[HN Gopher] Wehe - Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations ___________________________________________________________________ Wehe - Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations Author : simonpure Score : 94 points Date : 2021-01-22 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (dd.meddle.mobi) (TXT) w3m dump (dd.meddle.mobi) | peter_d_sherman wrote: | For some reason, I can't currently reach the web page -- but that | doesn't matter -- | | _THIS IS A GREAT IDEA..._ | | That is, this, and tools like this, are highly necessary, in | other words... | karlzt wrote: | https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/dd.meddle.mobi?proto=htt... | curiousgal wrote: | Works on mobile, doesn't work on PC. | teraku wrote: | Amazing name choice ;-) | | It means "Don't you dare" in German | adamhearn wrote: | Site appears to be down for me. Here is an archive: | https://web.archive.org/web/20210122155540/https://dd.meddle... | unnouinceput wrote: | "Have you ever wondered if your Internet service provider is | slowing down certain apps relative to others" | | Is this some sort of a US ISP problem that I am too Eastern | European to understand? | uoflcards22 wrote: | Yes | sodimel wrote: | It is listed in the "tools" page [1] on the Arcep website, | which is french [2]. | | [1] https://www.arcep.fr/demarches-et-services/pour-tous.html | | [2] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_de_R%C3%A9gulati... | jonpurdy wrote: | From what I remember reading when Wehe came out, ISPs in Spain | and Portugal (and Brazil?) were already providing data capped | plans with options to uncap particular services for a small | fee. So you'd get an (example) 100GB plan and pay $1-2/mo for | each service you want excluded from the cap (Netflix, or | whatever). | | IANAL but I'm sure this was/is legal in those jurisdictions, | which indicates a total disregard for net neutrality there. | chrisweekly wrote: | Great idea! Interesting sources of support, too: | | > This material is based upon work supported by the National | Science Foundation under Grant No. (CNS-1617728), a Google | Faculty Research Award, Arcep (Autorite de Regulation des | Communications Electroniques et des Postes), Verizon Labs and | Amazon. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or | recommendations expressed in this material are those of the | author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the | National Science Foundation, Google, Arcep, Verizon Labs or | Amazon. | | (c) Copyright 2012-2021 by David Choffnes, Northeastern | University. | joshuakelly wrote: | Net neutrality seems like an irrelevant discussion now to anyone | interested in "radical" internet models (read: anything that's | not deeply entrenched in the client-server paradigm). Why should | we care about the battles between corporate titans over how they | treat each other? Frankly, I _hope_ the ISPs and carriers are | able to squeeze them, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. | arcticbull wrote: | Well, until proven otherwise, the answer to that question is: | centralization and trust is a huge efficiency optimization. | Just look at how wildly inefficient Bitcoin is as compared to | all other forms of ... well anything. The reason we see such | centralization is because it represents a huge saving in | energy, in time, in money. That market incentive will continue | to exist into the future. Even if alternative strategies take | hold, there will be a massive market for centralized solutions | - they will serve the majority of the population - so we will | need to make this push one way or the other for that faction to | be well served. | | If that ever changes, we can stop the fight. To do so now is, | to say the least, premature. | Strongylodon wrote: | >Why should we care about the battles between corporate titans | over how they treat each other?... the enemy of my enemy is my | friend. | | You should read a bit about the cold war in my opinion. This | logic can burn you. | teddyh wrote: | " _The enemy of my enemy is my enemy 's enemy, no more, no | less_" | | -- Maxim 29, _The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective | Mercenaries_ (https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_M | axims_of_Ma...) | WarOnPrivacy wrote: | Yes but the enema of my enemy . . . | mathgorges wrote: | Can you help me understand what you mean by '"radical" internet | models'? | | My brain isn't sure if you're talking about: | | 1) Things which disrupt HTTP like IPFS 2) Things which disrupt | entrenched ISPs like Starlink or 5g internet; or 3) Both | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: | Maybe it is not so radical. The original, pre-web internet was | not client-server. Each end of the connection potentially had | something the other