Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Michael Richardson via Bloat]

Mike Conlow via Bloat  wrote:
> As I read this thread and think about the coming debate in the U.S., two
> things come to mind:

> 1. Ofcom is considering
> 

> a net neutrality "clarification". The first topic in the consultation is
> whether ISPs should be allowed to offer "premium quality retail plans". It
> doesn't specify the technical implementation, but there would be different
> plans for "users who mainly stream" vs "people who use high quality
> virtual reality applications". Apparently ISPs feel the existing NN rules
> are not clear on whether this is allowed.

> The question I'm thinking about is do we want an Internet where end user
> plans are divided up this way? And if not, is a NN regulation the right
> place to put those rules?

Network Neutrality means that all senders are treated the same by the *ISP*
The ISP doesn't get to decide to prefer some peers over others.

It doesn't mean that the customer can't be given controls to determine what
traffic they want, and what priority they want to give it.

I think those two categories are totally bonkers.  I would never want to
subscribe to either service plan, because clearly the ISP thinks they can
just offload bufferbloat.   We've had protocols to classify traffic for
decades, but ISPs couldn't be bothered to figure out how to sell that.

> 2. To the point in the PS of the below email, I would agree things are
> mostly working in the EU, and in the US. But things
>  are

What's twitter?

> Are NN rules the right place to address this and make sure it doesn't
> happen in the US? Or is one bad actor across the EU and US the cost of
> doing business and the Internet ecosystem and "market" are *mostly* 
solving
> the issue?

The EU bureaucrats are mostly lost in some fantasy land.
I don't think it will end well.

--
]   Never tell me the odds! | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works|IoT architect   [
] m...@sandelman.ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/|   ruby on rails[



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Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Mike Conlow via Bloat]

First, a thank you to Dave, and lots of you all, for longtime shepherding
of this community and efforts to make the Internet better.

As I read this thread and think about the coming debate in the U.S., two
things come to mind:

1. Ofcom is considering

a net neutrality "clarification". The first topic in the consultation is
whether ISPs should be allowed to offer "premium quality retail plans". It
doesn't specify the technical implementation, but there would be different
plans for "users who mainly stream" vs "people who use high quality
virtual reality applications". Apparently ISPs feel the existing NN rules
are not clear on whether this is allowed.

The question I'm thinking about is do we want an Internet where end user
plans are divided up this way? And if not, is a NN regulation the right
place to put those rules?

2. To the point in the PS of the below email, I would agree things are
mostly working in the EU, and in the US. But things
 are
 broken
 in Germany to the
point where consumers have a degraded Internet experience because their ISP
won't provision enough interconnection.

Are NN rules the right place to address this and make sure it doesn't
happen in the US? Or is one bad actor across the EU and US the cost of
doing business and the Internet ecosystem and "market" are *mostly* solving
the issue?



On Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 8:19 AM Sebastian Moeller via Rpm <
r...@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> Hi Frantisek,
>
> > On Sep 30, 2023, at 14:00, Frantisek Borsik via Rpm <
> r...@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >
> > Back then in 2015, when NN was enacted by Wheeler & CO, there was a
> great body of work (IMHO) done on this subject by Martin Geddes:
> > https://www.martingeddes.com/1261-2/
> >
> > But let's pick one report written by his colleagues and published by
> Ofcom (UK telecoms regulator):
> >
> >   • You cannot conflate ‘equality of [packet] treatment’ with
> delivering equality of [user application] outcomes. Only the latter
> matters, as ordinary users don’t care what happened to the packets in
> transit. Yet the relevant academic literature fixates on the local
> operation of the mechanisms (including Traffic Management), not their
> global aggregate effect.
>
> [SM] The EU laid out pretty clear why they mandated the NN
> regulations in eu regulation 2015/2120:
>
> [...]
> (8)
> When providing internet access services, providers of those services
> should treat all traffic equally, without discrimination, restriction or
> interference, independently of its sender or receiver, content, application
> or service, or terminal equipment. According to general principles of Union
> law and settled case-law, comparable situations should not be treated
> differently and different situations should not be treated in the same way
> unless such treatment is objectively justified.
> (9)
> The objective of reasonable traffic management is to contribute to an
> efficient use of network resources and to an optimisation of overall
> transmission quality responding to the objectively different technical
> quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic, and thus
> of the content, applications and services transmitted. Reasonable traffic
> management measures applied by providers of internet access services should
> be transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and should not be
> based on commercial considerations. The requirement for traffic management
> measures to be non-discriminatory does not preclude providers of internet
> access services from implementing, in order to optimise the overall
> transmission quality, traffic management measures which differentiate
> between objectively different categories of traffic. Any such
> differentiation should, in order to optimise overall quality and user
> experience, be permitted only on the basis of objectively different
> technical quality of service requirements (for example, in terms of
> latency, jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth) of the specific categories of
> traffic, and not on the basis of commercial considerations. Such
> differentiating measures should be proportionate in relation to the purpose
> of overall quality optimisation and should treat equivalent traffic
> equally. Such measures should not be maintained for longer than necessary.
> (10)
> Reasonable traffic management does not require techniques which monitor
> the specific content of data traffic transmitted via the internet access
> service.
> (11)
> Any traffic management practices which go beyond such reasonable traffic
> management measures, by blocking, slowing down, altering, restricting,
> interfering with, degrading or discriminating between specific content,
> applications or 

Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Sebastian Moeller via Bloat]

Hi Mike,

[I took the liberty to remove some individual address from the Cc, as I assume 
most/all already be covered by the lists]


> On Sep 30, 2023, at 16:41, Mike Conlow  wrote:
> 
> First, a thank you to Dave, and lots of you all, for longtime shepherding of 
> this community and efforts to make the Internet better. 
> 
> As I read this thread and think about the coming debate in the U.S., two 
> things come to mind:
> 
> 1. Ofcom is considering a net neutrality "clarification". The first topic in 
> the consultation is whether ISPs should be allowed to offer "premium quality 
> retail plans". It doesn't specify the technical implementation, but there 
> would be different plans for "users who mainly stream" vs "people who use 
> high quality virtual reality applications". Apparently ISPs feel the existing 
> NN rules are not clear on whether this is allowed.

[SM] Not sure this is not simply an attempt of using regulatory 
divergence from the EU (IMHO for no good reason or outcome)... Also und er the 
existing EU rules ISPs are arguably already free to treat the whole class of 
latency sensitive VR to lower delay than bulk streaming as long as they do son 
consistently and not based on commercial relationships with the senders...
During the covid19 lock downs the EU offered clarification on the regulation 
that really drove home the do not discriminate inside of a specific traffic 
class, and define classes by purely technical not economical parameters. That 
said, I always like to look at data and hence am happy to the the UK apparently 
prepping to run that experiment (I am also happy not to live there right now 
not having to prticipate in said experiment*).


*) Other than that the british islands offer a lot of really great places I 
certainly would like to live at, but I digress.

> 
> The question I'm thinking about is do we want an Internet where end user 
> plans are divided up this way?

[SM] Personally, I consider internet access infrastructure and do not 
think this looks like a good way forward.

> And if not, is a NN regulation the right place to put those rules?

[SM] Could well be, but depends on the framing, no?

> 
> 2. To the point in the PS of the below email, I would agree things are mostly 
> working in the EU, and in the US. But things are broken in Germany to the 
> point where consumers have a degraded Internet experience because their ISP 
> won't provision enough interconnection. 

[SM] This a very peculiar case of the local incumbent Deutsche Telekom 
(DTAG) (all in all a pretty competent ISP that runs a tight ship in its network 
and tends to follow regulations to the letter (not however necessarily to the 
intent, but they are not different from other corporations of similar size)). 
DTAG is large enough to qualify as tier 1 (T1) ISP that is, to the best of our 
knowledge they do not pay anybody for transit and peer with all other T1-ISPs, 
they also have a relative large share of eye-balls in one of Europes larger and 
profitable markets. They (as did AT and Verizon in the US and probably other 
ISPs in similar positions as well) that most of their users traffic was within 
network (e.g. from German companies hosted/homed by DTAG) or via important 
partners like Google that have decent peering links (unclear whether/if Google 
actually is charged for that) but that there is a considerable number of 
services that reach DTAG eye-balls via their transit, that is essentially via 
one of the other T1-ISPs (I simplify here, I have no insight in the actual 
bisiness relationships between all players). And now DTAG basically instructed 
its generally capable network team to simply manage the size of the peering 
links with the big transit-providers carefully so that they never fully clogg, 
but clearly see increased packet loss and queueing delay during prime time. 
That in turn is clearly a competition problem if streaming service A 
judders/jitters/and buffers jumps between quality tiers while streaming service 
B smoothly and boringly just streams at the desired resolution. Now Telekom is 
happy to offer service A a product they call "internet transit" but that is 
priced pretty high (I have seen some comparative numbers for transit pricing in 
Germany I am not permitted to share or reveal more about) so high in fact that 
no content provider that can afford more than a single transit provider would 
use for anything but reaching DTAG eye-balls or closely related ones (like in 
the past SwissCom).
This behaviour is not s secret but evades regulatory action, because it does 
not openly violate the EU regulation which in the BEREC interpretation does not 
really cover the interconnection side. DTAG is careful enough to not 
purposefully target specific potential customers but simply treats all traffic 
coming in/out via "other transit than its own" as "has to tolerate overheated 
links during primetime". 


