Saving Net Neutrality in US

[amirm]

As some of you may know, the new FCC chairman is aiming to ent net neutrality in US in about 3 weeks and thereby allowing ISPs to favor one kind of traffic over another. While I am not a big fan of government regulation of businesses, in this case these ISPs run near monopolies and have been scooping up content/distribution assets left and right (e.g. Comcast acquiring NBC/Universal). Hate to see them try to advantage those over others I may want to use.

Eff is running a nice service to let your state representative in congress know you don't want this to happen: https://act.eff.org/action/congress-don-t-sell-the-internet-out. It took just a couple of minutes to fill it out if you see fit.

 

[Old Listener]

2018 elections!

 

[watchnerd]

This fight has been going on for...what? 15 years? 20?

 

[amirm]

It has been but FCC put the hammer down a few years back and to good effect especially in wireless. The current chairman wants to undo that.

 

[Cosmik]

I get my internet plus digital TV channels down the same co-ax cable. In the house it gets split off to a modem/router thing for the internet, and to a DVR for the TV - both supplied by the telecoms company. Presumably this means that for at least the last bit of cable, the system isn't "net neutral" i.e. the supplier is combining high priority data (the TV never drops out) plus the internet. (Technically, the TV may not be 'internet', but some other way of multiplexing digital data into the same cable). Does it matter that this may only happen for the last section of cable - doesn't this offend against the idea of net neutrality anyway? If not, how far back along the system would it be permissible to have this 'two tier' system sharing the same cables/fibres? Would the world be a better place if the the company was forced to bring two cables into the house instead?

Basically, I am pretty sure that within a telecoms company's own infrastructure, they can prioritise what gets sent across their own networks. The difference that abandoning net neutrality would make is that companies could make agreements with each other and the internet backbone providers to prioritise certain forms of packet..?

I am seeing the issue conflated with free speech arguments i.e. that allowing packets to be treated differently means that certain political views will be suppressed. Is this a real issue, or just a way of stirring up support for net neutrality? I find that aspect an interesting twist on the debate. The instinct among most of the intelligentsia these days is that free speech should be suppressed if it is "deplorable" or "populist" or fake news". Abandoning net neutrality would presumably provide useful mechanisms for governments or whomever to kill off whatever information they decided was unacceptable no matter how it got into the system. It could be a way of reducing internet-based crime..? Terrorism? Supposed Russian trolls? I can see how the idea could be sold as a positive thing.

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

It has been but FCC put the hammer down a few years back and to good effect especially in wireless. The current chairman wants to undo that.

You don't get it. Hey, didn't our President promise to "make America great again"? What could possibly be greater than screwing millions of citizen consumers and small companies in favor of big telecoms, ISPs and media giants? Land of the free, home of the brave!

 

[amirm]

I am seeing the issue conflated with free speech arguments i.e. that allowing packets to be treated differently means that certain political views will be suppressed.

I have seen the argument go there in another forum where I found this link but I really think it doesn't include that. Even in the worst situation, no one is really thinking ISPs will attempt to actually look inside information in packets and try to suppress them altogether. It is just a matter of causing packets that make them less money, slower.

In fairness I should include the explanation given by FCC chair and proponents of nixing net neutrality. And that is, it allows more innovation by the ISPs. To the extent they can do bundling, that allows them to push their offering ahead of others and with it, be motivated to bring such new services to market. In a highly competitive market, that would be OK. But as I noted in my OP and my letter to my congressmen and women, this is not a competitive market. If they advantage say, a crappy new service and force another new but better service buffer all the time, it would not be right.

Having worked at Microsoft and experienced "bundling" with the OS, it is a false promise. Unless you have something great, the fact that it is bundled is of little value. It makes companies feel like they have more power to create success but they really don't. What happens though is in the interim while they experiment, consumer suffers.

 

[Jinjuku]

Having worked at Microsoft and experienced "bundling" with the OS, it is a false promise.

I want to make a skit where you have IE/Chrome/FF engineer hooked up to a voltage producing device that keeps upping the voltage with each incorrectly rendered page that conforms to HTML5 / CSS / JavaScript standards.

A Jeopardy like setup where the opening shot already has the IE engineer with wet pits and beading along the forehead.

 

[RayDunzl]

On a side note...

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solut...ndex-vni/complete-white-paper-c11-481360.html

"Globally, IP video traffic will be 82 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2021, up from 73 percent in 2016. Global IP video traffic will grow threefold from 2016 to 2021, a CAGR of 26 percent. Internet video traffic will grow fourfold from 2016 to 2021, a CAGR of 31 percent."

 

[Thomas savage]

Snip
Having worked at Microsoft and experienced "bungling" with the OS, it is a false promise. Unless you have something great, the fact that it is bundled is of little value. It makes companies feel like they have more power to create success but they really don't. What happens though is in the interim while they experiment, consumer suffers.

FIFY

 

[watchnerd]

Having worked at Microsoft and experienced "bungling" "bungholing" with the OS, it is a false promise.

FIFY

FIFY

 

[Cosmik]

Could the anti net neutrality people invent an argument about energy and tonnes of CO2? Could they claim that maintaining net neutrality means they have to over-engineer the network in order to guarantee the performance of paid-for services whilst also catering for non-critical traffic on an equal basis? Simply by allowing non-critical data to wait a bit longer compared to the critical stuff, the climate can be saved, and the world could avoid...

