preroll music
Herald: Actually, we have two
consecutive talks of half an hour.
And as they’re both on the
same more-or-less topic
we’ve decided to junk
them. One is right now,
that’s Thomas Lohninger from
Austria, my home country.
And the next one is Fredy
Kuenzler from Switzerland.
And they’re both talking about the same
problem. You know the old Churchill
saying: “There’s two things you
don’t wanna know exactly, that’s
how do they make sausages,
and how do they make laws?”.
Well, actually, you do wanna know
exactly how they make laws!
Otherwise you find yourself
with a law you don’t want.
And a sarco enemy can avoid a banger,
but you can’t avoid a law.
So Thomas here is gonna tell you
about the fight for net neutrality
in Europe. And let’s have a big
hand for Thomas Lohninger!
applause
Thomas: Hello and thank you,
everybody! Good.
So, let’s dive right in. We have a lot of
ground to cover for the past 3 years
which have to fit in the next 30 minutes.
So I’m gonna talk fast at the end,
so that we have a little bit more
time for the outlook in the future.
The subtitle of this talk is ‘Alea iacta
est’, so ‘the dices have fallen’
which in fact is not really true.
We now have legislation
in Europe for the first time, binding
legislation for net neutrality
in all 28 member states. And this
talk will be about the history
of this legislation and how civil society
played a huge role in this law.
But still the law that we have
now is really ambiguous;
so the fight is not over. There are next
steps to come which will actually give it
real meaning, and influence what net
neutrality we’ll actually have in Europe.
A little bit of introduction: So,
net neutrality in principle is
the universality of the network.
As you see here
we’re all interconnected
over the network and…
the basic foundational principles
that boil down in these days
– in the age of deep packet inspection
and discriminatory pricing –
net neutrality boils down to
discrimination protection.
And it’s basically preventing
ISPs to establish
new discriminatory business models.
This was also the starting point
for this European legislation called
‘Telecom Civil Market’. It’s a regulation;
that means it’s directly applicable
in all 28 member states,
not like a directive. It doesn’t have to
be transposed to national legislation,
it’s already a law in all 28 countries.
And the responsible commissioner, back in
September 2013, when it was introduced,
is this old lady, Neelie Kroes.
Audio/Video playback starts
Neelie Kroes: It is a fact that we are all
connected or we want to be connected.
So this package is essential for
Europe’s strategic interests,
for Europe’s economic progress.
It is absolutely crucial
for the telecom sector itself.
And, of course, for citizens
who need full and fair access
to telecom services such as
internet, and such as mobile services.
Audio/Video playback stops
Thomas: “Such as internet”…
This is also the spirit of this whole law.
You have internet, which is kind of
neutral, and then you have other stuff.
Like specialized services, which you
could basically translate in your head to
‘net neutrality violation’, or ‘paid
fast lanes’. And if you look
at the original Commission proposal,
which they put in front of us, they had
really weird language, like “within
the contract that you enter into
with your ISP you’re not allowed to
discriminate”. But if the contract states
that you have discriminatory pricing,
or different speeds for different types
of applications that would be legal, under
the original Commission proposal.
The Commission had a 3-fold
strategy: It used the election
to get the Parliament to adopt
this regulation really fast,
to put it in a hurry, to rush this
thing through before the elections
in May 2014. It used a populist
element which was roaming.
If you have heard any coverage about
this legislation it was probably
about the roaming part. That Europe
would abolish roaming charges
which was actually kind of a fuzzy deal.
You will still have Roaming charges
but you will have different names and
different forms. But that was something
which made it essential for all
MEPs, for all parliamentarians
in the European Parliament to
pass this legislation really fast.
And they used bizarre and complex
language as you’ve just seen:
the whole regulation was full of that.
And the fourth point is
that in their language, in the PR
strategy, they were always claiming
to support net neutrality. We see the
same thing with Guenther Oettinger now,
the successor of Neelie Kroes, he’s also
saying that he supports net neutrality,
but in fact he’s doing the opposite.
So what have we done, once this
regulation was in front of us?
We started to write amendments
in a wiki. Actually it took us
only a month to come up with
the first improvements for this text.
And I also said that I wanted
to give some ‘lessons-learned’.
The first lesson-to-learn if you want to
influence European policy is: Come early!
The earlier you are on the table, the
earlier you start talking with officials
about a subject the more influence
you will have on the process. So
if you want to influence legislation don’t
look what is in the calendar next month
– look what is in the calendar in 3 years.
Then you have a good chance
to really make a difference. And we
had the ‘savetheinternet’ campaign
which was actually launched here
on that stage, 3 years ago.
And the talk with Markus
Beckedahl at 30C3.
And the website basically
followed a simple idea.
Translate attention into political force.
Give people something to do.
And provide actionable items – it’s the
second lesson that you can take away
from that. You have to give
people something to do.
Otherwise they will not care about
the subject. Otherwise they will
not get really involved.
They will not feel like they have
a part in whatever political
issue you wanna raise.
And emboss these
actionable items actually;
translate the attention and the will
of the citizens into something
that’s in front of the officials,
in front of the parliamentarians.
In our case: calls, faxes,
tweets and emails.