> Are NN rules the right place to 

Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Sebastian Moeller via Bloat]

Hi Jan,


> On Sep 30, 2023, at 16:28, Jan Ceuleers via Bloat 
>  wrote:
> 
> On 30/09/2023 14:19, Sebastian Moeller via Bloat wrote:
>> 
>> P.S.: Of course if we look close enough we surely can find corner-cases 
>> where either the EU regulations or the translation into national law result 
>> in less desirable outcomes, but "nothing is perfect" and all in all the 
>> regulations seem to be "good enough". With the caveat that explicitly 
>> excluding ISP interconnect from the regulations BEREC essentially pointed 
>> the way for ISPs wanting to monetize their eye-balls twice to do so via 
>> interconnects, but that only works for the 800 pound gorillas and generally 
>> is not a game smaller ISPs can play. I do understand why BEREC wants to stay 
>> out of the interconnection issue, as this is rather complicated and the 
>> market seems to generally work okay-ish (that is not badly enough to make 
>> intervention a hot-button issue for voters and hence politicians).
> EU Regulations have force of law in and of themselves; they need not be
> transposed into national law. That sets Regulations apart from
> Directives: those do need to be transposed into national law. Having
> said that many member states may adopt laws that implement Regulations,
> but in case of any differences between those national laws and the
> Regulations in question the Regulations will prevail in the courts.

[SM] Thanks for clearing this up! The regulation does punt a few things 
to wards national regulatory agencies that requires local action before being 
applicable like:
Article 4
[...]
4.   Any significant discrepancy, continuous or regularly recurring, between 
the actual performance of the internet access service regarding speed or other 
quality of service parameters and the performance indicated by the provider of 
internet access services in accordance with points (a) to (d) of paragraph 1 
shall, where the relevant facts are established by a monitoring mechanism 
certified by the national regulatory authority, be deemed to constitute 
non-conformity of performance for the purposes of triggering the remedies 
available to the consumer in accordance with national law.

where without action by the national regulatory agency to certify a monitoring 
mechanism and where the remedies apparently need to be need to be at least 
harmonized with local law.

But not being a lawyer, I completely missed that differenve between regulation 
and directive (I falsly assumed a directive would be of higher legal priority 
than a regulation).

Regards & Thanks again
Sebastian



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Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Jan Ceuleers via Bloat]

On 30/09/2023 14:19, Sebastian Moeller via Bloat wrote:
>
> P.S.: Of course if we look close enough we surely can find corner-cases where 
> either the EU regulations or the translation into national law result in less 
> desirable outcomes, but "nothing is perfect" and all in all the regulations 
> seem to be "good enough". With the caveat that explicitly excluding ISP 
> interconnect from the regulations BEREC essentially pointed the way for ISPs 
> wanting to monetize their eye-balls twice to do so via interconnects, but 
> that only works for the 800 pound gorillas and generally is not a game 
> smaller ISPs can play. I do understand why BEREC wants to stay out of the 
> interconnection issue, as this is rather complicated and the market seems to 
> generally work okay-ish (that is not badly enough to make intervention a 
> hot-button issue for voters and hence politicians).
EU Regulations have force of law in and of themselves; they need not be
transposed into national law. That sets Regulations apart from
Directives: those do need to be transposed into national law. Having
said that many member states may adopt laws that implement Regulations,
but in case of any differences between those national laws and the
Regulations in question the Regulations will prevail in the courts.
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Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Sebastian Moeller via Bloat]

