NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] ISPs and the "Secret Service"
Greetings. I'm not sending to the list several messages that threatened to spin us off into Neverland again, despite an amusing anecdote from Brett Glass, where he speculates that he was apparently being mischaracterized as a likely P2P user (!) which caused his attempts to do a large download of GPS software via RoadRunner to fail repeatedly. He ended up having to go to a cybercafe, and since their router was having problems he updated its firmware and finally got his download. A happy ending. Apropos, this might be a good time to note again a key reason why I instigated this project in the first place. In many ways, most consumer and low-end business Internet access packages are something of "secret services" from the standpoint of individual customers. To an extent that is really quite remarkable, people really don't know what they're getting for their money, and most ISPs seem perfectly happy to let their subscribers assume that any observed service oddities are due to problems in subscribers' hardware or software, not related to how the ISP network is provisioned. Note that Internet access services at this level are sold almost entirely based on theoretical speed claims, with usually nary a mention of traffic shaping, throttling, blocking, jitter, warping, morphing, or other "active" ISP data management procedures that really can have dramatic impacts on end-user applications performance. The specific decisions of how these various actions will be applied to customer circuits are generally made by (from the customer point of view) faceless entities deep in giant corporations (yes, Brett, I know *you* are not a faceless entity in a giant corporation, but you're the exception). Typically, only the most general description of such activities will be buried in the Terms of Service, and ISPs often consider the details to be proprietary. Subscribers pay anyway, because (1) they don't really know what's going on in these respects and (2) they don't have much choice anyway. In Brett's case, was the behavior he saw the result of purposeful decisions by RoadRunner, or was a misconfiguration or other technical problem to blame? Hard to really know for sure, and trying to dig out info like that could easily become a long-term hobby for the average consumer. We can argue forever (but not on the list!) about which (if any) of these data "management" procedures are appropriate and reasonable. But my take is that keeping them secret is not acceptable. Customers deserve to know exactly what they're paying for. This project hopes to help provide them, and policymakers, with that information. --Lauren-- NNSquad Moderator