We have been talking to Verizon for a long time about trying to get an agreement on the definition of what net neutrality is. We’re trying to find solutions that bridge between the hardcore net neutrality view and the telecom view. I want to be clear what we mean by net neutrality. What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another. But it’s OK to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video, and there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue. The issues of wireless vs. wireline get very messy because of the issue of Type I vs Type II regulation and that is an FCC issue not a Google issue.
> "What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another. But it’s OK to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video"
Which sounds good, but completely falls apart upon examination.
E.g. Is a video-call video? or voice? Is it a new type altogether? What if a new videochat service uses a new protocol with different encryption/compression/etc? Is that a distinct "type" with distinct 'management' profile?
Given the largely arbitrary distinction of bits into "types" of communication, being able to decide what is or is not a discrete "type" and priority essentially gives the power to decide whether a new service sinks or swims.
And, as many new service types are effective competitors against old service types, getting to decide whether the new type is discriminated against is functionally equivalent to deciding whether to discriminate against arbitrary competitors within a service type.
The only improvement of discriminating by type over discriminating by source, is that you can still have competition among those who use an entrenched protocol -- to the extent that competitors are free to use said protocol.
Because --to be perfectly clear-- there's absolutely nothing stopping that sort of "compromise" being followed by a patented, proprietary google/verizon video chat protocol that they will not license, while they simultaneously throttle FaceTime/Fring/etc.
We're quickly going to be in a world where all phone calls are VoIP and I don't think it's unreasonable to allow QoS tiers. I don't want to have my phone not work because my neighbors are torrenting. Hell, I already do this on my home network. Google just wants to make sure you don't have to pay to get in a QoS tier.
Again: that sounds good, until you think it through.
What happens when an upstart wants to compete with Verizon on VoIP? Say they roll out an innovative new protocol that offers far better quality in a still-reasonable footprint. Or offers some sideband feature that existing VoIP doesn't. (say, streaming file transfer, letting you send data bits during a call while on the call directly to the person you're talking to. no need to open a mail client or sftp and negotiate a second connection)
Why wouldn't Verizon decide that this new competitor is a new flavor of VoIP that needs to be in its own QoS tier?
It will have a different traffic profile, so you can't very well argue that they shouldn't be able to "optimize" it separately on technical grounds.
But now it's a new "type" and Verizon is free to kick it into the QoS round-file tier to either blackmail payment or simply hamstring adoption.
Maybe they only do that until they catch up and offer similar features. Or maybe they launch their own next-gen VoIP protocol in yet-another QoS tier, where the upstart is still not allowed.
Once you open the door to QoS by type --and leave type classification in the hands of the ISPs who directly profit from how these largely arbitrary lines are drawn-- there's a vanishingly small difference between QoS by type and by source.
Your example doesn't make any sense. For purely technical reasons there would be no reason to send a VoIP call along with the "sideband feature" over the same connection.
Even if your VoIP application offers a feature like streaming file transfer, you wouldn't actually implement that by sending that data over the VoIP connection, because the VoIP data requires real-time performance (the call starts breaking up if packets are delayed) but your streaming file transfer does not. It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call.
If you simply opened a second, non-VoIP connection for the file transfer, everything would work fine.
Would Verizon have an incentive to cheat by favoring its own services? Maybe, but that seems to be what these Google talks are all about in the first place. I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply.
> "It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call."
1. I think it would be silly to assume a reasonable person would propose sending multi-gigabyte files down a VoIP connection. You might want to consider asking people if there was a miscommunication before assuming they're unreasonable or ignorant.
2. I thought the qualifier that it would remove the need to open a second app was sufficient to indicate that I was talking about opening a second app. Ergo "connection" meant the human-process of mapping a VoIP contact to a data-transfer app/credentials, opening second app, sending file, etc.
3. No, a second physical connection for the file stream doesn't necessarily mean "everything would work fine". Anything that requires a new protocol/extension would make classification of the product/feature/service game to be, well, gamed, by the ISP, for profit.
As the VoIP connection itself would need to at least be modified to signal/establish the physical data connection, you'd necessarily have a protocol variant - even if the file transfer itself was, say, ftp.