Hi Frantisek,

> On Sep 30, 2023, at 14:00, Frantisek Borsik via Rpm 
>  wrote:
> 
> Back then in 2015, when NN was enacted by Wheeler & CO, there was a great 
> body of work (IMHO) done on this subject by Martin Geddes:
> https://www.martingeddes.com/1261-2/
> 
> But let's pick one report written by his colleagues and published by Ofcom 
> (UK telecoms regulator):
> 
>   • You cannot conflate ‘equality of [packet] treatment’ with delivering 
> equality of [user application] outcomes. Only the latter matters, as ordinary 
> users don’t care what happened to the packets in transit. Yet the relevant 
> academic literature fixates on the local operation of the mechanisms 
> (including Traffic Management), not their global aggregate effect.

[SM] The EU laid out pretty clear why they mandated the NN regulations 
in eu regulation 2015/2120:

[...]
(8)
When providing internet access services, providers of those services should 
treat all traffic equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, 
independently of its sender or receiver, content, application or service, or 
terminal equipment. According to general principles of Union law and settled 
case-law, comparable situations should not be treated differently and different 
situations should not be treated in the same way unless such treatment is 
objectively justified.
(9)
The objective of reasonable traffic management is to contribute to an efficient 
use of network resources and to an optimisation of overall transmission quality 
responding to the objectively different technical quality of service 
requirements of specific categories of traffic, and thus of the content, 
applications and services transmitted. Reasonable traffic management measures 
applied by providers of internet access services should be transparent, 
non-discriminatory and proportionate, and should not be based on commercial 
considerations. The requirement for traffic management measures to be 
non-discriminatory does not preclude providers of internet access services from 
implementing, in order to optimise the overall transmission quality, traffic 
management measures which differentiate between objectively different 
categories of traffic. Any such differentiation should, in order to optimise 
overall quality and user experience, be permitted only on the basis of 
objectively different technical quality of service requirements (for example, 
in terms of latency, jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth) of the specific 
categories of traffic, and not on the basis of commercial considerations. Such 
differentiating measures should be proportionate in relation to the purpose of 
overall quality optimisation and should treat equivalent traffic equally. Such 
measures should not be maintained for longer than necessary.
(10)
Reasonable traffic management does not require techniques which monitor the 
specific content of data traffic transmitted via the internet access service.
(11)
Any traffic management practices which go beyond such reasonable traffic 
management measures, by blocking, slowing down, altering, restricting, 
interfering with, degrading or discriminating between specific content, 
applications or services, or specific categories of content, applications or 
services, should be prohibited, subject to the justified and defined exceptions 
laid down in this Regulation. Those exceptions should be subject to strict 
interpretation and to proportionality requirements. Specific content, 
applications and services, as well as specific categories thereof, should be 
protected because of the negative impact on end-user choice and innovation of 
blocking, or of other restrictive measures not falling within the justified 
exceptions. Rules against altering content, applications or services refer to a 
modification of the content of the communication, but do not ban 
non-discriminatory data compression techniques which reduce the size of a data 
file without any modification of the content. Such compression enables a more 
efficient use of scarce resources and serves the end-users’ interests by 
reducing data volumes, increasing speed and enhancing the experience of using 
the content, applications or services concerned.
(12)
Traffic management measures that go beyond such reasonable traffic management 
measures may only be applied as necessary and for as long as necessary to 
comply with the three justified exceptions laid down in this Regulation.
[...]

There really is little IMHO that can be brought against these, all pretty fair 
and reasonable. What it does is accept that internet access is essential 
infrastructure and that hence access needs to be as well regulated as access to 
water, electricity, gas, streets, ... . Yes this has some consequences of what 
ISPs can and can not do. But this is normal "cost of business". I for one am 
quite happy about this regulation existing as locally it did away with some 
(not all) shenanigans of some ISPs that were 

Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Frantisek Borsik via Bloat]

Back then in 2015, when NN was enacted by Wheeler & CO, there was a great
body of work (IMHO) done on this subject by Martin Geddes:
https://www.martingeddes.com/1261-2/

But let's pick *one

*report written
by his colleagues and published by Ofcom (UK telecoms regulator):


   - *You cannot conflate ‘equality of [packet] treatment’ with delivering
   equality of [user application] outcomes.* Only the latter matters, as
   ordinary users don’t care what happened to the packets in transit. Yet the
   relevant academic literature fixates on the local operation of the
   mechanisms (including Traffic Management), not their global aggregate
   effect.


