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see what you can do to help save the internet at http://www.savetheinternet.com/
Last edited by trekeyus on Tue 11-28-2006 11:59PM, edited 1 time in total.
Joined: Thu 05-10-2001 7:23PM Posts: 826 Location: USS Santa Fe (SSN 763)
Source: Off Campus
This is an issue that never really made a lot of sense to me. My understanding isn't that you are being denied content, rather that the providers want to build a higher speed route that they can charge a premium for use. Maybe people will choose the shiny large company content because it is delivered at a high speed, but that isn't really the providers fault. It just means that the smaller guy has to be better if they want to compete.
_________________ M-S-M U-M-R M-O-U-S-T
Go ahead, say it to the Mickey Mouse Club Theme.
"Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return."
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see what you can do to help save the internet at http://www.savetheinternet.com/
Last edited by trekeyus on Mon 12-04-2006 10:48PM, edited 2 times in total.
_________________ M-S-M U-M-R M-O-U-S-T
Go ahead, say it to the Mickey Mouse Club Theme.
"Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return."
-
see what you can do to help save the internet at http://www.savetheinternet.com/
_________________ M-S-M U-M-R M-O-U-S-T
Go ahead, say it to the Mickey Mouse Club Theme.
"Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return."
-
see what you can do to help save the internet at http://www.savetheinternet.com/
This is an issue that never really made a lot of sense to me. My understanding isn't that you are being denied content, rather that the providers want to build a higher speed route that they can charge a premium for use.
Well, these are the types of network bias I can think of:
[1] Examine the IP headers on packets and have your routers prioritize them based upon their origin or destination. Not getting along with telco's in China? Just lower the priority of all traffic from their network. Don't want the Democratic party to retain power in Congress? Decrease the priority of traffic destined for their campaign servers.
[2] Examine the UDP/TCP headers on traffic and prioritize it based upon what application sent it. Cue underhanded business like decreasing the priority of all World of Warcraft traffic while increasing it for Star Wars Galaxies.
[3] Prioritization of traffic based upon its content. For example, one could look at FTP traffic, scan it for MIME headers, and then speed or slow it based upon what type of files are being transferred. One could even build traffic profiles on individuals. Is the majority of their traffic BitTorrent-related? They must be running a tracker; scale them down. Do they use VOIP instead of a land-line provided by Time-Warner, like God intended? Ditto.
My take on [1] is that the agreement you sign should dictate exactly what type of prioritization scheme you are operating under. That way, those who need/want prioritized traffic get it (such as a hospital), and the scheme doesn't change under one's feet. Otherwise, the end-users end up in an endless, dynamic bidding war (after paying for bandwidth and signing an agreement). I don't want to wake up one day and discover my latency sucks, knowing it's time to pay la costa nostra; I want to buy into a prolonged quality-of-service agreement.
An intelligent Internet sporting [2] and [3] would be a phenomenal achievement, provided everyone could come to an agreement on what types of traffic are the most important (and then keep that policy relatively static). Unfortunately, there are *lots* of different views... and tremendous potential for abuse (on the telco-side) exists.
Both bandwidth and latency do strike me as scarce resources. Entire business models are built around them... for example, the two MMORPG's I mentioned in [2] are latency-sensitive. Google's web services are another good example... they're so concerned about the last mile that they want to position thousands of small data centers around the country.
In some sense, net neutrality comes down to telco's becoming angry over the fact they aren't making money off the content that passes through their "pipes"... web-based ads, voice chats, whatever. They want to charge users based upon what they are doing... and not just how thick that pipe is to their house... dynamically, if possible (like cellular providers). That scares me, as I want the Internet to remain (as much as possible) a level playing-field that rewards good ideas (instead of well-funded ideas).
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Joined: Thu 05-10-2001 7:23PM Posts: 826 Location: USS Santa Fe (SSN 763)
Source: Off Campus
jollyplex wrote:
In some sense, net neutrality comes down to telco's becoming angry over the fact they aren't making money off the content that passes through their "pipes"... web-based ads, voice chats, whatever. They want to charge users based upon what they are doing... and not just how thick that pipe is to their house... dynamically, if possible (like cellular providers). That scares me, as I want the Internet to remain (as much as possible) a level playing-field that rewards good ideas (instead of well-funded ideas).
I think that well funded ideas are always going to hold an advantage. Google having the captial to actually put servers all over the place to increase preformance gives them a big edge over any newcomer in the market who doesn't have the funding to pull the same thing off. I suppose if you aren't paying to priorities your packets it reduces the wall by some margin but I'm unconvinced that it has the impact that some are trying to give it.
I really think that this is an issue that the free market can handle without regulation. If packets get prioritized to the point where content isn't being delivered to the users satisfaction then someone will come along with the next great thing that will deliver what the users want. Maybe it is as extreme as a whole new network with non-prioritization at the core. One thing that is more certain is that once a government starts dipping their fingers into the regulation of an industry it is very diffcult to get them out and rarely is anyone happy with the results.
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