4. The whole point of the example is just "New product that extends old protocol, thereby giving ISP chance to QoS-round-file new product rather than compete". Focusing on the example itself is just wasting our time.
> "I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply."
I think Google is doing nothing more than hedging against the possibility that legislation will undercut the FCC's net neutrality kick; particularly given legislative power being likely to tip back to the strongly pro-corporate side.
I sincerely doubt they're negotiating with Verizon over treatment of any traffic that does not come from Google.
> You might want to consider asking people if there was a miscommunication before assuming they're unreasonable or ignorant.
Your entire argument is based on the assumption that Google is being unreasonable or ignorant. You're posing completely trivial scenarios of Verizon gaming the system, and assuming that Google is negotiating an agreement that is vulnerable to such trivial gaming.
Furthermore, your only evidence whatsoever about these non-public negotiations is an extremely vague and misleading NYT article, and a paragraph blurb from Eric Schmidt. You know next to nothing about these negotiations (as do I), but you're completely confident in asserting that it "completely falls apart upon examination."
> I sincerely doubt they're negotiating with Verizon over treatment of any traffic that does not come from Google.
Did you even read what Eric said? "What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another." If what they're negotiating only applied to Google, it would be the opposite of the principle Eric is describing.
> "Your entire argument is based on the assumption that Google is being unreasonable or ignorant."
Absolutely not. It's based solely on Verizon and Google operating in their own financial best interests. In fact, as far as my argument goes, Verizon and Google are placeholders for any ISP and any content company. The argument would be the same if we were talking about Verizon/NBC, Sprint/Microsoft or AT&T/Time Warner.
I'm not arguing against some hypothetical secret terms of a specific rumored agreement. I'm arguing against the line of logic I quoted in my original reply. Who it came from is irrelevant. It's a very common justification for QoS-by-type and it's a wholly misleading simplification.
I only referred to Google's interests because you brought it up. It's not in their best interests for them to argue for terms from Verizon that benefit more than Google itself, because that would necessarily weaken any concessions they could get for themselves. It would be unreasonable to expect Google to go toe-to-toe with Verizon behind closed doors and sign a binding agreement for the benefit of the entire internet.
Ignore hypotheticals, look at history. Say you have a network and you decide that voice calls are so important you should have (real) 5 nines reliability, backup generators, redundant capacity, the works. Now let's say that people start using this voice network to send data. Let's say that people start using other networks for voice traffic. Let's say that people start sending voice traffic as data. Let's say that people start using other forms entirely where they would have used voice (even for extremely important business and personal uses).
How do you decide what gets priority? How can you even know?
This is what has happened in real life. People started using modems on their land-lines. People got rid of their land-lines all together and used cell phones or voip as their sole voice line. People started communicating and doing business via email, text message, even facebook. Million dollar deals have been hashed out over blackberry messages. Relationships have been made and ended over IRC and SMS.
Meanwhile, the land-line voice network is orders of magnitude more expensive to operate even as it has become less relevant, because we thought we knew how to prioritize communications.
> But now it's a new "type" and Verizon is free to kick it into the QoS round-file tier to either blackmail payment or simply hamstring adoption.
This is what Google's looking to make sure doesn't happen. No one should be able to pay for a QoS tier or kick a competitor into a lower tier.
It's not perfect, but as an end user I'd rather have SIP traffic prioritized and take a chance that a non-prioritized upstart standard will take longer to catch on than my calls to drop.
Obviously the best scenario is a dramatic increase in network capacity so QoS is a non-issue, but that's not realistic in the short term.
How about a corollary: why should your neighbor's torrents slow down just because you are making a bunch of phone calls? (And remember, people are using torrents for legitimate purposes, like how Blizzard uses it to distribute purchased copies of Starcraft II.)
That's a 'fix' if network capacity were infinite. You can rephrase your corollary as 'why should my VOIP calls drop just because I'm downloading StarCraft II'. There isn't anything inherently evil in the notion that you might want to prioritize, say, latency-dependent traffic over traffic that isn't.
Haven't people done studies on this and found that the cost to implement QoS is greater than the cost to just increase network bandwidth? That may not hold forever, but it holds now in the U.S.
