Net neutrality non-neutrality
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
First off, once again, distinction without a difference. The reason streaming was using so much bandwidth was because the vast majority of customers were using it.
And the streamers switched to an internet provider that didn't have the proper configuration with the rest of the internet. But yeah, that was totally Comcast's fault, right?
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Well, again, the conversation had been about the Netflix thing and I didn't expect you to change the topic of dicsussion to ISPs without telling me.
It's been about ISPs the entire time. I'm the one who keeps saying, over and over again, that it's not about Netflix when other people keep trying to drag it off on a Netflix tangent!
I know, it's how you keep a consistent level of cognitive dissonance. Why are you talking about last-mile ISPs here?
Umm... I dunno. Maybe because they're the entire point of Net Neutrality?
It's good that you're letting the contradictions show within the same post. Maybe you'll notice and decide if you want to talk about peering or last-mile ISPs. You also shouldn't let your hatred of Comcast color your analysis here, which it definitely seems to be, because it's not at all clear that the onus was on Comcast.
Fact: Comcast promised its customers a certain amount of bandwidth, which was enough to stream video over.
Fact: They did not have the capacity to deliver this bandwidth to their customers.
Fact: They did not take the money their customers gave them, which was paid in exchange for the promised bandwidth, and use it to build out the capacity to deliver that bandwidth.Given the above--and do you have any reason to dispute any of those points--who else could the onus possibly be on?
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Fact: Comcast promised its customers a certain amount of bandwidth, which was enough to stream video over.
Fact: They did not have the capacity to deliver this bandwidth to their customers.
Fact: They did not take the money their customers gave them, which was paid in exchange for the promised bandwidth, and use it to build out the capacity to deliver that bandwidth.
Given the above--and do you have any reason to dispute any of those points--who else could the onus possibly be on?I struck out the main thing you got wrong here (and of which you have no evidence), but you're correct, if your version of the facts were accurate then you'd have a point. Absent that, there is a very good argument that the onus was on Level3.
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
I struck out the main thing you got wrong here (and of which you have no evidence), but you're correct, if your version of the facts were accurate then you'd have a point. Absent that, there is a very good argument that the onus was on Level3.
What do you mean I have no evidence for something that is self-evident? If they had had the capacity to deliver that much traffic, their network would not have gotten overloaded by it.
Is any evidence really necessary beyond that simple observation?
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@masonwheeler
Their network didn't get overloaded. Their interconnect to Level 3 did. Which they were willing to upgrade under the standard terms for upgrading CDN interconnections, which was the service Level 3 was providing.Level 3 wasn't willing to pay for it. They decided to start the Church of Net Neutrality instead.
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
I struck out the main thing you got wrong here (and of which you have no evidence), but you're correct, if your version of the facts were accurate then you'd have a point. Absent that, there is a very good argument that the onus was on Level3.
What do you mean I have no evidence for something that is self-evident? If they had had the capacity to deliver that much traffic, their network would not have gotten overloaded by it.
Is any evidence really necessary beyond that simple observation?
Isn't the whole point of that episode that their network didn't get overloaded but the interchange between Level3 and their network got overloaded?
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
I struck out the main thing you got wrong here (and of which you have no evidence), but you're correct, if your version of the facts were accurate then you'd have a point. Absent that, there is a very good argument that the onus was on Level3.
What do you mean I have no evidence for something that is self-evident? If they had had the capacity to deliver that much traffic, their network would not have gotten overloaded by it.
Is any evidence really necessary beyond that simple observation?
Isn't the whole point of that episode that their network didn't get overloaded but the interchange between Level3 and their network got overloaded?
This seems like if cables between Europe and the USA were cut, you'd say that the US network sucked because you couldn't access European servers very well since you had to go the long way around.
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@izzion said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@masonwheeler
Their network didn't get overloaded. Their interconnect to Level 3 did.Which is not part of their network?
Which they were willing to upgrade under the standard terms for upgrading CDN interconnections, which was the service Level 3 was providing.
