests), which is a major metro area, you likely have many more options then you realize.

http://broadband.theispdirectory.com/broadband/c/page1/MN/Twin%20Cities/Twin%20Cities.html

Above and beyond that, due to existing laws, if you want direct access to the backbones, you can pay for that (see post #16). It's not as cheap, but because of current law, it's content neutral.

[CreekDog]

12. so you're saying don't fix it

because you don't think it's being censored or used in that way means not to anticipate that it could be and do something about it.

or perhaps you didn't say a word about that in which case you wrote multiple paragraphs about a very timely and important topic and begged the entire question of what to do about it.

very not useful.

[boppers]

13. I'm saying it isn't broken.

It's arguably always been censored for most consumers, but not by the government. If you think adding government censorship is a good thing, we will have to disagree. I think the FCC's censorship of television speaks for itself, and what they think about free speech.

If you don't want a censored internet connection (i.e., not inhibited on content, usage, etc.), you can buy it if you want.

[CreekDog]

14. How? By laying my own cable and buying my own backbone?

digging up streets? owning my own satellites?

hell, i can't even get power of my own.

you're delusionally libertarian.

[boppers]

16. That's one route I and several of my friends have taken in the past...

Not the satellites part, but getting in their own connections to backbones. The vendors do the "digging" for you, but usually existing copper works just fine. Snap a router in, config it, wire it to your LAN, and you're done. If you want to go a tier or so out to keep costs low:
http://www.speakeasy.net/service/broadband/t1/

For only $299 a month, you too can have an unfiltered 1.544Mbs feed (router not included, but those are cheap, about a grand or so).

I'm not "delusionally libertarian", I'm a geek who has set up a lot of internet links that *needed* to be unmolested by unreliable consumer-service-level ISP's.

edit:typo

[Name removed]

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