Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s top digital policymaker

Re:Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s t... by lazaroclapp on Friday March 06, 2015 @11:02PM (#9160940)

Basically, the whole principle of Net Neutrality (as I understand it without knowing the details of the U.S. law, much less the European one) is: you bill data in the last mile to the consumer and you are not allowed to charge them based on the semantics or origin of the data. You do not charge the provider at all, unless they are the direct ISP you are peering with. You can however, give the customer a fast lane and a slow lane if you want, with different caps, and they can tell you which traffic they want you to get to them faster.

As far as I understand it, nothing prevents the hospital to get:

Connection 1: Availability guarantee 99.999%, bandwidth 150Gbps max with 50Gbps dedicated, RTT for last mile: <=80ms

Connection 2: Normal, small business grade connection.

Then the hospital can use connection 1 for critical medical equipment and connection 2 for everything else. But, they could do just the reverse (why would they?) and the ISP would need to abide by connection 1's guarantees regardless of content (assuming the upstream connection from the provider is also good enough).

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Re:Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s t... by gojomo on Saturday March 07, 2015 @02:20PM (#9162766)

The problem occurs if I, an entrepreneur, want to solve the hospital's problem for them, and sell them a single connection that meets their application-specific needs. I'd set it up so that I could always meet their demands, and a sensible way to do that would be with app-specific routing rules. Also, to help make that peak, application-specific offering possible, it would likely help for me to sell other nearby connections that have much softer throughput/lag requirements – users who don't mind if the hospital's needs occasionally stall their YouTube/Netflix, because they're getting such a good deal most of the time on most of what they use.

NN regulations make such economically-sensible, mutually-beneficial business arrangements illegal. Everyone's got to buy the mandated, "neutral" service tiers – rather than other cheaper mixed-traffic-treatment formulas that could meet their needs.

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Re:Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s t... by AnthonyMouse on Sunday March 08, 2015 @03:26AM (#9164910)

I don't understand why you think the rules need to be application-specific or why you think the alternative would be more expensive.

If you want a high-bandwidth low-latency guaranteed-reliable fully-provisioned circuit then it's going to be expensive. Providing the same guarantees but only for a single application doesn't reduce the cost at all. If the customer is paying you to guarantee the delivery of packets, it doesn't cost you anything more if the customer then decides they're going to be YouTube packets rather than telemedicine packets. None of the things that cause that level of service to be expensive are application-specific so there is no savings to be had by treating applications differently.

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Re:Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s t... by klodolph on Saturday March 07, 2015 @01:55AM (#9161261)

It might be easier for the hospital to buy one pipe and then do the prioritization in-house.

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