So they started getting more traffic from an Internet backbone company, and decided to arbitrarily reclassify them as a CDN, which they were not, because it would let them charge more money.
Level 3 wasn't willing to pay for it.
I wouldn't be either if someone tried to shake me down.
They decided to start the Church of Net Neutrality instead.
So now Level 3 has a time machine?
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Isn't the whole point of that episode that their network didn't get overloaded but the interchange between Level3 and their network got overloaded?
If I say someone has something wrong with their house, does it really make any sense at all, in any context, to say "no, the problem isn't with their house, it's with the door to their house!" ???
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Isn't the whole point of that episode that their network didn't get overloaded but the interchange between Level3 and their network got overloaded?
If I say someone has something wrong with their house, does it really make any sense at all, in any context, to say "no, the problem isn't with their house, it's with the door to their house!" ???
It doesn't make sense when you misrepresent stuff like that. More like, there was a problem with the walkway between their house and someone else's house and there was a dispute about who should pay to fix it.
Which can in no way said to be a problem with their house. You're seem to be getting closer to the truth, however, because you've dropped the pretense that this has anything to do with "last-mile" stuff.
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
More like, there was a problem with the walkway between their house and someone else's house and there was a dispute about who should pay to fix it.
- Not much room for dispute when the problem was on their side of the walkway. Level 3 had the capacity to send the content to Comcast. Comcast didn't have the capacity to receive it. That's pretty cut-and-dried.
- The part that you keep conveniently ignoring is that it would have cost Comcast virtually nothing to fix their interconnection points. (A few tens of thousands, as I've mentioned before.)
- The other part you're conveniently ignoring is that--despite having no real obligation to do so--Level 3 did in fact offer to pay the few tens of thousands for this upgrade. Comcast turned the offer down, because that wasn't what they wanted; they wanted to double-dip and get paid twice for the same traffic by extorting Netflix.
Which can in no way said to be a problem with their house. You're seem to be getting closer to the truth, however, because you've dropped the pretense that this has anything to do with "last-mile" stuff.
Nope. Comcast is still a last-mile ISP, and this was about traffic requested by their last-mile clients. My position has remained perfectly consistent from the beginning, because I actually understand the issue in depth.
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@xaade the last mile infrastructure only has to deal with the amount of data that its users consume, by definition. And if those users have paid for a supposedly unlimited amount of incoming data, then you can hardly say it's Netflix's fault for sending the user data that the user wanted to get.
ISPs oversold their network capacity by promising unlimited data to all of their users, and now their users are assured that they'll get as much data as they need so they're happily munching down that data by watching Netflix, and in trying to figure out who to blame, the ISPs have somehow managed to decide that this is Netflix's fault. Rather than upgrading their last-mile infrastructure to actually handle the unlimited data that they're selling to their customers.
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@izzion said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Level 3 wasn't willing to pay for it. They decided to start the Church of Net Neutrality instead.
@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
their network didn't get overloaded but the interchange between Level3 and their network got overloaded
I apologize if one of the links already posted in this topic was the answer to this, but can anybody explain this clearly and offer citations?
My impression was that it was the last mile that was getting overwhelmed.
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Not much room for dispute when the problem was on their side of the walkway. Level 3 had the capacity to send the content to Comcast. Comcast didn't have the capacity to receive it. That's pretty cut-and-dried.
Yes, again, when you misrepresent the situation, it's very cut an dried.
@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
The part that you keep conveniently ignoring is that it would have cost Comcast virtually nothing to fix their interconnection points. (A few tens of thousands, as I've mentioned before.)
No, it's just irrelevant so why bring it up?
@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Nope. Comcast is still a last-mile ISP, and this was about traffic requested by their last-mile clients. My position has remained perfectly consistent from the beginning, because I actually understand the issue in depth.
OK, so you've been consistently wrong. Not that they're a last mile ISP obviously, but that they're only a last mile ISP. Because you're set in your delusions, I guess.