These were our actionable items; and
here I also want to thank Michael
Bauer who was the core developer
of all the contact-your-MEP
tools of savetheinternet
besides the Pi phone from
laquadraturedenet who sadly deceased
with a heart attack this year. And…
applause
But without him we never would
have made it in such a good time.
He developed the whole contact
suite in like a week or so.
He was a really brilliant person.
So the fax thing was really cool.
We sent around 40,000 faxes to the
parliament[arian]s, 20,000 of which
were already also received by them. Here
again, I want to thank the ISP Kappa
who sponsored us all those faxes
for free, for the first round.
We didn’t have to pay for any of them.
So third lesson is: be creative.
So faxes were a novel thing,
It wasn’t done any time before.
And so they were really influential
because suddenly you would have
a physical token of a citizen’s will
in the office of the parliamentarian. But
like every creative campaigning idea
only works once or twice now the
Parliament has switched to
an electronic fax delivery.
So this idea no longer works.
At least not so efficiently.
So you have to adopt fast.
This is the process in the
European Parliament.
You have these several committees
which all adopt their opinions
on the legislation. And then the whole
thing goes into the leading committee
– the Industry Committee in this
case. And then to plenary.
Here I wanna thank Petra Kammerevert,
German Social Democrat.
It was like the only MEP that sticked with
us, from the beginning to the end.
She was really fighting like hell.
And she was one of the good guys.
One of the bad guys is [Vera] Pilar del
Castillo, the Rapporteur down there,
in the ITRE committee. As
a Rapporteur she has a lot of power
over the process of this legislation
in Europe. And she was really
working against us wherever she could.
And also working against the opinion
of the European Parliament. So she was not
really negotiating to get the good deal
that the parliament adopted in plenary
in first reading. She was really working
to get what the telcos and Telefonica
are wanting. And so in the plenary
we actually managed to get amendments
through. Before that, it looked quite grim
but we had those amendments
which got a majority
and which brought us the victory.
Because this legislation is now passed
and published in the journal, I’m now
also at liberty to speak a little bit more
about what is the background
of it. And actually,
as you have here in this email
from a UK Social Democrat,
the text came from civil society,
which in fact is true.
When we drafted this text there were
like 3 things that we had to do.
We had to fix all loop holes. We had
to change as little as necessary,
so only minor text changes.
Every word is costly.
And we couldn’t use any politically
loaded phrases. So we had to come up
with totally new language. Which
would solve all problems but still
get a majority which in fact
we managed to achieve.
There was also a bigger majority…
applause
So that’s us celebrating
after the victory. And…
that was big fun. So fourth lesson
to take away is: Be clear about
your demands with politicians.
You will not succeed in asking
for stuff that you will not…
that is impossible for the politician.
You have to ask for something
which is realistic. And in their eyes
getting a good text in first reading
was realistic. But there were many
formality arguments in second reading.
Which worked against us, and
at the end broke our necks.
One was that the parliament is
not really emancipated from
the other institutions. Council has much
more power. So the member states
really can make demands and draw red lines
that the parliament is not really willing
to step over. And ‘second reading’ also
means that you need an absolute majority
for any amendment. Not just a simple
majority. So half of all MEPs
and not just those who
are present at the vote.
But it’s not all just the first reading:
here you have a basic idea of
how laws are adopted in the European
Union. With the Commission on top,
the Parliament at the left and the member
states in the Council on the right.
And we had savetheinternet
campaigns for all of those steps.
And basically when the Commission adopted
their proposal that was of course
anti net neutrality at its best.
The Parliament fixed it,
the Council reverted it and really came
up with a text that was partly even worse
than what the Commission
originally wanted.
And then those 3 institutions sat
together in the most intransparent way
you could imagine… and came
together and made a new text.
And the agreement here, in trialub (?),
that was actually reached
at 2 AM with everybody almost
asleep, everybody like:
“Okay, let’s fix this, let’s fix this…”.
And the Liberals,
the Greens, the Left, all of them were
already out of the room. They were saying:
“Okay, no deal, we’ll continue
after the summer break,
let’s just not continue any
more discussion!” And then
the negotiator from the Social Democrats,
Patricia Toia, she was already standing
in the doorway with her
handbag in her hand.
And then she agreed to this proposal.
Because the Conservatives gave her some
concessions on Roaming, then she agreed,
to the shitty net neutrality. So that’s
it actually what it boils down to,
at some stages. And it was [Pilar del]
Castillo who was driving this compromise.
So we had a really bad text
which was on the table.
And agreed between all 3 institutions.
But then it would still need
to go through Parliament.
And we had to ask ourselves
over the summer break: “Is this text
worse than useless?” Should we really
fight for amendments, or
should we fight for deletion?
This was a huge argument
within the savetheinternet coalition.
And even I was sympathetic
with both sides.
But at the end we thought
this text is better than
e.g. what the US had in their first
net neutrality law. And therefor
it’s worth fighting. Because maybe there
are countries, like Austria, like Germany,
like the Netherlands that have or
would adopt good legislation.
But many other countries would not.
And so, in the sense of the European Union
we thought: “Better have this compromise
for 28 instead of just a few good laws.”
And then something really magical
happened. Because finally we got support
from the US. We had Barbara van
Schewick, the world’s leading expert
and scientist on net neutrality
speaking out in support for us.
