[HN Gopher] Wehe - Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations
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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.
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(page generated 2021-01-22 23:00 UTC)