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@anotherusername said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
ISPs oversold their network capacity by promising unlimited data to all of their users, and now their users are assured that they'll get as much data as they need so they're happily munching down that data by watching Netflix, and in trying to figure out who to blame, the ISPs have somehow managed to decide that this is Netflix's fault. Rather than upgrading their last-mile infrastructure to actually handle the unlimited data that they're selling to their customers.
Don't read @masonwheeler posts seriously. How was it a last mile problem?
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@anotherusername said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
ISPs oversold their network capacity by promising unlimited data to all of their users, and now their users are assured that they'll get as much data as they need so they're happily munching down that data by watching Netflix, and in trying to figure out who to blame, the ISPs have somehow managed to decide that this is Netflix's fault. Rather than upgrading their last-mile infrastructure to actually handle the unlimited data that they're selling to their customers.
When a fat person walks into the buffet, do you pick a point where you tell them to go home?
Expectations changed. They didn't oversell. Demand grew.
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Yes, again, when you misrepresent the situation, it's very cut an dried.
You keep saying that, and yet every time I explain in greater detail, you end up agreeing that I'm right about most of the points. (And then I explain the rest of it in greater detail and the cycle continues, like a fractal.) What exactly am I misrepresenting here?
No, it's just irrelevant so why bring it up?
Because the next point, which you conveniently neglected to address here, makes it relevant. If they had wanted Level 3 to pay for the interconnection, they would have let Level 3 pay for the interconnection when Level 3 offered to do exactly that. But they didn't, which serves as pretty solid evidence that that was not what they were after at all.
OK, so you've been consistently wrong. Not that they're a last mile ISP obviously, but that they're only a last mile ISP. Because you're set in your delusions, I guess.
Not at all. Whatever else Comcast does, does not make them not be a last-mile ISP, and the Net Neutrality issues are about their treatment of customer data, ie. last-mile stuff.
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@xaade said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
When a fat person walks into the buffet, do you pick a point where you tell them to go home?
That sounds like a good way to get sued, especially if your buffet was explicitly advertised as "all you can eat."
Don't make promises you can't keep. And if you do, don't try to blame someone else for it.
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Level 3 heats up the Netflix, Verizon internet war
Level 3 accuses Verizon of admitting to deliberately slowing down Netflix traffic.
Level 3 Calls Out Verizon Directly on Peering Upgrades | Telecom Ramblings
At least one piece of the simmering interconnection dispute over Netflix data bottlenecks has been getting clearer lately. Following Netflix's 'crowded
There are a bunch of other news articles at the time as well (July 2014 timeframe). To be fair to Level 3, they did offer an option for "deep potato routing" into Verizon's network, basically giving Verizon a dedicated Level 3 circuit to move traffic from the LA meet point to the areas in Verizon's network where the traffic needed to go, thus obviating the need for Verizon to build the cross-country links which are ostensibly the reason for interconnection charges.
However, (because of the BGP technological limits at the time), that solution would have meant a Level 3 owned circuit was operating a critical backbone link inside of the Verizon network, meaning that Verizon would be subject to waiting for Level 3 to fix it and potentially Level 3 deciding at some future point that it wanted Verizon to pay to lease that circuit from Level 3, so they rejected that option.
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@izzion that sounds surprisingly reasonable from both sides of the argument.
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Yes, again, when you misrepresent the situation, it's very cut an dried.
You keep saying that, and yet every time I explain in greater detail, you end up agreeing that I'm right about most of the points. (And then I explain the rest of it in greater detail and the cycle continues, like a fractal.) What exactly am I misrepresenting here?
That the main point of contention was the equipment.
No, it's just irrelevant so why bring it up?
Because the next point, which you conveniently neglected to address here, makes it relevant. If they had wanted Level 3 to pay for the interconnection, they would have let Level 3 pay for the interconnection when Level 3 offered to do exactly that. But they didn't, which serves as pretty solid evidence that that was not what they were after at all.