wanted. IMO, that's a truer representation | of the real world. Today's internet is entirely web and mobile | app centric, as if the world is nothing more than a feedlot, | with only a small number of large-scale "farmers". | | https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/exa... | gcblkjaidfj wrote: | ironically, what you describe today happened because those | central points were the ones producing the content (portals) | that everyone wanted. | | Now that users produce the content, they kept the | distribution and revenue model (i.e. you go to the central | places and they sell you to advertisers) but they have zero | cost for content since everyone is a producer and consumer, | which was the use case for the non-centralized portals in the | first place. | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: | An astute observation. In an ideal "web" (as imagined in | the 1990's), every business might have a website, there | would be news sources[1], and many nerds would have | websites, but beyond that, to the non-nerd, after a while, | it's not very interesting. Despite what people once might | have thought in the early-mid 90's, every living person is | not going to create their own website. (Or even a blog, as | people thought in the 2000's). The web is finite and that | is bad news for search engines.[2] UGC and "social media" | have been a way for certain companies to mask this truth. | | 1. As I remember it, news was one of the early internet | centralisation points. As dial-up telephone charges were | expensive, we patiently waited for someone at a large | university to download the news and forward it. I am not a | great source of internet history, others will may correct | me here, but one of the largest operations like this, | downloading Usenet news and making it available, ended up | becoming what some called the first "ISP". That was UUNet. | The takeway from this footnote is that "news" showed to be | an early centralisation point, high traffic. Everyone wants | "the news". | | 2. The trend today with Google and Bing, and those who use | their feeds, is to limit the number of unique search | results any user can retrieve. Around 250-300 max but with | many searches one is lucky to get 50-100. The search | engines are trying to market themselves as a way to "get | answers" instead of a way to discover what websites exist | on the web today. We all know what this looks like on | Google and Bing. The companies place their own "web | properties" in the results, i.e., many of the "results" are | links to the companies own servers, and they scrape other | websites to provide "instant" answers. The user never | leaves the search results page, never even visits another | website. DDG, following the lead of Google, calls this | "instant answers" and "zero-click info". This statement | from DDG sums up the present day popular search engines: | | "When people search, we believe they're really looking for | answers, as opposed to just links." | | source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- | pages/results/so... | | (Personally I do want "just links". I have written scripts | to get them.) | | It is up to the reader to decide whether this is | intentional or not, but either way, unlike in the 1990's | and early 2000's, search engines are limiting how much of | the web users can actually "see" at one time. Regardless of | intent, that is the effect. If, hypothetically, the web was | not growing very much, no one could detect that using a | search engine. The web today is portrayed by search engines | as some sort of oracle that can provide answers. For easy | questions, sure. For more difficult ones, we can fabricate | answers but that does not mean they are good ones. Than add | in "AI" hype. What happens when people lose all critical | thinking ability. They just accept the oracle's answer as | "good enough". We can already see this happenig with young | people. You can end up with a Wizard of Oz scenario, but no | one ever discovers the tiny man behind the curtain. The | truth is that the web is still a motley collection of | websites, along with some very large "walled gardens" of | UGC that draw the lion's share of daily traffic. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | > 2. The trend today with Google | | Sorry, but I think this is totally wrong. | | I knew the guy who wrote the very first web | crawler/search engine, and even then, the intent was to | find answers, not websites. | | Moreover, I don't see any limit on what google returns | when you search. I just searched for "the trend with | google today" and it told me there were 927,000,000 | results. When I got to page 22 of those results, it told | me that the rest were all very similar but gave me a link | to fetch them anyway. I could get to an arbitrary Nth | result. | | The reality is that search engines actually are, by any | historical standard "some sort of oracle that can provide | answers". | | And when they can't/don't, they still function as tools | that provide you with links to help you explore the | question more. | | Recognizing whether or not you've actually found the | answer (from a book, from deductive processes, from a | human oracle or from a search engine) has always required | critical thinking skills, and that has not changed. | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: | Yes, I can imagine that search engine folks always | thought the web would be some oracle. But if you have | been using the web since its debut you know that it | isn't. Search results are a list of results (links, i.e., | addresses/locations of the sources), not an "answer". The | oracle idea is only realistic to some programmers. When I | go to the library and search for sources (books, | journals, etc), I might have a question in mind to which | I seek an answer, but at the library I am only searching | for the location of the sources. I do not expect an | "instant answer" from the library's search terminals. In | any event, not all searches are questions. Does Google | Scholar return "instant answers". | | For the query you tested, I could only get 101 results. | Could you get more than that. If you can get more than | 300 results, I would like to know what headers you sent. | I do not think this is possible anymore. | | Interesting if you believe critical thinking skills are | not on the decline. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | Google _does_ provide answers to simple questions, and | its capabilities grow over time. Wolfram Alpha has | operated in a similar domain, but using different | technology (i.e. not inherently a search engine) for some | time now. | | request with arbitrary results accessible out of 927M: | https://i.imgur.com/PHzrXSu.png | | I didn't suggest that critical thinking was declining. I | don't have a position on whether it is or is not - I can | think of several different factors that would | (collectively) push in both directions. | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | Does it? I'm interested in radical internet models. I worry | that without net neutrality we're on a gradual slippery slope | towards an internet whose "slow lane" goes away entirely and I | have to apply for a permit so that my IPFS node can be | appropriately prioritized. | noizejoy wrote: | > the enemy of my enemy is my friend | | My analogy is more: When the giant dinosaurs are fighting | amongst themselves, us little mammals can scurry about and | survive :-) | kevwil wrote: | I'd rather not know, because I have no reasonable alternative | here. Stress management 101. | entropea wrote: | When I download games from Steam I can only pull around 25.5MB/s, | but when I turn on my wireguard VPN I suddenly can pull 95MB/s | from Steam. The same happens with Netflix because fast.com is | throttled. Comcast ISP. | aloknnikhil wrote: | I'm not sure this works very well. I tried running the test on | T-mobile's LTE which has free Spotify streaming. It basically | said there was "no differentiation" implying there was no packet | inspection? | | EDIT: Re-read the technical details. I think it can only measure | one aspect of Net Neutrality I.e. Throttling one in favor of the | other. Which seems reasonable. But I don't think it should be | marketed as detecting "Net Neutrality Violation". | pmb wrote: | It is almost precisely what "network neutrality" means in the | EU. The US definition is different. | gcblkjaidfj wrote: | tmobile still steals DNS requests to their weird search page? | | that alone would get them very low grades in my book. | arcticbull wrote: | Aways set your DNS, preferably to 1.1.1.1 | gcblkjaidfj wrote: | Google won't allow you on non rooted android phones. | | > cue in google apologists telling me how to root or | install hacks to do that and that it is totally possible | alias_neo wrote: | On newer Android versions there's a setting called | "Private DNS", I usually set it to Cloudflare IPv6 DNS. | | There is 100% some funky shit going on in Android though; | I was working on a project the other night and my phone | absolutely refused to connect to the service on my PC. My | phone and tablet both on Android simply gave me "no route | to host" or timeouts even with data disabled and WiFi | only set; this is connecting directly to IPs no | hosts/DNS. Of course I assumed the firewall was up until | I confirmed every other computing device I can access was | able to hit it. | | Why is my phone messing with my networking on my private | network? | isiahl wrote: | Just tested with my S9+ and could change my DNS settings | Toutouxc wrote: | How does it work? Does an Android on my WiFi