15 Facts About Net Neutrality
By Barry Ritholtz - August 23rd, 2010, 2:30PM
Via: Online MBA Programs
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Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
August 23rd, 2010 at 3:14 pm
I hesitate to get behind any package like “Net Neutrality”, “Financial Reform”, Tea Party” or “Health Care Reform” because the ugly, compromised power grab that comes out of the machine looks so little like the elegant, principled outline that goes in.
Let the phone companies create the threatened 2-tiered system, then let market participants like me find a way to get to ritholtz.com instead of msnbc.com on our own. I will be more effective in that mission than my senator.
August 23rd, 2010 at 3:24 pm
not far different from the argument for banning faster data feeds from exchanges…everyone should have similar access…funny how the same debates pop up in a variety of areas.
August 23rd, 2010 at 3:55 pm
The trend is firmly established. Either your are in the club or you’re under the club. The System must exclude contrary messages, and unfiltered discourse. The obscenity implicit in this drive by operators like Comcast to exert exceptional control over communication in this territory is that their infrastructure buildout was subsidized by the US taxpayer/ and its consumers.
August 23rd, 2010 at 4:23 pm
I love listening to prattle like this from people who don’t know jack about the internals of IP routing and forwarding. It goes back to my desire to have liberals arts majors STFU about that which they know nothing.
Now here’s a fact: Not all IP traffic will be treated equally. Get used to it, it is a fact, a technical requirement. Even below the IP level, there is a preferential treatment of traffic. Example: Frame Relay has had a “discard eligible” bit (DE) that can be set on a Frame Relay header that tells a FR switch “when you get congested, you can drop this frame to retain the frames that do not have DE set.”
Even if we don’t have preferential discarding of frames, there is preferential reservation of resources (eg, buffer space and transmission queue slots) that exists today in routers. Go look at the RSVP protocol if you don’t believe me. NB how long RSVP has been around, BTW.
Lawyers and other know-nothings can legislate and bluster all they want on this issue, but in the end, buffer space in routers and switches is not infinite, and when the shit hits the fan, the engineers designing routers and switches have to make a call who gets their packets dropped.
I’ve written router code. Your postings are going through my code in routers all over the ‘net as we speak. I can guarantee you this: Not all IP packets are created equally, they won’t be treated equally, they never have been and they won’t be in the future. As the market moves towards voice-over-IP for phone service, “smart grid” power control systems, etc, I can guarantee you this: A 911 phone call’s IP packets will have preference over your porn surfing. The control and stats packets that affect the availability and stability of electric power will have preference over blog postings.
Call Morty and make book on it.
August 23rd, 2010 at 4:31 pm
dsawy – you obviously haven’t understood anything, have you? Do you really think this is a technical discussion?
According to your logic, only doctors can have an opinion on healthcare? Only engineers on road safety?
August 23rd, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Plus, thought provoking data is very sparse.
Video currently sucks up more than half of all bandwidth because it is dense.
Something like this comment section is such a small load, you won’t notice a speed difference.
The fight to be fought is between Comcast, Dish Network, YouTube and Verizon, not Big Picture and Propaganda.com.
August 23rd, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Feeling better now?
“the engineers designing routers and switches have to make a call who gets their packets dropped”
Yeah, okay. The engineers are making the calls.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=998172
August 23rd, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Heck, our regular highways have a two tiered system !!
Some lanes “reserved” for people with multiple occupants in the car aka HOV lane(s) and others for everyone else.
Some highways are toll roads which are built on public land probably with tax payer money that only people who can afford are able to drive on. (I know it is not expensive to pay tolls but toll is a non zero positive value)
So lets get real !!!
August 23rd, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Here’s another cool interactive chart (via Slashdot)
It uses the icons of the most popular websites and sizes them according to their site hits.
http://nmap.org/favicon/
August 23rd, 2010 at 5:49 pm
This is a weird discussion, as a consumer I can choose from low to high cable bandwidth and if needed telephone bandwidth. So in my neighbourhood, on the consumer side everything is allright.
