Technicalities of Net Neutrality - Computerphile

What's the technical side of the net neutrality debate? We look at how a it works with a fictitious video streaming site. Dr Richard Mortier has the details.

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[moff]

It's a symbiotic relationship. Without the ISPs, the websites can't function properly. However, without the websites/content, the ISPs are useless.

[antivanti]

The main issue of net neutrality isn't even mentioned in this video. That being whether ISPs should be allowed to treat data from different content providers differently. What they are doing is strangling the speed of certain services like NetFlix for instance so that they can then extort money from them by holding their users hostage.

[taiken]

Neglected to mention that NetFilm also has to pay to be on the Internet in the first place, either through paying for hosting or maintaining a server farm. Regardless, those are not cheap. Cable networks charge cable companies for access to their networks. The ISPs just got smart and want to establish a precedent of websites paying for access to customers rather than the other way around.

[DevonBernard]

Great video, thank you for sharing your perspective and explanation of Net Neutrality.

[lmiddleman]

Contrary to the title, this video says nothing about net neutrality.

[veloxsouth]

Informative, but I don't understand what net neutrality would do to this system, or if you were describing a system that already has net neutrality.

[DSMikeNW]

I do not believe you guys actually addressed what net neutrality is. You explained the way the internet works and how/where money changes hands, but thats pretty much it, you didn't touch what net neutrality is and why is(or is not) important. I would have named the video "Technicalities and business relations of the Internet - Computerphile"

[trailkeeper]

It seems like the issue boils down to having a "guarantee of speed".  If you pay for 3mb/s then you should have a guarantee of that speed no matter how much traffic is on the rest of your internet/server system.   So the average user and high data user should both have a guarantee of speed, that way everybody is satisfied.  But if a "server" or system cannot handle more volume of data, like live video passing through, than it was designed for, priority should go to the people who have purchased the speed on that server/system, this ensures the "guarantee of speed".   Net neutrality seems to be more of a speed issue than a lack of communication issue.  "Smart routing" may disappear which is to get the best efficiency of the system.

What is mentioned in the video seems to be a "rewireing of the internet" or "change of the infrastructure of the internet", such as having additional (public/gov?) servers for mass data, perhaps like the "cloud computing" concept.

[RnBurgundy]

This just me or did this not cover net neutrality at all?!?!  Net neutrality is treating all data as data and not changing more for different types of data.  Customers pay there ISP for a connection to the internet, content providers also pay to be connected to the internet.  ISP should not be allowed to throttle different types of data because they want to prioritize different serveries (such as there own) over competitors services.  This is the real issue!

[trailkeeper]

If a user pays for a speed it should be guaranteed, regardless of any big users, also this does not seem to be a lack of communication or accesability issue, but one of speed.   "Smart Routing" helps the system be more efficient, and this may be needed so that individual users have a guarantee of speed.

[Roxor]

Just a thought: Could you use Bittorrent for streaming instead of needing to build your own big capacity networks? Once one person has some of the film, they can distribute the data for the parts they have to, say, 4 people (I'm assuming they have a 10Mbit/s upload speed and the video file uses 2.5Mbit/s), and they can distribute to 4 more, and so on, resulting in your server just acting as a backup source for when nobody else has the file a user wants to watch.

[FallenBytes]

Also remember that any ISP that is also a content provider won't let "Netfilm" place servers within their network because extortion with the bonus of stifling competition is more profitable than network efficiency.

[shelvacu]

You seem to (possibly purposefully?) omit that although Big Services like youtube depend on ISPs to provide connection, ISPs also depend on Big Services to provide service; Can you imagine if you couldn't access youtube from the sprint network? NOBODY would use sprint.

[Nichoalsziv]

that was kind of confusing? What does it mean if the traffic is anonymous or not dosent netfilm still have to pay for the increased bandwidth they are using? 

[DrRChandra]

At the core of the Netflix et al. debate is, are you a network customer or a network peer?  It's not really about slowing down some net traffic over others, or (mostly) trying to extract more money out of people or businesses because they become popular.  If you send roughly the same amount of traffic as you accept, you're a peer, and the arrangement almost always is (and has for a long time been) SETTLEMENT-FREE PEERING, meaning when it comes time to settling the money, they call it a wash in charging each other and don't exchange actual funds.  But if for example you're sending more traffic, you're a lot more like a customer, so the receiver of such traffic feels justified in declaring the relationship as being a customer and not a peer, and therefore will NOT have settlement-free "peering."  So this is NOT really a radical change in business practice.