just ignore | the DHCP provided DNS, or..? | kurthr wrote: | Wow, Android/IOS only! | | No PC options at all. Interesting choice, and perhaps a JS | browser version wouldn't have worked properly. Maybe I'll try it, | and maybe my PC VM would have caused issues, but doing a full | mobile install is a big ask. | OkGoDoIt wrote: | This appears to be specifically looking at cellular data, and | cellular carrier's tendency to throttle video services. It's | not a generic service to check generic ISP throttling. Perhaps | updating the title might help. | | That being said, I have cellular data on my laptop and I've | always been curious if it gets throttled the same way they | throttle mobile, since I'm sure there some differences in the | connection that may or may not fit the content filters the | carrier has set. | specialist wrote: | I still don't understand "net neutrality". Further, reading other | people's definitions and opinions, it feels like the pro and con | advocates are talking past each other. | | Here's my current stab at understanding each side: | | Customer perspective: Rent seeking bad. Don't want to be gouged. | | Broadband providers perspective: Mitigate the free rider | problem(s), make the system fair. | | Examples would be very helpful. Of course there are bad actors. | I'm trying to not get sucked into that food fight. My hope is | that we can curtail bad behavior (cheating) with better policies. | | Surely we can design markets to satisfy the needs and concerns of | both sides. Right? | | -- | | Mea culpa: My bro created and runs the ISP portions of a cable | company. He relates examples of their struggles. Stuff like | spending millions of dollars on gear and having other companies | abusing it. | | We pretty much don't agree on anything. But my bros examples and | concerns are legit. So I've been trying to dig into his positions | on net neutrality, to better understand the larger impasse. | sologoub wrote: | Can you share more of what he considers abuse and any other | sides of that story? | zeroflow wrote: | > Mitigate the free rider problem(s), make the system fair. | | Which free rider problem? The customer pays the ISP for access | to the internet. | | I understand that the ISP would like to double-dip on this | deal. But I regard this as wrong. | specialist wrote: | Other broadband providers. My bro has never complained about | their end users. | nickelcitymario wrote: | I don't understand the "free rider" problem. | | I pay my ISP for bandwidth. WHAT I choose to download with that | bandwidth has no impact on their bottom line, unless they were | counting on me not actually using it. | | Websites and web apps pay for bandwidth. Anyone who has paid an | AWS bill knows there's nothing free about it. | | The only group of companies that are guaranteed to make money | in any internet venture are the ISPs. The rest of us are | gambling, hoping that our investments will be worth it. On top | of that, we're all competing with a global market, whiles ISPs | tend to only compete with a handful of local providers at a | time, allowing them a lot more control over prices. | | Meanwhile, they're selling pick axes in a gold rush and crying | victim? | | Doesn't make a lick of sense to me. | specialist wrote: | Consumers are not the free riders my bro cares about. It's | other companies. Like when he builds out new edge servers | which get filled up by YouTube, TikTok, etc. He thinks the | _sources_ should pay their fare share. | | I'd like to learn what fare means, how to curtail consumer | throttling, how yo curtail free loaders (bypassing transit | fees), what system would be more fair. | | Surely we can design market mechanisms to balance these | concerns. | majormajor wrote: | > Consumers are not the free riders my bro cares about. | It's other companies. Like when he builds out new edge | servers which get filled up by YouTube, TikTok, etc. He | thinks the sources should pay their fare share. | | Is he letting those sources push content to him for free? | | Or are his customers determining what's going through his | network? | nickelcitymario wrote: | I don't get it. How do the sources not pay? Don't they pay | for hosting and bandwidth? Aren't edge servers an | implementation detail that's inherent in providing | bandwidth? | specialist wrote: | Me neither. I don't consider my bro a reliable narrator. | What I've gleaned is the transit fees were regulated for | a while. | | It seems to me that Generic ISP Inc would meter all the | Netflix traffic and then send them a bill. And if Netflix | wants to ensure their end users are getting whatever | quantity and quality of bandwidth, the two parties will | negotiate. | worldofmatthew wrote: | You pay your ISP for their transit and peering blend. The | same as I pay my Web host for access to their transit