Re: What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

[Rick Astley <jnanog () gmail com>]

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. 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. 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.

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". 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. People are already
paying for the Internet, if they don't give me my free ride they are double
dipping!

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. 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 () 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 () 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.