All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik



https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.bor...@gmail.com


On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 6:15 PM dan via Rpm 
wrote:

> ok, lots and lots of great comments here for sure.
>
> bandwidth abundance:  Not for most people and ISPs.  The 'carriers' aren't
> carrying to many places at affordable rates.  I've pulled quotes from Lumen
> and Zayo at over $5k/month/gig.  We typically pay 900-1400 for a gig of
> service.  This isn't abundance and it's widespread and it leaves only
> major providers that can afford/amortize out 100G transits etc.
> My answer to this is one that Dave and I have bounced back and forth is
> the idea of micro IXs in every municipality and having that somehow tied
> into access to the ROW in counties etc.  Not fully hashed out, but the
> fiber is in the ground, it could be sold, but the carriers are not well
> incentivised to sell it.  It takes the better part of a year to get a DIA
> within 100ft of a Lumen hut sometimes...  Heck, it could even be a
> government program to get an μ*IX* with x feet of every school, city
> hall, and library.  I don't care how it's done but this would get abundance
> NEAR end users and open up essentially every town to competition.
>
> monopoly.  This is a historical thing for most cable and DSL incumbents.
> They have enjoyed virtual monopolies with cable owning population centers
> and DSL owning the outskirts and there is no product darwinism here where
> customer satisfaction is a pressure.  That may not be the future but it
> definitely is the past.  These companies may have to shift into customer
> satisfaction as a major part instead of a minor part of their corporate
> culture to fend off fttx and ultra-modern wisps.
>
> Starlink is not offering significant competition to major carriers.
> Starlink's 1.5 million customers are at LEAST 90% pulled from other
> satellite services and small ISPs.  Spectrum and Comcast's losses to
> starlink are measured in decimal points.
>
> Only fttx and ultra-modern wireless tech really threatens these
> incumbents.  Typical wisps aren't putting a dent in these guys, just
> scraping the paint off their bumper.  We're pulling customers at the scale
> of 'dozens' for example.  Spectrum's management doesn't know we exist we're
> such a small threat to them.
>
> But to further the point here, these fttx and ultra-modern wisps can only
> exist in places where there is adequate carrier services to start with.  In
> areas where they spend the money and do the build but there aren't good
> carrier services, those fiber services suck and the wISPs start to claw
> back even with inferior technology.  We've pulled quite a few customers off
> fttx deployments because of this sort of situation.
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 7:28 AM Rich Brown 
> wrote:
>
>> Thank you Jonathan for this clear description of the issues and their
>> history. I wonder if there's a fourth one - privacy.
>>
>> Rosenworcel's talk
>> https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397257A1.pdf also points out
>> that ISPs might want to monetize our traffic patterns and location data.
>> (This is less of an issue in the EU, but the US remains a Wild West in this
>> regard.)
>>
>> I am hopeful that the FCC will include this in their NPRM (which must be
>> available by now but I haven't looked...)
>>
>> - Rich Brown
>>
>> > On Sep 29, 2023, at 12:54 AM, Jonathan Morton via Rpm <
>> r...@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On 29 Sep, 2023, at 1:19 am, David Lang via Bloat <
>> bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Dave T called out earlier that the rise of bittorrent was a large part
>> of the inital NN discussion here in the US. But a second large portion was
>> a money grab from ISPs thinking that they could hold up large paid websites
>> (netflix for example) for additional fees by threatening to make their
>> service less useful to their users (viewing their users as an asset to be
>> marketed to the websites rather than customers to be satisfied by providing
>> them access to the websites)
>> >>
>> >> I don't know if a new round of "it's not fair that Netflix 

Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[dan via Bloat]

ok, lots and lots of great comments here for sure.

bandwidth abundance:  Not for most people and ISPs.  The 'carriers' aren't
carrying to many places at affordable rates.  I've pulled quotes from Lumen
and Zayo at over $5k/month/gig.  We typically pay 900-1400 for a gig of
service.  This isn't abundance and it's widespread and it leaves only
major providers that can afford/amortize out 100G transits etc.
My answer to this is one that Dave and I have bounced back and forth is the
idea of micro IXs in every municipality and having that somehow tied into
access to the ROW in counties etc.  Not fully hashed out, but the fiber is
in the ground, it could be sold, but the carriers are not well incentivised
to sell it.  It takes the better part of a year to get a DIA within 100ft
of a Lumen hut sometimes...  Heck, it could even be a government program to
get an μ*IX* with x feet of every school, city hall, and library.  I don't
care how it's done but this would get abundance NEAR end users and open up
essentially every town to competition.

monopoly.  This is a historical thing for most cable and DSL incumbents.
They have enjoyed virtual monopolies with cable owning population centers
and DSL owning the outskirts and there is no product darwinism here where
customer satisfaction is a pressure.  That may not be the future but it
definitely is the past.  These companies may have to shift into customer
satisfaction as a major part instead of a minor part of their corporate
culture to fend off fttx and ultra-modern wisps.