So did Lawrence Lessig, so
did Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and
many other supporters. And we also had
companies getting involved, start-ups
and big internet companies like Wordpress.
And we also had venture capitalists
that urged the parliamentarians to
really adopt these amendments,
make this a clear legislation. Because
otherwise they would stop investing
into European start-ups. Because I would
not get money into a business model
which might not work in a few months.
And also in Germany we had big
support from the media authorities,
the Landesmedienanstalten, and the
Association of German Journalists.
Many others. But really, what we
didn’t do here, we didn’t come early.
This was all a last-minute action. The
real traction this whole thing gained
one week before the final vote!
And that was too late.
If we could have had this traction,
this media coverage beforehand
then it might have turned out differently.
But what you can take away from that is
that we have to broaden our movement.
That we really have to go
out of the net political nerd bubble.
We have to reach other people.
Digital rights issues are
broad civil society issues.
And we have to treat them as such.
Go to the churches. Go to the journalists.
Go to whomever is willing to listen, and
make your cause, and broaden the movement.
And we had really creative
actions like here in Barcelona.
Our member Xnet had this nice projection
on the building of Telefonica.
But at the end it didn’t work. We
failed in Second Reading. And I have
to speed up a little bit and explain you
why this is not the end of net neutrality.
I know this was in the media quite
heavily. And if you look at it binarily,
of course this is a loss for us because
we campaigned for amendments
and we did not succeed. But still
the text it’s now on the table.
The biggest problem
is that it’s ambiguous.
But it has some good parts in it. And one
word of advice: you have to keep in mind
that the US also needed two
approaches to get this right.
The first net neutrality laws were
even worse than what we have now.
There is clarity that this is now
applicable – not only to fixed line
but also to mobile internet. And at least
we’ll see no longer commercial blocking
in Europe. You could still have state
blocking, so like censorship lists
from any public authority. But
you could not e.g. block Skype
if you are a mobile operator and want
people corner into using your own roaming.
There is intentional ambiguity, and all
the big questions about net neutrality and
paid fast lanes. And so the real decision
is now left to the unelected regulators.
And to the unelected judges. We
most certainly expect court cases
in front of the European High Court.
And this means huge legal uncertainty.
Which is really bad. Not only for
citizens but also for business.
So there are 4 big subjects
we have to cover.
That are still in the debate now with the
European regulator that’s now tasked with
giving this law actual meaning.
Specialized services…
as I said you could translate it in
your head with ‘paid fast lanes’
and ‘not net neutrality’ or with ‘those
services that really have nothing to do
with the internet’. That has to be our
goal here. There are 5 safeguards
in the regulation that we have to apply
right and then we can still achieve
that goal. But the regulators… like
these are the 28 organizations
in Europe that are tasked with
regulating the telecom markets.
They are not doing anything else than
reading laws and applying them
on the market. And that’s one of the
questions they asked us in the hearing.
So would it be okay to have internet
services as specialized services?
And you can see how really vague and
ambiguous this law is, if this is
the basic question that they’re asking us.
Similarly with zero rating, the practice
of commercial discrimination. If some
data packages cost more than others.
Again, we have some sort
of safeguard here.
But ‘commercial practices’ is the corner
word here. Because zero rating
is not mentioned in the whole legislation.
‘Commercial practices’ – and that’s
the funny part. They’re asking us
– the regulators asking civil society –
what in our understanding ‘commercial
practices’ actually means. And
from our perspective there are 2 ways of
seeing it. Either it means ‘zero rating’
in which case it has to be prohibited. Or
it means anything else in which case
e.g. it could mean ‘interconnection’.
That applies perfectly to the legislation.
But in that case this whole topic would
be left for national legislation.
So the Dutch net neutrality law
could still outlaw zero rating,
or Germany could adopt a new law
which would prohibit that practice.
A very important point which was
sadly not so much discussed
is traffic management. There is
a risk that ISPs could introduce
a class based CIF system to manage
congestion, e.g. That would look like:
“Okay, we have all video streaming
applications in one class
and we prioritize them. But we don’t
prioritize telephony applications,
because although they also are
delay-sensitive they are
against our own business models, and
therefor we are not prioritizing them.”
Class-based traffic management has another
big problem. And you can look at the UK
where this is a common practice.
If you want to throttle file-sharing
and you have some gaming applications
that look similar like file-sharing
you could end up with
throttled gaming applications
which make the games unusable.
And so in the UK you have now
standing committees between game
developers and ISPs like Plusnet
and before they have a rollout of a new
game they have to sit down and agree
on the technical characteristics,
so that the game actually works
in the British internet. And this is
the total opposite of innovation
without permission.
And from our understanding
traffic management always has to be
as application agnostic as possible.
So: only look at the header, don’t
look in the contents of the package,
don’t make any differentiation
between applications or services.
And there’s also a problem: If you
look at the content, if you want
to treat encrypted traffic differently
there is a risk that all encrypted traffic
could end up in the slow lane.
In principle this is what we want to
achieve. Be as application agnostic
as possible and then only allow
traffic management based
on technical characteristics where it is
really necessary and proportionate
and you cannot solve the problem
in any other way. And then only
if this is not sufficient you could
resert to a class-based system.
Transparency – we will see
some big change here
when it comes to advertised
and real speeds of internet.
