New Network Neutrality Squad — Users Protecting the Net

Lauren Weinstein writes in to announce the new "Network Neutrality Squad" — NNSquad. Joining PFIR Co-Founders Peter G. Neumann and Weinstein in this announcement are Vinton G. Cerf, Keith Dawson (Slashdot.org), David J. Farber (Carnegie Mellon University), Bob Frankston, Phil Karn (Qualcomm), David P. Reed, Paul Saffo, and Bruce Schneier (BT Counterpane). The Network Neutrality Squad ("NNSquad") is an open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet's users to help keep the Internet's operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable restrictions. The project's focus includes detection, analysis, and incident reporting of any anticompetitive, discriminatory, or other restrictive actions on the part of Internet service Providers (ISPs) or affiliated entities, such as the blocking or disruptive manipulation of applications, protocols, transmissions, or bandwidth; or other similar behaviors not specifically requested by their customers.

Great idea...

...awful name. I can't help but think of Geek Squad, and that doesn't make me happy.

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..awful name. I can't help but think of Geek Squad, and that doesn't make me happy.

We already understand the issues surrounding network neutrality (and Best Buy). To a normal person a name reminding them of the people who fixed their computer adds credi

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I for one welcome our unlikely super hero's

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I think it looks really interesting. Too bad Comcast won't let me access their sites. :-/

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When I see NNSquad I think Non-Nude ... helping to keep porn of the tubes everywhere!!!

"Layer 3" might be better

...or something that evokes the Internet Protocol.

People need to be reminded of what the ISP's role is: The offer Layer 3 service in the form of IP. Muck around with the protocols above that and you've not only stepped outside the bounds of an ISP, but are guilty of false advertising and data falsification.

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Agreed. The should have called it the Crush Comcast Coalition.

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There's a whole lot more to Net Neutrality than just privacy. To me, they are two completely separate issues. Naturally, we should be able to have some confidence that our use of the internets is private.

But Net Neutrality to me means much more that once

By Our Powers Combined...

They certainly have some big names on the list. I hope that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and they're more effective at getting politicians to listen than they were when standing apart.

expand their mandate

The formation of this group is an excellent idea.

Once they start finding and pressuring individual ISPs found guilty of "non-neutral" behavior, it will create incentive for customers to leave that ISP and go to a competitor. Sometimes there won't be a competitor, such as in many rural areas.

The logical progression is to encourage consumers to form their own local groups and move to community-owned Internet access [google.ca]. This new NNSquad should expand their mandate to provide resources that help and encourage communities to achieve network independence.

Defence of Free Thought

I wonder if the big telecoms realize how badly they will be entrenched in cyber-guerrilla warfare with people like you and me if they somehow pull off grasping control of the net. It would be nice and a hell of a lot of fun to have a fully morally justifia

Where's the tools......?

Its all great running around banging the drum and asking users to 'join the war on non-neutrality' but it's all for nothing if you cannot DETECT non-neutrality in the first place.

I recall some discussion a while ago here on /. where someone was writing an application to detect non-neutrality... but it went quiet very quickly. Now the way I see it is that the list contains people that have the skills, or know the people who could write an application that could aid in the DETECTION of unfair practices from the ISP's.

The application could be used by the volunteers, and test the various protocols to various hosts (Skype, Google, youtube, TPB) and between the users themselves with various traffic (p2p, ping, tcp/ip, udp etc...) and see if any 'delay' occurs specific to one type of traffic. If it contained an automated reporting tool (OMG Tinfoil hat!!), then the aggregators could see trends across the various providers and not rely solely on one or two users. Of course you're entering a war of cat and mouse....

Before we can go accusing ISP's on non-neutrality, we need the tools to detect unfair play in the first place... anyone know of any?

Network neutrality is actually redundant

There are two issues which network neutrality avoids, which are only loosely related. Suppose ISP A calls up site S and says "your site's traffic will get low priority unless you pay us". Now, you might think that if site S wants fast Internet access, they

Focus on anti-competitive practices

ISPs claim they need to end Net Neutrality because third-party websites (and pirate networks) are abusing their bandwidth. Don't let them fool us.

Conversely, some people have tried to use the free speech angle in order to defeat ISPs. I believe it is a mis

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.

I have more money, and less time than most people to have to deal with the unwashed masses. I should have the option of paying for better QOS if I feel like it.

