Small tangent, but I feel like it is a good time to drop the term "net neutrality", which covers way too much ground. In the past in political discussions, the term "violation of net neutrality" was used to protest multiple different issues:

* Traffic shaping (e.g. slowing down Bittorrent traffic)

* Traffic fast lanes (pay for priority access to some content providers)

* Selective zero-rating (exclude some providers from counting towards a traffic limit)

* Artificial peering restriction (what Telekom is doing, usually via forcing content providers into paid peering agreements)

I think people should start using more specific terms that are understandable for non-technical people, because otherwise the discussion becomes confused, which helps the providers.

Lots of semi-technical people think that "violating net neutrality" refers to traffic fast lanes, because the last time this discussion entered the public was when the US social media was in uproar about FCC rules 10 years ago.

What Telekom is doing looks similar to the outside (some content providers are fast, some are not), but they can just deflect by saying that they do not intentionally throttle traffic, which is pretty much true, as they hit their physical bottlenecks. If you are knowledgable enough as a lawmaker to press them on the peering issue, they could argue that forcing peering would force them to pay rent at Internet Exchanges, just so other providers have good access. Where they also kind of have a point.

And even lots of technical people have no clue about peering, transit etc. and treat their uplink as a blackbox, a cloud in their network chart where the Internet comes out.

For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.

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sgjohnson 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.

Realistically not going to happen, as the effort would need to be global. Like, Cogent STILL refuses to transit-free IPv6 peer with HE. https://bgp.tools/kb/partitions.

T1s are very happy where they are, and it's an exclusive club. Any attempts to tame this behavior from DTAG will also face backlash from basically all the other T1s.

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yayachiken 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Regulating peering within the EU would already be a win.

The providers are then free to either move out of the EU market, or let their non-EU traffic flow via the (then likely larger) unrestricted pipes at DECIX and AMSIX. If they think that routing everything via EU is cheaper instead of just peering better in the other parts of the world to deliver traffic locally, then be it, that is their own economic freedom to decide so.

But they will realistically not do that. Also, SDNs will likely never go back to serving content in Europe from e.g. the US. Good connectivity is just generally the economically better option.

That being said, T1 companies like Deutsche Telekom who also serve a large consumer base via broadband and mobile and not just other large business networks are probably more vulnerable to such legislation than an exclusive transit provider.

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sgjohnson 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Regulating peering within the EU would already be a win.

Regulating peering how? Freedom of commerce is one of the core pillars of the EU. Forcing a company to do business with another company is insanity.

If DTAG doesn't want to peer with CloudFlare, you can't force them.

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yayachiken 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DTAG are also a consumer ISP. A consumer ISP should be considered a utility, and utilities can also be forced to provide certain services. In addition, Internet Exchanges have become so critical for the Internet architecture that they should also have some privileged status.

Legislation could focus on the following general rules, without favoring some providers over the others:

* If you participate on an IX node, there is no reasonable technical or financial reason not to peer with the other participants at that node. Of course this would also mean that participants have to be protected against price-gouging of IXs when they need to scale up their uplink for that reason.

* Alternatively, you could conditionally allow paid peering, but in that case require certain availability guarantees on your general transit connection.

* If you do not want to do business with a certain party, it should be all or nothing. Blacklist them organization-wide. No misleading to consumers that a content provider just appears slow, announce that you do not want to play with e.g. Netflix anymore and if your customers do not like it, they will switch.

* If you want to opt out of all of this regulation, you are free to run fiber yourself and just directly connect with everybody you are interested in. That is expensive? Too bad.

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sgjohnson 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Letting the government regulate peering will be the death of the internet as we know it.

I don't believe that there's a single lawmaker, anywhere in the world, who understands anything about the fundamentals of IP transit. But no doubt they have ISP buddies who understand everything about it, and no doubt they'll be the ones actually writing the legislation.

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yayachiken 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, there is always a regulatory measure that would be a lot easier to implement: Lawmakers could just disallow Tier 1 carriers to provide consumer Internet access. (This forced separation of business domain already has precedent in other sectors, e.g. energy companies having to separate network upkeep from energy trading or banks having to split their investment branch from the credit branch)

And I have a feeling that as soon as that is seriously discussed, the current exploitation of market power will stop rather quickly, without any need for actual regulation.