So if this regulation enters into force
and if the transparency provisions
are applied correctly you will no
longer have just up to a certain
Megabyte [per second] of internet; instead
you will have a minimum, an average
and a maximum bandwidth which
has to be stated in the contract. So
more accurate information
for consumers. Now,
this is the organization that is now
tasked with making actual sense
out of this legislation. So this is the
umbrella of all 28 regulatory authorities
in Europe. Like Bundesnetzagentur
in Germany, or RTR in Austria.
All those come together under
the umbrella of BEREC; and
they now have until the end of
august, according to the regulation,
to come up with actual guidelines
that give this text real meaning.
And if we look at the timeline this
is basically our work programme
which we’ll have to fill with life.
The parliament adopted the
regulation in October; and
it was published in the journal on
November 26 which gives us the 9 months
of time we now have. And there
was a stakeholder hearing
from civil society; I could
participate for EDRI; and
we basically sat down with the regulators
and gave them our interpretation
of the text. But just so did also the
content application providers
like the public broadcasters,
or internet companies;
and so did the telecom industry. So
now they have to strike a balance
between those 3 stakeholder groups.
We’re now at a point where the working
groups are drafting the guidelines.
Really weird fact: the whole
regulation will enter into force
at the end of April. Although the
guidelines are not applicable there.
And nobody could answer the
question what this actually means
if there would be a case, in this
period between April and August.
So this working draft will
then be voted in plenary
at the end of June, and then we’ll
have 20 days of public consultation.
You’ll have 20 days to say
what you think about
the new net neutrality in Europe.
Which is ridiculous. And then they have
roughly a little bit less than two months
to analyze all this feedback,
and to redraft the guidelines.
So the more feedback they receive
the fewer time they’ll have to actually
redraft the whole thing before it’s
finally voted in the extraordinary
plenary within BEREC.
So that it can be published.
So let’s focus on those 20 days.
In the US we had several months of
consultation and 4 Mio. comments.
In India it was 28 days.
Still 1 Mio. comments.
And they are continuing. They all have
another consultation up and running
right now. And now in
Europe we have 20 days.
So this is the comparison that we face.
And this also means for European
civil society and all those people
who care about the internet – this is the
time line, and this is the opportunity
that we have. We can look at the US.
This is an analysis of the comments
that were given to the FCC
when they first asked for
opinions about net neutrality.
And there is now a huge collection
of scientific papers,
visualizations and everything
about this huge record
about the topic of net neutrality.
So you can see that there are
so many issues that – also organically –
that people commented [on].
You have very few templates in here.
So out of these 4 Mio. comments
many of them are actually people sitting
down, writing in their own words
what they think about the subject.
How it would influence their business.
How it would influence their education.
How it would influence the network
that they are running. And you
have many interesting stuff like
“you need net neutrality
for the American Dream”.
And the idea behind that is also a
“maybe we can take some advice
from the US, here, for Europe”.
That America is America
because you can connect to different
opinions. At the core of net neutrality
you have the equality of the network.
And this was preserved here
with the new rules in the US; and we
should really take advice on that.
And that’s also why we as
savetheinternet coalition
will come up with a new version
of the website. That will
support the consultation and
extend it, not just in the 20 days
but for a longer time period. So that
more of you have the opportunity
to have an actionable item, to do
something for this legislation.
And to really have your say.
In the remaining time I would like
to step a little bit out of Europe
and follow the motto
of this year’s Congress,
and look a bit at the global issue.
You see now there’s… many
legislation are actually discussed
or already in place. It varies greatly
in the amount of safeguard
that it provides for citizens. And thanks
to Andre Meister from netzpolitik.org
we have a little collection of all the
billboards and advertisements
in Latin America about zero rating.
So let’s have a look how this is
seen in Peru, in Chile and other
countries. You have here
free social networking which
is huge advertisement donors.
And you have full internet
with this websites.
And we’re not speaking about nerdy stuff.
This is like a selling proposition,
that you can have these services for free,
therefor buy my SIMCard, buy my internet.
And it goes on and on like that. But it
gets really ugly if you look at
what’s happening in India right now.
Facebook has this program called
internet.org which is basically
a gated community which gives
poor people without any access
to the internet just access to
Facebook and a few other sites.
And Facebook is now on the
offensive. They are asking citizens
to lobby the regulator
against net neutrality.
They’re really challenged in that, and
you could see that Facebook was
fast responding because
the public pressure in India
amounted to companies, and
telecom actors and also politicians
publicly denouncing this
program. I can only quote
one of the founders of
savetheinternet.in, Nikhil Baba.
He said yesterday that the only question
that he would ask Mark Zuckerberg
who is always on the forefront
to defend his program:
“Why is he just giving
these free basic services
with just a few selected hundred sites
instead of giving them the whole
access to the internet?”. If you give
the bandwidth that’s reserved for these
programs just freely to everybody
so that they can use them in whatever
way they want you would achieve
exactly the same commercial
interest for the telecom providers.
And there are similar programs from
Mozilla and also from other Indian ISPs
that just give people 3 months
of a few megabytes
to get them hooked on the
internet. If this is just the idea
to bridge the digital gap by getting
people some sense of our internet
that could be easily done by that way.
We have to look at the challenges for
the global net neutrality movement.
