[NNagain] On "Throttling" behaviors

[Mark Steckel]

Adding to some of the points that Sebastian made that I largely agree with.

Some of the big ISPs own or are affiliated with content creation and/or distribution companies. AT&T owns Time-Warner, Comcast owns NBC and produces TV shows and movies. Some other large ISPs have done deals with content providers to provide the content over their network. These latter deals are a source of revenue of the ISPs and a way for the content owners to juice the distribution and audience for their content.

In both cases it is rational for the ISPs to favor this content over other content. This can be done by zero tier ratings, throttling, etc.

All this is nearly identical to the rail road industry during the 1800's (at least in the US). One example: A rail road company became involved with a coal mining organization. The Rail road company then decided to disfavor a competing coal mining company by charging more and slowing traffic. There are many examples of this from the rail roads in the 1800's. Everyone was against this except for the companies that profited from it. Laws and regulations were created to force the rails roads to be "common carriers" (as defined in the US). [Apparently the term "common carrier" has a different meaning in Europe.]

It is reasonable to expect that large corporate ISPs will act in their self interest, and in ways that harm the public. 

While there are numerous issues around NN, the core of it starts with whether the public and companies that use the Internet are entitled to transparent, fair and and equal access to the Internet. It is not about whether things like VOIP traffic is prioritized, that is a distraction IMO. It's about whether an ISP can favor traffic to their benefit in ways that hurts consumers and other businesses. 

The experience with the rail road industry (at least in the US) provides a clear example of the abuses that occur when a company owns a choke point and decides they will exploit it. 

And finally, a few years before bittorrent brought a lot of these issues to the foreground Michael Powell (son of Colin Powell) was the chair of the FCC (appointed by pres Clinton). The cable companies had started providing Internet service over their cables during the 90's and had started looking at providing phone service. The Internet started with the traditional phone companies which were regulated under Title II. The cable companies did not want to be similarly regulated so Powell got the FCC to declare that Internet was an "informational service" which put it in a separate category which did not fall under Title II. The gist of this is Title II concerns about the Internet started well before bittorrent and bufferbloat entered the picture.








---- On Mon, 02 Oct 2023 09:43:40 -0400 Livingood, Jason via Nnagain  wrote ---

 > From: Nnagain nnagain-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net> on behalf of Patrick Maupin via Nnagain nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net>
 > 
 > > If there are no would-be bad actors, no regulation is needed.  But if there are would-be bad actors, then they will attempt to be instrumental in shaping any new regulations, and many of the presumed would-be
 >  bad actors have time, money, and histories of securing significant face time with regulatory agencies such as the FCC.
 > 
 > Often the ‘bad actor’ is really just a ‘dumb actor’ that did something without thinking it through fully or understanding root causes, secondary effects of a network change, etc. In our industry (writ large)
 >  it seems like 99% of the negative stuff can be ascribed to mistakes/lack of foresight/incorrect root cause analysis/etc and 1% is due to some ‘evil genius plan’. ;-)
 > 
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