<story><title>Judges suspends FCC net neutrality restoration rule</title><url>https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/judges-suspend-fcc-net-neutrality-restoration-rule.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parasense</author><text>Back in the old days, early 1990s Net Neutrality actually meant something, and was not an overloaded nebulous term like today. It was very simple, being a boiler-plate contract clause between Internet routers, such as universities that peered with eachother. In peering agreements there are several contractual clauses, and the net neutrality was simply sayign that each side of the agreement would forward packets without any interference. In some cases this causes one side to disproportionatly overload the other, but with increased peering the load would ballance out as time went. Many universities had this kidn of agreement with other universities they peered with back in the days of inter-academic networks. No reason to router over the internet when reasearchers can direectly access paperes on the backside, and everything was peachy... Net Neutrality meant something, and it was a very concrete idea.&lt;p&gt;Transiting services changes things, those are not exactly peering agreements, it more like a company connecting one university to another, and that traffic was interfered with... usually to simply offload the packets&amp;#x2F;frames off the network as quickly as possibly, or in other cases to not impact other higher paying customers.... and those packets&amp;#x2F;frames would transit over a crappy legacy network to be dumpped on the other side with little care for  quallity beyond the minimum agreement.&lt;p&gt;This is why it&amp;#x27;s so weird for consumers to say they get to have Net Neutrality, because consumers are not normally peering with other consumers, or universities, or whatevery industry. Their just end nodes on the network, and there is fundamentally nothing to be neutral about.&lt;p&gt;When it comes to netflix complaining about some ISP refusing to peer with them for free, it&amp;#x27;s also very strange, because there is no mandate to freely peer with anybody. And, when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure. So again, these net neutrality crusaders are very strange when looked at in perspeective of the OIG net neutrality.&lt;p&gt;Should the internet be a common carrier, in my humble opinion probably yes. But that&amp;#x27;s orthogonal to the meaning of Net Neutrality. The point is it&amp;#x27;s an overloaded term that means nothing anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsingel</author><text>This is wrong on so many accounts.&lt;p&gt;An ISP selling Internet access to regular folks sells access to the entire Internet. To do that the ISP connect its network to the rest of the internet via a transit connection.&lt;p&gt;All your traffic goes through that unless you peer with other networks. When you peer with them you send less through your paid transit connection. So both parties benefit when they interconnect so long as they send a decent amount of traffic back and forth.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no such thing as a bandwith hog network. Netflix sends traffic to your network because your users asked for it and they pay you to deliver that traffic.&lt;p&gt;The notion that traffic ratios have anything to do with whether it makes sense to peer and whether someone should pay as long been debunked in the internet context. Those ideas are just remnants from the phone network which operates on a very different economic model, the one that make phone calls cost dollars per minute.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a very clear presentation from 2005 from a NANOG meeting explaining exactly why you&amp;#x27;re wrong.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;drpeering.net&amp;#x2F;white-papers&amp;#x2F;The-Folly-Of-Peering-Ratios.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;drpeering.net&amp;#x2F;white-papers&amp;#x2F;The-Folly-Of-Peering-Rati...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And you&amp;#x27;re also wrong but what neutrality is.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s simply the principle that the network that you pay to get online doesn&amp;#x27;t get to interfere with what you do online. That encompasses lots of behaviors including interconnection.</text></comment>
<story><title>Judges suspends FCC net neutrality restoration rule</title><url>https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/judges-suspend-fcc-net-neutrality-restoration-rule.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parasense</author><text>Back in the old days, early 1990s Net Neutrality actually meant something, and was not an overloaded nebulous term like today. It was very simple, being a boiler-plate contract clause between Internet routers, such as universities that peered with eachother. In peering agreements there are several contractual clauses, and the net neutrality was simply sayign that each side of the agreement would forward packets without any interference. In some cases this causes one side to disproportionatly overload the other, but with increased peering the load would ballance out as time went. Many universities had this kidn of agreement with other universities they peered with back in the days of inter-academic networks. No reason to router over the internet when reasearchers can direectly access paperes on the backside, and everything was peachy... Net Neutrality meant something, and it was a very concrete idea.&lt;p&gt;Transiting services changes things, those are not exactly peering agreements, it more like a company connecting one university to another, and that traffic was interfered with... usually to simply offload the packets&amp;#x2F;frames off the network as quickly as possibly, or in other cases to not impact other higher paying customers.... and those packets&amp;#x2F;frames would transit over a crappy legacy network to be dumpped on the other side with little care for  quallity beyond the minimum agreement.&lt;p&gt;This is why it&amp;#x27;s so weird for consumers to say they get to have Net Neutrality, because consumers are not normally peering with other consumers, or universities, or whatevery industry. Their just end nodes on the network, and there is fundamentally nothing to be neutral about.&lt;p&gt;When it comes to netflix complaining about some ISP refusing to peer with them for free, it&amp;#x27;s also very strange, because there is no mandate to freely peer with anybody. And, when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure. So again, these net neutrality crusaders are very strange when looked at in perspeective of the OIG net neutrality.&lt;p&gt;Should the internet be a common carrier, in my humble opinion probably yes. But that&amp;#x27;s orthogonal to the meaning of Net Neutrality. The point is it&amp;#x27;s an overloaded term that means nothing anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>candiddevmike</author><text>Most folks have 1, maybe 2 viable ISP options.  For them, net neutrality is one of the only things keeping the carriers from completely screwing them over.  We need far stricter laws around what it means to be an ISP, what minimum service guarantees should be, and how to provide more competition in the space, such as splitting line (physical cable going to your residence) and access (your IP provider).</text></comment>