This issue is far from just
a Western debate right now.
And we always have been wondering in the
Digital Rights movement how it would be
if Google or Facebook would be
on the other side of our debate.
If they really would fight against us.
We can look at the global south.
It’s first happening there. So
that’s the end of my talk and also
my time. I want to thank you.
I want to urge you to keep fighting;
net neutrality is not lost in Europe.
It’s more like we now have
a really ambiguous law.
The responsibility lies now with the
regulators. So we are in a way
at a point where the US was in 2014. And
now we have to do a similar mobilization.
We have to do a similar form
of argumentation to get it right.
And savetheinternet is
a coalition of 12 NGOs,
and we don’t have one fixed hub, but
there is a lot of development going on
in Austria. And we’ll also have a workshop
today at 6 PM at the EDRI assembly
at Noisy Square. If you want to get
involved, if you have a special interest,
a business, or are an ISP, then
please participate in this workshop
to get the new savetheinternet
as best as we can. Thank you!
applause
Herald: Okay, we gonna do something
unorthodox today. We gonna have
the next talk right onto this one.
Please – flying change of people
who wanna come and leave! Because
the two talks are related we’ll have
Ten minutes of Q&A after the next talk.
So here’s – das ist jetzt eine
Schwietzer Angelegenheit –
this is the gentleman from
Switzerland, Fredy Kuenzler!
Fredy: He speaks Fribourg dialect!
laughter
Can you believe that? Fribourg –
and pretty good actually!
Herald: We both agree that buffering
sucks, so please, let me have a hand
for – Fredy Kuenzler!
applause
applause
Fredy Kuenzler: Thank you! My name
is Fredy Kuenzler. Gruetzi mitanand’!
I was thinking whether to have the
talk in Swiss German or in English…
Herald: Sorry, excuse me for a moment -
Fredy: Never mind.
Herald: This is unorthodo… when you
leave, please leave in peace, and quiet.
Okay? And give him a chance.
Fredy: laughs
So Swiss German would be an option for me.
English, because you know the
Swiss don’t speak proper German.
My six year old digital native
is telling people rather proud that his
Dad invented the fastest internet
in Switzerland. It’s called Fiber7.
applause
Thank you.
While we went to Greece for vacation,
I was in a target conflict,
because I had to explain him
why he couldn’t watch YouTube.
I mean Greece, you know
it’s maybe a bit difficult,
but as a matter of fact, here
in Hamburg it’s not any better.
I’m next door in the hotel InterCity
and they offer “free Wi-Fi”
with 256 kbit/s.
laughter
If you want 5 Mbit internet,
you pay 8 Euros extra,
per day. So this is where we are in 2015.
A few words about me: I’m
married, one son as I said.
He was born 2009. He was
able to unlock the iPhone
with the age of 17 months.
No one showed him how.
laughter and mumbling
My early connection
with digital techniques
was about 1978 when I was
playing with these chips 7400.
Who knows them? Raise
your hand. – Few, thanks.
Later on I did an apprenticeship as a
Fernmelde- und Elektronikapparatemonteur.
And I started to do
IT business about 1991.
Then 1996 – almost 20 years ago –
we started with Linux stuff.
My first Linux was Suse 4.2.
In the year 2000 we started with Init7
and later on I became president
of the SwissIX association.
This is an association
which runs an Internet Exchange. I had
also my time in a startup called Zattoo.
It’s a network architecture
OTT IP Television.
Besides, I need a hobby, so I’m also
a politician for the Social Democrats
in my city parliament, already 8 years.
Then I started with the other
hobby, Fiber7 as you know.
Oh besides, I was also working
in an internet expert group
of the Social Democrats Switzerland.
There the internet paper
was adopted earlier this month
by the national Delegiertenversammlung.
I don’t know what this is in English.
So, Buffering sucks! Ladies and Gentlemen,
this talk is not about Deutsche Telekom.
It’s not about peering. It’s not about
interconnection. It’s about these
thousands and millions of youngsters out
there which want to watch YouTube
in HD resolution without buffering.
So let’s quickly look at the reason why
YouTube and all the other video buffer.
It’s usually lack of bandwidth.
If you have a 2 Meg DSL
or if you have an InterCity
free Wi-Fi with 250 kilobits;
so HD video is not possible.
Sometimes they have old PCs,
so CPU power is an issue –
these days no longer relevant.
Wi-Fi quality sucks sometimes.
This is rather an individual issue.
And sometimes we have an over-subscription
of the shared node –
mainly in cable networks.
Streaming source can be too far
away. If you stream from the U.S.,
it doesn’t really go well.
That’s why we have so many CDN,
Content Delivery Network systems,
close to the end users.
Then adaptive streaming
can be an advantage,
but also disadvantage. You cannot
turn it off. When you watch HD
and the connection sucks
you just cannot keep it on HD.
It just drops to SD or lower
resolution. It works, yes.
But Claire Underwood in
low-res is not so cool.
Routing algorithm issues – sometimes
it’s a mismatch of client and server.
If your client is assigned to the
wrong CDN server, then it’s also slow.
Anycast routing is a trick sometimes.
And, last but not least
and the most important thing:
It’s over-subscribed interconnections.
We go back quickly to the
old days. The caller pays.
