Interesting Links for 03-06-2014

[andrewducker]

• 23 Words That Have A Totally Different Meaning In Scotland
  (tags: Scotland language funny )
• Edinburgh trams ‘worth 400 year wait’
  (tags: Edinburgh trams )
• Smokers with gene defect have one in four chance of developing lung cancer
  Which I think means that those without it have a 10% chance. Anyone care to check my maths?
  (tags: cancer genetics

Comments

[fanf]

One of the things I don't understand about net neutrality is why it has been imported from the US to the EU. Here our last mile ISPs have much lower prices and better performance than in the US, and we generally don't hear about stupidities like that recent Level 3 blog post. The usual observation is that there is a positive correlation between competition and performance, both in the US and the EU.

I think that concepts like net neutrality and common carriers are nice, but the principles and arguments seem to have more to do with civil liberties and censorship than with performance and cost-effectiveness. So I don't think net neutrality can fix the streaming video performance problem, or even fix different quality of service between an ISP's own video services and those from competitors: after all, a congested peering point drops packets neutrally without regard to their contents, source, or destination. The way to fix that is to force the ISP to upgrade their peering so it isn't congested, or force them to host co-located fan-out proxies for competitors' video services on their network. And I don't see how a high-minded regulation about fair packet forwarding can reasonably lead to that kind of heavy-handed outcome without having horrible side-effects.

So when I say "bullshit" I mean that net neutrality proponents seem to be dressing up a problem of bad service as (almost) a failure of human rights in order to justify regulation. But the regulation is in the wrong place, because in practice we observe that proper competition is enough to address the original problem (as opposed to its window dressing).

The other thing about net neutrality in the EU that puzzles me is how odd it is as a political strategy. Dressing it up as freedom of speech clearly plays well in the US where they give that a much higher priority than our governments do. Here there is a much greater enthusiasm in government (and in the tabloid press) for censorship. So are the EU net neutrality people importing it to fight that? Are they casting ISPs as the bad guys because they have capitulated to government demands? But I haven't seen any arguments along these lines - it looks to me more like copy-cat lobbying: "look, they have net neutrality over there, we should have it too!"

[andrewducker]

Oh, I think the level 3 thing was blown out of proportion - there has always been paid peering, and if you're trying to significantly transfer more data than your opposite number are currently dealing with then you'll have to come to some kind of arrangement.

I think that the argument is that if you're with, say, Comcast, and they have a deal with Hulu, then you don't want them streaming stuff in from Hulu's external servers faster than they stream stuff in from Netflix's external servers. But then they'll just put a cache in their network for their supported services anyway.

Having competition over the last mile certainly has made a big difference in the UK, and I'm not knocking it. But I can understand that people don't want to give their ISP any kind of control over the content they deliver - they want big, dumb, pipes.

[fanf]

I don't think net neutrality regulation will save users from getting small dumb pipes.