The carriers shouldn't even have any visibility to what is being carried, beyond what is necessary to route it to its destination.
Just like I don't want snail mail carriers opening my letters (even if it is strictly for the purpose of deciding whether or not they are important for speedy delivery).
There should be a protocol in which as much as possible is hidden. Even things like port numbers. From the traffic pattern it will usually be obvious whether it is bulk or interactive and such, and it has to be addressed, but beyond that, what protocol it is using, what port number and all that should be shrouded from prying eyes. If I have two connections going to the same host, it should not be possible for a wiretapper to tell which packets belong to which connection only "host A sent some blob to host B".
The content of the communication can be (and many times is) encrypted. Encryption is irrelevant here. You still need addresses of the local and remote to make the connection happen. That plus some pretty simple heuristics are all that is needed to make an informed guess into the nature of media in transit.
You could spin this argument in the other direction and say that the contents in the pipe should be extremely visible and transparent to everybody. It would be a complete violation of privacy, but it will also identify (to everybody) the kinds of traffic flowing and the costs of that traffic in terms of congestion (if any).
> Just like I don't want snail mail carriers opening my letters (even if it is strictly for the purpose of deciding whether or not they are important for speedy delivery).
But you can pay for express delivery in which case your package is delivered over the other packages. Isn't that a good analogy of non-NN world?
No, the non-NN analogy would be if you wanted to send/receive packages with Amazon it would be one price, and with someone else it would be another price.
You do know that Amazon does that right? Some sellers offer free shipping, but their price reflects the added shipping.
Before you say 'I meant UPS charging one price to one manufacturer, and another to another', then UPS does that too. You can be very certain that UPS charges Amazon much lower shipping fee (due to the bulk business) than an independent seller on Amazon.
Vendors have been charging different fees to different businesses since forever, and we never had a problem mostly because nobody ever finds it more profitable to charge for printing Bible more than printing Sears catalog just because they don't like Bible.
The article makes some good points. The problem the article illustrates is that the interconnection points that comprise the hardware of the internet are commercial property that costs money by commercial companies who derive profit from those piped.
A valid solution is to regulate both the network providers and the content providers. The network providers should not be allowed to selectively throttle connectivity to targeted sources. At the same time the content providers should not be allowed to exploit their users with malicious script execution pushed through online advertisements and excessive privacy violations.
If the online advertising industry weren't fixated upon stalking users and harmful negligence perhaps there would be less incentive for the network providers to throttle that content. There would certainly be a lot more bandwidth. I will just leave these here:
The term "Net Neutrality" was a very poor choice to describe the situation. The majority of people have no idea what the term is referring to without reading the details. In hindsight, something simpler like "Keep the internet free" or "Fight for the internet" would have been much more effective to rally up non tech individuals who have no idea what we are fighting for. Just my 0.02
The interstate highway analogy isn't really excellent either. "Slow lanes." So bandwidth = speed limit. Now instead of ISPs dictating your speed, it's the government. The interstate has speed limits. Drat, foiled again!
The argument here is against capitalism. The owner of the network dictates what happens on that network. To take a argument directly from HN, if you want (Net Neutrality | free speech), go build your own (network | Facebook).
The author even makes that argument. "The clear solution is to appropriate the means of distribution, the cables and airwaves, and develop mesh internets."
Guess what, now you're an "evil ISP" who is traffic shaping on your own equipment.
Are we going to have Net Neutrality for Facebook and Twitter too? Do we limit what they can do on their services? Classify them as a public utility?
How do you figure? Government officials make arbitrary decisions all the time. Border agents for instance have wide latitude, lots of regulations are unevenly applied, and DAs often spend their resources based on public perception and press coverage.
Then, as it was said in another HN comment, make ISP liable like facebook and twitter are. They have to detect and prevent DDoS from their customers, detect and prevent malware, as well as child pornography and stuff. If they want to look at what you're sending and receiving, they should be liable for it too.
If a law allowed all post office to take a look into your personnal mail, they should at least uses this power to prevent criminal activities.
>They have to detect and prevent DDoS from their customers, detect and prevent malware, as well as child pornography and stuff.