Current residential broadband lines in the U.S. could go much faster with zero technical effort. They're capped because Verizon and Comcast only give you enough bandwidth to make sure that you get more than you would with a competitor. They hold the rest in reserve so that they can raise speeds and please customers easily when a competitor raises speeds.
We've got the slowest Internet speeds in the developed world, and you can bet it isn't because of technological reasons:
My point was that 'adding bandwidth' is not actually a solution to congestion-related problems. Double the bandwidth, now StartCraft II downloads in two instead of four hours, during which time your VOIP calls still drop. This is not unlike a problem urban planners have run across - adding lanes to a thoroughfare often does not relieve traffic congestion. So unless you can add bandwidth indefinitely so that there is never, ever any congestion, the issues are somewhat orthogonal.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand QoS. QoS uses latency-aware networking to push low-latency packets closer to the top of the queue. That doesn't necessarily mean that they get full bandwidth priority. VoIP calls may delay Bittorrent packets by a couple tenths of a second. In other words, low-latency applications are usually inelastic, while file transfers are usually elastic.
Far be it from me to encourage the fostering of bureaucracy, but this is one case where a consortium with a self-governing body might actually be in order.
Imagine an industry-wide QOS board. The board solicits input and transparently sets standards for types of traffic and the priority they recommend giving them. Then providers who have signed on to the charter agree to prioritize exactly according to these standards. The board reconvenes annually to examine current technological trends and review and update their recommendations.
All of this will end up working out fine so long as money doesn't change hands in the process. It seems reasonable that someone will have to make a judgement call about whether a certain type of traffic deserves to preempt others or not. The really awful world will be if people can pay ISPs to influence that judgement call in their favor.
The most elegant, protocol-agnostic solution I've seen for doing this is 1st to throttle individual clients to their allocated BW (i.e. so that one client doesn't gobble up an entire shared link), and 2nd to simply kill any long-term (12hrs+) TCP/IP connections that are not over a recognized/allowed L7 protocol. The 2nd is very effective at starving unwanted bit torrent usage.
This method is in use right now by the guys who hang 5.8GHz antennas on grain silos, i.e. rural WISPs.
simply kill any long-term (12hrs+) TCP/IP connections that are not over a recognized/allowed L7 protocol. [This] is very effective at starving unwanted bit torrent usage.
I don't see how. BitTorrent will just reconnect to a different peer and continue.
I like first one. However, while the second one is fair enough for the example of rural WISPs - if my ISP starts killing connections as a matter of common practice then I'd be looking for a new ISP.
It seems to me that you're hitting on a likely issue that could let there be general agreement between Google and Verizon with great room left for negotiation.
In any case I hope they come to some sort of agreement, as imperfect as it may be. And shortly thereafter I'd like to see agreement that certain kinds of traffic, such as port scanning, should be filtered very aggressively. (Yeah, I can dream, can't I?)
Sure there are edge cases, but I fully support a decision that if it comes to dropping a call or interrupting someones youtube watching, the priority should go to the call. Video calls are an interesting case, but it seems to me that the audio stream should be given higher priority than the video.
Why should the priority go to the call? You don't know if the person is watching a Youtube video showing how to give someone CPR, and the person is busy dying. Would you prioritise a call from a telemarketer over that? Tele-medicine is just one example. Who decides?
I completely agree with roc that once you start thinking about it, there are just too many holes in the argument for prioritising on type. "Type" can just be a synonym for "provider". There will be nothing to prevent carriers to push new protocols to a non-priority "type", if they don't pay up.
If voip calls get priority, what prevents me from writing a torrent protocol over voip? That would just be a waste of bandwidth. Prioritising will set off a never-ending arms race.
As long as bandwidth is a scarce resource, something will happen. Either there's a well thought out procedure, or it's random. I think we can do better than random.
I argue that a "well thought out procedure" is not possible for such a complex system as the internet. Every kind of procedure that can be thought of will either have holes in the logic, or will be gamed by users and providers in a never-ending arms-race.
Emergent complexity is not "random", although it can be based on elements of randomness.
Nature is an example of a massively complex system that has evolved on elements of randomness, but the system itself is by no means random. And there's no way that it could have been designed with a "well thought out procedure".
