[HN Gopher] Vodafone Germany is killing the open internet - one ...
___________________________________________________________________
Vodafone Germany is killing the open internet - one peering
connection at a time
Author : PhilKunz
Score : 420 points
Date : 2025-11-07 17:05 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (coffee.link)
(TXT) w3m dump (coffee.link)
| wil421 wrote:
| I worked with Vodafone years ago to do an integration with
| ticketing systems. It seems like no one actually worked for
| Vodafone it was all contractors or contractors of contractors of
| contractors.
|
| Outsourcing peering to a 3rd party seems like their playbook.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| I used service of Vodafone Germany once. In paperwork fever I
| only scanned the contract and saw somewhere 6000 but signed off
| and moved along with remaining paperwork. I thought "it has to
| be at least 60Mbit/s, right?". Nope. 6Mbit/s DSL, two years
| contract, cancellation by letter. Fuck you, Vodafone.
| egeozcan wrote:
| At such organizations, you can usually communicate with any
| contractor, but you must go through a project manager. These
| managers, who are often contractors themselves, act as a
| support center for the other contractors.
| benced wrote:
| Rare comparative W for American ISPs?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think Comcast charges for peering as well (but not through an
| intermediary).
| stego-tech wrote:
| Not really, as US ISPs have been repeatedly trying to game the
| system into becoming landlords for decades. The difference is,
| ironically, their own self-imposed monopolies: Comcast may be a
| T1 ISP, but they're largely a monopoly in the markets they
| serve. Same goes for Verizon, Spectrum, Cox, TDS, etc. The end
| result is a sort of "forced cooperation" with each other,
| though occasionally one will try to extort the others for cash
| (I seem to recall L3 and Cogent both engaging in this bullshit
| around the time streaming video got big).
|
| Companies are extractive by nature, and they will always try to
| find new ways of squeezing blood from a stone absent
| regulations saying otherwise (and suitable punishments ensuring
| anyone caught violating them is crippled in the marketplace, if
| not outright destroyed). This has been going on for decades and
| will continue absent regulatory intervention. Just look at how
| the US Electrical grid bills to see how this could end up
| (higher prices, bullshit fees, redundant billing).
| rsingel wrote:
| California's net neutrality law bans these kinds of paid
| interconnections, but they likely exist as all these deals
| are wrapped in 15 layers of NDAs
| stego-tech wrote:
| Exactly. Regulations without suitable punishments and
| investigatory powers are essentially only barriers to new
| entrants, not deterrents of bad behavior.
| Liftyee wrote:
| New selling point for all the VPN sponsored segments... "if
| you're on Vodafone Germany, make your connection speeds faster
| with YetAnotherVPN!"
| timvisee wrote:
| A VPN won't make your route shorter
| toast0 wrote:
| If the shortest route is congested, a longer route can be
| advantageous if it avoids congested hops.
| undeveloper wrote:
| I'm not sure that will not speed anything up, since you face
| the same peering issue with connecting to XYZ vpn's server
| wmf wrote:
| The VPN will be fast if they pay the extortion. It's
| basically a paid fast lane.
| Lio wrote:
| Is there anything that Vodafone customers can do legally to
| punish Vodafone or not delivering on their broadband contracts?
|
| If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection and Netflix is only able
| to stream to you at 0.93 Mbps because Vodafone or Inter.link are
| choking off the supply, surely that's breach of contract on
| Vodafone's part?
|
| I'm sure Cory Doctorow has a word for what's happening here.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Are there competing options, or are they a monopoly?
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| In Germany in specific building there is only one provider
| available in your telephone socket, and one in your cable
| socket in your apartment. Frequently there is no cable
| socket.
| amaccuish wrote:
| That's not relevant. Over a Deutsche Telekom phone line you
| can choose an ISP. The ISP sometimes has a layer two
| connection to you and therefore has their own
| infrastructure or they have a layer 3 connection in which
| case you suffer from the Telekom policies.
|
| Layer 2 = their infrastructure connects you to the internet
|
| Layer 3 = theyre literally just a reseller, DTAG is
| providing your internet connection, the ISP just billing
| etc.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| That's too many words for simply saying "The fastest
| available DSL is 16Mbit/s and the customer service will
| be rude and useless".
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Sounds like their largest competitor (DT) is already doing
| this.
| okanat wrote:
| Yes and no. There are other providers in Germany. However,
| with the EU's neoliberal privatization policy the governments
| privatized many existing infrastructure. Vodafone bought the
| previous government company that owned all of the the cable
| TV infrastructure of Germany. So they are a monopoly of a
| particular type of internet connection. Depending on the
| place the alternatives could be too slow since Germany also
| has an aging population that do not {care about, demand}
| higher internet speeds and didn't upgrade its copper
| infrastructure due to corruption.
| lxgr wrote:
| Some new apartments also simply lack phone lines. No idea
| how that's legal (since there is no competition at all on
| DOCSIS, unlike on DSL, in Germany), but it's a thing these
| days.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| No monopoly. Only for cable internet, which may be a possible
| argument. For landline internet (DSL), there's plenty of
| alternatives.
| Retric wrote:
| High speed internet is a market not just internet access.
| Email might not care that your on a DSL connection but a
| streamer can't generally use DSL as a substitute.
| namibj wrote:
| They mean VDSL; that's 100~200 Mbit down and 10~24~50
| Mbit up.
| Retric wrote:
| VDSL2 can hit those speeds in optimal conditions, but at
| the end of last year ~14% of Germans have internet under
| 10Mbps and ~17% where 10-30Mbps.
| lxgr wrote:
| Unfortunately, having a landline capable of DSL is no
| longer the default in Germany.
|
| Some apartment buildings exlusively offer DOCSIS via a
| single provider (as there's never been any unbundling of
| the DOCSIS "local loop"; presumably under the assumption
| that a landline will always be available anyway?).
