The Sun has re-established net neutrality in the US, the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. A federal appeals court judge ruled last week that the Federal Communications Commission cannot classify Internet service providers, or ISPs, in a way that would prevent them from promoting certain content over others. Without net neutrality, providers would be able to throttle or throttle traffic to competitor websites. Or ISPs may require you to pay for fast connections to specific Internet destinations.
The new ruling, issued by three judges of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, marks the apparent end of the FCC’s net neutrality enforcement that began in 2015. when the agency took over The Obama-era Open Internet Order. That order defined ISPs as telecommunications providers, requiring them to act in the “public interest” under FCC oversight. Two years later it was that order It was killed by the Trump administration’s FCCIt was revived under President Joe Biden by FCC vote in April 2024.
Net neutrality advocates include consumer watchdog and free speech groups, as well as World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. “The web is yours,” he wrote in the year American scientific in 2010. “It’s a public resource that depends on you, your business, your community and your government.” Netflix, YouTube, and other video streaming giants also support net neutrality; they benefit when they don’t have to pay extra for fast loading of their content. (Estimates vary, but streaming probably accounts for at least two-thirds of all Internet traffic.)
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However, the internet operators who manage the network’s cell towers and cables are adamantly against net neutrality, and they celebrated Thursday’s verdict. In the decision, the judges mentioned it Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo, overturned the Supreme Court case Chevron deference called in June; this means that courts should not rely on the expertise of the FCC or other federal agencies to interpret ambiguity in the laws.
The FCC says the fate of net neutrality now rests with Congress. “Consumers across the country have told us time and time again that they want fast, open and fair internet,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a news release. “With this decision, it’s clear that Congress must now heed their call, stand up for net neutrality, and put open internet principles into federal law.”
Net neutrality may now appear to be out of the FCC’s control, but that doesn’t mean the principle is dead, the computer scientist says. David Choffneswho directs the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University. “We can always continue to collect data, continue to observe what’s going on, go to our representatives, say that this matters and find a solution,” he says. To start, Choffnes and some of his colleagues have created an app called Wehe, which anyone can download to test net neutrality violations. It has been used for more than 2.5 million tests since 2017. According to Choffnes, Wehe has detected traffic slowdowns in the US and censorship in some other countries, with censorship “reducing to zero bandwidth”, he explained. He spoke to the Choffnes American scientific about the consequences of the judge’s decision.
(Below is an edited transcript of the interview.)
Net neutrality can mean many things to different people: it has been described in mechanical terms as the practice of blocking or throttling the speed of certain websites, or as a policy of treating the Internet as a public utility, or taking a free market approach. Someone like Ajit Pai, former FCC chairman under President Donald Trump, using unnecessary and suffocating ISP restrictions. How would you define it?
Generally, the idea is that your network providers will treat your Netflix traffic no differently than Hulu traffic or Facebook or TikTok. All Internet traffic is treated equally. And it is this principle, this idea of openness and neutrality, that made the Internet so successful.
How does Weh work?
When your apps send network traffic, they don’t declare themselves to be Netflix or YouTube or Hulu. It’s just internet traffic. It is data that goes to a server that is named, which is a number. And those numbers, those servers, those IP addresses are reused by many services. So how do (network providers) know it’s Netflix and not Hulu or Peacock?
We found that the answer was looking for certain parts of the network traffic where the domain name was exposed. Think of Netflix’s netflix.com as an example. (ISPs) have these devices on their networks that would look for this text… and if they find this match in your network traffic in the first (data) packets, then they’d say, “Oh, I’ve decided. This is now YouTube traffic, and it’s going to slow down I have”.
Because we know that these devices aren’t looking for IP addresses—they’re looking for text in the network traffic itself—we record everything that’s sent between a real app like Netflix and its servers. We then load our app and our servers with that information.
Our application will be submitted specifically Sent by the Netflix app, and our server will respond specifically With what the Netflix server responded. From the perspective of those cellular network devices doing this type of application detection, our network traffic looks like Netflix.
Then, from behind, we repeat the experiment again, except we flip all the 0s and 1s. The way things are represented in Internet traffic, at a very basic level, are 0’s and 1’s. We turn them over. It is the most effective way to break any pattern, whatever (an ISP) is looking for.
Look, if one of these networks, say, Netflix is routed and throttled, you’ll see that when our network traffic looks like Netflix, you get some sort of performance hit. And when it doesn’t, you usually get a lot more performance.
Then we do some statistical analysis to get a reliable and validated way of saying, “Yes, it was a big difference.” This was not, you know, a random chance to see that big of a difference. We will say, in a technical term, that it is “separation”. But the most popular is the “violation of net neutrality”.
A paper you presented at a conference in August 2019 analyzed metrics from over 126,000 people who used Wehe between January 2018 and January 2019. In it, you and your colleagues identified 30 ISPs in seven countries, including the US, that restricted streaming of popular websites. such as YouTube. But that was from a total of 144 ISPs, and you wrote that the “major broadband providers in the US” (Comcast, for example) do not differentiate traffic by content. What else did you find?
We’ve done 2.5 million tests since we started this thing, including many countries. However, the top shots from that photo six years ago are mostly the same as today.
What we see in the US is not censorship, (but) every wireless provider, and by that I mean cellular provider or long-range wireless or satellite wireless, they all have at least one subscription plan where we have test users, and you see the difference they have They find that some video playback applications slow down. We have seen that landline providers do not do this.
Would you like to know why throttling doesn’t happen with broadband providers, but wireless does?
All I can do is speculate. I think for bandwidth, that’s clear that bandwidth is not very scarce.
On the wireless side, traditionally, the issue has been that spectrum is scarce. (And spectrum is just a proxy for bandwidth.)
Historically, it may have made sense to try to limit how much video streaming bandwidth was used. At a certain point, it would make sense for this to be a strain on their networks.
Today you go to mobile provider websites and they tell you how fast their 5G networks are and how much bandwidth they have. I don’t think it’s scarce anymore. That was the purpose of these evolutions in our cellular technologies: to remove this bandwidth limitation. I’m not sure that’s a problem yet.
Your Wehe project has continued, and is now driving traffic to apps like Zoom. Have you seen any changes since state net neutrality laws went into effect? (States with such laws include California, Oregon, and Washington state).
The answer is no. No matter what regulations were passed, federal or state, we found no change in behavior on these networks.
I think the states that have passed these laws probably haven’t done anything because they are waiting to see what happens if this decision really is the death knell of the FCC rules.
How will last Thursday’s decision affect Internet traffic?
In the short term, I don’t expect any change, because network providers never change their behavior in response to laws or regulations we’ve passed since we’ve been collecting data.
Are you motivated to continue working? Or do you feel like you have an extra burden on your shoulders?
I’ll preface this by saying that this has all happened before. The research (behind this project) started before the 2015 Open Internet Order. And since 2017 we’ve had the Wehe app around the world, so I’ve seen net neutrality rules created, overturned, challenged in court, and overturned. I’ve seen it all at this point…. (My response) more… “I’m tired of being the way things are.”
My sense with this project has always been that we need to have that transparency. When things are opaque, when no one can verify what companies are doing, we tend to find that they are doing something that is not in the best interest of the consumers they use. I’m not saying that all companies are bad, and I’m not saying that when they do bad things, they do it with malicious intent. But the important thing is that bad things happen, and if you don’t know about it, you can’t fix it.
