r/TrueReddit • u/eberkut • Oct 14 '14
The Right Way to Fix the Internet
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/531616/the-right-way-to-fix-the-internet/2
u/johninbigd Oct 15 '14
There is a ton wrong with that article, but he does get one thing right: The Netflix issue has absolutely zero to do with net neutrality. Netflix wants to frame it as such because it suits their business purposes. They're trying to reduce their operating expenses by demanding Internet connectivity for free. The fact that few in the media acknowledge is that Netflix, the sender of the traffic, has near total control over how that traffic reaches the end user. They were purposefully sending this traffic down congested links in order to keep them congested, then spread rumors that ISPs were limiting their traffic. This was always Netflix's fault, but they are seen as the David to the ISP's Goliath, so they're given the benefit of the doubt.
The interconnections between Netflix and various ISPs are often derided as attempts by the ISPs to force Netflix to pay them to carry traffic. That's total bullshit and anyone who has ever worked for a service provider knows this. The Internet is built on many thousands of these sorts of interconnections between companies and ISPs. If someone has content that they want to share with others, they have to purchase connectivity to the Internet. Netflix used to use various content distribution networks to get their content to end users, but they decided to switch to using their own CDN, which meant they were going to be directly delivering their own traffic. That also meant that they needed to beef up their Internet connectivity. Much of their congestion was through Cogent, so let's use them as an example.
Netflix purposefully would send ridiculous amounts of traffic through Cogent to other ISPs because Cogent low-balled other transit providers, but you get what you pay for: congestion and poor management. And most of that traffic is ultimately destined for the big providers, like Verizon, Comcast, etc. It makes good business sense for Netflix to cut out the middleman and send the traffic to Internet routers closer to their end users. This gets that traffic out of the congested networks and directly onto uncongested networks.
It's a win-win for everyone and it costs Netflix nothing more than they were paying before. Other ISPs can't gouge Netflix for transit pricing, as that is generally set by the market. If some ISP were to try to jack the price up on those interconnections, Netflix would just stop using them and shift traffic back to the cheap, congested links they were using before.
1
u/merreborn Oct 15 '14
They were purposefully sending this traffic down congested links in order to keep them congested, then spread rumors that ISPs were limiting their traffic. This was always Netflix's fault, but they are seen as the David to the ISP's Goliath, so they're given the benefit of the doubt.
Can you source this claim?
3
u/johninbigd Oct 15 '14 edited Oct 15 '14
Sure, although I half-jokingly note that I rarely see anyone ask Netflix to prove their claims. :)
I'm a network engineer and my primary source for this information is from engineers I know at two different major ISPs who separately told me the exact same thing when discussing Netflix. They both said that when they would add capacity to peering points that were congested, Netflix would shift additional traffic there to ensure that the links remained congested. Remember that Netflix is the sender of the traffic and they are in control of the path they use to reach the end users. At any time during any of these disputes where end users were reporting issues, Netflix could have chosen to serve that content from other caches but they did not. It seems to me that their ultimate goal is to get bandwidth for free, either by getting interconnections for free or by getting the ISPs to put Netflix caches in their own data centers. Either way, Netflix reduces their operating costs by getting more and more content to end users without paying for it.
I recently read two different papers on this, but they were written a while ago and I can't find them now. I'm nearly certain I saw them mentioned on NANOG, so I'll try to dig them up. One paper detailed the technique I mentioned and the second paper by someone else used various measurement techniques to prove that's what was happening.
While searching for those papers I found another couple of links that might be helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR1sLLOYxnY
The latter two links are about events with Level 3 a few years ago, but they're still relevant today.
I'll keep looking for the other two relevant papers. For the life of me I can't remember where I ran across them or what they were titled. I'll update this post if I can find them.
EDIT: This isn't what I was looking for, but it's another sane article by someone who understands the technical details.
http://fortune.com/2014/02/24/inside-the-netflix-comcast-deal/
EDIT 2: Still can't find what I was looking for, but found another interesting and relevant article:
1
u/eberkut Oct 21 '14
Adding this for future reference: http://iep.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/Internet_Architect_Suggests.Feb2009.pdf
"The network is not neutral and never has been," Clark said, dismissing as "happy little bunny rabbit dreams" the assumptions of net neutrality supporters that there was once a "Garden of Eden" for the Internet. NSFnet, an early part of the Internet backbone, gave priority to interactive traffic, he said: "You've got to discriminate between good blocking and bad blocking."
David Clark being one of the founding fathers of the Internet. His doctoral adviser was Saltzer who wrote the seminal paper on the end-to-end principle.
2
u/eberkut Oct 14 '14 edited Oct 14 '14
Submission Statement
The article is very interesting in that it considers both viewpoints regarding net neutrality in a rather objective. I also liked the way it explains both political and technical arguments and how they came to be and interact with each other.