[PLUG-TALK] Netflix neutrality

Keith Lofstrom keithl at gate.kl-ic.com
Wed Mar 4 07:52:46 UTC 2015


"Keith" == Keith Lofstrom <keithl at gate.kl-ic.com> writes:
Keith> You can move as much video as you want - if you choose to
Keith> distract yourself rather than learn something, it is your life.


On Mon, Mar 02, 2015 at 04:51:16PM -0800, Russell Senior wrote:
...
Russell> A street analogy might be appropriate here.  Streets are a neutral
Russell> platform.  There is a network of interconnections with access to many
Russell> locations.  A local street owner doesn't get to decide that a particular
Russell> destination is undesirable and then deny access to the streets on the
Russell> basis of your destination.  There aren't Subaru streets, Ford streets,
Russell> and General Motors streets.  The streets are common carriers.
...

That is /exactly/ why we must not confuse "net neutrality" with
"netflix neutrality".  Of course streets are common carriers,
and everybody with a driver's license and an approved vehicle
can drive on them.

But roads have limits - you can only move so many pounds per axle
over bridges.  A trailer truck can only have (2? 3? for sure not
more than 4 ) trailers.  If you go faster than the speed limit,
drive erratically, or with high blood alcohol, you get a ticket,
lose your permission to drive, or spend time in jail.

Comcast and other carriers are not "penalizing" Netflix because
Netflix pushes movies rather than web pages.  The carriers are
reacting to the equivalent of million ton, thousand trailer
juggernauts going way faster than the speed limit without
yielding to other traffic.  We have systems for that - they are
called railroads.  Different path, different rules.  Freight
train traffic mixed with road traffic is called a "grade crossing
accident".  Railroad companies are required to provide signals,
crossing guards, even put tunnels under or trestles over limited
access highways.  Different modes, different rules.

Comcast bought their equipment and made business arrangements
based on bidirectional traffic of moderate bandwidth.  Netflix
alone accounts for 30% of weekly backbone traffic, increasing
exponentially and rapidly.  Netflix is NOT paying huge upfront
dollars to add 30% new equipment and fiber to the hundreds of
billions of dollars worth of deployed backbone. 

Most importantly, the 30% they do add isn't uniformly spread
out over 168 hours in a week - it is concentrated evenings and
weekends.  What we are really talking about is hundreds of
percent increased traffic over a bandwidth saturated backbone
on Friday and Saturday night.  Netflix sets the flags on their
packets for high Quality Of Service, so those of us who do not
set the QOS flag get crowded off the net. 

That is "netflix neutrality", and it is vastly different from
"net neutrality", AKA freedom from censorship.  My freedom of
speech does not extend to shouting though a kilowatt bullhorn
six inches from your ear. 

Paraphrasing Voltaire, "I may disagree with your website, but
I will defend to the death your right to provide content." That
right does NOT extend to crowding out other content by sheer
volume, nor does it require anyone to provide huge bandwidth
for your site gratis.

If we let major corporations like Netflix scream "censorship"
when they are de facto censoring others by their behavior, we
abandon our rights.  When we let them steal phrases like "net
neutrality", we lose the ability to communicate accurately.


The internet is not some ethereal abstraction.  It is a vast
network of expensive equipment, fiber, and other physical
infrastructure, approaching the road network in scope and
expense.  You can't quadruple capacity by waving your hand.  Real
physical hardware has real limits set by physics.  We can move
far more over the same single mode optical fiber using wavelength
division multiplexing, but the fiber has switches on each end,
and repeaters in the middle.  Move more bandwidth over the fiber,
and you must replace the optical repeaters with more complex,
higher power repeaters.  New expenses for power to feed those
repeaters, larger batteries and larger diesel backup generators
and fatter power lines feeding some very remote sites.  Much of
that requires permitting delays and staff retraining, not merely
lots of expensive additional investment.

At peering hubs, the fiber signal splits into many electrical
channels, because we do not have the chip technology to cheaply
switch more than 10 Gbps or so.  Packets must be routed, not
merely streamed.  Data rates have improved;  in the early 1990s,
my designs moved 50 Mbps signals per switch port, better than
the competition's 20 Mbps, because my designs did better analog
signal processing.  Still, there are limits, if nothing else
keeping those very fast switches cool.  Faster data == more heat.  

"New technology" is why I think municipalities should provide the
physical tunnel for the internet, and rent space to non-municipal
services (corporations, NGOs, research consortiums, perhaps even
hobbyists) to run their fiber.  That way, the municipality need
not shoulder the technical risk of future technology change.
One way or another, we will hopefully develop an intelligent
accomodation with Netflix (I propose "build your own damned $$$
petabit backbone out to the distribution routers").  Eventually,
some other company will come up with something even more
incompatible with the IPv6 backbone - single photon quantum
encryption, perhaps.  Cities should not be financial hostages to
unpredictable technology change, nor bamboozled by smooth talking
lobbyists for special interests, nor should we dig up the streets
every time some brainiac finds a better way to move data.  I like
Russell's road analogy, but fibers and switches are more like the
vehicles than the asphalt, and the data content like passengers
and packages in those vehicles.  Styles change.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com



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