No. Different tiers of internet service are like having a first-class and business-class seating section. You pay for X downstream and Y upstream.

Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

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I think it's more like the airline charging the receiving hotel to take you. If they don't pay to get you off the plane, you sit there for eight hours.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

I think you guys need to read up on the topic. Teired service is NOT like your first class/economy example, though it may head that way eventually.

ok heres the deal. AT&T is mad because Google is making money off selling ads to THEIR users without writing a check to AT&T. the users paid for their access, as did google, but AT&T wants to double-dip, and charge Google for access to THEIR subscribers.

so lets say AT&T and Yahoo! entered into an agreement whereby Yahoo would be the default search provider for AT&T networks. AT&T could then degrade or eliminate traffic to google, in an attempt to sway user preference. would you keep going to google if it took 35 seconds to load, while yahoo comes up at lightspeed?

Teired service comes in two flavors. one is paid for by web providors, the other by customers.
1) Google pays AT&T for perfered access to THEIR customers. google would have to pay off every ISP nation wide if that were the approach.

2) create user packages where the user would pay extra for access to sites that AT&T does not have deals with. For $19.95 you get yahoo, and email. for 29.95 you can get google (but not any of the sites linked therein), and for 59.95 you can get access to the internets 200 most popular sites. full access to the internet available for $.20 per site hit. be sure not to hit reload...

neither gives you any more than you have today, all it does is take away. I pay my bill. if that isn;t enough for them, then they either need to raise their prices, or live with it.

I heard Tim Berners-lee came down on the anti side of NN. I read his arguments and while they are valid from a network engineers perspective, he's completely missing the consumer protection aspect, which is the whole reason the rest of us are discussing NN.

I am not a commodity that AT&T can buy and sell. if AT&T wants to charge companies for access to AT&T subscribers, then they owe us subscribers a check, not the other way around.

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Mod Parent Up. Very good example, it's not about getting better access, it's about getting access at all.

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Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

Or it's like paying up-front for first class on ev

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Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

No, net neutrality is like saying that the airli

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No, it is like not allowing the airlines to charge both the passenger AND the city of Los Angeles for a ticket to Los Angels, CA. i.e. Net Neutrality would prevent ISPs from charging both the end user and the web site the end user goes to for access to th

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Or more like "Oh, you're traveling to Washington and staying at the *Ramada*? Well, that means we have to transfer you through Atlanta on the way there (I know, it's four extra hours; you'll miss your meeting? Oh well, should have thought of that before.

Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

Let's drop all the bad analogies for a minute (pretend I'm new here) and actually look at the situation.

Net Neutrality is an issue I'm concerned with. However, the only information I get from the Net Neutrality camp seems to be "the-sky-is-falling" sensationalist propaganda. So while I want to support NN, my rational mind says "Hold the phone. This is just an ad-hominem rant, not a rational argument."

Say I'm a network operator. (I am, actually. I have more than one PC at home. And quite a few I'm in charge of at work. But let's also say I'm in the business of renting access to my network -- an "ISP" as we all say.) So I've got a bunch of subscribers paying me a fee for a connection my network. I've also got connections to other operators. Some of those are transit I pay for, some are peering agreements. My customers use those connections indirectly, of course.

Now let's say I'm looking at my traffic logs, and I see that a ton of traffic is going to and from YouTube. So much so that I have to buy more transit to operators connected closer to YouTube. So now I have a bigger bill. And that cost has to be covered (TANSTAAFL).

I could raise rates for my subscribers. Or I could say to YouTube, "Hey, guys, you're a hot ticket. If you give me some more money, I'll buy a faster pipe to you guys. If not, well, you're going to be stuck on an overloaded transit line."

While I do have concerns with the above scenario, it does not make me want to take to the streets with a torch and pitchfork. Can someone explain what is so evil in the above?

If you want to propose scenarios that involve abuse, censorship, wire-tapping, giant insect overlords, etc., that's fine, but please also address plain old business scenarios like the above.

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Now let's say I'm looking at my traffic logs, and I see that a ton of traffic is going to and from YouTube. So much so that I have to buy more transit to operators connected closer to YouTube. So now I have a bigger bill. And that cost has to be covered (TANSTAAFL). I could raise rates for my subscribers. Or I could say to YouTube, "Hey, guys, you're a hot ticket. If you give me some more money, I'll buy a faster pipe to you guys. If not, well, you're going to be stuck on an overloaded transit line."