|
| If that one provider is oversubscribed, you're pretty much
| out of luck.
| growt wrote:
| Afaik almost a monopoly: there is Deutsche Telekom which does
| the same thing and Vodafone. I think apart from some local
| providers almost everybody else is just a reseller of one of
| the two.
| fweimer wrote:
| There are resellers that do not just rebrand a whitebox
| product, but have their own IP addresses, network and
| peering polices. Their customers are not necessarily
| impacted by the IP peering policies of the company that
| owns the access network.
| aktuel wrote:
| Depends on the region. Often there are smaller regional
| companies providing fiber internet. Prices for these fiber
| connections a still somewhat higher than the cheapest
| vodafone tier, but you also get better service for your
| money.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| This is a bit messy but if there are completing options at a
| given location install multiple ISPs and run them
| concurrently and log the details--download speeds, etc.
|
| There's nothing as good as hard verifiable data--even if
| regulators play hardball and favor ISPs then you've the
| evidence to whip up political action (claim biased decisions,
| etc.).
| m_gloeckl wrote:
| You can file a complaint with the "Federal ministry for digital
| transformation" (formed this year). It does actually work, but
| it's a lengthy process.
|
| I did force my cell phone carrier to grant me proper 4G speeds
| last year, after spending many hours with their help line and
| ultimately complaining to the (then) ministry of transportation
| and digital infrastructure.
| afeuerstein wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what was wrong with your cellular
| connection?
| m_gloeckl wrote:
| My plan advertises "up to 50 Mbit/s" on a 4G connection. I
| was getting less than 1 Mbit/s a lot of the time. Websites
| and videos would not load properly.
|
| I downloaded the app of the german ministry that allows you
| to take speed tests and file a complaint. After multiple
| weeks of measuring connection speeds on the cellular
| network, I was able to file a complaint.
| antongribok wrote:
| What did the provider do? Did they put your IMEI onto
| some list of other customers that complained, where all
| of you get better network prioritization?
|
| I'm genuinely curious.
| lukan wrote:
| "If you're paying for a 1Gbps connection"
|
| That's why you are paying for a "up to" 1Gbps connection. (I
| think it was already a struggle that they had to put the "up
| to" in the big advertisement)
| Telaneo wrote:
| Surely there's a reasonable expectation that Netflix would
| work at decent speeds, especially given that Netflix's
| infrastructure, nor the network load as a whole are to blame,
| but rather the specific ISP bureaucracy? Getting 1/1000 the
| listed speed does not strike me as something even a 75 year
| old computer neophyte of a judge would take kindly too,
| unless it were for very good reasons.
| fluoridation wrote:
| I don't think there really is much that can be done. Even
| under ideal conditions, an ISP could only possibly
| guarantee the advertised link speed between you and their
| routers, not between you and any particular node on the
| Internet. Is it possible an ISP might be doing things that
| harm the QoS? Yeah, sure. But the angle to approach that
| problem is not by complaining about instances of limited
| bandwidth.
| Telaneo wrote:
| But the true link speed's not even what's being asked
| for. 4K Netflix never goes above 20 Mbps as far as I
| know, so getting just 1/50 the advertised speed to one of
| the most well-known internet services in existence,
| hardly seems like a big ask, especially when the only
| reason that it can't reach that speed or higher is
| because of the ISP, given that swapping to one that
| aren't being knobheads about it fixes the problem. It
| should be the responsibility of the ISP to keep links to
| other parts of the internet as open as possible. If real-
| world constraints prevent the speed from being all that
| high, because it's a shitty server in Australia, then
| that's understandable. This however, isn't that.
|
| All I'm getting from this is that it's a good idea to
| label ISPs utilities and bring the hammer down if they're
| being knobheads about it.
| kbolino wrote:
| It is mostly the middle, and not either of the endpoints,
| that is the real problem. You have a 1Gbps link, the
| Netflix DC you're reaching probably has multiple links
| with aggregated bandwidth measured in Tbps, but at some
| point in between the two there's a 10Gbps link being
| shared between 5000 subscribers at peak times and now the
| bottleneck is 2Mbps per subscriber. This link may or may
| not be under your ISP's (or Netflix's ISP's) control, and
| it may or may not be the only relevant bottleneck.
|
| The solution that was developed in the Netflix-Comcast
| fight over a decade ago is content distribution. Instead
| of trying to build out extra capacity in every possible
| link, you shorten the path and thus reduce the number of
| contended links involved in each interaction. This scales
| much better, but it has two major problems: the first is
| rightsholders and their obnoxious anti-piracy
| restrictions, and the second is good old jurisdictional
| friction and economic misalignment. Somebody has to own
| the physical servers in all the myriad locations that
| keep the content closer to the consumer. If the ISP owns
| them, then they naturally want to exploit them. If
| Netflix owns them, they naturally don't want to serve
| their competitors. If a third party owns them, you
| address those two problems (potentially) but add new ones
| around liability, non-disclosure, competitiveness, etc.
|
| If regulation is going to be useful here, it needs to
| focus on opening up opportunities to serve the unsexy
| middle of the infrastructure puzzle and not just the most
| visible parts that consumers/voters usually interact
| with. Also, "Netflix" needs to be understood as just a
| stand-in for any high-bandwidth Internet service, as the
| landscape is constantly changing.
| wmf wrote:
| _at some point in between the two there 's a 10Gbps link
| being shared between 5000 subscribers at peak times and
| now the bottleneck is 2Mbps per subscriber. This link may
| or may not be under your ISP's (or Netflix's ISP's)
| control, and it may or may not be the only relevant
| bottleneck._
|
| No, that link is absolutely under Vodafone's control.
| They're deliberately not upgrading it so that they can
| extort money from Netflix.
|
| _The solution ... is content distribution._
|
| CDNs have been worldwide, including Germany, for a long
| time. That's not the problem here.
| kbolino wrote:
| There are two issues here.
