So this is flaring up again and everyone seems to be all in on having the government getting involved with the internet. There are plenty of reasons why it has never been so and never should be, but I will get to that later, first there needs to be some established history and clearing up facts about the internet functionality. Unfortunately this will be long.

Starting with the most recent history, the source of this stupid debate that has real consequences to destroy the internet as we currently know and love/hate it. This started when people started to whine that their $8/month TV service is buffering, not something catastrophic like not being able to get to other countries, this is about TV. It's pathetic and the definition of a first world problem.

So it's all because of people having a bad experience with Netflix. This has driven the huge debate demanding "net neutrality", unfortunately by people who have no idea how the internet works and ignorant the phrase really is.

Before continuing, some information about me, I'm in my late 20s, my degree focuses on computer networking with a dab of systems administration, worked with starting up an ISP and digital Cable TV (all MPEGoIP based), and tinkering with networking and various internet services (IRC, FTP, HTTP, game servers, to name a few) since I was in high school, and I dabble in programming occasionally. I know a lot about networking and how the internet, details on some of the protocols that run on top.

Let's start with looking at what the "net neutrality" movement is asking for: "all packets must be equal", no "slow lanes", and the need the government to get involved and stop the evil ISPs! Ugh, most of these are based on the logical fallacy, argument from ignorance, that are just parroted without any backing knowledge.

The fact is that the modern internet has never operated with all packets having equal priority; if it was DDoS would be even more effective than it currently is, Bittorrent would bring the internet to a crawl (like it did around 2006), VoIP and video calling would be impossible, telepresence surgery couldn't even be considered and your Netflix experience would be worse as its competing with everything else; the internet would be an unusable mess. IP was even designed with a field specifically for identifying packets that request timely transport as they hit the router. For example, VoIP packets are typically labeled at layer 3 or 4 as they require timely and ordered delivery to operate correctly, "net neutrality" would require this to be ignored to make them equal with everything else. Every ISP quality router supports at a minimum some form of prioritization through layer 3 or 4 labels or its information; generally priority would be given to HTTP, VoIP and email to keep the lower usage customers happy, while power users won't even notice the small loss from these low bandwidth prioritizations.

It should be noted that most priority configurations only take effect as bandwidth utilization approaches the capacity limit. Defining a capacity limit is difficult as the capacity (or link speed) varies along path when packets travel across the internet. The internet is built up of a large number of interconnected networks, and the link speeds can of course vary. As the focus tends to be on ISPs, there are at least three points where link speeds would be different, that the ISP has some control over:

1. Customer edge, the modem in your home connects here. Typically this is limited to the physical layer's speed and is shared among all nodes on the MAC domain, ie. for DSL its the DSL version and for cable it depends on the DOCSIS version, more info here. Bottlenecks can happen here, but the ISP should be managing their capacity properly to alleviate this.
2. ISP Core. This is the network that links all of the ISP's local servers to customers as well as the first stop to get to the internet; typically this would be some variant on Ethernet so the link speeds here would be 1Gb/s to 40+Gb/s. Bottlenecks should never occur here.
3. Internet peers/edge. Link speeds here are could be anything depending on the peering/transit agreements. This is the second most likely bottleneck and one that is not easily fixed, as these links are generally extremely expensive to put in place or upgrade outside of contracts or must be budgeted for.

So why is it important to talk about link speeds? In the beginning of this mess it was suspected, even shouted as fact, that this occurred at the customer edge and that the ISPs were all to blame. It's hard to say whether this was true or not in all situations, but it extremely unlikely to be the cause as it was wide spread with nothing in common except Netflix. Some of the proof of this that floated around was Netflix bit rates at <1 Mbps while speed tests are are showing full 10+ Mbps speeds; therefore it's extremely unlikely to be a customer edge bottleneck if speed tests to the core are normal.

