Rather than go into my opinion about the FCC reclassifying broadband networks in the US as common carriers under Title II, I figured I'd just pose some questions that I haven't seen answers to, so far.  In fact, I haven't seen many "gory technical details" at all.

First, what ISPs are going to be reclassified?  What is the definition of broadband Internet nowadays, anyway?  Is it just the 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps throughput requirement or is it just the multi-media requirement, both, or neither?  Does the multi-media component require circuit switching (e.g., ATSC + DOCSIS) or can it be extended to different kinds of services (TV, phone, data, etc.) over the same packet-switched protocol?  If so, this extends the definition of broadband to many more ISPs' offerings including commercial ones.

I've heard that blocking certain TCP and UDP ports constitute a net neutrality violation.  Some popular examples are VPN-related ports like UDP/4500 (IPsec NAT-T), IP/50 (IPsec ESP), UDP/1194 (OpenVPN), etc. or BitTorrent-related ports (traditionally TCP/6881-6889) but how about the less-common ports?  How about TCP/135 or TCP/139?  These are routinely blocked by many residential ISPs since they have a bad history of abuse and are hardly ever legitimately used over the Internet.  Would blocking TCP/135 be considered a net neutrality violation?  What if there's a huge amplification attack vector discovered on some UDP service that happens to be listening on most home routers.. can an ISP block that without someone screaming about a net neutrality violation?  Assuming that those "bad" ports aren't considered net neutrality violations, what if I decided to run a web server on TCP/135?  Would that then bring TCP/135 into the scope of violation once again?

To go even further than just blocking ports, how about broadband ISPs that only hand out unroutable IPv4 address space (RFC 1918, squat space, or other junk) and use NAT+PAT to provide Internet access?  Without some sort of UPnP there's no way for that host to receive unsolicited traffic from the Internet at large.  Peer-to-peer "stuff" breaks.  Does the choice of the address selection constitute a net neutrality violation?  How about mobile networks offering IPv6 but firewall all inbound connections (hello, Verizon Wireless)?  The IPv6 address space is typically publicly routable so the inbound filtering is certainly a net neutrality violation.. or is it?

What is the real definition of "fast lane" as it relates to net neutrality?  The easy [naïve] answer to this might be something like "providing a faster connection to Facebook than Google"—but it's not that simple.  Speaking only as it relates to the network infrastructure, the definition of "fast" is dependent on some general variables like link speed, RTT, and network congestion.  While it's conceivable that link speed and network congestion can be made somewhat equal for a few networks (i.e., Google, Facebook, etc.) it's less likely that the RTT will be equal.  Paths to other networks are almost never going to be equal because the chance that both the interconnect locations to the remote networks and destinations on the remote networks will be equal from an RTT perspective is highly unlikely.  For example, is Comcast providing a "fast lane" to Google for a certain service area that may be closer to a peering point with Google than it is to a peering point for Facebook?  The content providers' network architecture certainly makes a big difference, here.  If Google has caches at every peering points but Facebook doesn't, how does an ISP provide equally fast lanes?

How do on-net caches play into this?  Google and Netflix are two examples of content providers that offer on-net caches so ISPs don't have to eat transit costs to get content to their customers.  It also provides a much better experience due to the lower latency—is this also considered a "fast lane"?  To add an additional twist on this, how about Akamai's on-net caches?  Well, wouldn't this favor only content providers that pay Akamai to host objects on their CDN?

How about peering vs. transit vs. customers?  Does a peering connection (how many peering locations?) constitute a net neutrality violation?  What if a small content provider has one transit provider and decides to get another one, would other customers of that second transit provider now have a "fast lane" to that content provider?  There are many permutations.

I doubt I'll ever hear definitive answers to all of these questions.  It's possible many of these questions will become invalid, too.

New comments are currently disabled for this entry.