Tag: Managing the Internet
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The Last Mile Bottleneck and Net Neutrality
When thinking about the performance of any computer system or network, the first question to ask is “Where is the bottleneck?” As demand grows, one part of the system reaches its capacity first, and limits performance. That’s the bottleneck. If you want to improve performance, often the only real options are to use the bottleneck…
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ICANN Says No to .xxx
Susan Crawford reports that the ICANN board has voted not to proceed with creation of the .xxx domain. Susan, who is on ICANN’s board but voted against the decision, calls it a “low point” in ICANN’s history. [Background: ICANN is a nonprofit organization that administers the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates human-readable Internet names…
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Nuts and Bolts of Net Discrimination: Encryption
I’ve written several times recently about the technical details of network discrimination, because understanding these details is useful in the network neutrality debate. Today I want to talk about the role of encryption. Scenarios for network discrimination typically involve an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who looks at users’ traffic and imposes delays or other performance…
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Discrimination, Congestion, and Cooperation
I’ve been writing lately about the nuts and bolts of network discrimination. Today I want to continue that discussion by talking about how the Internet responds to congestion, and how network discrimination might affect that response. As usual, I’ll simplify the story a bit to spare you a lengthy dissertation on network management, but I…
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Nuts and Bolts of Net Discrimination, Part 2
Today I want to continue last week’s discussion of how network discrimination might actually occur. Specifically, I want to talk about packet reordering. Recall that an Internet router is a device that receives packets of data on some number of incoming links, decides on which outgoing link each packet should be forwarded, and sends packets…
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Nuts and Bolts of Network Discrimination
One of the reasons the network neutrality debate is so murky is that relatively few people understand the mechanics of traffic discrimination. I think that in reasoning about net neutrality it helps to understand how discrimination would actually be put into practice. That’s what I want to explain today. Don’t worry, the details aren’t very…
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Quality of Service: A Quality Argument?
One of the standard arguments one hears against network neutrality rules is that network providers need to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to certain kinds of traffic, such as video. If QoS is necessary, the argument goes, and if net neutrality rules would hamper QoS by requiring all traffic to be treated the same,…
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How Would Two-Tier Internet Work?
The word is out now that residential ISPs like BellSouth want to provide a kind of two-tier Internet service, where ordinary Internet services get one level of performance, and preferred sites or services, presumably including the ISPs’ own services, get better performance. It’s clear why ISPs want to do this: they want to charge big…
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Net Neutrality and Competition
No sooner do I start writing about net neutrality than Ed Whitacre, the CEO of baby bell company SBC, energizes the debate with a juicy interview: Q: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others? A: How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe.…
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Discrimination Against Network Hogs
Adam Thierer has an interesting post about network neutrality over at Tech Liberation Front. He is reacting to a recent Wall Street Journal story about how some home broadband service providers (BSPs) are starting to modify their networks to block or frustrate network applications they don’t like. Why would a BSP discriminate against an application’s…