There's nothing wrong with that scenario. YouTube pays you a specific amount of money for a specific amount of bandwidth. If YouTube is getting more traffic than the bandwidth can support, transfer speeds will be lower because traffic has to be throttled.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

Here's the evil:

Let's say you implemented the scheme you proposed to YouTube, and the content providers are happily paying you more money for faster pipes. The money is rolling in, and your profits are at an all-time high. Your shareholders rejoice. Champagne and caviar for everyone!

Then Joe Schmoe (a USC grad) starts a website with The Next New Thing. Joe is strapped for cash, so he can't pay you for the same fat pipes that the other websites can, so his website crawls along. Your ISP customers who try to visit Joe's site can't, because it takes 25 seconds to load. But the Microsoft site, which has a similar but inferior offering, loads almost instantly because Microsoft bought your fat pipe.

Joe could have been the next Larry/Sergey, but he was never given the chance. Suddenly, internet access is only the domain of the rich and powerful, and the little guy (who actually innovates, you understand) is squeezed out of the picture. The forces of market competition have given way to artificially high barriers to entry.

(Keep in mind, this is totally different from tiered service, which has "classes" of service based on datatype, not based on provider. So, for example, VOIP packets would be given a much higher priority than streaming video packets, which would be given a higher priority than HTTP packets. However, *everyone's* VOIP packets would get higher priority, not just Skype. And *everyone's* HTTP packets would be lower priority, instead of Everyone Except Yahoo and YouTube.)

Analogies suck

It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.

No,

Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidd

That's not Net Neutrality

It's not about how fast your general Internet service is... that already works the way you want.

It's about how fast the sites you're getting your content from are, based on how much they pay your ISP. Want to buy TV shows and movies from iTunes? Better hope they paid off your ISP, and if customers in general want good service, Apple would have to pay all of the ISPs. Want YouTube? Better hope they paid up. BitTorrent? Games? Good luck.

Net Neutrality does not mean that the ISP doesn't discriminate against you based on how much you pay. It also doesn't mean that the ISP can't give certain types of traffic higher priority. It does mean that the ISP can't discriminate against traffic based on what site the content is coming from, and I think it doesn't suck, and is very important to understand.

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

Yeah, they sure did purchase that property legally.

With a government-granted monopoly over a municipality, and with government-granted rights to bury their legally-purchased property under other people's legally-purchased property.

I think if you are going to be given special rights by the government, then your responsibilities to that government (and ultimately to the people who are governed) are much higher than someone in a standard free-market scenario. It seems that the politicians have forgotten that little point, choosing instead to champion The Almighty Free Market, when in this market there is no such thing.

If the ISPs want to buy all the land their fiber is buried under, and the local government wants to allow more than one provider to do the same in the area, then they have a right to say "we can do whatever the hell we please with our property". I will just give them the heave-ho and move to a provider that gives me what I want. But since there is no competition, the telcos have a much higher responsibility to society than someone without a government-granted monopoly.

If you want to look at it from a backbone perspective, consider this: all of these major telcos are interconnected in a giant mesh, and it is impossible to get access to "The Internet" without crossing over between these providers. The internet is an end-to-end network; the stuff in the middle shouldn't be providing much other than access. So if Google is hooked up to Comcast, and has paid Comcast for fast access, but you're hooked up to Quest, and Google has not paid Quest, then Google will still be slow for you, which is unacceptable. And if we make sure that everyone pays everyone else for every connection, then it's just a giant payola clusterfuck where all the money ends up in the middle, and the little guy is squeezed out of the market.

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Net neutrality has nothing to do with your ability to buy a faster service from your ISP. It has to do with not allowing providers to prevent you from accessing certain sites or protocols.

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Bad Analogy here we come!

So say you pay top dollar to fly first class (i.e. you paid for a fast internet connection), but the company that provides the catering for the flight (i.e. nytimes.com) didnt pay top dollar to the airline (ISP) so you get an econo

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I have more money, and less time than most people to have to deal with the unwashed massAnd yet you have time to read slashdot and post inanity. Something tells me that not only do you have plenty of time, but that you yourself are a member of the massive

Re:Network Neutrality != good

There's always the possibility that ISPs could voluntarily (after receiving a few visits from the NN Mafia, er Squad) adopt network neutrality principles.

