DISQUS

Richard Bennett · 1 year ago

Network neutrality is probably a mistaken interpretation of "application neutrality", the characteristic of TCP whereby it doesn't know anything about the requirements of its user application. "Application neutrality" in TCP leads to a dumb pipe at the IP layer by default.

But there are other interpretations; Wu himself has defined it at least five different ways, one of them being "a principle of network architecture."

I don't think the DNS thing clarifies because we can't agree whether DNS is an end-point service or a network feature.

One thing that is clear is that the Internet is not really a pure end-to-end network, because it does routing in the core rather than at the end points (end point routing is called "source routing".) The PSTN is actually more end-to-end than the Internet because it lets you select your long distance carrier - route - at the end point.

The Internet does everything at the edge except when it doesn't.

Larry Sheldon · 1 year ago

I am not clear on what is mean some of the terms here, but one thing that grabbed me is that in general the ordinary user (including me, who for the sake of the discussion is very knowledgeable of the internal workings of networks) does NOT have the option of selecting other DNS servers (see the Ritz v. Sierra case in Fargo recently).

Most network providers disallow source routing. Period.

To me network neutrality means simply that the purchaser of services at some level in the protocol traffic is entitled to have his traffic treated exactly like every other purchaser of the same service. If somebody wants to introduce a notion of "class of service" I guess that is OK, but the network is going to need some re-engineering because the way it works now, when anybody hands the traffic off, they pretty much lose control of it.

Tim Lee · 1 year ago

Larry, I'm afraid you've lost me. How do ISPs prevent users from using other DNS servers? And what does source routing have to do with it?

Larry Sheldon · 1 year ago

ISP preventing it is not the issue.

The issue is if you select 100 people using the Internet to change the DNS servers they use, most will have no idea what you are talking about.

Of the remainder, most will use (be required to use) DHCP or a cable-clone of it where the configuration received will carry the DNS server to use.

Of the remainder, most will not know an alternative to use. And a lot od fire-walls won't allow it.

And in any case, I don't think DNS has much to do with the neutrality issues.


What does have to do with it is policy routing where the "policies" involve source, destination, protocol, and things like that.

See "packet shaping" http://www.packeteer.com/

Adam · 1 year ago

"Is network neutrality synonymous with the end-to-end principle"

Can you tell me what these mean and what the distinction is?

Seth Schoen · 1 year ago

Larry Sheldon:

Selecting your own DNS server is not incompatible with the use of DHCP. DHCP does provide a means for an ISP or network operator to propose DNS servers that users can use, and most DHCP clients will, by default, accept these suggestions and configure the local resolver to obey these suggestions. However, there is no reason that DHCP clients must do so, and they could be configured not to. For example, I was able to find out quickly by looking at the documentation for pump that pump.conf files can use the nodns directive to simply ignore DNS server information provided by DHCP servers (so that manually-configured DNS settings would continue to be used, even as IP address and route and network configuration changed). I'm sure that many other DHCP clients have an equivalent option.

For example, the OpenDNS people have configuration suggestions for various operating systems and they show that Windows XP separates the concepts of obtaining an IP address automatically and obtaining DNS server addresses automatically:

https://www.opendns.com/start?device=windows-xp

I imagine that the other instructions at

https://www.opendns.com/start

would provide fairly straightforward means of choosing to use OpenDNS in lieu of ISP-provided resolvers from many different operating systems, even while continuing to use DHCP.

(I'm not sure that this resolves the question of what kind of service we ought to consider the DNS to be.)

eee_eff · 1 year ago

It would seem that although the end to end principle, as described in the wikipedia article that Tim provides a link to (hint to all those who are asking about what it means!) was one of the original goal of TCP/IP implementation, but because of some creep in complexity of the network, it is no longer purely an end to end system.

Free.net, in its original implementation, did violate the end to end principle, in that much processes (cloaking really) was done on the intermediate points.

I understand the interest in technology, but the heart of the network neutrality debate lies in the content and protocol neutrality issues: whether AT&T; will be able to stop criticisms of it by denying or delaying access to content they don't like.

Protocol neutrality is in fact very closely linked to content neutrality, more closely than many seem to think. A recent example is the Bank Julius Baer suppression of the site wikileaks. Of course I immediately went over to PirateBay and downloaded the torrent and helped redistribute the content the bank objected to, and have done the same thing for the training video that the RIAA has distributed to prosecutors.

If ISP's can discriminate by content or by protocol, I will lose the freedom to redistribute this type of content.

Of course, I can't see the totality of your paper, but I feel overfocusing on the technology and not on the results could result in your paper being obscurantist.

Charles · 1 year ago

Maybe network neutrality isn't such a good word. EF above uses the words 'content and protocol neutrality', which I kind of like. I definitely don't care if isp treat different protocols differently. In fact, I'd really like it if, whenever they detected some voip traffic, they made sure it had priority over other things (within limits). My phone calls would be smoother. What I don't want, is for comcast to block my vonage-voip traffic on the basis that they also offer a voip package. Protocol neutrality, I don't care, so long as I have content neutrality. I can't be the only person in the world to be articulating this thought, really?

Larry Sheldon · 1 year ago

Why the fixation on DNS? It has nothing to do with routing or prioritizing, which I take to be the issues in "neutrality".

And there is considerable pressure to block port 53 traffic from end-user locations.

Wes Felter · 1 year ago

Different companies use different protocols for the same ends. For video, Akamai uses HTTP while Vuze uses BitTorrent. For VoIP, Vonage uses UDP while Skype uses various protocols. Allowing protocol discrimination thus also allows discrimination between companies, which tilts the playing field. Protocol discrimination also encourages the wasteful cloaking and inspection arms race.

YP · 4 months ago

I doubt that net neutrality has anything to do with the end to end principle.
the e2ep specifies that the endpoints should be 'involved' in a process, but it is generally understood to exclude performance optimization, which QoS is an example of.
Even without the exception, apps would not be 'broken' by any selective QoS, and thus the e2e principle is not violated.