[NNagain] "FCC explicitly prohibits fast lanes, closing possible net neutrality loophole"

[Robert McMahon]

Hmm, seems more about wiglomeration than regulation.  Per Dickens,

"Here he is, Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, comfortably putting his hands into
his pockets and stretching out his legs. "He must have a profession; he
must make some choice for himself. There will be a world more wiglomeration
about it, I suppose, but it must be done."

"More what, guardian?" said I.

"More wiglomeration," said he. "It's the only name I know for the thing. He
is a ward in Chancery, my dear. Kenge and Carboy will have something to say
about it; Master Somebody--a sort of ridiculous sexton, digging graves for
the merits of causes in a back room at the end of Quality Court, Chancery
Lane--will have something to say about it; counsel will have something to
say about it; the Chancellor will have something to say about it; the
satellites will have something to say about it; they will all have to be
handsomely feed, all round, about it; the whole thing will be vastly
ceremonious, wordy, unsatisfactory, and expensive, and I call it, in
general, wiglomeration. How mankind ever came to be afflicted with
wiglomeration, or for whose sins these young people ever fell into a pit of
it, I don't know; so it is."

On Wed, May 15, 2024, 2:43 PM Karl Auerbach via Nnagain <
nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> As a matter of drafting the FCC has left some potholes:
>
> "We clarify that a BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service] provider's
> decision to speed up 'on the basis of Internet content, applications, or
> services' would 'impair or degrade' other content, applications, or
> services which are not given the same treatment,"
>
> That phrase "speed up" is too vague.  Does it conflict with active or fair
> queue management?  Does it prohibit things that some Ethernet NIC
> "offloads" do (but which could be done by a provider) such as TCP data
> aggregation (i.e. the merging of lots of small TCP segments into one big
> one)? Does it prohibit insertion of an ECN bit that would have the effect
> of slowing a sender of packets?  Might it preclude a provider "helpfully"
> dropping stale video packets that would arrive at a users video rendering
> codec too late to be useful?  Could there be an issue with selective
> compression?  Or, to really get nerdy - given that a lot of traffic uses
> Ethernet frames as a model, there can be a non-trivial amount of hidden,
> usually unused, bandwidth in that gap between the end of tiny IP packets
> and the end of minimum length Ethernet frames. (I've seen that space used
> for things like license management.)  Or might this impact larger path
> issues, such as routing choices, either dynamic or based on contractual
> relationships - such as conversational voice over terrestrial or
> low-earth-orbit paths while background file transfers are sent via fat, but
> large latency paths such as geo-synch satellite?  If an ISP found a means
> of blocking spam from being delivered, would that violate the rules?  (Same
> question for blocking of VoIP calls from undesirable sources.  It may also
> call into question even the use of IP address blacklists or reverse path
> algorithms that block traffic coming from places where it has no business
> coming from.)
>
> The answers may be obvious to tech folks here but in the hands of
> troublesome lawyers (I'm one of those) these ambiguities could be elevated
> to be real headaches.
>
> These may seem like minor or even meaningless nits, but these are the
> kinds of things that can be used by lawyers (again, like me) to tie
> regulatory bodies into knots, which often a goal of some large
> organizations that do not like regulation.
>
> In addition, I can't put my finger on it, but I am sensing that without
> some flexibility the FCC neutrality rules may be creating a kind of no
> cost, tragedy of the commons situation.  Sometimes a bit of friction - cost
> - can be useful to either incentivize improvements and invention or to make
> things (like spam) less desirable/more expensive to abusers.
>
>         --karl--
> On 5/10/24 7:31 AM, Frantisek Borsik via Nnagain wrote:
>
> "Net neutrality proponents argued that these separate lanes for different
> kinds of traffic would degrade performance of traffic that isn't favored.
> The final FCC order released yesterday addresses that complaint.
>
> "We clarify that a BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service] provider's
> decision to speed up 'on the basis of Internet content, applications, or
> services' would 'impair or degrade' other content, applications, or
> services which are not given the same treatment," the FCC's final order
> said.
>
> The "impair or degrade" clarification means that speeding up is banned
> because the no-throttling rule says that ISPs "shall not impair or degrade
> lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or
> service."
>
>
> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/fcc-explicitly-prohibits-fast-lanes-closing-possible-net-neutrality-loophole/
>
>
> All the best,
>
> Frank
>
> Frantisek (Frank) Borsik
>
>
>
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik
>
> Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714
>
> iMessage, mobile: +420775230885
>
> Skype: casioa5302ca
>
> frantisek.borsik at gmail.com
>
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