Only if you refuse to acknowledge that it was the peering agreement that was the problem and not the equipment. Sheesh. You're like a dog with a bone.
OK, so you've been consistently wrong. Not that they're a last mile ISP obviously, but that they're only a last mile ISP. Because you're set in your delusions, I guess.
Not at all. Whatever else Comcast does, does not make them not be a last-mile ISP, and the Net Neutrality issues are about their treatment of customer data, ie. last-mile stuff.
I've never claimed that they weren't a last mile ISP. But that aspect of their operation is irrelevant in this dispute. If you disagree, please explain what their last mile stuff had to do with their connections with Level3. You've admitted that the problem was not in their last mile pipes but with Level3. So I don't know why anything "last mile" is brought up here.
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@gąska
Yeah, hence why us "free market" types don't think that this is a problem in need of a government solution. Yes, there have been pain points when ISP pricing models built in an era where all traffic was bursty (email, internet pages) meet an era where the majority of traffic is consistent (streaming & gaming). But a combination of technical advances (new BGP extensions that would allow Level 3 to deliver to Verizon in a way that Verizon can dynamically specify, allowing Level 3's network to take care of long-hauling their CDN traffic, improved WiFi & mobile data standards that allow more bandwidth in the same frequency space) and market forces have resolved basically every "Net Neutrality" issue as it has come up. Just not always in a way that results in Netflix users not getting a data usage surcharge to go with the content library charge they're paying Netflix for.
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@xaade said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
When a fat person walks into the buffet, do you pick a point where you tell them to go home?
That sounds like a good way to get sued, especially if your buffet was explicitly advertised as "all you can eat."
Don't make promises you can't keep. And if you do, don't try to blame someone else for it.
But if they run out of a particular dish but keep putting out the others, they're still providing what they promised. This is a tempting analogy but breaks down in a lot of ways. Still, if they ran out of, say, pot roast, you wouldn't say that the problem was with the buffet line.
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@xaade said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
When a fat person walks into the buffet, do you pick a point where you tell them to go home?
That sounds like a good way to get sued, especially if your buffet was explicitly advertised as "all you can eat."
Don't make promises you can't keep. And if you do, don't try to blame someone else for it.
This is why they find other ways, like.... not bringing out food as fast. :P
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@izzion if this claim is true, then I don't see how anyone could plausibly say it's anyone's fault but Verizon's:
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. ... 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.
...unless there's some hidden cost there that Level 3 isn't telling me about; they appear to think that the only possible cost would be adding more ports, which, as they say, are not terribly expensive. So what's the hidden catch? Are they charging Verizon $10k/mo for each 10Gbps port that they have connected or something? Or are Verizon just being dickheads because they want to extort some more money from someone first?
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@anotherusername said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
if this claim is true, then I don't see how anyone could plausibly say it's anyone's fault but Verizon's:
Again, the crux of the issue was the business relationship, not the hardware.
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@anotherusername
Because what gets lost in the circles (Level 3's Network, Verizon's Network) is that those circles include cross country links that are super expensive -- at that time long range fiber was in the realm of $5,000-$20,000 per mile (depending on whether you were going overhead, along highways, underground, etc) of wire. Costs varied on the number of pairs (the largest strands at the time were 144 pair), and you could get 10Gbps per pair of "standard" fiber. Though most long haul links were using DWDM (a technology that lets you "split" a single pair of fiber into 28 useable links by riding many different frequencies across the same pair), but DWDM increased the per-end cost by a lot, and since long-range fiber requires an "end" every 80km (and/or powered boosters, which are just as expensive as ends in DWDM land), it still worked out to $100+ per mile per Gbps of data transfer.At the time, BGP's only (implemented - I honestly don't know when the BGP extensions for indicating preferred ingress points became accepted standards, but even then it's still quite a while before Cisco has firmware & hardware that supports it and then longer before carriers adopt it) technical option was for Level 3 to hand off to Verizon at either a single point, or at points that basically randomly round-robin'd. Meaning that Verizon then had to support the cross-country links to take traffic from the handoff (Los Angeles, in the example) to wherever the customer lived (e.g. the New York area, or Florida, or Indiana, or...) So yeah, they could turn up another 10Gbps with Level 3 no problem, just a few thousand dollars. And then transfer that traffic cross country across millions of dollars worth of fiber links.