	▲	sgjohnson 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Lawmakers could just disallow Tier 1 carriers to provide consumer Internet access. This one I actually agree with.

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amiga386 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Governments successfully managed this before. It was called Local Loop Unbundling.

They recognised where the monopoly was: the incumbent telcos with millions of customers that had to go through them to get anywhere else.

So the government insisted that such incumbents make available space in their exchanges for third parties (not for free!), and to allow their customers to use the third parties for telephone and/or internet service, rather than themselves.

A similar argument and regulation could be made today. It could only apply to ISPs with a significant number of endpoint customers. It could require that the ISP make peering available to third parties, at the third party's cost, but the resulting transit should be settlement-free. It could require that if a peer asks the ISP to upgrade, because the ISP is deliberately underprovisioning, the ISP is compelled to allow the third party to pay reasonable costs to upgrade both sides (so the ISP can't sit on its hands, can't brazen it out, and can't set an impossible price)

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direwolf20 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

WhatsApp has been required to provide an open API, Apple has been required to provide alternative app stores. Neither one has actually done it because the EU is too pussy to enforce the law, but the legislators clearly had no huge principle disagreement when writing these laws.

Mobile networks have been forced to allow roaming in other countries for a certain low fee, and that is actually enforced and has happened. It's clear the EU has no qualms about forcing companies to do business a certain way when it serves some greater interest.

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sgjohnson 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The difference between WhatsApp open API, alternative App Stores and forcing peering is that it costs virtually nothing for WhatsApp to provide an open API, and for Apple to allow alternative App Stores.

Roam-like-at-home is also not a particularly good comparison here, because the the roaming fees were basically a price gouging scheme.

Don't like DTAG? You're free to switch to another ISP.

	▲	direwolf20 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It costs DTAG virtually nothing to have good peering, certainly compared to their income. It costs Apple a very high percentage of their revenue to allow alternative app stores, since their main revenue source is the 30% tax on all in-app purchases through the Apple store.
	▲	luckylion 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What's your estimation for how much more expensive it would be for DTAG to peer at Decix instead of only doing dedicated private peerings that they get paid for? Because I don't believe it's about any additional cost -- it's only about additional revenue that could be extracted. That's a behavior you don't like to see from a state-owned ex-"Only Offer Allowed" monopolist that is still dominating the market while the government entities tasked with regulating the market are closing both eyes.

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andersa 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People use the same word because all of those actions have the same result for an end user.

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direwolf20 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's no such thing as paid peering, is there? There's only being a customer. DT wants you to buy transit to get access to their customers.

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yayachiken 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Peering just means that two AS physically connect to each other directly. Whether this peering is paid or not is independent from the technical implementation.

Just nearly everybody except Telekom is doing this on a liberal and informal not-even-handshake basis. On ISP scale, you either invest in infrastructure, or pay rent for network ports or cross-links, and you generally want your traffic usage to be smooth without spikes, and also go to the destination without going through your expensive ports more than once. So general connectivity is more important than any kind of traffic metering.

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direwolf20 an hour ago | parent [-]

> peering just means that ...

This also describes transit and describes getting internet service at home. I wouldn't say my cellphone peers with my provider. My cellphone is very much subordinate to my provider, not a peer.

DT thinks it's important enough that it can extort everyone.

A good policy for ISPs is to peer as many places and networks as possible, and carry traffic between your peers and customers, and customers and customers, and transit and customers, but not between peers and peers, or peers and transit. This way one end is paying for all traffic you carry. If you are a bully, you can try to make both ends pay.

	▲	yayachiken 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> This also describes transit and describes getting internet service at home. Well no. Transit means that you use another AS (usually by a larger ISP) to get connectivity to a certain AS. And as for your internet service at home, unless you announce an AS, you are not peering with anyone.

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7bit an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

All the points you list contribute to the Internet being neutral or not, therefore of course these items come up in discussions.