Starlink is not offering significant competition to major carriers.
Starlink's 1.5 million customers are at LEAST 90% pulled from other
satellite services and small ISPs.  Spectrum and Comcast's losses to
starlink are measured in decimal points.

Only fttx and ultra-modern wireless tech really threatens these
incumbents.  Typical wisps aren't putting a dent in these guys, just
scraping the paint off their bumper.  We're pulling customers at the scale
of 'dozens' for example.  Spectrum's management doesn't know we exist we're
such a small threat to them.

But to further the point here, these fttx and ultra-modern wisps can only
exist in places where there is adequate carrier services to start with.  In
areas where they spend the money and do the build but there aren't good
carrier services, those fiber services suck and the wISPs start to claw
back even with inferior technology.  We've pulled quite a few customers off
fttx deployments because of this sort of situation.


On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 7:28 AM Rich Brown  wrote:

> Thank you Jonathan for this clear description of the issues and their
> history. I wonder if there's a fourth one - privacy.
>
> Rosenworcel's talk
> https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397257A1.pdf also points out
> that ISPs might want to monetize our traffic patterns and location data.
> (This is less of an issue in the EU, but the US remains a Wild West in this
> regard.)
>
> I am hopeful that the FCC will include this in their NPRM (which must be
> available by now but I haven't looked...)
>
> - Rich Brown
>
> > On Sep 29, 2023, at 12:54 AM, Jonathan Morton via Rpm <
> r...@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >
> >> On 29 Sep, 2023, at 1:19 am, David Lang via Bloat <
> bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Dave T called out earlier that the rise of bittorrent was a large part
> of the inital NN discussion here in the US. But a second large portion was
> a money grab from ISPs thinking that they could hold up large paid websites
> (netflix for example) for additional fees by threatening to make their
> service less useful to their users (viewing their users as an asset to be
> marketed to the websites rather than customers to be satisfied by providing
> them access to the websites)
> >>
> >> I don't know if a new round of "it's not fair that Netflix doesn't pay
> us for the bandwidth to service them" would fall flat at this point or not.
> >
> > I think there were three more-or-less separate concerns which have, over
> time, fallen under the same umbrella:
> >
> >
> > 1:  Capacity-seeking flows tend to interfere with latency-sensitive
> flows, and the "induced demand" phenomenon means that increases in link
> rate do not in themselves solve this problem, even though they may be sold
> as doing so.
> >
> > This is directly addressed by properly-sized buffers and/or AQM, and
> even better by FQ and SQM.  It's a solved problem, so long as the solutions
> are deployed.  It's not usually necessary, for example, to specifically
> enhance service for latency-sensitive traffic, if FQ does a sufficiently
> good job.  An increased link rate *does* enhance service quality for both
> latency-sensitive and capacity-seeking traffic, provided FQ is in use.
> >
> >
> > 2:  Swarm traffic tends to drown out conventional traffic, due to
> congestion control algorithms which try to be more-or-less fair on a
> per-flow basis, and the substantially larger number of parallel flows used

Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Livingood, Jason via Bloat]

On 9/29/23, 09:29, "Rich Brown" mailto:richb.hano...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> Thank you Jonathan for this clear description of the issues and their 
> history. I wonder if there's a fourth one - privacy. 
> Rosenworcel's talk also points out that ISPs might want to monetize our 
> traffic patterns and location data. (This is less of an issue in the EU, but 
> the US remains a Wild West in this regard.) 