And even assuming Level 3's summary of "Verizon's network = 50% utilized" was accurate, that's still only 9 months worth of breathing room for Verizon's network given the normal traffic growth patterns of the time. If they just accept CDN traffic from Level 3 without the normal interconnection charges and set that precedent, then what happens if other CDN providers start letting their ports with Verizon congest because Verizon won't give them settlement free peering? Now Verizon's network is 100% utilized, they're not getting peering charges for those long haul links any more, and they have to bear the millions of dollars to upgrade those links themselves.
Pretty sure they'd have been rolling out very hard data caps and charging heavy users by the GB pretty damn quick.
Edit: Fixed my error in the number of pairs in a single fiber run. And as a disclaimer, the $ figures quoted are very rough ballpark estimates based on what construction work cost us in a fairly low cost of living area in 2014. Costs will vary widely depending on whether you have to get permits in the land of fruits & nuts and what the construction market is like in the area you're running fiber.
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@boomzilla I'm not really sure what you mean by that.
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@izzion said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
So yeah, they could turn up another 10Gbps with Level 3 no problem, just a few thousand dollars. And then transfer that traffic cross country across millions of dollars worth of fiber links.
The impression that I got from Level 3's statement was that that interconnect mostly just affected Verizon's customers in that local area, and was chosen (by Verizon) as a relatively small, localized example of congestion, not as a "this right here's the main bottleneck for the whole US" example.
Anyway, if Verizon's "millions of dollars worth of fiber links" isn't capable of transporting data that is being used by Verizon's customers, then how is that Level 3's problem? Isn't Verizon just trying to shift the blame by saying that their interconnect can't handle the traffic, if in fact they don't want to add the capacity to the interconnect because they know if they did then their backbone won't handle the traffic?
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@anotherusername
Because Level 3 chose to become a CDN (by taking on Netflix's CDN contract) and refused to pay for it, since they had previously had settlement free peering. They broke the rules of the game, and expected Verizon to just take it.
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Only if you refuse to acknowledge that it was the peering agreement that was the problem and not the equipment. Sheesh. You're like a dog with a bone.
Yes, attempting to unilaterally change an agreement out from under someone just because it would make more money for you is a problem. I did, in fact, acknowledge that earlier, when @izzion was going off on his CDN tangent.
I've never claimed that they weren't a last mile ISP. But that aspect of their operation is irrelevant in this dispute. If you disagree, please explain what their last mile stuff had to do with their connections with Level3. You've admitted that the problem was not in their last mile pipes but with Level3. So I don't know why anything "last mile" is brought up here.
No, the problem was not with Level 3; it was with Comcast's connection with Level 3. And when Comcast is taking that data from Level 3, they are doing so to deliver it to the customer, not to deliver on to some other ISP. Therefore, this is fundamentally a last-mile function, even if the point at which it occurs happens to be on the backbone portion of Comcast's network.
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@izzion noob question: why cross-country gigabit-mile of fiber is so much more expensive than in-city gigabit-mile of fiber? Shouldn't it be mostly constant?
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
But if they run out of a particular dish but keep putting out the others, they're still providing what they promised. This is a tempting analogy but breaks down in a lot of ways. Still, if they ran out of, say, pot roast, you wouldn't say that the problem was with the buffet line.
But that wasn't the original question posed by this analogy; the question was about kicking someone out.
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@izzion said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
So yeah, they could turn up another 10Gbps with Level 3 no problem, just a few thousand dollars. And then transfer that traffic cross country across millions of dollars worth of fiber links.