Of course if there would be any laws needed, net neutrality is preferred: All bits and bytes have the same rights until proven guilty. In principle no discrimination… All packages are born equal.
What’s the problem? Websites need to buy bandwidth too, just like the consumer does.
What’s the problem? Internet traffic is internet traffic & that’s it.
August 23rd, 2010 at 6:01 pm
I don’t claim to know that much about it, but I think it’s a little more complicated than Reinko is making it out to be. Not all traffic on the web is the same. I think of it as a good bit different than a water pipe, where water is water and it’s all coming out in the order it went in the other end. Not the same situation here.
However, I’m letting my ignorance show, and I’ll say that’s about all I know about data traffic, and “packets” as it were….
August 23rd, 2010 at 6:04 pm
@Reinko 5:49pm
Internet traffic is internet traffic & that’s it.
NO, like dsawy@4:23pm said all packets are NOT created equal. FCC requires VoIP providers like Vonage to guarantee 911 call support. 911 call coming out of your Vonage phone is a packet, just like the packets used to deliver porn to you. When a choice has to be made between who goes first, I think its clear that 911 call packet goes first.
August 23rd, 2010 at 6:07 pm
BR’s post over the weekend about competition in the soda business was a good warm up to the ideas in this post by Fred Wilson. I am not a big fan of regulation but some regulation is absolutely necessary since the bigger telecommunications players seem to control the legislative process as well as they do. There needs to be a bias toward encouraging smaller start ups and actually giving them a chance to succeed.
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/regulation-strangulation.html
August 23rd, 2010 at 7:53 pm
The net result without net neutrality will be a “Legacy” internet, slow, unresponsive and still paid for as at present, then high speed Corporate networks with highadditional costs.
Pay to play. The American way!
August 23rd, 2010 at 10:53 pm
@dsawy: There’s a huge difference between “preferential treatment” and “discriminatory treatment”.
Has nothing to do with the underlying protocols.
Has everything to do with unfair, discriminatory bandwidth throttling based on source or destination or bandwidth demands.
Sure, the gov has buggered things with 911 demands and GTS and ETS. But that’s a drop in the bucket.
We do not compare favorably with other countries in terms of access bandwidth and cost.
Video is a huge load. And voice has delay and jitter requirements to deal with.
But let’s not make it a mandate to require multi-tiered service based on corporate destinations.
We already have price discrimination. I can get an access pipe of differing sizes based on my needs and willingness to pay.
But I have to feel confident my bandwidth usage is being handled fairly WITHIN the network and on a non-discriminatory basis (e.g.; Google vsYahoo search vs peer-to-peer).
The conflict is between carriers and ISPs supporting the bandwidth they have promised and the capital investment needed to do that.
Every American should be familiar with market segmentation based on willingness to pay.
But the internet is a little more of a “shared commons” traversing regulated, subsidized facilities.
And its social value has to be considered as well.
August 23rd, 2010 at 11:47 pm
@Arequipa01 – complete non-sequitur.
@caseoane – the matter of which packets get priority is a technical discussion. The policy of which do and do is not, but the fact that traffic is currently prioritized, that traffic will continue to be prioritized and there are net connectivity reasons as well as reasons of pre-existing policy (eg, emergency traffic) why it must be are technical and trump all talk of “neutrality” policy.
Lawyers can complain all they want. They’re irrelevant.
August 24th, 2010 at 12:24 am
Did anyone honestly think the Corporatists were setting this up for the benefits of free speech and equality for all mankind? LOL!
You have to give praise to the providers though: they paved the streets, built up the fabulous drugs & drug dealers (Google, etc.), have all of us hooked, and now plan to make us pay for an inferior version of a drug we cannot live without. Brilliant business model!
Be prepared for the Internet to have 100 sites of bull$#%t dedicated to Lindsey Lohan, Cramer, and Extreme Housewife Makeover or whatever happens to be the trend in the future.
