Samsung's warning: Our Smart TVs record your living room chatter - CNET

[kf4hcw]

On 2015-02-11 21:40, Rob Seastrom wrote:
> Me too.  Email in '82, ARPAnet in '84.  You could at least respond to
> my points as I did for yours rather than calling what I wrote a
> "myopic rebuttal" and trying an argument from authority.  Most of us
> here took debate in high school, college, or both and find that tactic
> unbecoming.

Your opening remark was

> Ah yes, the "only one side pays" canard.  OK, I'll be happy to debunk that.  When people talk about "fast lanes" it's a clear sign that they are unclear on what's going on.

How is that anything other than myopic -- essentially saying (I
paraphrase): "First, your a liar. (canard), and second you don't know
what's going on." My "argument from authority" was simply a rebuttal to
your apparent claim that I didn't know what was going on.

I know this: Verizon leveraged their monopoly position to extort
additional profits from Netflix simply because they could. The problem
could have been solved for the cost of a few patch cables and a few
network cards in a handful of data centers, and in fact it finally was.
But before that could happen there were many many dollars of potential
profit at stake so Verizon went after it.

It is my opinion that this is not the way to do business and it's not in
the interest of the greater good. I will never be able to factually
support that opinion because all such attempts would require conjecture,
circular arguments over ideology, or references to predictive models and
historical events that can be shown to be incomplete, unprovable, or
irrelevant. So, if you want to control the conversation by framing it as
a debate then you win. I concede. I never intended to enter a debate. I
answered a simple question: "... show how the new FCC rulings will help
any of this..." again I paraphrase... but I took that as an honest
request for supporting evidence of my opinion and offered precisely that.

As for the "only one side pays" canard I will say the following:

Of course Cogent and (3) oversubscribed -- that has been a fundamental
practice of all networking providers since day 1 and is a cornerstone of
the business. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, and every other company in the
industry does the same thing all the time. The bursty nature of Internet
traffic almost requires the practice in order to make the business
models work. How much of this practice a particular provider can get
away with depends on a lot of factors -- greed balanced against support
costs and market perception being  just a few of the factors.

My position on the matter is that when I paid Verizon for my Internet
connection my SLA did not say that Verizon could choose which parts of
the Internet I could reach reliably. It stated that they would do their
best to provide my stated bandwidth through their network to any point
on the Internet I chose to reach to the extent that connectivity is
under their control.

If I want to pull down a stream from Netflix or Youtube or my
grandmother's basement web server then I've already paid Verizon for
that connectivity and it is my expectation that they will resolve any
problems within their control to ensure they meet their SLA terms. If it
turns out that a few zillion similar customers make the same choice to
download from the same location on the 'Net then it is Verizon's duty to
honor that agreement for all of us and make the stated bandwidth through
their network available. If the problem is outside of their control and
grandma's server is falling over then that's not Verizon's problem and I
don't expect them to fix that. But, if the problem that they
intentionally allowed connections leading to gradma's server to become
saturated so that they could bully grandma into giving them money then
that's not ok. It's extortion.

Note also that I don't expect the transmitting side not to pay -- They
should, and in this case they did. When I want to stand up a server farm
I pay for my upload bandwidth and my download bandwidth -- and so does
everybody else. Everybody sort of winks and nods about the unspoken
over-subscription and the bursty nature of the 'Net and unwritten
expectations about what the SLAs really mean and then they shake hands
and it's all fine... that is, right up until somebody gets greedy.

Netflix paid to send. Myself and a large chunk of Netflix customers paid
to receive. Everybody in between played their version of the "how much
can we oversubscribe this week" game and everything should have been
fine -- especially given the extraordinarily low cost of the actual
hardware required to deliver bandwidth these days... especially at
peering points in large data centers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

Peering agreements between large network providers have been a key
factor in building a robust Internet. Everyone benefits from this
practice because diversity and redundancy are fundamental to
reliability. If my network helps you connect your customers to servers
on another side of the network then it's good for everybody if we make
that connection -- pretty simple really. Better still if I make multiple
such agreements with multiple providers so that everyone involved can
benefit from a rich diversity of routs and copious bandwidth.

In this case, Verizon found themselves in a position to squeeze Netflix
by refusing to upgrade their interconnects with intermediate providers.
Comcast showed them they could get away with it. If they didn't have a
monopoly position on the last mile to a HUGE chunk of Netflix customers
they would not have had the leverage to pull it off and they would have
had to play nice --- again, my opinion, as there is no math to do here
on what that means or whether my take on good business practice is
relevant in any way.

I think it is clear that reducing diversity and redundancy by cutting
out these middle networks is detrimental to the fabric of the Internet.
It might be great for Verizon's profits, and those of other monopolies,
but it definitely works against the greater good; and growing
consolidation like this weakens the Internet. There is good math on
those engineering principles and settled science so I shouldn't have to
debate those points.

No matter what the facts are, the argument between us is really whether
the policy and business choices that were made were the right ones and
whether the FCC's take on this will make things any better --- again, an
opinion. Actually, I never wanted an argument -- I was just sharing my
thoughts.

There is no way to win a debate on an opinion, and I have no intention
of trying to do so. Based on the adversarial nature of your initial
remarks I doubt I would enjoy it, and I have every reason to believe the
exercise would generate more heat than light.

_M

-- 
kf4hcw
Pete McNeil
lifeatwarp9.com/kf4hcw