So what you're saying is, you are completely unfamiliar with the economic concept of "sunk costs"? Because if you understand sunk costs, you understand that what you just said is utter gibberish.
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@gąska
They're similar in cost, since the costs are largely getting permits to do the work, time to string / dig / bore, etc. The end point costs are higher for cross-country because you're using extended range (high power) transceivers, boosters, etc.But that's why Google Fiber didn't run to every house in every neighborhood in Kansas City. Fiber runs are very expensive, and they wouldn't break even to run it into low income areas.
Also, I made a mistake in my original post, the line mile cost is per run, and those runs are generally more than one pair (more pairs increases the cost of the wire some, but again the installation & permitting is the predominant cost). Will edit accordingly shortly, but the upshot is about an order of magnitude on the per-mile cost, but still millions of dollars to build a fiber link from LA to NYC.
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@anotherusername said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@boomzilla I'm not really sure what you mean by that.
Like, all the stuff that @izzion keeps posting. Basically, about how different companies agree to carry each other's traffic and call it a wash. But only for levels that were comparable. The dispute was whether the amount of Netflix traffic changed those levels enough that it meant someone should be paying someone else instead of just swapping traffic.
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@masonwheeler
The network cost isn't a sunk cost. They only had 9-18 months worth of capacity growth left, per Level 3's own graphic! If they just kept keeping on with all their other peering providers and did nothing with the Level 3 links, they'd have run out of network capacity in 9 months. Letting Level 3 eat that faster without the customary & reasonable peering charges directly increases their expansion & maintenance costs, since now they have to build out sooner then budgeted, and is thus a direct, current, variable cost.
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Yes, attempting to unilaterally change an agreement out from under someone just because it would make more money for you is a problem. I did, in fact, acknowledge that earlier, when @izzion was going off on his CDN tangent.
TDEMSYR. You think it's a tangent because you can't acknowledge that there was a change in the relationship. Or something like that. Honestly, it's hard to understand
you're thinking here, but you're not considering what happened.@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
No, the problem was not with Level 3; it was with Comcast's connection with Level 3. And when Comcast is taking that data from Level 3, they are doing so to deliver it to the customer, not to deliver on to some other ISP. Therefore, this is fundamentally a last-mile function, even if the point at which it occurs happens to be on the backbone portion of Comcast's network.
You're redefining "last mile" to suit your purposes. And I shall continue to mock you for it.
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@masonwheeler said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
But if they run out of a particular dish but keep putting out the others, they're still providing what they promised. This is a tempting analogy but breaks down in a lot of ways. Still, if they ran out of, say, pot roast, you wouldn't say that the problem was with the buffet line.
But that wasn't the original question posed by this analogy; the question was about kicking someone out.
Yes. Did you notice how I started that with "But"? I was providing a superior analogy that had actual relevance.
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@gąska I can think of a few reasons why that might be the case. The cost of in-city fiber may be nearly just as expensive but be offset by the fact that there's a paying customer hooked up to it every few hundred meters. And the cost of long-range fiber may be higher simply because you have to cross a whole bunch of different cities and states, which complicates the whole process of getting easements to pass through, electricity for your signal amplifiers, etc.
Also on a long-distance project I would imagine that you're going to be paying through the nose either for travel costs (if you have one contractor doing a length of the country) or for administrative costs and headache (if you have multiple contractors sticking within smaller localized areas but trying to work together where they connect).
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@anotherusername said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@boomzilla I'm not really sure what you mean by that.
Like, all the stuff that @izzion keeps posting. Basically, about how different companies agree to carry each other's traffic and call it a wash. But only for levels that were comparable. The dispute was whether the amount of Netflix traffic changed those levels enough that it meant someone should be paying someone else instead of just swapping traffic.
A last-mile ISP doesn't really have any room to call foul, there, though. Their traffic levels are determined almost entirely by how much traffic their customers are using. Which is dictated by... them.
