Europe's Net Neutrality Doesn't Ban BitTorrent Throttling (torrentfreak.com) 66
Millions of Europeans will have to do with throttling on BitTorrent. The Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communication (BEREC) published its guidelines for Europe's net neutrality rules on Tuesday in which it hasn't challenged the BitTorrent throttling practices by many ISPs. TorrentFreak reports:Today, BEREC presented its final guidelines on the implementation of Europe's net neutrality rules. Compared to earlier drafts it includes several positive changes for those who value net neutrality. For example, while zero-rating isn't banned outright, internet providers are not allowed to offer a "sub Internet" service, where access to only part of the Internet is offered for 'free.' However, not all traffic is necessarily "neutral." ISPs are still allowed to throttle specific categories for "reasonable" network management purposes.
INBOUND vs OUTBOUND (Score:2)
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Limited speed internet is relatively uncommon in Europe (or at least in France). You usually get whatever maximum speed your line and the ISP network can support. Yes, it means that 1 Mbps ADSL and 1 Gbps fiber can be at the same price.
BitTorrent is hard on the network so throttling it reasonably can make things work better for everyone. Basic QoS stuff.
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One person's outbound is another's inbound.
Look at it from the ISPs perspective: "Oh, if we screw up outgoing bittorrent traffic then we not only reduce network demands, but we make bittorrent slower for every service provider except ourselves!"
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I don't see what's wrong with trottling bit torrent OUTBOUND traffic, so long as INBOUND speed isn't altered. This is the practice in most places already.
My current ISP seems to agree with you. They give me 20M down and 256k up. Unfortunately it's not just for bittorrent but for everything. 256k up is barely enough to handle the backchannel so you really can't actually get 20M down because of it. The main point of having low upload is to prevent people from running servers on "consumer" connections but it also hampers innovation across the board and makes many existing services unusable. In my case, I have to turn off wifi on my iphone when I want to us
Government is not the answer. (Score:1)
Give the government more control.
This will give us all we want.
No, it will not. Government guaranteed net neutrality is a farce. It is only there to give the government more control over this wonderful thing. This thing that grew up and out mostly because of the lack of interference from government.
This will be regretted.
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Put the government in charge of QoS priority decisions at the ISP level. What could go wrong?
I'm just glad we can run torrents on any port. So they can play whack a mole.
Strong encryption everywhere fixes this.
Re: Government is not the answer. (Score:1)
They will then throttle every port, and then whitelist only the big companies that pay up.
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This thing that grew up and out mostly because of the lack of interference from government.
Sorry, this thing that grew up and out STARTED [wikipedia.org] with government interference.
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It started with the government.
It had no interference at all by them. Just some research money thrown at it early on.
No regulations, no overwatch, Nothing. This allowed enormous growth and a massive, almost unheard of rate of innovation.
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Re:Government is not the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
So let corporations be in control? I can't agree with that.
Corporations have shown time and again they have NO interest in supplying good service at a reasonable cost to their customers. (Comcast and TW) They want to maximize profit. They will find every way possible to achieve that goal. History proves this. The recent recession is a great example of that behavior. Not to mention Enron and a lot more.
Currently the ISPs have monopoly power. That's why I'm paying $85/mo for 20Mbps/2Mbps service. And it keeps going up because there is any competition.
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Your problem is still government.
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They never really had any before. They started it and left it.
The internet grew on its own. Now the governments want to regulate it. There is not much of it at the moment. But government covets power and there is a lot of it to be had by regulating the internet.
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ISPs have monopolies in areas simply because local governments have given them the monopolies. Your problem is still government.
And there you have one of the classic ironies of "free markets". The proponents of "free markets" publicly preach "small government", but in reality they need the collusion of "big government" to establish and maintain dominant positions in their industries. Some interesting background reading; Monopoly power and the decline of small business: big business vs democracy, growth & equality [boingboing.net].
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Big businesses that use government to protect their positions are not proponents of a free market. They may say it, but what they do is anti free market.
Many people who want a job, or run small businesses want to see more of a truer version of a free market. Do not paint the partners of big government regulations with the same brush as real people that encourage free market capitalism.
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No. Not "The proponents of free markets" Big businesses that use government to protect their positions are not proponents of a free market. They may say it, but what they do is anti free market. Many people who want a job, or run small businesses want to see more of a truer version of a free market. Do not paint the partners of big government regulations with the same brush as real people that encourage free market capitalism.
Perhaps I should have said [irony]free markets[/irony] instead. The reality is that there is no such thing as a free market. Every market has its rules (written or unwritten); it just depends which set you are playing with. And since the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s (under Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK) the rules have been stacked in favor of the 1%. What neo-liberals tout as "free market capitalism" is just means to make the 1% ever richer and entrench their power.
Ironically, the only w
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The only thing that changes when you substitute "government" in for "corporation" is now the people managing the Internet have guns.
What a great idea THAT has been shown to be /s
- Have you considered that the price is going up because demand is going up?
- Have you considered that a higher price encourages new entrants into the market?
- Have you looked into how local policies effectively grant monopolies and raise barriers to entry?
- Have you considered that Enron was merely outright criminal, the same way t
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MAKE LOCAL FRANCHISES ILLEGAL!
Cities making it impossible for competition to come in is and always has been a bad idea.
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Bring it down to a crawl. These selfish people take up all the bandwidth in order to move stolen contents. It seems the solution has been technical all along.
"Stolen contents" such as Linux Distros and other legitimate ISOs?
What's the complaint? (Score:2, Insightful)
Your BitTorrent packets have lower priority than most other traffic. That's objective fact.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with it. No one's treating the packets differently based on address.