What makes you think they don't do this already?
I can't run a mail server on port 25. I call my ISP and ask why. They tell me they are combatting open relays, and I need to accept a business class agreement with them to open the port.
ISPs have data retention policies to assist law enforcement with investigations into criminal activity. They will terminate your account for breaking the law as well.
The article echoes something I've been thinking lately, which is we won't win unless we go on the offensive. We need to rally around collectivizing the entire infrastructure of the Internet as a public good. Clearly the corporate interests are going for the kill. We can't be fighting every year just to maintain the same ground - we need to tackle this problem at its root.
Give ISPs a choice. They can choose to be blind to traffic. Or they can choose to be liable for it. No in between.
You want to open the Pandora's box of inspecting the content of packets? OK, you're now liable for malware probing your clients, and for malware probes coming from your clients! If your network is helping generate a DDoS attack, you can be sued for it.
Or you can avoid liability by simply being the network equivalent of a common carrier. You didn't generate or alter the packets, you're not responsible for their content.
I was curious about the idea of the Internet as a public utility several years ago, so I did some research. Specifically I looked into just how something is determined to be a "public utility" in the first place. Why is my water line regulated and the price of the water pegged to the cost of providing the service? Why do I get a letter explaining any proposed rate increase with a (required) explanation of how it arises from an actual increase in the cost of providing the service? Surely it wasn't always that way, not for water or electricity or anything else. So how did they go from being private services controlled by companies to public utilities generally either run by municipalities or privately owned utility companies answerable to a public utilities commission?
It turns out the answer is fairly simple. Although each utility followed its own path historically, it all boiled down to one question: Is the benefit society as a whole would derive from the cheap, ubiquitous availability of the thing greater than the damage which would be done to society by the elimination of competition and extraction of profit from the thing?
I think that question is a very easy one to answer for Internet access. The benefit to society would be incalculably greater than the damage done by eliminating the profit of Comcast and AT&T and Time Warner and whatnot. Just for one, we could close every physical government office in the nation and save billions by permitting the workers from there to work from home while citizens access everything via the Internet. So long as Internet access is a luxury, you can't do that. Then you have businesses. We don't charge restaurants 100x as much for water because they make soup with it, and "business connections" that transfer no more data than a home with a few teenagers shouldn't cost any more either. And if the cost was based on the cost of providing the service, then like everything in tech it would shrink with amazing rapidity.
I don't disagree with you, but I want to play devil's advocate. Unlike water and electricity, the internet is still kind of a luxury. If the electricity cuts out for a couple of days, all of our food rots, and we starve and die. If the water cuts out, we get dehydrated and die.
If the internet cuts out for a few days... well.. It'll suck. But nobody will die. If I recall correctly, 60% of the internet's traffic is Netflix, with the remaining diced up between Youtube, streaming, and social media. The internet, as it stands right now, is a global entertainment system. I know we do business on it, and it's a boon for communications, but it's not a life or death thing.
Aside from that, I'm actually still on the fence philosophically on whether or not the internet is "good" for humanity. It's allowed huge amounts of misinformation to spread. I think you could pin the spread of anti-vax ideas on the internet. We waste millions of hours playing video games and streaming videos. I am currently bored at work browsing hacker news, so instead of allowing that boredom to force me into improving our app, I'll just sit here quietly until somebody adds a ticket into my queue.
23 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 17.6 ms ] threadJust like I don't want snail mail carriers opening my letters (even if it is strictly for the purpose of deciding whether or not they are important for speedy delivery).
There should be a protocol in which as much as possible is hidden. Even things like port numbers. From the traffic pattern it will usually be obvious whether it is bulk or interactive and such, and it has to be addressed, but beyond that, what protocol it is using, what port number and all that should be shrouded from prying eyes. If I have two connections going to the same host, it should not be possible for a wiretapper to tell which packets belong to which connection only "host A sent some blob to host B".
You could spin this argument in the other direction and say that the contents in the pipe should be extremely visible and transparent to everybody. It would be a complete violation of privacy, but it will also identify (to everybody) the kinds of traffic flowing and the costs of that traffic in terms of congestion (if any).