When you call your mother-in-law
and you talk with her
– well, she talks to you for 45 minutes
and you say hello and goodbye –
you still pay the call.
laughter
So with YouTube it’s not any different.
You click YouTube and then YouTube
talks to you for hours maybe
and then you say goodbye, basically.
So is the broadband customer
calling the YouTube server or is it vice
versa? Is the YouTube server calling
the broadband customer? Probably
it’s the broadband customer who calls.
But still the data is flowing
from the server to the client.
But the client is causing the traffic,
because he is requesting the traffic.
And if we look at the structure of
the internet, we have basically…
(doesn’t work here, red
button is dead, never mind!)
…we have the end user to the right.
We have – here is the provider network
and the end user is only connected
to the provider’s network.
On the left side we have all the content
in the internet. We have the media
and video and streaming
and Torrent and… you name it.
But there is always only one
way going to the end user.
It’s the yellow marked interconnection
points and there is no way around them.
This basically means, the provider
can monopolize the end customer.
At least as long [as] he is
connected or subscribed.
There is no alternative way.
So this gives the provider
a position of power.
On the other hand these
interconnection points used to be
– for a long period of time – so called
Zero Settlement interconnections,
and they are basically the
foundation of the internet.
Without Zero Settlement peering,
without interconnection
the internet wouldn’t exist as we know it.
The broadband provider,
mainly the incumbent,
the ex-monopolist,
or large cable operators,
they tend to become more
and more restrictive
to provide sufficient
interconnection capacity.
Not upgrading interconnection
to the requirements
is very common these days and
it’s a passive aggressive behaviour.
So many providers – to name
a few: Deutsche Telekom –
they just do nothing. They just wait.
And the end customers are suffering.
Buffering is very common, especially
during prime-time.
This is basically what the topic of…
…the main topic of this conference is:
It’s a gated community. The provider
creates a gated community
for his own end customers.
So as I said before:
The data is flowing from the server,
from the video server to the end customer.
It’s about 50 times more
traffic flowing to the client
and the usual traffic ratio we have
for a broadband provider is 1:5
or 1:10. So they’re pulling about
10 times more traffic
towards the end customer.
Then we have this interconnection
policy. So they don’t do anything.
As I said before, they just over-subscribe
the existing interconnection.
And if you want to upgrade you have to
have a traffic ratio of
about 1:1.5 to 1.3.
But no video stream service
can deliver traffic
and also maintain the traffic ratio.
No content provider can.
So all they can do is: They can
pay money to get upgraded.
And if they don’t pay,
data is stuck in congestion
and their clients are suffering,
seeing the buffering sign.
Large broadband providers, such as
the incumbents and cable providers,
they want to get paid twice.
They are able to force the money
due to the temporary
monopoly – as I explained.
And they can ask money from the end
customer and on the other hand
also from the content.
This is called double-sided market.
And if they don’t pay,
the content is not paying, this is what we
see. And sometimes – as a side note –
the end customer pays,
but still sees this.
But IP interconnection would be cheap.
The business cost per broadband
customer is just a few cents per month.
And if the provider would invest
this, people would be happy.
On top content providers are easy to deal
for peering or provide cache servers etc.
So please talk to our community
fellows of Akamai, Apple,
Amazon, Facebook, Google,
Limelight, Netflix.
T is not Telekom, it’s Twitch.
And Zattoo, and a lot of others.
So traffic congestion is costly.
I took a random Google
search and was looking for
how much traffic is actually costing.
And “Die Welt” showed the result:
“Staus kosten in jedem
Haushalt 509€/Jahr”.
So my assumption was:
If traffic jam is costing money,
then probably data traffic jam
is also costing some money.
But I figured that no one was
really exploring that field, yet.
So I thought I’m going to do
a little “Milchbüechlirächnig”
laughter
applause
When I was a child, the milk man came
every morning and we just put our order
into the Milchbüechli and he put the milk
into the box outside of the house.
By the end of the month, we went to the
shop and paid our Milchbüechlirächnig.
So this is my quick calculation: We have
about 30 million broadband connections
in Germany. I assume that everybody is
waiting for one minute accumulated
while watching Netflix, YouTube,
whatever. Probably this is far too less.
Who thinks one minute is fine, or –
who thinks one minute is not enough?
Oh, ok, so let’s stick with one
minute for the calculation.
And I also assumed that 5€ / hour waiting
is a good salary. So if you
think, 5€ is not enough,
you can adapt the calculation.
This is called “Reservationslohn”.
I have no clue what it means,
but this was on Wikipedia,
for time when you take
a job or refuse a job,
how much would be the
value for the spare time.
So this is my calculation: If you wait one
minute per day, this is 6 hours per year.
If you multiply this with the 5€,
every broadband customer
would lose 30€ per year.
This sums up
– with 30 million broadband subscribers -
to 900 million Euros per year. This is the
economic damage in Germany per year.
applause
As we can assume that a large
part of the buffering is caused
by the insufficient interconnection,
especially during prime-time
when everybody wants to watch
Netflix. This is also a result
of the restrictive peering policy of the
incumbent and large cable operators
and the ability for them to
force some extra money
out of these double sided
market power as I explained.
They probably would gain a few
millions. I don’t have exact figures
but I assume it’s probably
some 10..20..30 millions per year,
they could force through
this market power.