|
| If the CDN is so poorly interconnected with Vodafone that
| there's one bottlenecked link, then it's not really
| accomplishing its job, at least as far as "inside of
| Germany" is concerned. It might have reduced pressure on
| another bottleneck, like links between the US and the EU,
| but it still needs to spread out more. If Vodafone is
| blocking that, then pressure should be applied to force
| them to open up more connections. I'm assuming this CDN
| serves more than just Netflix, mind you.
|
| Secondly, the question of responsibility cannot be
| answered the same way today that it was answered in the
| Internet of universities. Netflix and Vodafone are not
| peers. The bandwidth ratio between them is incredibly
| lopsided. This will never change, there is no foreseeable
| scenario under which Vodafone has a reason to send
| anywhere near the same amount of data to Netflix as it
| gets back. This asymmetrical relationship inherently
| implies a different kind of business arrangement than
| traditional peering.
|
| What Vodafone (any ISP) provides to Netflix (any content
| provider) is access to consumers. This is a service, and
| services are not free. The natural monopoly ISPs enjoy
| implies some degree of regulatory restraint must be
| applied on them, but it does not mean they bear all the
| costs of all the infrastructure either.
|
| However, my bigger point is that this cannot constantly
| be reduced to these two-party analyses. Netflix is
| waning, others are rising, this problem needs to be
| solved in a scalable way.
| wmf wrote:
| Nah, you're just an apologist for rent-seeking ISPs and
| you're trying to cloud the argument with unnecessary
| details.
| kbolino wrote:
| "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not
| less, as a topic gets more divisive."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| wmf wrote:
| In the US the FCC named and shamed broadband ISPs for
| their low speeds and "magically" those speeds increased
| over the following years. Overcome with greed, some ISPs
| eventually found ways to cheat on the benchmarks though.
| https://www.fcc.gov/general/measuring-broadband-america
| fluoridation wrote:
| The question was whether a customer could do something.
| wmf wrote:
| I suppose in aggregate the customers could use their
| elected government to fix the problem. In theory.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think it's actually a quite complicated question and it
| only works because people are playing somewhat nice with
| each other. Like imagine if Netflix refused to peer with
| one particular ISP unless they paid an extortionate amount
| of money. Should the ISP be legally required to pay any
| price they name? I don't think that would be fair.
|
| One solution could be to have geographically distributed
| test points. Any connection to be able to claim a certain
| speed has to be able to get that speed to those test
| points. And the test points are legally required to connect
| to anyone that can bring fiber to their doorstep. If
| someone plays hardball with peering there will then always
| be the backup option of routing traffic through one of the
| test points.
|
| Idk, just throwing out ideas here.
| wat10000 wrote:
| There's always an implicit reasonableness requirement on
| these things. "Up to" isn't a wildcard that lets you do
| anything you want. It will protect you if you struggle to
| maintain top speeds during peak hours, or if a technical
| fault cuts speeds in half for a few days. But if you provide
| 1/1000th of what you claim to offer, "up to" won't stop a
| judge from observing that you're not really providing what
| you said you would.
| dvdkon wrote:
| At least here in the Czech Republic, ISPs have to also list a
| "guaranteed speed", and it can't be less than some fraction
| of the advertised maximum. I don't know what part of the
| Internet that speed is supposed to be measured against,
| though.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's definitely not anything in the contract that promises
| performance to a 3rd party, especially not in a residential
| contract. The legal options are switch to a different ISP
| and/or start a new one. Not always easy or practical, but there
| you go.
|
| Who is to say where the performance problem is? Certainly not
| your contract.
|
| Maybe if the last mile is cronically congested, or between the
| local aggregation switch and their regional exchange points,
| you might have a legal case. But if the issue is insufficient
| connectivity between their network and other networks, I would
| be very surprised if the contract terms covered that at all.
|
| There's a bunch of networks throughout the world where their
| policies mean you can get more economically acheive better
| connectivity to their customers by hosting outside the
| geographic boundaries of the network rather than inside it.
| Doesn't make sense from a theoretical point of view, but when
| German ISPs won't interconnect within Germany, serve their
| customers from Poland or France and the connectivity picture
| may change significantly. Worst case, serve them from the US
| (but the latency may be too high)
| mystraline wrote:
| The play by major content providers is "not to pay" and "block
| inter.link"
|
| Sure, you lose Vodafone germany. Then you explain clearly why to
| every major media.
|
| This coukd be stopped fairly quickly.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Blocking seems overkill. Just put up a banner explaining why
| the service is slow, warning customers about their ISPs.
| Spivak wrote:
| Because a banner is ignorable. A block will actually spur
| action.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| A banner by itself is very ignorable, but in this case the
| website is going to be annoyingly slow, and people are
| gonna notice that and be thinking a little about why. In
| that scenario, they're much more likely to notice and pay
| attention to something like a banner.
| preya2k wrote:
| Doesn't seem to work in regards to Deutsche Telekom so far.
| noAnswer wrote:
| "The play by major content providers" like Google? Where in
| order to become a "Verified Peering Provider" you are not
| permitted to use a IX?!
|
| https://peering.google.com/#/options/verified-peering-provid...