That reference is to mobile networks in the US - but the US-EU contrast you 
make is a good one! The EU IMO does privacy right - it is not sector-specific 
regulation but is general privacy protecting law that protects user data no 
matter the entity collecting/aggregating/sharing. In the US we seem to pursue 
sector-specific privacy law - like specific to credit cards. What we end up 
with is a real mess and I would love to see comprehensive national data privacy 
legislation - but our legislative body can’t even agree right now to keep our 
government funded past this coming Sunday. ;-)

IANAL but it seems like if the US wanted to provide comprehensive location data 
privacy then it would have a uniform law that applied not just to a MNO with 
towers that can locate a handset, but also what the apps loaded on that handset 
with access to GPS can do with the data as well - and any other party that 
might be able to collect data.

JL 


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Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Rich Brown via Bloat]

Thank you Jonathan for this clear description of the issues and their history. 
I wonder if there's a fourth one - privacy. 

Rosenworcel's talk https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397257A1.pdf 
also points out that ISPs might want to monetize our traffic patterns and 
location data. (This is less of an issue in the EU, but the US remains a Wild 
West in this regard.) 

I am hopeful that the FCC will include this in their NPRM (which must be 
available by now but I haven't looked...)

- Rich Brown

> On Sep 29, 2023, at 12:54 AM, Jonathan Morton via Rpm 
>  wrote:
> 
>> On 29 Sep, 2023, at 1:19 am, David Lang via Bloat 
>>  wrote:
>> 
>> Dave T called out earlier that the rise of bittorrent was a large part of 
>> the inital NN discussion here in the US. But a second large portion was a 
>> money grab from ISPs thinking that they could hold up large paid websites 
>> (netflix for example) for additional fees by threatening to make their 
>> service less useful to their users (viewing their users as an asset to be 
>> marketed to the websites rather than customers to be satisfied by providing 
>> them access to the websites)
>> 
>> I don't know if a new round of "it's not fair that Netflix doesn't pay us 
>> for the bandwidth to service them" would fall flat at this point or not.
> 
> I think there were three more-or-less separate concerns which have, over 
> time, fallen under the same umbrella:
> 
> 
> 1:  Capacity-seeking flows tend to interfere with latency-sensitive flows, 
> and the "induced demand" phenomenon means that increases in link rate do not 
> in themselves solve this problem, even though they may be sold as doing so.
> 
> This is directly addressed by properly-sized buffers and/or AQM, and even 
> better by FQ and SQM.  It's a solved problem, so long as the solutions are 
> deployed.  It's not usually necessary, for example, to specifically enhance 
> service for latency-sensitive traffic, if FQ does a sufficiently good job.  
> An increased link rate *does* enhance service quality for both 
> latency-sensitive and capacity-seeking traffic, provided FQ is in use.
> 
> 
> 2:  Swarm traffic tends to drown out conventional traffic, due to congestion 
> control algorithms which try to be more-or-less fair on a per-flow basis, and 
> the substantially larger number of parallel flows used by swarm traffic.  
> This also caused subscribers using swarm traffic to impair the service of 
> subscribers who had nothing to do with it.
> 
> FQ on a per-flow basis (see problem 1) actually amplifies this effect, and I 
> think it was occasionally used as an argument for *not* deploying FQ.  ISPs' 
> initial response was to outright block swarm traffic where they could 
> identify it, which was then softened to merely throttling it heavily, before 
> NN regulations intervened.  Usage quotas also showed up around this time, and 
> were probably related to this problem.
> 
> This has since been addressed by several means.  ISPs may use FQ on a 
> per-subscriber basis to prevent one subscriber's heavy traffic from degrading 
> service for another.  Swarm applications nowadays tend to employ altruistic 
> congestion control which deliberately compensates for the large number of 
> flows, and/or mark them with one or more of the Least Effort class DSCPs.  
> Hence, swarm applications are no longer as damaging to service quality as 
> they used to be.  Usage quotas, however, still remain in use as a profit 
> centre, to the point where an "unlimited" service is a rare and precious 
> specimen in many jurisdictions.
> 
> 
> 3:  ISPs merged with media distribution companies, creating a conflict of 
> interest in which the media side of the business wanted the internet side to 
> actively favour "their own" media traffic at the expense of "the 
> competition".  Some ISPs began to actively degrade Netflix traffic, in 
> particular by refusing to provision adequate peering capacity at the nodes 
> through which Netflix traffic predominated, or by zero-rating (for the 
> purpose of usage quotas) traffic from their own media empire while refusing 
> to do the same for Netflix traffic.
> 
> **THIS** was the true core of Net Neutrality.  NN regulations forced ISPs to 
> carry Netflix traffic with reasonable levels of service, even though they 
> didn't want to for purely selfish and greedy commercial reasons.  NN 
> succeeded in curbing an anti-competitive and consumer-hostile practice, which 
> I am perfectly sure would resume just as soon as NN regulations were repealed.
> 
> And this type of practice is just the sort of thing that technologies like 
> L4S are designed to support.  The ISPs behind L4S actively do not want a 
> technology that works end-to-end over the general Internet.  They want 
> something that can provide a domination service within their own walled 
> gardens.  That's why L4S is a NN hazard, and why they actively resisted all 
> attempts to displace it with SCE.
> 
> 
> All of the above 