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what BS rhetoric.

allow me to bring you back down to reality from your rabid right wing frothing.

The "open market" as you so quaintly call these broadband monopolies is failing us. They are deliberately censoring websites, blocking protocols, forging packe

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I have a feeling that most users are too stupid to understand what their ISPs do, and if people-in-the-know don't organize to fight it that it will just get worse.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

I could be wrong, but it sounds more like they're looking for technical documentation and solutions to the issues rather than lobbying politicians for new laws. Also, do you really think that we even have "open market operations"? ISPs in North America have government regulated monopolies and it's killing our ability to keep pace with the rest of the world in connection speed and penetration to the majority of the population. I agree the solution is not more government regulation, but to kill these geographical monopolies.

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...Which, technically, is also government regulation, just regulation that's been underutilized in the past few decades. While I'm not exactly a fan of "Big Government;" it does have some usefulness in providing a "fair" and open playing field, which is w

Re:Network Neutrality != good

Network Neutrality doesn't really mean government regulation at all. It just means that all packets have as much right to the road as any others. If you try to block your competitors packets you get slapped, if you try to use anticompetitive practices you get slapped, if you act in a monopolistic manner you get slapped. However you are free to do whatever else you please beyond that. If you want to charge ridiculous amounts to all of your customers fairly you can, if you want to drop all of your peering agreements feel free, if you don't want to invest in your infrastructure and continue wringing every last dime out of your existing infrastructure go ahead... What we need to be regulated better is public rights of way and who has access to them until wireless is mature enough to handle broadband in large deployments.

How does Google find access to pipes that don't exist? There are basically 3 or 4 major players that everyone relies on and you can't just lay new pipe on rights of way that you don't own. Then there is the matter of incumbent telecoms and cable co's and their regional monopolies. If you want high speed internet you deal with 3 companies, Time Warner, Comcast or AT&T. There is nothing stopping time warner sticking up a roadblock to Google, Yahoo and MSN and say go here instead. In fact they already do that to a degree by taking over your browser settings with their client software. They have a portal that is steadily growing in size and services that is being supported by their near monopolies in what 40% of households in the US? Most of the US population isn't dense enough to attract a lot of competition because of the cost of laying cable. Ironically a lot of that cable laying is subsidized by tax payer money but is granted for sole use to one company. In a couple of years if we don't stand our ground on network neutrality we will have a cell phone esque market place for our internet services where we have to pay 10cents a search and 5 cents a dns lookup and 25cents an email and yadda....

Right now the major players are sitting on their pipes wringing as much money as they can out of them and doing the minimum amount of upgrades necessary to maintain the status quo. That is why the telecom companies are having bandwidth issues. The rest of the world is eventually going to surpass our pipes and offer a ton of dynamic content that we can't access because the infrastructure in the US can't handle it. Just like the cell phone industry is leaps and bounds ahead of the US industry in the rest of the world. Same in the console market and hand helds. I could go on but I digress.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

it really means government regulation

I agree that the government should keep its regulating to a minimum. The free market can often find optimal solutions to a variety of problems. However, there are two important things to keep in mind with regard to communication infrastructure: (1) It is already regulated; (2) It involves numerous layers of monopoly, hence it will never be a pure free market.

One of the important things to remember is that communication infrastructure requires using a limited public resource (e.g. burying cables on public property or even easements on private property, or using the limited bandwidth of wireless spectra ...). So no matter what, some kind of regulation is required. Moreover, some kind of government monopoly grant will be required (it is ludicrous to have hundreds of companies lay independent cable infrastructures, or compete for bands by building bigger and bigger transmitters).

So, given that government involvement (and moreover, the creation of various forms of monopoly) is inevitable, the question cannot be "do we want the government involved?" but rather "what do we want government involvement to be?"

The incumbent communication companies are, basically, abusing the monopoly status that was granted to them. That monopoly status was granted with an implied (and only occasionally codified) ethos: namely that this would create widespread access to the resource for the citizenry. Things like prioritizing traffic and double-charging people for access are explicitly contrary to the intention with which the monopolies were granted. Hence, it is totally reasonable to ask that government amend the agreement with these companies, so that they actually deliver the service they were supposed to deliver.

Put otherwise: why should government keep giving monopolies to companies that are not acting in ways that benefit the citizens?