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@anotherusername
Very large ISPs are two companies in one - they're both the last mile ISP (which "buys transit" from someone) and the backbone provider (which "sells transit" to ISPs and enters peering agreements with other backbone providers).The issue wasn't that Verizon or Comcast's last mile ISPs were charging Netflix to access their customer. The issue was that Netflix's CDN provider refused to pay the standard interconnection peering charges that the disparity in traffic from their backbone network to Verizon & Comcast's backbone network dictated, so Verizon & Comcast's backbone provider refused to upgrade congested interconnection links under the settlement free terms.
The customers got caught in the crossfire, because Netflix's CDN provider decided to play politics instead of following the market rules. And eventually Netflix fired the CDN provider and built their own CDN instead, and then figured out they were still subject to those rules of the game, and eventually paid for peering to Verizon and Comcast's backbone provider networks.
Now, I'll concede that it's at least sketchy on the face for Verizon ISP to be buying transit from Verizon Backbone, and maybe anti-trust or other existing regulations might be relevant to say "you can't be both an ISP and a Backbone provider". But I'm not sure I really agree with that position personally; there's a lot of economies of scale to allowing ISPs with customers in many markets to operate their own backbone network, and once you have those links, it's better for the health of the Internet to use them for inter-network transport.
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@anotherusername said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@anotherusername said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@boomzilla I'm not really sure what you mean by that.
Like, all the stuff that @izzion keeps posting. Basically, about how different companies agree to carry each other's traffic and call it a wash. But only for levels that were comparable. The dispute was whether the amount of Netflix traffic changed those levels enough that it meant someone should be paying someone else instead of just swapping traffic.
A last-mile ISP doesn't really have any room to call foul, there, though. Their traffic levels are determined almost entirely by how much traffic their customers are using. Which is dictated by... them.
Yes. But that's not what we're talking about here.
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@xaade said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
NN hasn't been around long enough to fair as spectacularly as anti-trust. Give it time.
When it fails, we push for something else that works. Just ignoring the problem because we have laws that aren't working is bullshit.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@xaade said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
NN hasn't been around long enough to fair as spectacularly as anti-trust. Give it time.
When it fails, we push for something else that works. Just ignoring the problem because we have laws that aren't working is bullshit.
No, we should fix the laws we have instead of uselessly piling new (non-functional) ones on top. That way leads to slavery and malicious "discretionary" prosecution.
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Another thought.
What if an ISP wanted to give unthrottled/uncapped access to emergency services online, in the same way that my phone carrier lets me call 911 for free.
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Ajit Pai responds to all the
around this:
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@lolwhat said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Ajit Pai responds to all the around this:
Firstly: He's much more parsimonious with the formatting than the other guy.
Here's my tl;dr; summary:
- He makes the case that 2015 NN has reduced investment in infrastructure and is preventing innovation and even the expansion of things like municipal wifi.
- Gets the FTC back in the game. It never made sense to remove an agency experienced in privacy and other consumer protection regulation and move that to the FCC. Frankly, it reminds me of the non sequitur of wanting the CDC to study gun violence.
- People calling this "authoritarianism." Pure nonsense, of course. How can you say that reducing regulation is authoritarian?
- Portugal: That stuff is legal under our current NN rules. The DC District Court of Appeals has apparently ruled that curated internet packages are legal.
You may commence with the
:whargarbl:now.
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@boomzilla said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
curated internet packages
This is the part I don't understand.
How are curated internet packages legal if they're not supposed to be packet sniffing?
The entire debate has been about fast lanes.
Now, I've said before, reading Title II, that it doesn't prevent fast lanes, but I'm surprised to find out that they literally said that out loud.
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I found this.
Here’s why the Obama FCC Internet regulations don’t protect net neutrality
It’s becoming clearer why, for six years out of eight, Obama’s appointed FCC chairmen resisted regulating the Internet with Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. Chairman Wheeler famously did no…