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That would make sense if net neutrality were limited in some way to treating packets differently based on address. Net neutrality applies to all throttling of all kinds for all reasons. It is none of my ISP's business what kind of packets I'm sending to who and not their perogative to decide which bits of my traffic are more important than other bits or even to inspect my traffic so they could do such a th
Re:What's the complaint? (Score:4, Insightful)
No reasonable definition of net neutrality makes QoS illegal.
The fact on the ground is some packets do get priority.
Do you even think it's reasonable to prioritize your torrent packets the same as your neighbors VOIP traffic?
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The fact on the ground is some packets do get priority.
Do you even think it's reasonable to prioritize your torrent packets the same as your neighbors VOIP traffic?
I have no problem with a "fast lane" and a "slow lane". I have a problem with my ISP deciding which of my traffic gets to go into which lane. This control should be given to the consumer. They should let the consumer mark their VOIP as fast and their torrent as slow and if I want to flag all my bittorrent for the fast lane, I should be allowed to do that and they can charge different rates for the different lanes. Free nights/weekends would be another way of encouraging non-realtime traffic to offload t
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You share bandwidth with your neighbor.
Are you OK with him setting his torrent traffic priority to 1? Even if it interferes with your VOIP and gaming?
If you want guaranteed bandwidth to a major connection point it will cost you a little more than a consumer grade connection.
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There is no reason everyone on the connection can't be given an equal share bucket regardless of the type of traffic. When there is no contention, by all means use all the slots but when the three of us are all pushing packets at the same time we should get an equal number of slots. If I want to priortize one of my traffic types over another within my slots that is my call but in no case should
Re:What's the complaint? (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely. I think it's reasonable to prioritize MY voip traffic over my torrent traffic but I don't think it's reasonable to prioritize any of my neighbors traffic over any of my own. Some sort of equal token bucket system is most reasonable.
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Do you even think it's reasonable to prioritize your torrent packets the same as your neighbors VOIP traffic?
Generally speaking: yes. Two customers with the same service plan shouldn't be treated differently based on the content (or port numbers) of their packets.
With that said, if the ISP wants to give each customer a limited amount of dedicated high-priority bandwidth based on the DiffServe IP header field, and let customers decide for themselves how to allocate it, that would be perfectly fine.
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Net neutrality applies to all throttling of all kinds for all reasons.
No, it does not. Net "neutrality" means you treat the sources of data the same way, not that you treat all data the same way. It is neutral if an ISP doesn't prioritize its own VoIP services over other providers, for example. The question to ask is if the traffic shaping is creating an advantage for the ISP. That's what "neutral" means in this context. If it's for traffic management for all of the same kinds of traffic, it's part of the system design from the very beginning.
It is none of my ISP's business what kind of packets I'm sending
That's a different issue than net
QoS and net neutrality are the same issue... (Score:2)
What you have just described gives an artificial advantage (or disadvantage in the case of bittorrent) to managed protocols, discouraging innovation. A neutral network should not discriminate based on packet contents whatsoever. It is fundamentally impossible to fairly classify traffic, because there will always be unknown traffic and lack of agreement on priorities. In some cases, encryption may even prevent classification; why should those packets suffer? The only place where QoS is both functional an
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What you have just described gives an artificial advantage (or disadvantage in the case of bittorrent) to managed protocols, discouraging innovation.
You have it backwards, if anything.
A neutral network should not discriminate based on packet contents whatsoever.
That's the issue being debated, not just a conclusion to be stated as final. The Internet was designed with such "discrimination" because the people who designed it understood that it is a useful function.
If you return to the reason for net neutrality in the first place, it is based on the desire to prevent ISPs from gaining an advantage as both the service and content provider by artificially slowing competitor's content. That doesn't argue for "no discrimination whats
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Bittorrent is a background distribution system. You are simply wrong that it should hog bandwidth "because, Homer, packets r packets."
QoS != Net Neutrality Violation (Score:2)
Net Neutrality is an issue of prioritising traffic based on source.
Throttling bitcoin is an issue of prioritising traffic based on protocol.
Net Neutrality rules shouldn't cover this, not unless it's lumped together in an overarching them of Quality of Service.
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We aren't neutering Netflix IP's! We're just neutering the packets that look just like Netflix ones, but that's just a coincidence!
Sadly, from a legal perspective, it'd be hard to determine the legal grounds for neutrality without specifically declaring what are legal grounds for QoS control and which ones aren't. Since accountFeatures & (source/destination) are probably the most relevant QoS controls, I'd like to see how this plays out.
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your Skype call stutter or your download of a movie take an extra few seconds.
your minecraft swing be delayed by 2/10 of a second or a web page add take 1 second longer to load
Unfortunately do I trust most ISPs to not game this to their own ends?
DO with throttling?! (Score:1)
"Millions of Europeans will have to do with throttling on BitTorrent"
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That's entirely grammatical where I come from.
More Neutral Than Others (Score:2)
.nl rules are more strict (as they should) (Score:5, Interesting)
Luckily the Dutch rules around neutrality are more strict. The Dutch also tried to push these same rules to be applied to the whole EU. But the corporate world convinced these "politicians" otherwise.
In the Netherlands "zero rating" is strictly prohibited: https://www.bof.nl/2016/05/25/... [www.bof.nl]
Mail, except for a short list of providers (Score:2)
In the US (and probably EU). inbound mail (SMTP), etc is usually blocked by ISPs. And sometimes outbound SMTP is also blocked except for a few select mail providers plus access to the ISP's own mail server.
It's probably the only way to keep spam under some semblance of control, but it isn't exactly network neutral. It's much easier for me to host my mail server on Google apps, than it is for me to continue running mail on my own hardware at a colo. The IP block I'm on gets blacklisted, most ISPs won't accep