But does that mean that a call takes priority over a live video feed? Does talking to your grandma take priority over a live feed of some major world changing event?
The key is to make the entire case moot. That can be done with a combination of software engineering and increasing bandwidth.
the challenge is how do you promote developers to build bandwidth efficient systems, as it seems bandwidth is now a distant thought in the minds of most developers.
Can't you just hack a website page to tell it that it is a video page? I mean you can hack a php file to tell it it is a css file.
So if this can be done, wouldn't any attempt to prioritize data by time be futile?
Why should video be prioritized anyway? I hardly watch youtube, much less than search on google, read a website, do online research, or whatever else. I'd rather video was less prioritised. I can pause it for a few minutes while doing something else, but if a website has to load slowly if video is to be prioritized that has the necessary effect of lowering my quality of surfing, thus less google searching.
"Remember we make the majority of our money on advertising and the powerful browser that is in Android when people search — they click on ads and that revenue goes to Google. And trust me that revenue is large enough to pay for all of Android activities and a whole bunch more."
It's funny that a lot of this would not be an issue if Verizon, et al, actually had the ability to deliver the speeds they quote you on any sort of consistent basis.
Most consumer-grade networking problems can be solved with "QoS via excessive bandwidth". But, what the carriers want to do is oversell their backbones by 10,000%, and then charge extra to deliver the kind of service you would have expected to receive in the first place.
Wholesale bandwidth to a Tier 1 provider is ~$15/Mb these days (monthly). This doesn't include loop charges of course. But still Verizon, Comcast, etc. should be able to deliver a symmetrical 5Mbs pipe to an average residence (ie: in a populated suburb) for $60/mo. without the end user every really worrying about running up against capacity for any practical application.
The ISP's are worried about being reduced to "dumb pipes", yet they could easily differentiate based on speed, uptime, customer service and other things that don't rely on packet tagging and prioritizations.
It is actually much, much less than $15/Mbps these days.
For a gigabit commit prices are under $3/Mbps, or $3,000 per month, for delivery to a datacenter or other on-net (meaning fiber is already there and running) location.
>Most consumer-grade networking problems can be solved with "QoS via excessive bandwidth". But, what the carriers want to do is oversell their backbones by 10,000%, and then charge extra to deliver the kind of service you would have expected to receive in the first place.
While this argument sells to the crowd, it's facile and doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
I'm really quite a layman in this area, but I've heard the overselling argument quite a lot, and I'd be interested in hearing why it might not be a valid one.
Look at the prices of unmetered commercial connections to understand the economics of overselling and burst connectivity.
I have a 15Mbps home connection, which serves me brilliantly when I need to grab an ISO or watch a couple of videos. I have no illusions that this is equal to a business 15Mbps connection, which would be significantly more expensive. A T3 runs $3000 a month, best case. I pay $45 a month.
The original point that I disagreed with was the assertion that everyone should have a unmetered 6Mbps connection. Firstly, I don't want a 6Mbps connection -> I want a 15Mbps burst connection that best accommodates a normal user. Secondly that's enough bandwidth that if you filled it at Amazon's AWS, you'd be paying some $240 a month, and Amazon is at the crossroads of a number of primary connections, pretty much the cheapest place to possibly origin data.
Joe Homebody is many nodes down, through a lot of infrastructure and choke-points, and the cost for throughput is significantly higher: My neighbourhood has a large number of cable modem subscribers, and to aggregate the total sum up through each junction would lead to enormous bandwidth potential.
In the mobile space the situation is vastly uglier. I don't think most people realize how incredibly crowded the data space is.
The price of unmetered commercial connections has more to do with competition (or lack thereof) among broadband ISPs and willingness to pay than technical reasons. Broadband in Japan costs 15x less and runs about 6-7x faster than in the U.S:
While this argument sells to the crowd, it's facile and doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
It does hold up, the math is all there. However what it does NOT provide is much room for burst capacity.
What I am saying is that the carriers could simply set reasonable expectations, and provide the consumer the option to choose what kind of connection to the Internet they wanted. They might even be able to provide priority routing to a specific content provider, if that became worthwhile in the future.
IE:
You can get a 15Mbps burstable connection for $50/mo. For this you might get 15Mbps, or you might get 6Mbps, but we'll guarantee you never get less than 2.5Mbps. It might also be a 95th% style billing scheme.