> Just like I don't want snail mail carriers opening my letters
Agreed
But you can pay for express delivery in which case your package is delivered over the other packages. Isn't that a good analogy of non-NN world?
Before you say 'I meant UPS charging one price to one manufacturer, and another to another', then UPS does that too. You can be very certain that UPS charges Amazon much lower shipping fee (due to the bulk business) than an independent seller on Amazon.
Vendors have been charging different fees to different businesses since forever, and we never had a problem mostly because nobody ever finds it more profitable to charge for printing Bible more than printing Sears catalog just because they don't like Bible.
A valid solution is to regulate both the network providers and the content providers. The network providers should not be allowed to selectively throttle connectivity to targeted sources. At the same time the content providers should not be allowed to exploit their users with malicious script execution pushed through online advertisements and excessive privacy violations.
If the online advertising industry weren't fixated upon stalking users and harmful negligence perhaps there would be less incentive for the network providers to throttle that content. There would certainly be a lot more bandwidth. I will just leave these here:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703061
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/an-alarming-numb...
* https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-sa...
* https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/cybercrime...
The argument here is against capitalism. The owner of the network dictates what happens on that network. To take a argument directly from HN, if you want (Net Neutrality | free speech), go build your own (network | Facebook).
The author even makes that argument. "The clear solution is to appropriate the means of distribution, the cables and airwaves, and develop mesh internets."
Guess what, now you're an "evil ISP" who is traffic shaping on your own equipment.
Are we going to have Net Neutrality for Facebook and Twitter too? Do we limit what they can do on their services? Classify them as a public utility?
If a law allowed all post office to take a look into your personnal mail, they should at least uses this power to prevent criminal activities.
What makes you think they don't do this already?
I can't run a mail server on port 25. I call my ISP and ask why. They tell me they are combatting open relays, and I need to accept a business class agreement with them to open the port.
ISPs have data retention policies to assist law enforcement with investigations into criminal activity. They will terminate your account for breaking the law as well.
https://www.wired.com/2010/01/verizon-terminating-internet-a...
It's their network. They are motivated to protect it.
Give ISPs a choice. They can choose to be blind to traffic. Or they can choose to be liable for it. No in between.
You want to open the Pandora's box of inspecting the content of packets? OK, you're now liable for malware probing your clients, and for malware probes coming from your clients! If your network is helping generate a DDoS attack, you can be sued for it.
Or you can avoid liability by simply being the network equivalent of a common carrier. You didn't generate or alter the packets, you're not responsible for their content.
It turns out the answer is fairly simple. Although each utility followed its own path historically, it all boiled down to one question: Is the benefit society as a whole would derive from the cheap, ubiquitous availability of the thing greater than the damage which would be done to society by the elimination of competition and extraction of profit from the thing?
I think that question is a very easy one to answer for Internet access. The benefit to society would be incalculably greater than the damage done by eliminating the profit of Comcast and AT&T and Time Warner and whatnot. Just for one, we could close every physical government office in the nation and save billions by permitting the workers from there to work from home while citizens access everything via the Internet. So long as Internet access is a luxury, you can't do that. Then you have businesses. We don't charge restaurants 100x as much for water because they make soup with it, and "business connections" that transfer no more data than a home with a few teenagers shouldn't cost any more either. And if the cost was based on the cost of providing the service, then like everything in tech it would shrink with amazing rapidity.
If the internet cuts out for a few days... well.. It'll suck. But nobody will die. If I recall correctly, 60% of the internet's traffic is Netflix, with the remaining diced up between Youtube, streaming, and social media. The internet, as it stands right now, is a global entertainment system. I know we do business on it, and it's a boon for communications, but it's not a life or death thing.
Aside from that, I'm actually still on the fence philosophically on whether or not the internet is "good" for humanity. It's allowed huge amounts of misinformation to spread. I think you could pin the spread of anti-vax ideas on the internet. We waste millions of hours playing video games and streaming videos. I am currently bored at work browsing hacker news, so instead of allowing that boredom to force me into improving our app, I'll just sit here quietly until somebody adds a ticket into my queue.