NYC politicians’ one-word case for net neutrality: Skype | Hacker News Reader

NYC politicians’ one-word case for net neutrality: Skype

washingtonpost.com

54 pointsLibertatea22 comments

Very excited to see my old friend Ben Kallos on the right side of the news again.

I know a few folks from my high school and college years who've gone into politics. He's the only one who was a cool, level-headed intelligent guy then and still seems to be one now.

I need to see if he wants to play Diplomacy again.

Bringing immigrants and the poor inexpensive, neutral broadband is the best argument for net neutrality.

The anti-immigrant crowd is gonna hate that one ... even more if they can figure out which bus it's on.

Unfortunately, it's possible that net neutrality will increase broadband prices (or reduce service for the same price).

Conceivable, but far from proven. An apparent employee of a major ISP+TV firm (username started with a "g") claimed that all company decisions were weighed against hurting TV profits. If neutrality could eventually force them to decouple those decisions, prices could go down and performance up.

Further, ISPs are currently profitable by a hefty margin, so they could continue operating the same network at the same price, but neutrally WRT to content.

Actually, I can't think of any reason why net neutrality would ever cause prices to increase. All ISPs need to do is give customers a dedicated allotment of priority/low latency inbound and outbound traffic, with the rest of their "advertised speed" served as best effort. Then the customer can decide what matters to them (or the application designers for less technical customers), and that should be cheaper for ISPs since they need no DPI hardware and fewer employees deciding what to throttle for profit.

"Possible", in that it cannot be categorically ruled out over scenarios and timescales, sure.

But a lack of "net neutrality" isn't going to cause broadband providers to magically freeze their prices either. So it's a choice between a one time "possibly more expensive", and continual raising every time providers buy more advanced dpi gear, segment offerings into more proprietarily-priced "services", and slowly dismantle the end-to-end principle.

I really like this as a NYC resident. It shows there are some people (I've only lived here for about 9 months so I'm not too familiar with the political scene) who are concerned about the residents of their city (local politics in general seem to be more citizen oriented than national politics (to me, however that could be an erroneous or anecdotal position I hold) but you could certainly see the case where NYC could be a distortion of that generality) and it's also an argument which goes beyond the "these companies might not have made it" and gives a good concrete example or how millions of people might be tremendously hurt by the proposed changes to net neutrality.

I know that I would feel tremendous emotional pain at the thought of not being able to communicate with my family effectively and easily when all of the technology is there and established. Hopefully some of the people who need swaying can feel with their hearts instead of their wallets and ensure that these millions will not feel that pain.

Wow, grandstanding much? There's no evidence ISPs have throttled VoIP or plan to, but if they did it would be REALLY BAD for $key_voter_demographic.

Sorry guys, even if the end result is commendable, this is literally just FUD. If there's to be any hope of better politics, we need to reject this BS.

They don't need to. They just need to neglect their peer infrastructure and the desired effect will be the same.

Net neutrality doesn't require ISPs to maintain their infrastructure to any particular standard. It's fine that it's crap as long as it's equally crap for all traffic.

If you neglect peering, gradually some peering points will become more congested than others. So it won't be equally crap for all traffic. Some sources will get crappier service than others.

Of course. There's just no language in any net neutrality proposals that will avoid that.

The net neutrality crime in the Netflix debacle was trying to charge Netflix for access, not refusing to upgrade the peering point (since all traffic is equally/neutrally affected by the congestion).

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior - we know ISP's have throttled streaming video to enhance their own streaming video offerings, so is it that far fetched to believe they would do the same with VOIP? Most of these large ISP's are heavy into bundling and offer their own VOIP packages, so I think it is fairly logical to assume this is being discussed internally somewhere. Definitely not FUD.

No, they've throttled streaming video to extort money from Netflix.

VoIP has been eating telcos long distance revenue lunch since Vonage came out 10 years ago. Why do you think it's "fairly logical to assume" that they're only just now getting around to to talking about what they might do about that?

Indeed, Comcast did try to throw its weight around in 2009. I'm not sure what came of if, but blocking competing VoIP evidently wasn't it.

There is evidence, in Europe. I've also personally witnessed this in Russia - mobile operator was blocking VoIP. Don't think US is any different in this regard.

Unfortunately, a bookmark from 2012 for a full research text had died, but I've found a brief press release here: http://berec.europa.eu/doc/2012/TMI_press_release.pdf

Yes, you're right, mobile is different. But the article is explicity about broadband.

No idea about first world countries, but in Russia there are broadband ISPs who throttle or completely drop P2P traffic for various reasons. Don't know about VoIP, though - the only cases for blocking those I've read about are corporate networks with their inhumane firewalling.

I can't say throttling/blocking is completely universally bad - for example, we (I work for an ISP, too) had to drop uTP traffic when uTorrent just rolled that protocol, because due to high-PPS low-size packets it put quite a heavy strain on routers, so everyone had worsened network experience. Even though that was somehow controversial decision I still think that that blocking brought more good than evil (we didn't block classic BitTorrent protocol by any means, just uTP) so there should be some rare and sane exceptions from Net Neutrality rules, but nonetheless... the point is, that happens on broadband, too. Just less often.

Back around 2006-2008 Comcast was suspected of massaging Vonage data to degrade the connection when they were releasing their competing phone service.

See:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121564856618241033.html?mod=...

http://adamnoah.com/comcast-admits-to-blocking-vonage/

http://www.wired.com/2006/03/comcast_throttling_vonage_users...

http://gigaom.com/2008/07/09/did-comcast-just-admit-to-vonag...

And they were slapped around and stopped doing it, so it's great that politicians are taking action in favour of consumers only 6-8 short years later.

Digicel is currently accused of blocking voip on its networks in the caribbean.

Jamaican here. It's not just an accusation. They've definitely done it and admitted it. I don't know if Skype is blocked, but they've accused Viber and other such services of "toll bypass", and blocked them. The Viber CEO said in an interview that Digicel wants them to pay to be allowed to work again.

I can't remember the name off hand, but there is a VoIP provider that has part of their marketing about how they are stable in the face of degradation. They specifically pointed out samples between theirs and Vonage with the same (poor) network conditions.

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