You can get a 5/5 symmetrical dedicated connection for $65/mo. We might even be nice and let you burst to 8Mbps if the capacity is there, but you'll never get less than 5Mbps, and you'd likely never get more than 8 either.
For an extra $10/mo on either plan you can have a "friends and family" routing concept where any traffic to the content provider of your choice (Hulu or Yahoo or Google, etc.) is guaranteed to never be less than 4Mbps.
Instead, it appears that what they are driving at is selling you a gob of bandwidth for $x/mo., unless you want to use that gob to connect to a business deemed a competitor or threat, then it's 2x.
Verizon has also moved to dismiss the story. "The NYT article regarding conversations between Google and Verizon is mistaken," the company said. "It fundamentally misunderstands our purpose. As we said in our earlier FCC filing, our goal is an internet policy framework that ensures openness and accountability, and incorporates specific FCC authority, while maintaining investment and innovation. To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect."
>But it’s OK to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video
Sounds like selling Internet priority to me. In fact, if you can prioritize voice over video you can likewise prioritize http over bittorrent, smtp, or xmpp. And if a competitor's video is going over xmpp while yours is going over FaceTime, that sounds like it's legit depending on how you define 'data type.'
You're arguing that they consider video types different when you have no idea what their talks entail - it may be so general as video, voice, web, mail, and other. Schmidt's comments were ambiguous to protocol and yet you're adding xmpp, smtp, FaceTime, and bittorrent. What NYT was suggesting was that Google be given priority over Bing, for example - grossly different from this situation. QoS is already in place for most major large corporations (and small!), but most ISPs have not gone down the avenue of implementing quality of service for their networks.
Here's the headline on NYT's site: Google and Verizon Near Deal on Web Pay Tiers
And a quote from the article: "...allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege."
The way I see it, there are only two possible ways to implement that kind of speed throttling:
1. Protocol filtering. This is basically the status quo with wireless. Voice/Text is separate from Internet data.
2. Deep-packet inspection. I'm sure that Schmidt wasn't advocating this, for a variety of moral and practical reasons.
How exactly do you do what Schmidt is describing without favoring a protocol? How do you favor a protocol without locking out third-party protocols? ISPs have no way of classifying the data sent on a third party protocol.
You are prescribing to one protocol versus another though. Whereas Schmidt is saying ALL video protocols be treated one way and ALL voip protocols be treated another way. For example, RTMP+MMS+RTSP+others may be considered "video," whereas SMTP+SMTP SSL+POP3 SSL+IMAP+IMAP SSL+others would be "mail," H.323+SIP+others will be "voice," and HTTP+HTTPS+FTP+FTPS+SFTP would be treated as "web." That is very different than pitting MMS against RTSP and saying MMS wins because Microsoft pays more.
From a legal standpoint that makes sense, but from a technical standpoint I just tunnel whatever I want over $SECURE_PROTOCOL and at that point all they've done is specified data latency/speed tiers.
Unless they're specifically looking at discriminating based on protocol, I don't see why they just don't talk about realtime vs. streaming vs. download data priority tiers, which seems a lot simpler from an implementation standpoint, and a lot easier to stomach from a net neutrality standpoint. Maybe that's all they're talking about. But the way it's phrased it sounds very dependent on protocol, which I would say is very non-neutral, because it's only possible to implement if you have a whitelist of protocols, and it's pretty much impossible for the established players to fairly arbitrate which protocols are which. What is streaming video over http? https? What if I've got a VOIP app running over https? Web-based email? Pigeonholing a protocol into a data priority tier just doesn't make sense.
Unless you're deliberately trying to lock out innovative protocols.
Doesn't anyone think that we elect politicians to decide precicley such things as whether there should be net-neutrality or not, rather than leave it to massive corporations to decide in their own interest.
All it takes is one sentence
No content should be prioritized by any internet service provider.
Hmm, maybe someone should make a Facebook page with that sentence. I hardly use Facebook myself, but seeing as this issue is quite in focus, it would probably get traction with some promotion and then you can get a newspaper saying 24,000 people have joined a facebook group called...
