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

Sat Sep 30 08:00:26 EDT 2023

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
<https://www.martingeddes.com/ofcom-publishes-pnsol-scientific-report-on-net-neutrality/>
*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

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On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 6:15 PM dan via Rpm <rpm at lists.bufferbloat.net>
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 <richb.hanover at 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
>> 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 <
>> rpm at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On 29 Sep, 2023, at 1:19 am, David Lang via Bloat <
>> bloat at 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
>> 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 were made more difficult to solve by the monopolistic
>> nature of the Internet service industry.  It is actively difficult for
>> Internet users to move to a truly different service, especially one based
>> on a different link technology.  When attempts are made to increase
>> competition, for example by deploying a publicly-funded network, the
>> incumbents actively sabotage those attempts by any means they can.
>> Monopolies are inherently customer-hostile, and arguments based on market
>> forces fail in their presence.
>> >
>> > - Jonathan Morton
>> >
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