blend. | | This is a seprate issue from what most people see as net | neutrality. If true net neutrality was enforced, then there | would be no caching boxes for Google,Facebook or Netflix and | they would have to rely on public peering with the congestion | that comes with. | specialist wrote: | > _This is a seprate issue from what most people see as net | neutrality._ | | Exactly. | | It really feels like the debate over "net neutrality" is | conflating multiple issues. | | I kinda get the ISP biz model. Overprovisioning and so | forth. | | I have no clue about the backbone biz model. How the | transit fees work. I want the ELI5 (Ray Dalio, Courtney | Love) covering how broadband works. What the basics? Who's | screwing who? How companies deal with each other. How they | deal with content publishers like Netflix, TikTok, etc. | itisit wrote: | You pay your ISP for bandwidth, but not for full and constant | utilization of said bandwidth. Check the acceptable use | policy of any major ISP, and you'll find they can throttle | you whenever and however at their sole discretion. | fat_pikachu wrote: | > I pay my ISP for bandwidth. WHAT I choose to download with | that bandwidth has no impact on their bottom line | | This isn't true in reality. For example, it's significantly | more expensive to deliver video traffic from say, my computer | to yours, than it would be to deliver from Netflix to your | computer. | majormajor wrote: | > This isn't true in reality. For example, it's | significantly more expensive to deliver video traffic from | say, my computer to yours, than it would be to deliver from | Netflix to your computer. | | At which side of the setup? To get the data from the | neighborhood hub to my computer? To get the data from the | start of the ISP's network to the neighborhood? To get the | data from you to my ISP's network? | | And are you meaning actually _from Netflix_ or _from a CDN_ | or _from a Netflix node in an ISP 's location_ or what? | wiml wrote: | Possibly helpful example: the classic net neutrality example, | in my mind, is a decade or so ago when Time-Warner Cable (in | some markets) was throttling Craigslist to be painfully slow, | because Craigslist was eating into the classified-ads business | of other parts of the Time-Warner group. | worldofmatthew wrote: | If it is just checking for speed differences than it useless at | checking for "Net Neutrality Violations". This is because Net | Neutrality would mean treating all traffic the same. | | As bigger players use more bandwidth, if treated the same they | will have congestion at peak hours as they use more bandwidth per | visitor than smaller sites. | | For someone like Netflix to be as fast as a smaller website, they | would need a peering arrangment that is special for them. | 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: | Go read the methodology section: they're explicitly looking for | ISPs that do packet inspection, not just speed differences from | site to device. | majormajor wrote: | This definition of net neutrality seems to rule out even | offering connections with different speeds. If I'm paying for | the 100Mb plan and someone else is on the 1Gb one, my downloads | will be slower than theirs. And Netflix here would be making a | deal for a really big pipe (oversimplification, obviously). | | I don't see a need for net neutrality to say you can't pay for | more if you need more. I think "we're gonna charge you extra | because of the TYPE of data you are" or "we're gonna charge you | extra because we have our own competing service" or "we're | gonna throttle you [for those same reasons]" are much bigger | concerns. | | What's the big concern with Netflix operating as their own CDN | vs paying a third party one? | jdminhbg wrote: | The Net Neutrality debate seems so quaint now. In January 2021, | ISPs are pretty much the least likely level of the stack to | interfere with who can be on the internet. Hosting companies, | cloud providers, payment providers, and big media platforms are | where decisions are made. | [deleted] | undefined1 wrote: | Right, the fear about Net Neutrality was largely directed at | ISPs. That they would create fast lanes and bundle web sites | like cable providers. | | I admit, I bought into that fear. But it didn't happen. Plus | average US broadband speed has increased drastically, up 91% | from 2019-2020[1]. | | Maybe big tech/media needs to ask themselves, "are we the | baddies?" | | 1. https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe- | intern... | NDizzle wrote: | Yep. Great reply. Said it better than I would. | | NN went away in 2017. Reading the replies on reddit is | troubling, thinking we need something that we actually don't. | With plenty of data to back it up. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-22 23:00 UTC)