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| It's important to keep in mind that Deutsche Telekom is basically
| doing the same, and has been... forever?
|
| I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| They mention it extensively in the article.
| kleiba wrote:
| I suppose OP is hinting at the fact that Germans are probably
| already used to having one of the shittiest internet services
| in the Western world.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| They certainly do; however, we all know the game: Headlines
| only. Reading TFA? Meh
| lxgr wrote:
| The big difference here is that you're almost never forced to
| use Deutsche Telekom for wired internet (there are many DSL
| resellers, and many of them actually provide routing
| themselves), but in some buildings, there is literally only
| Vodafone, with no choice of any alternative service provider on
| top.
| cachius wrote:
| Still Telekom has a big market share there.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Fucking around with peering is the specialty of German ISPs.
| Telekom (our biggest provider) is sometimes unusable for
| YouTube/Netflix/Cloudflare/Steam in big cities because of similar
| shenanigans.
| hylaride wrote:
| I was shocked just how slow and poor the mobile networks were
| in Germany. When I last visited (circa 2014) I literally
| switched my prepaid sim from T-Mobile to Vodaphone because the
| experience was so bad - only to have the same bad experience. I
| had barely usable LTE and connections dropped to EDGE on the
| train between Hamburg and Berlin. Google Maps barely loaded in
| the cities let alone the fact I was playing Ingress at the time
| and it was pretty much unusable
|
| This was surprising to my Canadian sensibilities. Our mobile
| networks are expensive, but I generally get solid 4G and now 5G
| coverage between Toronto and Montreal and had full 4G (at the
| time) coverage on a road trip between Saskatoon and Calgary.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I hate this line of thinking.. Netflix isn't just sending data to
| random users, it's data Vodafone users request and want to
| receive.
| phineyes wrote:
| This isn't unique to Vodafone. Google has also been slowly
| withdrawing from IXes globally in favor of PNIs and "VPPs"
| (verified peering providers). This only makes it harder for
| smaller networks to establish presence on the internet and feels
| pretty anti-competitive.
|
| On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to
| participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are
| withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and
| widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is,
| but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.
| stroebs wrote:
| I thought Google was _always_ like this. At least going back to
| 2015 when I left the ISP game, peering with them was
| notoriously difficult if you didn't have the traffic volumes
| required. Our network suffered from asynchronous routing to
| Google and Netflix for years because they refused to allow our
| routes despite checking all the boxes they require. Customers
| eventually left because other (larger) ISPs didn't have this
| issue.
|
| I get why the enshittification of IXPs is occurring. Over the
| years many small and careless ISPs have caused issues for IXPs
| (and peers) based on what I've seen on mailing lists. It's hard
| work managing many hundreds or thousands of peers, let alone
| the equipment cost with multi-100Gbit ports becoming the norm
| for larger providers.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why did your company expect Google to readily accept peering?
|
| If there was such a large difference in volume they would be
| choosing to intentionally make it more difficult for
| themselves.
| toast0 wrote:
| Google publishes a peering policy. It's reasonable to
| expect that they will peer with you if you hit all the
| requirements in the policy.
|
| Afaik, their requirements have never been judgement based:
| just bandwidth minimums, port types and locations. I would
| expect that they prioritize new connections in some way, so
| if you barely hit the criteria and are somewhere well
| served by transit, you'll be low priority, and the
| requirements might change before your connection gets setup
| and if so, you might not get connected because you don't
| meet the new requirements, but otherwise, seems like if you
| meet the requirements, send in the application, and have
| some patience, the peering connection should turn up
| eventually.
|
| It's not like they have a mostly balanced flows requirement
| like Tier 1 ISPs usually do. Also, even in their current
| peering policy, they don't require presence in multiple
| metros; just substantial traffic (10gbps), fast ports
| (100G), two pops in the same metro.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| What sort of verification are they doing? Is this trend being
| pushed by the lack of proper security on BGP?
| brynx97 wrote:
| Google gave a presentation on this that I think is helpful
| context for "why":
| https://nanog.org/events/nanog-94/content/5452/
| kyrra wrote:
| Direct YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Yg-qV6Fktjw
| techsupporter wrote:
| > low quality network participants are joining
|
| (Genuinely curious because I truly don't know in this context)
| What is a low quality network participant? One of the
| "bulletproof" hosts?
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| > IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in
|
| Could this be due to the rise of services like Equinix Fabric
| and Inter.link? Google doesn't need to peer directly with most
| anymore because there is always a middleman somewhere who can
| handle it, and for many businesses the convenience of a point
| and click web gui outways whatever it costs?
| hylaride wrote:
| Bell Canada also has had a long-standing policy of refusing to
| peer with internet exchanges. They'll only truly peer with other
| direct backbone providers and a handful of one-off peer with
| other large networks (google, cloud flare, etc), but their
| historical position as Canada's base backbone (not so much
| anymore, but it was definitely a thing pre-2005) has meant their
| policy is most people should pay them to peer. I'm not sure if
| it's still the case, but IIRC for awhile they also refused to
| peer with any other domestic backbone providers.
|
| The result has been some funny routes sometimes. I live in
| Toronto and have seen trace routes bounce over to Chicago to
| connect to stuff colocated here in Toronto.
|
| It's frustrating as their fibre is my only real high speed
| option; also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile
| network is annoying.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's insane given that Front St. 151 is probably the best
| spot on North America when it comes to connectivity.
| 1over137 wrote:
| it's also insane because probably no Canadian wants their
| traffic going through the US unnecessarily, since all the 51st
| state takeover crap.
| hylaride wrote:
| FWIW, this has being going on for decades. Bell literally
| doesn't care if there's a chance they can suck up some
| peering fees.
|
| There have been periodic times where it became an acute
| problem, like early in the YouTube and Netflix years there
| was a lot of congestion in their upstream peers and they held
| out hoping those orgs would pay for the peering. They were
| also over provisioned in early DSL days where their upstreams
| became saturated and there were few alternative paths.
| subarctic wrote:
| Maybe that's a way to give them bad PR and convince then to
| change policies? Unfortunately most people probably don't
| understand this well enough and they have a pretty well oiled
| PR machine with all their control over tv and radio stations,
| etc
| idatum wrote:
| > also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network
| is annoying.
|
| This gives me even less confidence after BCE took over
| ZiplyFiber, US PNW provider. There's a long running joke about
| IPv6 just one more lab test away from deployment.