Now all of this doesn't eliminate the possibility of an ISP throttling connections at the internet/peer edge, but really what is the gain? I highly doubt the engineers would waste time time not doing real work, to track down all of Netflix's addresses, the majority of which runs on AWS so the addresses or even blocks could be a part of some huge range. The theory floating on the internet behind this to 'support' the idea of throttling is that Netflix is competing against their cable services and throttling is due to retaliation. This would be one of the dumbest decisions any cable company would make; not only would it not be a secret for a long time, but it would hurt their already small margins on internet services as customers would leave in droves; and really the average Netflix subscriber is not their target market at the moment but that may change as their competing services are more mature.

None of the cable companies got to where they are today with truly anti-competitive business practices, maybe it looks like that in your local area, but that only happened through a agreement between the ISP and your local elected officials, or through acquisitions or some combination of both.

Netflix also has a dirty little secret that no one mentions, they employ caching servers inside of ISPs so the majority of traffic to customers does not go over the internet; this is NOT network neutral as it bypasses the Internet. Sure Netflix provides these for "free" to ISPs but it takes real money to power these boxes (apparently 100TB servers) and managed the networking; for a large ISP like Comcast etc, this is unfeasible as it they would need thousands of these to effectively balance the load across the entire U.S., so they made the call to just pipe it all through their internet links to the Tier 1 backbones at the various hubs and I completely agree with this decision. It moves the entire networking and capacity responsibility where it should be, at the data owner's transport for egress and the ISP's internet links for ingress. This is real network neutrality, each end pays for their transport and Tier 1 ISPs bring it together.

The Wikipedia page on Tier 1 ISPs gives a decent overview of the tiering for ISPs. It's worth noting that in the U.S., the large ISPs (Comcast, Time Warner, etc) are closer to Tier 2 ISPs simply because their size requires such a relationship.

I guess no one remembers when YouTube had capacity issues and they fixed it without whining and pointing fingers. So what's Netflix's deal? Netflix wants everyone else to pay for the extra transport, while their costs stay the same and thus the customer price the same and keeping their profits. So with a little cage rattling against the already unfavored ISPs, fueled by the masses need for TV, here we are; possible government intervention.

When the internet was young and beginning to gain traction (~1998), rules were put in place to have the internet completely managed outside of the government in the form of ICANN and under these ideals, the internet is where it is today. There are a few ideas making their way up the legislation track, they boil down to two core ideas, equal traffic priority and common carrier status. Equal traffic is terrible as I went over earlier, it also means those ISP cache boxes for Netflix and CDNs have to go as they give an unfair advantage to those going over the internet. Also note, EVERY legal draft for equal traffic specifically states it only applies to legal or lawful content or network traffic; which is of course left up to interpretation at enforcement time.

Common carrier status. This is the other big ask and if it happens, this will be the end of the internet as we know it today. Common carriers have been reserved to mainly phone companies, as they 'carry' a 'common' thing, a phone (land) line. A phone line at my house is the same at your house, it has a different number but if I take my phone over and plug it in I get a dial tone, same thing at any house with a phone line. This doesn't work with the internet. There is no standard last mile connector equivalent to an RJ11 jack, no common modulation as we choose DOCSIS or DSL and even those have multiple versions and incompatibilities, and no common bandwidth. Internet bandwidth is sold in tiers to customers, being a common carrier means only one tier, for everyone.

Sure the ISPs are fine being labeled a common carrier because they know all of this, for them it means they don't have to do big spends upgrading to meet the changing internet demands and instead casually sit back and enjoy the money from the new near monopolistic status given to them as the cost of starting a government compliant ISP goes through the roof. The FCC has been trying for years to gain control over Cable TV to censor and fine similar to broadcast, if that happened, shows like Game of Thrones would never exist, and the people want to hand that over to the internet.

I'm tired and this is already way too long and has been delayed for way too long. I may add more later, but that's unlikely.

Stuff worth reading:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bretswanson/2014/06/27/netflix-and-the-net-n...
http://donovanadkisson.com/feature/2014/05/20/the-not-so-hidden-truth-of...
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Google-Fiber-These-New-Paid-Interconn...
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/06/09/net-neutrality-a-web-of...
http://www.fierceonlinevideo.com/story/netflix-peering-dispute-verizon-c...