[76attendees] A Net Neutrality comment

[Fred Baker <[e-mail]>]

A remark to those who take a militant libertarian view of Net  
Neutrality, and those of ledbat and tcpm who have difficulty  
understanding why transports should tune to the knee (just enough of  
data outstanding, aka cwnd, to maintain the maximum goodput) as  
opposed to the cliff (the knee plus the maximum depth of the  
bottleneck queue, at which point throughput has not increased but loss  
has increased).

Saturday night, as I do many nights that I spend at hotels, I ran a  
ping study to characterize the network. It was obviously massively  
overprovisioned - it was difficult to register RTT variance in excess  
of a millisecond trans-pacific between Japan and the US. I did this  
again last night. The network behavior as measured from my room was  
equally stable until about 11:58 PM; at that point, someone fired up  
something huge, my guess being something that uses bittorrent, delay  
dramatically increased, and my VPN went down within a couple of  
minutes. When this happens, customers call ISPs and ISPs start  
throttling applications, because the applications are doing horrible  
things to the ISPs' customers.

The attached are a case in point.