| subarctic wrote:
| It's annoying how they're the only big ISP offering fiber
| everywhere when they're also the ones that don't support ipv6
| and have the shitty peering policy. I've heard you can use
| another isp though (teksavvy maybe?) that uses Bell's fibre and
| supports ipv6
| danogentili wrote:
| Seems pretty much a private equivalent of "fair share" govt
| regulation currently being pushed by ISPs in Europe through
| lobbying with the Digital Networks Act
| (https://www.namex.it/toward-the-digital-networks-act-the-fut...,
| https://stopdna.eu/).
|
| South Korea pioneered fair share govt regulations in 2016 (which
| caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair
| share" fees).
| stego-tech wrote:
| The solution - as always - is regulation. ISPs typically already
| have _very_ generous business models with widespread monopolies
| on customers, overwhelming barriers to entry for new companies,
| and a lack of rate controls allowing then to price arbitrarily -
| all of which supports immensely profitable businesses without the
| need for additional extraction of capital from other parties.
| Regulators and consumers alike should be screaming in rage at the
| idea that their ISPs are now multi-dipping for revenue, but we've
| done a piss-poor job of explaining how this works to the common
| man and thus can't count on them to support the Open Internet as
| we'd like to see it.
|
| That being said, the threat to the open internet is also more
| than just ISPs being gigantic assholes: it's centralization _in
| general_. A majority of web traffic passes into or through one of
| three main cloud compute providers; Cloudflare has such an
| outsized impact that regional IP blocks can disrupt global
| traffic; and ISPs have been permitted to consolidate through
| mergers and acquisitions into expansive monopolies. The internet
| is fiercely centralized and largely closed already, which is why
| these ploys by shitty ISPs are likely to work absent Government
| intervention.
|
| You want to protect the open internet? Regulate the shit out of
| its major players again. Force them to keep it open, _especially_
| when it hinders expanding profit margins.
| danogentili wrote:
| The current trend in govt regulation is actually going in the
| opposite direction, with telecom lobbies in Europe pushing for
| "fair share" (pretty much an implementation through law of what
| Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Germany are doing right now)
| through the Digital Networks Act.
|
| South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016
| (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the
| exorbitant "fair share" fees).
| stego-tech wrote:
| Because western governments (and those whose governments were
| modeled from western regimes - like post-war South Korea and
| Japan) have become victim to regulatory capture and
| corruption. It's why the FCC has repeatedly killed, blocked,
| or reversed reforms like net neutrality or "nutrition labels"
| on ISPs, and why South Korea gave in to "fair share"
| regulations that deterred further investment. Tech money is
| hugely influential, and the industry is almost exclusively
| made up of rent-seeking slumlords at this point, particularly
| at the top (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Apple, etc).
| It's why DMCA reform is blocked, why pirates get jail time
| while AI grifts get a hand-wave, and why right-to-repair or
| data privacy remains a fractured and piecemeal reform instead
| of a national agenda item.
|
| The problem isn't regulation, but regulatory capture ensuring
| companies get the regulations they desire and benefit from.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > The problem isn't regulation, but regulatory capture
| ensuring companies get the regulations they desire and
| benefit from.
|
| Aka regulation..... Nearly all regulation is for regulatory
| capture and if you think of something that isn't it
| probably just outlived who it was designed to capture for.
| wmf wrote:
| Unfortunately you're going to get regulatory capture and
| extortion when the "bad guys" are local but the "good guys"
| are foreign.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Regulation isn't good enough. The government needs to make
| their own competing ISP.
|
| Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this:
| government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most
| transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical
| mail delivery. At one point they even owned most of the
| railroads[0]. Communications and travel infrastructure are
| things government is moderately good at.
|
| For some reason, we just decided not to have a government-
| sponsored telecom company, even when Ma Bell made it patently
| obvious that having all the country's telecom infrastructure be
| privately owned by one company was a bad idea. It's obvious
| that a government-run ISP is about as crucial to life in 2025
| as a government-run postal carrier was in the early 1800s.
|
| [0] In the 1970s, all of America's railroads went bankrupt.
| First, they discharged their passenger rail mandates into
| Amtrak, then they went bankrupt _anyway_ , and then they got
| nationalized.
| stego-tech wrote:
| As I've stated in other comments, the reason western
| governments don't do this more often boils down largely to
| regulatory capture. Every single time there's been a large
| mobilization of efforts to regulate some aspect of tech -
| municipal broadband expansion, cable box standardization and
| openness, right to repair, DMCA reform, privacy reforms,
| mandatory binding arbitration clauses, EULA's, provider
| monopolies, etc - tech money floods into regulators and
| political races to counter the will of the mobilizers and
| their supporters. Then those same ghouls repeat mantras like
| "disrupt" and "deregulate" to convince people that actually
| _it's a good thing_ you only have three cellular networks,
| one cable provider, one telephone provider, two operating
| systems, and four media conglomerates to choose from. At one
| point these slimeballs claimed anyone who used anything else
| (like Linux, or GrapheneOS, or FOSS) was _obviously_ a
| criminal who wanted something for nothing, such was their
| fear of an open ecosystem.
|
| Regulations get a bad rap because for decades the only ones
| to really get passed have only entrenched existing players
| and (rent-seeking) business models while blocking new
| entrants or competitors. I'm 100% in agreement with you that
| _every single state and country_ should have an internet
| network that's open access and governed solely by that
| country's constitutional law - a sort of digital state, if
| you will, with which they can court business and interest
| groups alike to represent their interests globally. Instead,
| we're presently stuck with a "whoever donates the most money
| to politicians wins" model, and that means the open internet
| exists _in spite_ of the interests of Capital, _not_ because
| of their good graces.
| coredev_ wrote:
| What you are describing sounds mostly like a US-problem,
| not sure it's a western gov problem in general?
|
| In my city, the municipality owns much of the fibre. The
| country I live in owns a bank where you can get a mortgage
| pretty cheap. The good parts of GDPR or CRA are very good
| and was not disrupted by large corporations?
| panick21_ wrote:
| > Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this:
| government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most
| transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical
| mail delivery.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me the US government
| is doing a terrible job at all of these.