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I always wonder this about the difference between our communications industry and those in other countries where broadband and reasonable cellular phone service is common. What are they doing so different that eliminates these issues and opens up cheap me

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If Network Neutrality is legalized, it really means government regulation. The Internet regulated by the FTC/FCC, and we know how wonderful that won't be.

Slightly better than an Internet regulated by AT&T.

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Do we really think open market operations won't solve the issue?

The problem is that telecommunications in an inherit monopoly with no free market involved.

The only true free market solution would be to allow a complete free market in which eventually all t

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what about when "some ISP's" are going to block ssh access on your account and tell you that you can only have ssh access through a business account which costs double what you're paying? What about when "some ISP's" are actively blocking bit torrent on t

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Under such a system where they could actually restrict your access to anything else the Internet has to offer, well, that's like AOL

As much as I hate to come in on the side of AOL you are talking rubbish.
AOL have their own software for connecting to the ne

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Sadly I don't think the people would do anything to change it or if they did it would be decades from now. The users would experience the suckiness of the new net and would say apathetically "I guess I'm stuck with it this way." I agree that it would suck

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Suppose the request comes about by the first customer hogging more than his share of bandwidth?
How can he? If he buys 1.5Mbps down and 512Kpbs up how can he take more than that? Right now ISP's are saying if he takes his 1.5Mbps he's taking more than his

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If one user's activity degrades the quality of another's connection, then the ISP is selling a product that they don't actually have. I should be able to use all the bandwidth that I pay for.

Re:Too vague!

I don't think you can neatly separate out "good" and "bad" behaviors like this.

Well, one metric could at least be that ISPs don't violate the contracts they have with customers. I.e.: they are not committing fraud. Fraud is "bad." Your hypotheticals are not nearly as gray as you make them out to be.

What if one customer "requests" that another customer's internet performance be hindered? Is that OK or not?

Not OK. Why should one customer be able to influence another customer's service?

Suppose the request comes about by the first customer hogging more than his share of bandwidth? Is that OK or not?

"More than his share"? The available bandwidth is stipulated in the contract you sign for the service. The ISP has to honor that contract and deliver that bandwidth. The customer is allowed to use the bandwidth they paid for (yes, even saturate it). For the ISP to do otherwise is fraud. If the ISP enters multiple contracts and it cannot fulfill them all (over-subscribes) that is fraud on the part of the ISP.

Suppose an ISP provides special low latency connections optimized for VOIP? Is that OK or not?

Sure, that's OK, as long as it doesn't degrade the performance of other customers.

Suppose they slow down large downloads? Is that OK or not?

No, that's not OK. (Unless the contract the customer signed explicitly said that this would happen.)

When the world is covered with a grid of network nodes every meter, when we are online 100% of the time everywhere we go, we are going to need a network infrastructure which is flexible and smart.

This vision of ubiquitous connectivity isn't going to happen if we allow the telecoms to make the rules: they will charge so much for every little service that it will be far too expensive to maintain the connectivity you mention. As for "infrastructure which is flexible and smart"--I believe that's part of what network neutrality is about. One of the issues with allowing ISPs to filter content based on type (and especially based on origin/destination) is that such a system inherently becomes inflexible. Moreover it isn't smart, because people will fight against the traffic shaping rules if they don't conform to the way people want to use the net (e.g. people will start encrypting everything or spoofing origin IP or hiding one kind of traffic inside another).

An "arms race" between the infrastructure and the users is neither flexible nor efficient. It is wasteful and frustrating. The genius of the Internet was that it was a simple system that would blindly pass packets to their destination. It was this generality and equality that allowed a whole slew of new applications to evolve. The point is that we can't imagine, today, what the next "killer app" of the net is going to be... but traffic shaping inherently says "these are the services that are important"--which means anything currently unimagined will remain unimplemented forever.

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The point is that we can't imagine, today, what the next "killer app" of the net is going to be... but traffic shaping inherently says "these are the services that are important"--which means anything currently unimagined will remain unimplemented forever.

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I don't think you can neatly separate out "good" and "bad" behaviors like this.

Yes. Yes you can. The question is this: is the traffic shaping being done based on the source or destination of the data? If the answer is yes, it's "bad".

After that, we're

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Broadband is not in anyway related to the number of bits you can move in a given time. Its the opposite of baseband.

To you, maybe. To most of the world, the word is being used correctly.

Maybe you just need to deal with the idea that words may have *gasp*