Also, as mentioned in the video, so that content can be "close" to the end users, the content providers provide servers for their content in the various ISP network operation centers (NOCs).  This is essentially a colocation operation.  Likewise, colocation services are anything but free.  The ISP providing colocation has to provide building space, power, cooling, fire suppression, security, networking, etc., all of which costs money.

If there is any "extortion" it is typically ISPs who refuse to upgrade interconnects until they get paid extra.  This is where the end user customer experiences the slowdowns.  Interconnect links between those tier 2 and tier 1 ISPs become saturated, and therefore traffic cannot pass as quickly from tier 2 to 1.  This is the crux of one of the most visible squabbles, Verizon and Cogent.  Netflix is (or was?) a customer of Cogent, and Cogent is having a heckuva time getting ISPs to add ports (and links) to their routers.

I'm not saying this is the best arrangement/business practice, just that charging for colocation services and terms of settlement-free peering are nothing new.  A lot hinges (as the video mentions) on what customers an ISP has.  As a rule of thumb, if their customers are mostly servers, they're semi-obviously going to be sending a lot more than they're receiving.  If it's mostly end-users, they're going to be receiving more traffic than sending.  If it's a mix of both, then they can probably get some settlement-free arrangements.

[KLIMTIK]

If the service originates from different places to eliminate traffic across multiple networks, how do they add movies to the service? Mail physical data to the other areas?

[samramdebest]

I thought big host didn't need to pay for their internet only for the equipment.
I thought it went like this: the host pays for cables to a few other hosts(or other network stuff) and they can freely send data to those hosts and in return they allow the hosts they are connected to to send data to them(to be redirected to other hosts)

or maybe simpler put, you handle my data if I handle your data

[nosuchthing]

This video was WAY too technical. What we want is a video that examines the issues surrounding NN. Start from zero - What would happen if Verizon started their own service, Netfilm and then slowed down Netflix and boosted access to Netfilm. Is this legal in America? Can ISPs start throttling down speeds to content they do not agree with? etc.

[Roboterize]

Netflix-user-tip: If you use a proxy you can access the Netflix content of the proxy-ip-location.
E.g. you can watch all American movies and series that are blocked in your country due to copyright restrictions, when you use a US-proxy-adress.

[Durakken]

The opening sentence is highly biased towards the networks as Mortier leaves out that the value of the networks are derived from the fact that there are content providers. In other words a road that leads nowhere is worthless. Likewise a place with no way to get there is worthless as well.

The explanation in short is such

T1a <-> T1b = balanced value transaction. They derive value from linking with each other.
T2 is just another term for the local network that people connect to.
T3 is the "end user" in this network model.

(T3a -> T2 -> T3b) is faster than (T3a -> T2a -> T2b -> T3b) so it is best to distribute the connection of T3b to serve T3a if possible.

The argument for why some seem to think that T2/T1 networks can charge more is that as T3 becomes more popular they take up more bandwidth and as such should be charged more. 

The reality is that a Network's ability to deliver quicker connections to a popular point increases its value and as such the idea that T3 service providers need to pay more to distribute across the networks is nonsense... And then there is the following...

The connection between T3 and T2 is paid for by T3 already, on both sides. It's like you pay for the road to a hub. and I pay for the road to a hub. Several other people pay for their roads to the same hub and they all want to come to me. The Hub owner then goes and says I should pay more for my road because more people want to use my road, even though there requires no change to the road and if I don't they'll set up a gate that will only let 2 people on the road to me at any time.

This would be perfectly fine (as they own the hubs), save for the fact that governments have made it so that only one hub owner can exist in a given territory which essentially makes the situation tyranical and blackmail. The solution is either to prevent this gating grom happening OR to allow multiple hubs to be created. ie, Net Neutrality needs to exist or monopolies need to be broken. A third option is that we make a public network, just like we made the roads and the railways public, which are networks as well and as far as I can see should happen.