| fweimer wrote:
| Is doing business with Inter.link really structurally different
| from getting connectivity to an exchange like DE-CIX and doing
| business there? I know that in theory, you get settlement-free
| peering at exchanges, but only for those networks that
| participate.
|
| And who funds Inter.link? Their publicly available balance sheet
| shows significant, growing debts to a linked company, but it
| doesn't mention its name.
| bbzylstra wrote:
| I'm surprised to read an obviously AI written article ("This
| isn't about efficiency--it's about extraction") from a tech/news
| site. Does anyone else find this weird? It make me question the
| editors note about how much background research was actually
| done.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| It didn't seem AI to me.
| oasisbob wrote:
| The easiest way to notice it is its excessive use of what
| Wikipedia calls "negative parallel construction". [1] It's a
| super common genai tic
|
| > This isn't about efficiency--it's about extraction
|
| > The problem isn't your connection to Vodafone--it's
| Vodafone's restrictive connections to the rest of the
| internet.
|
| > Vodafone's exit from public peering isn't an isolated
| technical decision--it's part of a broader pattern of large
| telecoms trying to reshape internet economics in their favor
|
| The more obnoxious signs though is the excessive length,
| loose structure, repetition, and lack of serious editing.
| Writing ~3000 words used to take quite a bit of effort, so
| you'd need to be at least a strong enough writer to organize
| and structure your thoughts to make it that far. Now it's so
| easy anyone can put out tons of generated content on whatever
| topic they want.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It looks like the website was founded not so long ago, and I
| guess AI-generated slop is the only way to make a profitable
| web media nowadays.
| bbzylstra wrote:
| Also, am I going crazy or do the "comment" and "share" buttons
| under the header just tick up but don't allow you to actually
| do anything? This feels like a vibe-coded website but it could
| be Firefox being weird.
| PhilKunz wrote:
| HeyHey. The website uses Ghost right now, and a lit based web
| components catalogue. Some features are not yet entirely
| carved out. The commenting system being one of them.
| Components are ready, but some integration work has to be
| done. We also want to enable highlighting stuff directly, so
| people can comment on specific referenced stuff...
|
| The commenting APIs in ghost are a little obscure.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Hate it, but doesn't surprise me one bit.
|
| This article is 2700 words of repetitive slop. It seems that
| people are adapting to this new world.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| The disclaimer at the top of the article is really mind blowing:
|
| > We may have failed in some areas to grasp the issue entirely.
| The reader is advised that not everything might be correct and
| you should follow the sources and conduct your own research to
| get an adequate understanding of the subject at hand.
| alienbaby wrote:
| it sounded to me like an AI generated article covering it's
| ass, or at least written by someone who did naught but AI
| generated research as their own 'research'.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Not to say that Mr. Musk seems popular in Germany, nor that
| orbital dynamics are friendly to high user densities, but ...
| noAnswer wrote:
| https://inter.link "Trusted By: SpaceX"
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| It's very simple. I host my stuff on a network with an open
| peering policy. If you as an ISP somehow have peering issues with
| that, then that's a _you problem_. I will not pay a ransom to
| some shady middleman that you decide to use because your network
| admins are too lazy. I will (rightfully) blame you and tell your
| customers to switch ISPs if they have issues.
|
| Play stupid games, win stupid prices. Just wait until Vodafone
| Germany customers get slow speeds and an automated warning banner
| on every other website they visit. "Too big to fail" until it
| isn't.
| LaurensBER wrote:
| This is a very reasonable approach until somehow your
| competitors service loads twice as fast on the Vodafone Germany
| network.
|
| As a business, at that point, you're basically extorted to pay
| the ransom or deal with a loss of revenue. Since the ransom is
| most likely lower it won't take long for your other competitors
| to start paying it as well leaving you with an objectively
| worse product, irrespective of your warning banner (which lefty
| Linda or Gradma Garry isn't going to understand).
| lwn wrote:
| I recently moved to a Dutch municipality that runs its own non-
| profit ISP. They installed a symmetric 1 Gbps fiber connection
| with a static IP at my house for 40 euros per month.
|
| The service is solid, there's no upselling or throttling, and
| hosting things from home just works. I bring this up because when
| we talk about "open", "fair" and "monopolies" the model of a
| local, non-profit ISP backed by the municipality could offer a
| real alternative. It doesn't directly solve the peering issues,
| but it shifts the balance of power (and cost) somewhat.
| LaurensBER wrote:
| While this is great when it works it does raise some
| interesting challenges, what happens if the ISP loses money,
| should taxes be used to cover the cost since this is a public
| service? Is it reasonable for this ISP to undercut commercial
| offerings? Internet is in a weird grey zone where it's almost a
| utility but not on the same level as water or sewage.
|
| I'm glad this non-profit ISP exists but on a national level I
| would prefer (strong) net neutrality laws. Probably not an
| issue in NL but in less developed countries neutrality isn't
| guaranteed.
| redserk wrote:
| Why make the assumption that municipalities must treat their
| internet services as a second-rate utility? Many local
| governments are competently run.
|
| If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible and
| probably will yield as many complaints as losing power,
| sewer, and water.
| markdown wrote:
| > If the internet is out, it's going to be just as visible
| and probably will yield as many complaints as losing power,
| sewer, and water.
|
| More. Far more visible. Much easier to go without municipal
| power than without internet.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I don't find that it is usually even _possible_ to have
| internet without power. How would that work?
| knollimar wrote:
| Seems like a question of whether solar power with battery
| backups or satellite internet is easier, no?
| tharkun__ wrote:
| When we loose power here internet usually works just
| fine. All you need is a generator and you're back up and
| running. Usually the POP still has power so this works
| for a long time. Sometimes they are or run out of
| (backup) power too if its widespread and prolonged. Cell
| service including LTE is usually still up / up for
| longer, so again as long as you have a generator, you're
| good.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| After a famously bad wind storm in 2008, my house (along
| with thousands of others) was without power for about two
| continuous weeks.
