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

[Karl Auerbach]

You are right, a simple expression of the goal is almost certainly a far 
better way to express a regulation than an endlessly detailed 
enumeration of things.

My concerns arise from a variety of sources.

First is the natural inclination of some large organizations to use 
regulatory language as a weapon, often twisting inadequately detailed 
expressions of intent around a Procrustean iron bed of regulatory 
definitions.

Second is that the US Supreme Court seems to be tending to cast disdain 
on the expertise of regulatory bodies, such as the FCC, to find sensible 
ways through difficult and ambiguous situations. (This legal stuff tends 
to go under the header of "Chevron deference" - 
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/chevron_deference ) Personally, I'd 
rather that smart people at the FCC figure this out rather than a bunch 
of j-random Congress critters.

Third is that sometimes it is useful to have a bit of financial or 
competitive fire to push innovation or to impede ill use. (Imagine if 
sending emails had a cost - that could have [perhaps] have slowed the 
rise of spam.)  So perhaps a small amount of non-neutrality could act as 
a driver or catalyst.

I am intrigued by the possibility of obtaining better efficiency from 
the net - by using underused bandwidth (hence my example of the spare 
space where a small IP packet does not fully occupy a minimum sized 
Ethernet frame.)  Some of these ideas could cause streams to piggyback 
on one another (such as how SMS messaging kinda piggybacked into the 
empty spaces of telco signalling protocols.)  We tend to focus our 
attention of big fat flows, like entertainment video or gaming, but 
there are a lot of small flows that could ride, with adequately 
reliability, for essentially no technical cost. These could include a 
lot of home, security, or medical monitoring stuff.)  This is hard to 
articulate - but there are real life analogies, such as the notion of 
van-pooling to airports, where a single vehicle carries diverse 
loads/passengers that have little relationship to one another except 
that they are traveling to and from roughly the same locations.)

A while back I wrote some notes about network measuring tools such as 
iperf.  One of the things that struck me was the number of bits that 
wrap even the smallest of packets. (For instance - 
https://www.iwl.com/blog/counting-bits )  For video that overhead is 
negligible, but for some forms of traffic (e.g. security alarms) that 
overhead can add up.

And yes, I am stepping dangerously close to notions of multiplexing 
within packets or at least within one of our most common wrappers for IP 
packets, Ethernet frames.

         --karl--

On 5/15/24 5:55 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> An interpretation of the intent might be not so much a prohibition of 
> various grades of service but that all grades are available on the 
> same terms to all comers.
>
> v
>
>
> On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 5:43 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
>>     <tel:+421%20919%20416%20714>
>>
>>     iMessage, mobile: +420775230885 <tel:+420%20775%20230%20885>
>>
>>     Skype: casioa5302ca
>>
>>     frantisek.borsik at gmail.com
>>
>>
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>
> -- 
> Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
> Vint Cerf
> Google, LLC
> 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor
> Reston, VA 20190
> +1 (571) 213 1346
>
>
> until further notice
>
>
>
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