On the other hand we have the damage
of 900 Million Euro per year and I mean
this is like a – how do you
say that? – Imbalance.
So my conclusion in democratic
countries like [in] Western Europe:
The economic gain of a multibillion
company at the expense
of the general public is
commonly not tolerated.
The next question is basically following
the previous talk of Thomas:
When will the regulators wake up
and force every market participant
to cooperative peering and interconnection
because the end user is suffering,
the public is suffering.
Zero Settlement peering – as I explained -
is rather common.
Of course the incumbent,
the Deutsche Telekom lobbyists
would tell otherwise, this is clear.
The unbalanced traffic should no
longer be used to refuse peering;
and also disputes about the
interconnection should be resolved
rather quick. My case against
Swisscom is taking years already
and still no end… no light
at the end of the tunnel.
Then, last but not least we should
have broadband providers…
must be committed to the interests
of their own end user customer base.
As I said, Telekom managed to get paid
twice because of their market power;
and other Telecoms, such as
Telecom Hungaria or Swisscom,
they use Deutsche Telekom and
their market power as a leverage
to force their also
restrictive peering policy;
and the regulators so far don’t do
much. I quote here Marc Furrer,
this is the chief of ComCom Switzerland:
“Nur ein fauler Regulator
ist ein guter Regulator”.
laughing
Thank you! Questions?
applause
Herald: Okay, thank you Fredy; and
let’s have Thomas back up on stage
and we’re gonna take questions, please.
There is actually more than the
[number of] mics I said before,
there is two right up on the top
and there is three in each aisle.
So if you please line up if you have
any questions to ask; and please
speak into the mic, we need
your questions on tape,
and those who are leaving
now: Do it silently please.
Okay, first question, over there!
Question: I have a question for
Thomas: From your talk it sounds
like you did a lot of work. Can you
tell us a little bit about the budgeting,
that goes into having a team like that?
T: Yeah, so, SaveTheInternet
is a coalition of 12 NGOs
which have all their independent
budget. There is no fixed budget
for the work that we have
been doing as a whole.
All of them have transparency
reports. So I can not really speak
for the budget of EDRI or accessnow. The
organization where I am based in Austria
got a grant from the media democracy
foundation from 10.000€;
and money from Netflix, 10.000€ also.
And we used both for development
and paying for the faxes. Because
in the second round of the fax tool
the provider that it was referring to
was no longer paying.
Otherwise the funding in general about
Digital Rights in Europe is awfully low.
So if you compare it to the U.S.
where you had double-digit millions
going into the lobbying it is
ridiculous what resources we have
here in Europe; and we are thinking
about making a donation tool
for the new SaveTheInternet;
but again, that’s complicated
because you have 12 NGOs with
very different activity scales.
Like some of them do a lot, others
not so much. So how would you divide
the money? These are unresolved questions,
that we are working on right now.
If you wanna support us with independent
funding, then just donate to
the individual organizations.
EDRI, Initiative für Netzfreiheit,
are probably the ones I would mention
most, because they have done
most of the work; accessnow as well,
but they generally have a lot of funding
from the U.S., so I don’t think
they need it that much.
Q: But to summarize, I saw a picture of
your team. I saw all the work you did.
You did that for 20.000€?
T: No. I never got a Cent.
I was paid by EDRI for 4 months
when I was working in Brussels
within BEREC for the first reading;
but otherwise this was mostly free time.
I got my expenses covered for travel
but other than that I am doing this
in my spare time. Also now I’m employed…
applause
…I work for Data Protection NGOs,
so they are allowing me to do
a lot of my stuff also for Net Neutrality.
Herald: We’re all elephants. We do it
for peanuts. Okay, No.1 go ahead!
Mic 1: Yeah, hello! Hi Thomas, thanks
a lot for your work, that’s great.
I have a question about the involvement
of the business, the angels
and the companies: What is the
reason, what do you think
why they came so late into
this discussion in Germany.
What probably can we do to change
this in the future because
I think that’s a… they
are great allies in this fight.
Thomas: That’s… you’re asking
exactly the right question.
Sadly, in Europe you have no
organized voice for startups
or for SMEs when it comes
to Digital Rights issues;
and you would have to work with them
to get them involved in the debate.
They were really late to the party
and then, again, mostly activated
through U.S. networks. So the connection
between the civil rights scene here
and the business scene, particularly the
one which is organized in Brussels
with European umbrellas is very weak.
So everything you can do there
to strengthen this connection
would be great.
But I don’t have those business
contacts. I got a few people involved
in the first reading stuff but we’ll
definitely need more people that
act as multipliers to get more
companies involved, particularly now
when we enter into a new phase
with the BEREC guidelines.
We no longer need the loud arguments of…
…of many people, we need more the
arguments from the business side,
from the universities, from those people
who run networks. These arguments are
better suited to make
a difference with the regulators.
Fredy: And to add: Don’t underestimate
the influence of the lobbies,
of the big names, the Telecoms
and the liberty globals…
They have a lot of money and they
try to influence the politicians
as good as they can. They do
a good job from their perspective.
Thomas: You can be sure that the Telecoms
will have people for all 28 regulators,
now continuously lobbying for an
upcoming 9 months. The question is:
Who is in our team?
