A rather interesting take on post net neutrality.
I don’t agree with most of the fear mongering in this article, but the notion
that the major platform and Edge Providers can play a role in monitoring the
behavior of Internet Service Providers has some merit.
The author does not seem concerned with Non-Neutrality of the Edge Services,
but the same concepts can be applied in reverse - Apps that rank these services
based on THEIR BIAS.
Regards
Craig
http://www.zdnet.com/article/holding-isps-accountable-lets-build-an-app-to-monitor-net-bias/?loc=newsletter_large_thumb_featured&ftag=TRE-03-10aaa6b&bhid=24728584684180976123116719441341
Holding ISPs accountable: Let's build an app to monitor net bias
In the continuing fight for holding our broadband providers accountable for
their actions, our front line weapons will be the cloud and the Internet of
Things.
By Jason Perlow for Tech Broiler | January 3, 2018 -- 14:56 GMT (06:56 PST) |
Topic: Cloud
A New Year and a new relationship with our broadband and wireless services
providers begin for Americans as we wake up to an internet post-net neutrality.
This is the internet in the age of "net bias."
Since the repeal of the net neutrality rules enacted by the Obama
administration on Dec. 15, the Tier 1 service providers have all issued
statements along with the major trade groups representing them that they don't
and will not block or throttle connections to content and sites.
They have said, emphatically, that they won't engage in most forms of paid
prioritization -- the practice of charging sites (and end-users) more for
faster delivery of streams and downloads.
Will they stick to these promises? For the next year, while the FCC is under
legal challenge, they are likely to keep a low profile and not make significant
changes. But, past that, it's possible subtle changes may occur, which will be
slowly rolled out in the hopes that consumers don't notice them.
When that happens we must prepare to fight back. We must empower ourselves as
end-users and stop the content providers that serve us from being discriminated
against. We will hold these huge telecoms and regional broadband providers
accountable for their actions when they do eventually cross an unacceptable
line.
The cloud and the Internet of Things
How do we hold them accountable? We use the best weapons in our arsenal: The
cloud and the Internet of Things.
We must have actual visibility into the performance of our service providers --
in essence, we need the network equivalent of a weather map to tell us if we
are actually getting what we pay for.
We need to know, using a consumer-friendly visualization and user interface, if
the ISP is neglecting its infrastructure or that an event of some kind is
occurring -- such as whether it is DDoS or malware-based.
We need to know if port blocking, throttling, or QoS is being applied to and
from where. We need to be able to point out that it isn't uniquely something
wrong with our on-premises equipment or that other broadband consumers are
experiencing similar issues, so that, effectively, we can construct a report
card and a record of the behavior.
We need a real-time leaderboard that ranks how the providers perform against
their peers when it comes to service responsiveness and openness and indicates
when they are clearly dropping the ball.
Today, there is no easy way for a consumer to correlate anything when events do
occur. Nor do they necessarily know it is happening or what is causing it.
Yes, there are open-source tools out there like Nagios that you can install on
a server to monitor publicly available infrastructure with pings and such, but
there's no way to know if other customers are experiencing the same problem.
It's also not a consumer-friendly piece of software, and you need to have
network and systems expertise to set it up.
We can't depend on the government
What we need is an easy to configure app or a service that runs on all of the
major OS platforms (Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Linux) and on our IoT
devices/premises equipment that provides the needed telemetry for correlation
and reporting in the cloud.
Obviously, we can't depend on the government to build this and hold broadband
and wireless services providers accountable. The industry needs to build this.
I see this as a major priority for the Apples, Amazons, Googles, and Microsofts
of the world -- for a number of reasons.
First, they build the platforms we use, the PC, and mobile operating systems.
They also run the public clouds these platforms use to consume content. They
also host many of the content providers on their public clouds.
They have their own reputations they need to keep pristine, and they need to
keep their enterprise broadband provider QoS agreements and SLAs with these
very same ISPs in check, too.
He-said, she-said situation
Today, if the broadband consumer experiences any kind of throttling or
slowdown, it's very much a he-said, she-said situation. A lot of finger
pointing with no substance. The broadband provider is going to be inclined to
blame it on the on-premises equipment at the residence -- or they'll blame it
on the content provider.
If we had the ability to see what was actually going on in real time, across
thousands or millions of representative devices, we can catch the broadband
providers red-handed when the inevitable transgression occurs.
I also see this as a tool for increasing competition between the broadband
providers. The ones with cleaner records and proven performance will be able to
point this out in their advertising and marketing material. And the ones who
screw up will be called on the carpet by their competition and consumer
protection/advocacy groups (especially if they block the telemetry).
How do we build this? I envision this as a combination of a cloud service that
runs on each of the public clouds -- Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google
Cloud Platform -- and a telemetry service that runs on your devices.
The more data points we collect on ISPs, the better
The telemetry service, which I see as being a core function built into each
operating system platform, would measure performance/responsiveness against a
baseline list of popular public websites and services, such as Netflix, Hulu,
Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and any number of others that a major cloud
provider runs.
It could run on your PC, your smartphone, your smart speaker, and other smart
devices, or even your router -- or all of them. The more data points we collect
on ISPs, the better.
The telemetry service would have to be opt-in. You'd have to agree to turn it
on so that you can start collecting a history of your household's and device
performance with these services relative to your provider.
You would be able to see individual reports of how your provider is performing
against your equipment and also that of your neighbors and national subscribers
on a historical basis.
I see this as essentially a version of OOKLA's or FAST.NET's speed tests on
steroids -- but this would measure performance on a service and application
level versus a snapshot of broadband link speed. And it would be running all
the time, sending data to the cloud provider over a secure web protocol.
Each of these cloud providers would then take this telemetry data and display a
leaderboard in real time of how all the services providers are ranking against
their public cloud services.
Google would run its own for Android and Chrome OS on Google Cloud. Microsoft
would run its own for Windows, Xbox, and Office 365 on Azure. Apple would run
its own for iOS and Mac in iCloud. Amazon would run its own on its own devices
and services in AWS.
Netflix, Twitter, and Facebook can build this into their respective apps for
the platforms they run on, or they can tie into the OS-specific
collectors/telemetry services via a standardized API.
"Internet weather map"
I believe that the major cloud service providers should then share this
metadata/rankings with each other so that the overall composite "internet
weather map" can be created as a standardized app/service for each device
platform.
Ideally, the collector/telemetry service and the public mirrors of the "net
bias leaderboard" should be an open-source effort that is modular and the cloud
and platform providers would agree to maintain it as a group effort.
In my opinion, this is the killer app for big data. It is the analytics app
everyone wants and it will allow the invisible hand of competition to work the
way it is supposed to by providing the visibility consumers need to make
informed decisions about who they do business with.
It would allow competitors to determine whether they can challenge
poor-performing incumbents in established markets where few choices exist.
It becomes a much more powerful tool when Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and
Microsoft -- as well as any other cloud services provider -- can say as a group
representing their customers that a broadband or wireless provider is behaving
badly.
If something wacky starts happening, alarms could go off. Notifications could
be sent to mobile devices and on your PCs. Your smart speakers, such as Alexa
and Google Home, could also be configured to audibly tell you when a "storm"
was occurring.
You would know immediately if service is being degraded or when it resumes to
normal, or a network-wide security event was occurring.
Today, we do not have these tools at our disposal. But the infrastructure in
the cloud and the platforms exist to build this now -- and if net bias is the
new normal, we need to have the ability to shame the ISPs as a collective when
they cross the line into unacceptable behavior.
Do we need better tools to hold our broadband and wireless providers
accountable? Talk Back and Let Me Know.