Welcome back to Oz folks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSiJbhoA8zw&feature=related
August 24th, 2010 at 12:38 am
NO, like dsawy@4:23pm said all packets are NOT created equal.
We’re not really talking about packets or buffer space or RSVP, though. We can all agree that 911 calls, etc, get preference during periods of network congestion. The operative phrase is “periods of network congestion.” What is being discussed is the pay-to-play tiering of traffic streams all of the time where Comcast, Verizon, et al, determine when and what order your data is sent and received – rather than it remain mostly a bandwidth issue as it is now. The engineering jive is mostly irrelevant to this discussion.
August 24th, 2010 at 2:37 am
[...] Via the Big Picture: [...]
August 24th, 2010 at 5:04 am
what the…
Tiered services? How? The only way you can do that is by either laying more cable, or slowing everyone down and letting rich gamer kids play. Thats nuts! On one side you get a slower service than what you signed up for, and on the other you get to pay more for exactly what you were supposed to have gotten anyway.
And what about the stuff being mentioned around 2008 – before the discussion was muddied up ? Back then the proposals were transparent thievery. Cable providers wanted to charge Google (and other content providers) for sending content over their networks, even though Google already paid their ISP for their bandwidth. Basically they wanted to charge for the service, and then for the type of content that runs on it.
America’s internet and telecom sector is famous worldwide as an example of what not to do. Its either tragic, or hilarious, that the country which created the internet, has worse service than its peers.
To add to matters, “filtering” also often relates closely to packet inspection and brings a host of privacy and control issues up.
August 24th, 2010 at 8:37 am
this thread is following the net neutrality side of pipe flows .. there is another side – that of pay’g/share’g content .. in other words – train this beast for profit maximization
I was getting a LOL on the 911 calls get priority over porn downloads .. next step there how about 3DHD surveillance cameras on every Chicago street corner to the 911 response center .. for you @ TBP – the markets are going crazy – commercial brokers get pref flow if they pay for pref treatment (taxes write-off – why not)
back to a main point – pay’g for these leaps in tech world .. we have 3DHD become’g mainstream .. both I & Dsawy know ITs got to get paid for -or throttle down -or lose the customers that are troublesome … I’m sure there is a balance point . there always is …. like the Cablebox make’g a comeback .. yuk .. so much for cablereadyTVs ….. these consolidating media industries in this new age of mind reading for the purpose of capital extraction and coercion .. umm .. yuk
August 24th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
@MikeinSF: Agree totally.
August 25th, 2010 at 5:38 am
dsawy Says: “I love listening to prattle like this from people who don’t know jack about the internals of IP routing and forwarding. It goes back to my desire to have liberals arts majors STFU about that which they know nothing.”
Actually the post and most comments (besides yours) seemed to show a lot better understanding of the nuances surrounding this issue than your claptrap diversions/simplifications about the necessity of QoS.
Hopefully you’re a good coder as your inability to see the broader implications of the code that someone else has you write, kind of limits your prospects in the board room. Might I suggest a bit of a broader focus in your education? Maybe an EE/liberal arts double major?
There are plenty of us here that know bytes and bucks. I’m pretty sure that the more articulate proponents of net neutrality don’t much dispute the idea that “when the shit hits the fan, the engineers designing routers and switches have to make a call who gets their packets dropped” . Personally I’d prefer you engineer types focus on ‘what types’ of packets to drop as opposed to ‘whose’ packets to drop…but as long as you focus on ‘engineering’ I’d give you some latitude.
However, when that decision on ‘whose’ packets get dropped moves up to the marketing departments of the of the various internet infrastructure providers we then have a pretty serious policy issue to debate with far reaching implications. Whether you understand this or not, we are pretty much at this point from a ‘capabilities’ perspective and your rant only serves to confuse the non technical and contributes nothing to the policy discussion.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:20 am
[...] http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/08/net-neutrality/ [...]