Re: [Bloat] [Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Sebastian Moeller via Bloat]

Hi David,


> On Sep 29, 2023, at 00:19, David Lang via Rpm  
> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 28 Sep 2023, Livingood, Jason via Bloat wrote:
> 
>> Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2023 20:48:58 +
>> From: "Livingood, Jason via Bloat" 
>> Reply-To: "Livingood, Jason" 
>> To: dan , Dave Taht 
>> Cc: Rpm ,
>>Dave Taht via Starlink ,
>>    bloat ,
>>    libreqos ,
>>Jamal Hadi Salim 
>> Subject: Re: [Bloat] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] [Rpm] net neutrality back in the
>>news
>>> dan  wrote:
>> 
>>> "(I assume most ISPs want happy customers)."
> 
>>> made me laugh a little.  'Most' by quantity of businesses maybe, but 'most' 
>>> in terms of customers being served by puts the Spectrums and Comcasts in 
>>> the mix (in the US) and they don't care about happy customers they care 
>>> about defacto monopolies in markets so that they don't have to care about 
>>> happy customers. 
>> 
>> In that context, happy customers stay longer (less churn) and spend more 
>> (upgrades, multiple services). And unhappy customers generate costs via 
>> disconnects (loss of revenue, costs to replace them with a new customer to 
>> just stay at the same subscriber levels), and costs via customer contacts 
>> (call center staff).
> 
> Except when you have a monopoly in an area, at which point the ability of 
> customers to leave is minimal, and years of bad customer service means that 
> people don't bother complaining, so the call center staffing costs are lower 
> than they should be.
> 
>>> For the last mile, I'm actually less concerned with pure NN and more 
>>> concerned with no-blocking or 'brand' prioritization and required/label 
>>> transparency...
>> 
>> The two thoughts your comments (thanks for the response BTW!) trigger are:
> 
>> 1 - Often regulation looks to the past - in this case maybe an era of 
>> bandwidth scarcity where prioritization may have mattered. I think we're in 
>> the midst of a shift into bandwidth abundance where priority does not 
>> matter. What will is latency/responsiveness, content/compute localization, 
>> reliability, consistency, security, etc.
> 
>> 2 - If an ISP blocked YouTube or Netflix, they'd incur huge customer care 
>> (contact) costs and would see people start to immediately shift to 
>> competitors (5G FWA, FTTP or DOCSIS, WISP, Starlink/LEO, etc.). It just does 
>> not seem like something that could realistically happen any longer in the US.
> 
> Dave T called out earlier that the rise of bittorrent was a large part of the 
> inital NN discussion here in the US. But a second large portion was a money 
> grab from ISPs thinking that they could hold up large paid websites (netflix 
> for example) for additional fees by threatening to make their service less 
> useful to their users (viewing their users as an asset to be marketed to the 
> websites rather than customers to be satisfied by providing them access to 
> the websites)
> 
> I don't know if a new round of "it's not fair that Netflix doesn't pay us for 
> the bandwidth to service them" would fall flat at this point or not.

[SM] In the EU we have this as a continuous lobbying effort by big 
incumbent ISPs (a move to have the large content providers (CAPs) shoulder 
their "fair" share of the cost of modernizing the networks*), why this flys 
with at least some EU politicians is that the intended payees of this scheme 
are all located outside the EU and hence will have little support by the EU 
citizenry... (The latter is IMHO not fully undeserved either, the days of "do 
no evil" are long behind us and big tech often forgets that we are all in this 
together, but I digress). In the EU one of these days such an effort might 
actually succeed, as much as I dislike this.




*) This argument about fairness is indeed made by the same ISPs that already 
charge their eye-ball customers for the same capacity they say they need to 
built with particpatoin of the CAPs


> 
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