|
| The internet connection, which was FTTN VDSL, never
| skipped a beat. It was completely solid.
|
| This was accomplished by using batteries and generators.
|
| The ISP was The Phone Company, so their Cold War-era
| central office had very good backup power.
|
| The VRAD nodes scattered all over town had enough battery
| backup that (at least in my neighborhood) things stayed
| up until they brought out generators for those nodes.
|
| And at my house, the VDSL box had its own UPS. And I also
| had a rather overkill UPS, and a portable generator
|
| We ran the generator intermittently, mostly to charge
| batteries and chill down refrigerators.
|
| It wasn't an awesome time. It was hot as hell. It was a
| pain in the ass to keep the generator fueled. We didn't
| even try to run the desktop PC rigs.
|
| But, yeah: The internet was working fine.
|
| (We charged batteries for neighbors, too. One or two
| neighbors also dragged over extension cords to run their
| own fridge. And I opened up the WiFi completely so
| everyone nearby could use it.
|
| So if you were my neighbour in that 2008 power outage,
| I'd have just taken care of that internet problem for
| you. The range at 2.4GHz was amazingly good in that
| abnormally-quiet RF environment.)
| markdown wrote:
| One doesn't have to rely on others for power. One can run
| their own generator, or set up a solar power system, or
| if you live out in the sticks, run a mini hydro system or
| use wind power. All of these can provide power to the
| home.
| linohh wrote:
| Usually these ISPs are part of or under the municipal utility
| provider. So if they lose money, it first gets offset by
| profits from other utilities and eventually yes, the taxpayer
| will step in, directly or indirectly. No big deal. No one is
| complaining about subsidies for water or power lines in rural
| areas, neither should they when it comes to internet.
| Remember: These ISPs were founded because the market was
| already failing to provide decent offers or any at all.
| wat10000 wrote:
| If it loses money, do some combination of raising prices and
| cutting costs. Aim for an average of zero profit/loss over
| the long term. Undercutting commercial offerings is perfectly
| fine if it works out that way.
| oersted wrote:
| There's voting with your wallet and voting with your, well,
| vote.
|
| In some sense a democracy is also a market and can lead to
| efficient allocation of resources, particularly common
| resources for common good.
|
| This is why public utilities tend to work so well in
| practice. People, especially in the US, don't seem to realise
| that such services are also subject to strong market forces,
| just a different kind of market.
|
| Voters care a lot about good public services, and they also
| care a lot about not getting taxed much. This can lead to
| very efficient outcomes in well functioning democracies,
| often more efficient than those that come out of private
| enterprise, when it comes to services that most of the
| population needs.
| rcbdev wrote:
| In Austria the Internet, like the postal service, is a
| Universal Service ("Universaldienst"). As such, any
| completely unserviced citizen can petition the current
| Finance Minister to decree an ISP of his choice - usually A1,
| which is the privatized form of our former public office for
| postal services and telegraphs - to service their area. The
| costs of facilitating the servicing of this area are covered
| by all active ISPs of a certain size operating in Austria.
|
| Telecommunications law in Europe is a very interesting thing.
| thelaxiankey wrote:
| i've wondered for a long time why this isn't a more common
| solution to these services that are almost inevitably
| monopolous. power, water, and internet kind of things.
| jimbokun wrote:
| In the US the governments have actively killed them as a
| favor to the large corporate Internet providers.
| binome wrote:
| Interesting take, but generally large, incumbent eyeball networks
| have refrained from open peering at IX's for decades at this
| point. They maintained presences, but usually just to grab a few
| specific peers they wanted, not to peer broadly with everyone
| across the exchange, and the bulk of traffic from large providers
| into eyeball networks comes across PNIs or on-net CDN nodes, not
| IX.
|
| If anything, this move to centralized PNIaaS platforms makes
| interconnecting with the eyeball networks even easier for smaller
| providers. The portals allow for straightforward visibility on
| what they want to charge for paid peering, and instant automated
| EVCs and turnup, shortcutting the long and windy process of
| negotiating terms and establishing individual XCs in DCs that you
| agree to peer in.
| meibo wrote:
| The Telekom story mentioned in this article is 100% as bad as
| they make it out to be, most of the users we support with issues
| reaching our services are with Telekom Germany. Or in an
| authoritarian nation that blocks access to western services.
| amaccuish wrote:
| Can confirm, recently moved to o2, it was insufferable.
|
| For anyone wondering: netzbremse.de/
|
| EN https://netzbremse.de/en/
| mft_ wrote:
| Would you recommend o2?
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Using Starlink as your Internet provider does not protect you in
| any way when it comes to changes in pricing, speed or
| connectivity.
| Jackson__ wrote:
| Yeah, the blog post took a bit of a weird turn there + the AI
| slop headers are also quite off putting. I know this may be
| conspiracy territory, but it does make me wonder whether this
| is guerilla marketing to ensure big E meets the sale goals for
| his $1T payment.
| PhilKunz wrote:
| except the only infrastructure to replace is the satellite
| dish, and not the fiber that goes into your home. Or am I
| wrong here.
| pimeys wrote:
| Awesome. The only internet connection we get IN THE MIDDLE OF
| BERLIN is Vodafone Cable. Deutsche Telekom wants to build fiber
| here, but our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar
| because he wants to kick everybody out and raise the rent for new
| tenants.
|
| What a time to be alive.
| immibis wrote:
| Deutsche Telekom is just as bad as Vodafone. IIRC the
| government stepped in and said they had to offer peering to
| everyone, so now they offer peering to everyone in some random
| hamlet in the middle of nowhere for 5000EUR per month per
| gigabit, while peering at other locations and prices is still
| at their sole discretion.
| mtmail wrote:
| The issue here seems to be the landlord.