Herald: OK. Thank you. Is there a question
from the internet? While we’re at it?
Signal Angel: Yes, there is a question,
it is: Whether peering providers
should differentiate between
virtual private network traffic
and public traffic; and where is the line
between internal network
and the public internet?
Fredy: What should I say… this is
difficult question, I mean… Basically,
if you over-commit your backbone
then there is always plenty of traffic…
or plenty of capacity. So there is…
there shouldn’t be any differentiation.
Networks should provide enough
capacity and then we’re good.
A common argument from the big names:
“Oh we are investing millions and millions
and millions in broadband expansion”,
but unfortunately they stop investing
right at the end of their own backbone
so they don’t invest any money
beyond their little percentage
of the total investment
for their interconnections.
Herald: Okay, there is
another question at No.1?
Mic 1: I have a question about buffering:
So the most of the content in the web is
delivered over TCP/IP and…
will changing the media
to something like UDP which has
lower overhead over TCP/IP;
will that change the situation?
Fredy: Not really.
Mic 1: No?
Fredy: No. It won’t help. I mean
packet loss is packet loss
regardless whether it’s TCP or it’s UDP.
Herald: OK, that was a short answer. Next
question please. Please talk into the mic.
Mic: So when I came here, this
year, I had the impression that
at digital subscriber line connections
not only bandwidth is bad but also the
ping [time] gets up way high.
Of course, I mean,
at home I have Fiber7 nowadays
so I just thought I got spoiled
by fiber connections but I noticed
that ping times went up
from, well, couple of years ago 60-80 ms
from sites in your neighborhood
more or less
to nowadays 80-160ms.
Where is the problem there?
Fredy: Well, the latency
is directly related
if the provider is not delivering
enough bandwidth,
then ping goes up that’s
a normal behaviour of TCP.
Mic: So the problem is also
at the interconnection sites?
Fredy: Probably yes, most likely,
you can find out if you do traceroute.
Then you see where… well,
there is a long presentation
how to interpret traceroute properly.
If you look for “Nanog traceroute”
you should find this lecture. But that
would probably give some indication.
Mic: Alright, thank you.
Herald: Thank you. Next question from
the internet, just in between and
then we’ll go back, go ahead.
Signal Angel: “Is Netflix a gated
community by itself?” and
“Are you sure that their interest
will align with the movement
of net neutrality in the long run?”
Fredy: We should differentiate
between Netflix content
and Netflix interconnections. So for
the content I probably would say:
Yes. But I am not the expert. This would
be then layer 7 in the OSI model.
I am talking here on layer 3,
this is content agnostic.
Netflix, they are one of the good
guys because they really help
to deliver the packets. I know
them personally a few fellows
from the peering community.
They are the good guys, definitely.
Thomas: Just also to answer this
question for the European debate,
Netflix was one of the good guys in the
U.S. and they also supported of course
the European movement. But again, they are
so big that I wouldn’t really trust them
as an ally because they could
also pay, they could also survive
in a double sided market and for them
in the growing emerging markets
like Europe where they just have started
it’s probably risky to allow for this
new type of anti net neutrality business
models; but in the consumer side
where net neutrality is seen as an end
user issue I think so far their interests
mostly align. On interconnection they
have their own interests, of course.
Fredy: So I can say: Netflix is
definitely paying Deutsche Telekom,
otherwise no single Deutsche Telekom user
would be able to watch any
movie on Netflix! So! For sure!
Herald: Okay, we are short for
time so please, last 2 questions.
One, no.2 first. Keep it short,
please. Talk into the mic.
Mic 2: Regarding the first talk: What
is the… do you have an explanation for
the behaviour of the European Commission
in behave of the net neutrality debate?
I especially think of the behaviour
of Guenther Oettinger
who repeatedly said his ridiculous lie
of “net neutrality kills” and
he repeated it again and again
even if there was no reason
behind it. And do you
have an explanation for this behavior
of the Commission, and Juncker and this?
Thomas: For that argument, we had this
great YouTube video “net neutrality kills”.
If you search it you will find it or
“Netzneutralität tötet” in German.
That deconstructs this argument of
Oettinger. But in general, and you can
go back to the previous commissioner
Neelie Kroes that I showed.
Our sole suspicion is that the deal
was that the telecom industry
has to give up a little bit of their
profits when it comes to Roaming,
but on the other side they gain a lot
of future profits on the abolishment
of net neutrality. And so it was like:
“Okay, we need a populist argument”,
Neelie Kroes also needs a quick
win at the end of her career.
And this was again like you take
a little bit there and put it there
for the Telecoms industry. And Oettinger
is a big industrial favour guy,
he is always for big business.
Herald: Okay, short for time,
last question, No.1.
Mic 1: Hi, so what strategy should an ISP
use when their capacity on their backbones
is fully loaded? Like first-in-first-out
or what is your idea about that, because
the capacity is limited, so when there is
so much traffic that everything is stuck.
Fredy: Upgrade!
Thomas: Yes, invest in the network!
Fredy: I mean, sorry, a 10G port is now
some 3000€ including optic and cross
connect. It’s not that much. Upgrade!
Herald: Okay, thank you!
Let’s have a hand!
applause
Fredy Kuenzler, Thomas Lohninger.
Thank you very much! And goodbye.
postroll music
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