[NNagain] Intro - and questions

[Karl Auerbach]

Hello everyone - I was surprised how fast this list populated and filled 
with useful content.

I observed the "network neutrality" some years back and eventually 
stopped following it because it felt more like rocks randomly bouncing 
around inside a can than a focused inquiry towards a clearly articulated 
goal.

I do not think network neutrality is impossible.  I see it as possible, 
but within limited, defined scopes.  And defining what NN, and defining 
those scopes, is is going to be difficult and there will be plenty of 
differing equally valid points of view.

My first questions are definitional:

- What do we mean by "net" in "net neutrality"?  Do we mean the carriage 
of IP packets in some what that is "fair", or at least not self-dealing 
by providers?  Or do we reach up into that realm felt by users - 
application behavior and performance?  (Example, is Google's actions 
vis-a-vis proprietary web extensions in Chrome a form of 
non-neutrality?  I could also understand claims that use of 
non-standardized media codecs or rapid deprecation of TLS digest 
algorithms are also forms of discrimination, although the latter does 
have some solid rationales behind it.)

My own sense is that it has become more important to view "net 
neutrality" through the eyes of users rather than down at the packet 
switching layers some of us with grey beards like to live in.

Someone raised the point about late 1800's discrimination on railroads 
(carrying coal or the infamous Standard Oil "rebates" from oil shipments 
by others.)  Low level price-to-transport arguments did not carry as 
much weight as the outrage of end users who realized they were paying 
more $$.  To my mind net neutrality is at least as much a political 
issue as a technical one, and if one wants to push a position that 
position is made stronger is the end user (who ultimately pays the 
bills) view is articulated and brought to bear.

- And what do we mean by "neutrality"?

I grew up in the era of the JC Whitney catalog of (largely bogus) car 
parts - through the right sequences of bolt-on parts you could turn a 
50hp VW bug into a raging monster that got thousands of miles per gallon 
of gasoline.  I see lots of ads for bolt-on network widgets that make 
similar claims about improving network performance.  Are those things 
"non neutral" or do we leave them outside in a bucket labeled "worthless 
snake oil"?

Back when we were developing entertainment grade video distribution 
(1995-early 2000s) Fred Baker and I worked on the RSVP (resource 
reservation) protocol - he did the router side, I did the client side.  
At the time I always felt that making resource reservations along a 
network path was a good idea, but I simultaneously wondered about the 
costs and the opinions of those who lived in the classic "best effort" 
world.  And I was concerned with the ability of providers to juggle all 
of these things without going technically bonkers or being financially 
drained.

I still have that concern about "who controls" and "who pays". And I'm 
sympathetic  to the view that "those who want better should pay more", 
at least to the extent that that paying more reflects actual costs of 
delivering more.  (There's a giant bag of worms in that phrase "actual 
costs", particularly in our world of multiple carriers along a path.)

- How do we measure things?

I have been appalled at the widespread use of "speed test" tools as the 
basis for product advertising and regulatory impositions.

Network performance, as perceived by a user is the result of an 
extremely complex interactions of factors beyond mere average data 
delivery bytes-per-second.  It includes everything from path MTU to 
delay variation (jitter) to loss and reordering to burst 
characteristics.  It also includes ancillary stuff like DNS lookup times 
and even (with IPv4), ARP re-resolution time.  And as a person who mixed 
Sun workstations and PC's back in "the early days", I've seen how even 
seemingly trivial parameters (in that case, Ethernet collision backoff 
times) could end up giving the entire cable to Suns and lock out the 
PC's entirely.

As some of you know, I have an evil side, an evil Mr. Hyde to my nicer 
Dr. Jekyll - I'm also a lawyer (California and US Federal.)

So I'm kinda used to the difficult question of figuring out the line 
between "light grey" and "dark grey" - situations in which there is no 
"correct" answer, just adequate ones.

And I wonder how we create quantitative, or at least comparative, 
expressions of network quality - how do we describe burst aspects (such 
as bursts of packet loss or the bunching together of packets?)  How do 
we separate foreseeable factors such as the solar blanking when a 
satellite transits the face of the sun as perceived from a particular 
ground station, from less predictable factors such as rain attenuating a 
satellite signal?

My own sense it that we are going to need both of statistical 
expressions of quality and softer qualitative expressions. Perhaps we 
could perhaps measure user experience, eg can a movie be watched with 
less than N seconds of frame breakup?  (This can get far more 
"interesting" when we move from essentially one-way traffic, e.g. 
watching a video, to interactive/conversational, such as a voice call or 
multi-player gaming.)

I won't ask, but I will allude to, the question of "who/what will 
enforce this?"

OK, now that I've made my "hello" I will lean back and lurk and learn 
for a while...

         --karl--