| socksy wrote:
| Part of the issue is that the landlord gets any say
| whatsoever about a public utility.
| pimeys wrote:
| Yes. It's the so called Berlin issue. If you're lucky enough
| to find an apartment, you have a good chance of getting a
| slumlord who does everything to make your life miserable.
|
| I'd buy my own place, if there would be anything available.
| Probably need to move to another city or country.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| How one can still buy into Berlin's hype in 2025?! Fuck
| their rental market, their landlords, three months deposit
| for completely empty apartment without even lightbulbs,
| copyright trolls, rundfunkbeitrag, rude customer service,
| schufa. Turn around and walk away.
| pimeys wrote:
| You forgot the government who spends billions to 3km of
| motorway a few people uses. To an airport that is one of
| the worst in EU and almost a decade late. And of course
| now cut from arts because of all this.
|
| And every single construction project takes forever. And
| costs a fortune. And it is impossible to build housing
| fast enough.
|
| The reason to be in Berlin has always been its great art
| scene. Now they are actively destroying it. What's left
| is a few Rossmanns and an Edeka.
| lxgr wrote:
| > our landlord refuses to open the door to the cellar
|
| The simple solution would be to make this illegal, i.e. require
| landlords to allow at least two competing wired ISPs to connect
| each household.
|
| No need to make them pay for it; I suspect it would be more
| than enough to end their very lucrative arrangement of somehow
| rewarding exclusivity. (I don't have any evidence that
| landlords are getting paid for it by Vodafone directly, but I
| highly doubt that there's any above board reason for the status
| quo.)
| naIak wrote:
| Refusing to peer directly is not "killing the free internet".
| This level of hyperbole doesn't help your argument.
| globular-toast wrote:
| When can we start doing meshnets again? I was excited about it in
| '05 long before I could afford networking equipment. 20 years
| later and we've only regressed.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Inter.link is openly peering on IX's tho. So I'm unclear why the
| angst. https://inter.link/knowledgebase/peering-policy/
| metanonsense wrote:
| Ironic that I switched to HN from chess.com because Deutsche
| Telekom's peering with Cloudflare (or more its lack of) made the
| site even more unusable than usual. 5 minutes ago I thought
| ,,Maybe it's time to switch to Vodafone"
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| Do not switch to Vodafone. Even without their peering it's
| still a horrible ISP
| trvz wrote:
| Even the first paragraph is wrong:
|
| > There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you click
| a YouTube video in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some
| convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It flows
| through something called an "internet exchange point"--a giant
| room full of routers where hundreds of networks connect directly,
| swapping traffic efficiently and, crucially, for free.
|
| When you open a Youtube video page, the video is probably loaded
| from Google's caching servers located in your ISPs network.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Thank you for writing this article. It is a rare take on what is
| happening, and not everyone has the expertise to write it. It
| seems easy enough to share to consumers who may be affected by
| this. And it does have some action steps too.
| vitorsr wrote:
| Telefonica does this.
|
| Until I switched, it would only peer with other Tier 1 providers
| 2000 mi away from my location, even though there is a large IX 5
| mi from home co-located with a large regional ISP with several
| other networks and appliances connected to it.
|
| I filed a complaint but it is impossible to escape the event
| horizon of the customer service black hole, and customer
| protection regulation agents fail to appreciate how clownish it
| is to have 100 ms ping to my university 5 mi away.
|
| So I switched and recommended everyone within earshot to do so as
| well.
|
| To this day I fail to understand the logic behind not peering
| locally.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I think the open internet like it existed in the late 90s and
| early 2000s is never coming back. Luckily tech got cheap enough
| that I believe we eventually will have continent wide grass roots
| mesh networks and uncensorable free communication again.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Mesh networks don't really scale to continent size and there
| really isn't a lot of free/unlicensed spectrum to work with,
| it's already really crowded. WISPs do a lot with what they have
| to work with but it's still not going to supplant the internet
| without some major technical breakthroughs.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| I do not think this is about replacing the current Internet
| and watching Youtube or Netflix using a mesh network.
|
| It would be more about having a slow, free and backup
| internet available. Nowadays, we talk a lot of cyber attacks
| and WW3. I am pretty sure the Internet would be the first
| thing to go out if things would escalate (at least at the
| same time as the grid).
|
| I am not sure how long a "modern" society can operate without
| connectivity. The idea of a mesh network is also very cool.
| fortranfiend wrote:
| Wow, thanks I hate it.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Instead, all traffic will flow through a single company called
| Inter.link, which charges content providers based on how much
| data they send to Vodafone customers.
|
| As a past customer, I'd like to challenge the implication that
| it's possible to send _any_ data over Vodafone 's network. (My
| DOCSIS connection with them peaked at fractions of an Mbps for
| many months during the pandemic, with latency measured in
| multiple seconds.)
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| Germany is on a weird path; first the nuclear power withdrawal
| and now this. It's all a bit topsy turvy.
| lxgr wrote:
| Germany has had a weird approach when it comes to the Internet
| for several decades, but sure, it must somehow be related to
| recent nuclear power policies.
| glitchcrab wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to conflate a decision made by the
| government with that of a private company, just because they
| happen to be in the same country.
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| > When Deutsche Telekom customers want to watch YouTube, that
| traffic flows directly from Google's network to Deutsche
| Telekom's network at a Frankfurt exchange point--maybe four or
| five router hops, minimal latency, no intermediaries. It's
| elegant. It's efficient. And it's exactly what Vodafone is
| abandoning.
|
| Tab closed
| cachius wrote:
| Why?
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| AI writing cadence I presume.
|
| Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850683
| cachius wrote:
| Thanks. I thought it was something factually wrong.
| galaxy_gas wrote:
| It is also likely factually wrong as most major ISPs use
| GGC for popular traffic
| mft_ wrote:
| Is anyone in Germany able to recommend ISPs which aren't Vodafone
| or Telekom?
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