...some kind of tax or charge on data use – for example, imposing a fee for uploading photographs on to Facebook – or even a straightforward rationing of activity;

 

[Thomas savage]

FIFY

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/bungling

 

[RayDunzl]

It has been but FCC put the hammer down a few years back and to good effect especially in wireless. The current chairman wants to undo that.

Here's his speech:

REMARKS OF FCC CHAIRMAN AJIT PAI AT THE NEWSEUM “THE FUTURE OF INTERNET FREEDOM” WASHINGTON, DC APRIL 26, 2017

https://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db0427/DOC-344590A1.pdf

 

[Don Hills]

I get my internet plus digital TV channels down the same co-ax cable. In the house it gets split off to a modem/router thing for the internet, and to a DVR for the TV - both supplied by the telecoms company. Presumably this means that for at least the last bit of cable, the system isn't "net neutral" i.e. the supplier is combining high priority data (the TV never drops out) plus the internet. (Technically, the TV may not be 'internet', but some other way of multiplexing digital data into the same cable). ...

It's on separate RF carriers. (Think of it as "channels" in analogue terms.) There's no contention for bandwidth on the cable.

 

[Cosmik]

It's on separate RF carriers. (Think of it as "channels" in analogue terms.) There's no contention for bandwidth on the cable.

That's what you're assuming, but as the capacity of the cable is reached, more data bandwidth could be accommodated if the TV channels were dropped; it's not a miraculous way of creating infinite bandwidth in a cable. The same would go for optical fibres if they were the medium.

 

[Don Hills]

I assumed nothing. I repeat, there's no contention for bandwidth between the broadband and the TV channels on the cable. They each pass their designed capacity regardless of load. With some limited exceptions, dropping the TV channels would not miraculously provide more bandwidth for data, because each modem (the data one, and the one built into the TV or set top box) can only use a portion of the total bandwidth that the cable can carry. It works like radio - each station can only use a portion of the available spectrum. For homework, I suggest starting with the DOCSIS page on Wikipedia.

 

[Cosmik]

I assumed nothing. I repeat, there's no contention for bandwidth between the broadband and the TV channels on the cable. They each pass their designed capacity regardless of load. With some limited exceptions, dropping the TV channels would not miraculously provide more bandwidth for data, because each modem (the data one, and the one built into the TV or set top box) can only use a portion of the total bandwidth that the cable can carry. It works like radio - each station can only use a portion of the available spectrum. For homework, I suggest starting with the DOCSIS page on Wikipedia.

You don't actually know the information carrying capacity of the cable entering my house, nor the exact methods being used to get the data across it, so you cannot say that dropping the TV channels wouldn't allow more bandwidth for data. You even say "With some limited exceptions..." so I don't think the patronising "homework" comment is in order.

I asked the more general question:

how far back along the system would it be permissible to have this 'two tier' system sharing the same cables/fibres?

Combining carriers of different colours or frequencies will not miraculously (the word I introduced) mean that there is no conflict for data carrying capacity in the ISP's networks.

 

[Cosmik]

The failure to grasp the point I was making earlier has caused me to think of this scenario:

As described, my ISP provides digital TV and internet through the same cable. Maybe people who know about the low level details can say categorically that there is no conflict between the TV channels and the internet - but if so, they are simply describing things as they are, not how they could be. But I don't think they are even doing that.

Part of the service we get at our house is that the TV box can access on-demand services like Youtube, the BBC iPlayer and, if you subscribe to them, Netflix, etc. Now, supposing my ISP prioritises the on-demand TV packets above my next door neighbour's browsing of ASR. According to net neutrality, this is a no-no.

What if my ISP cleverly caches popular Netflix series quite locally, so that when I demand them the internet backbone is saved from having to fetch them from farther afield? Does the ISP still not have any right to prioritise those packets above those of ASR when it sends them to me? To my mind, the packets now 'belong' to my ISP, and they should have the right to do with them as they may - just like the standard TV channels they 'broadcast' (through the miraculous medium of a different carrier frequency? Maybe. But that carrier frequency is then unavailable for browsing ASR). If they want to maintain a smooth TV experience for the on-demand stuff while maintaining net neutrality, must they reserve entire portions of their total bandwidth specifically for services which may only be used occasionally or maybe not at all?

If so, then rigid net neutrality does seem to conflict with common sense and innovation...

 

[amirm]

You don't actually know the information carrying capacity of the cable entering my house, nor the exact methods being used to get the data across it, so you cannot say that dropping the TV channels wouldn't allow more bandwidth for data.

I don't know about your country but in US Cablelabs (a consortium of cable operators) sets unified standards for cable communications (the data portion is called "DOCSIS"). The data transmission scheme simply uses the allocation for one TV channel with a bandwidth of 6 Mhz for downstream (and another one at lower frequency channel for upstream). Out of the 1 Ghz bandwidth of a coax cable, that is not much and hence there is no competition from TV broadcast to squeeze that even further. There is not a lot to squeeze and doing so lowers the advertised max speed to customers which is not good from competitive point of view. The trend is to have higher and higher internet speeds so if there is any pressure, it is the other way around.

On your other point regarding Netflix and such, the same broadband internet channel is used for that according to Comcast -- our biggest operator. So their choice of that service will impact the customer cost and available bandwidth to others. Hence the worry about net neutrality going away.