Breaking the net neutrality deadlock | Hacker News Reader

Breaking the net neutrality deadlock

news.stanford.edu

40 pointssinak24 comments

I get how this could benefit end-users if all goes to plan, but how does this benefit ISPs like Comcast? The entire reason they want to break net neutrality is to push their own agenda on users. This doesn't allow them to do that at all. I suppose it opens users up to coercion.

That said, I think the net neutrality deadlock is a good thing. It's where it's supposed to be at right now. We have a free and open internet and a public branch of the government protecting that.

There will be a constant onslaught of corporate interests trying to limit free speech via marketing and bribery for many years to come, and I don't see Network Cookies solving that issue...in fact, I think it gives leeway more to the ISPs than the users. Now Comcast can sell you a modem with "recommended settings" and unless you know what 192.168.0.1 is you're going to just go along with it.

Let's keep net neutrality simple: access means full access.

More simple yet: you build it, you get to decide what to do with it.

Just curious, what do you mean with "you built it"?

> Just curious, what do you mean with "you built it"?

You know, paid taxes that funded government projects that largely developed the underlying technology. Got your friends in local and state governments to allow you to use a combination of public land and imminent domain to force people to let you build your network (nominally partially as a public good), etc., etc. Once your network was in place, you used regulations to prevent competitors from the same sorts of government manipulations. You built a telco that manipulated governments in the proper way, and now you get to engage in rent-seeking on those imminent-domain'd pipes all you like.

At least in NYC, the local telephone company is required to lease phone lines to competitors essentially at-cost, as a condition of their monopoly status and use of imminent domain (according to my DSL installation guy when I moved to NYC a decade ago, when he explained that my landlord had cut all of the phone lines during renovation and Verizon would take their sweet time providing the legally required 12 inches of working phone line into the domicile). I don't think similar competitive measures apply to cable and fiber lines that also use public land and imminent domain.

It puts the ISPs/carriers in a little bit of an awkward position. If an ISP can afford to provide me X GB / month of zero-rated data, and this technology exists, how can they argue against it while claiming to be pro-consumer?

I'd assume they'd want to charge users different amounts for different priority levels like any other vendor, with perhaps a level that is free for an arbitrary amount. Seems pretty typical for many vendors, or even toll roads. Don't think there's anything in the protocol that dictates how the ISPs use the priority request flags.

Well, I'd set up one web shop for content providers where they can buy different cookie plans and pay fees to get ranked differently on my cookie descriptor page.

On the cookie descriptor page I'd use a dark pattern to avoid having users scroll to long down the list. We want to use that list and the order of the entries to pressure more cash out of content providers.

Then, of course, you set up the cookie descriptor page as a type of web shop where users can buy say 1h of netflix fast lane for $1.

Isn't this just QoS revisited?

Also, think about it for a second: the user wants all their traffic to be high-priority zero-rated. Except maybe ads and DDoS traffic.

The anti-net-neutrality cases come from reversing the customer relationship. Zero-rated traffic obviously doesn't exist, what they mean is "traffic paid for by someone else". Either voluntarily as part of a market-cornering promotion (Facebook basics), or as part of a shakedown (throttling of Netflix in an attempt to get them to pay).

The lack of an integrated billing system is a great historical strength of the internet. We already had a global telecoms network where the billing had primacy, it's the telephone network. In which the lack of market competition meant that every little thing got charged for.

The one case that might work would be the possibility of specifying a "not important" flag on your own traffic in exchange for exemption from any kind of caps. In the event of actual congestion the ISP could drop "not important" traffic first.

I'm not really sure why consumers or ISPs have a reason to be excited about this. I'm beginning with the assumption that the custom shaping rules will only take effect once a bandwidth cap is reached (otherwise, why would someone self-limit?). If a consumer reaches their bandwidth cap it means some service will suffer. Letting them choose which one suffers the most doesn't seem like a killer feature. For ISPs, it doesn't matter how the bandwidth is distributed once the cap is reached.

Maybe there is some use case for metered connections or data caps?

> Maybe there is some use case for metered connections or data caps?

The main legitimate use case I can imagine would be to spread out peaky utilization to minimize congestion and make the most efficient use of links. This might be achieved through differential metering or caps, where off-peak usage is unmetered or costs less. Giving everyone a 300GB limit doesn't do much good for the infrastructure if they're all blowing their 300GB watching Netflix during "prime time".

Of course, that would require an ISP that had genuine concerns about congestion and efficiency rather than blowing smoke about how "fairness" somehow demands that they squeeze more revenue out of any party within reach [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3rnfnm/leak_of_...

If I can zero rate whatever traffic I want, what's stopping me from zero rating torents and download terabytes of content on lte with impunity?

Your data cap?

Zero-rating means it doesn't count towards your cap. Blackberry messenger is an example of a service/traffic that was zero-rated.

You request zero-rating. The ISP can deny it. (I guess.)

This opens "interesting" commercial opportunities for ISPs. "If you (the customer) voluntarily zero rate or fast lane services X and Y you get a discount." And those services pay the ISP more than that to get an advantage over competitors. The money flow is similar to having X and Y pay the ISP not to be throttled down on the ISP network, which is what some ISPs wanted to do.

There is no reason for data caps (duapolies ISPs are being greedy)... if you sell a specific speed/bandwidth (which are usually sold as bits per second?), I should be able to use it all the time.

For most customers, average usage and instant usage are very different though. A data cap is a way to be able and sell higher peak bandwidth than would otherwise be possible, by oversubscribing in a controlled way.

> sell higher peak bandwidth than would otherwise be possible

What about increasing the total capacity, by investing into the infrastructure? Better transportation technology, putting more fibers in the ground, putting up more LTE/5G/6G/7G whatever towers.

Violation of network neutrality gives a competitive advantage to those who trick their customers over those who actually invest in their infrastructure.

Network neutrality is a way to restore the ISPs' incentives to invest in the infrastructure, and to protect those ISPs who already do that from their shady competitors.

(The only other way would be to educate the population so they votes against network neutrality with their money. That may or may not be harder to achieve than passing a law.)

Net neutrality and investing in infrastructure are completely orthogonal to data caps, so I'm not sure what you're trying to argue.

There is a simple algorithm that would suffice.... Whatever I'm using right now is what I want to have preferential delivery. Really it is that simple.

Why are they using the term "cookies"? It has such a negative connotation.

Same as other commenters I'm struggling to see how this is useful in the zero rating debates. But if it could somehow be used as an easier more dynamic way of doing user-controlled QoS then that would be fantastic.

Just give preferential treatment and zero rate to ALL content. Then we're actually neutral, and everyone is happy.

But what if you send 1 packet, and your neighbor sends 10 packets, disguised to be from 10 different IP addresses. Then your neighbor effectively gets 10x your speed.

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