That's a good question, the problem is what if your only available ISP makes you this hypothetical deal:
For $59.99 a month:
- Get Facebook, Google, Netflix at 100 Mbps max.
- Any other traffic is limited to 5 Mbps max.
Watching Hulu, or Amazon Video for instance would be limited at 5 Mbps max.
But in that case your own VPN would also fall in the second category, so even if you tried to watch Hulu via VPN, you'd still get only 5 Mbps max. (And you'd be then stupid to watch Netflix through your VPN since it would also be at 5 Mbps max instead of 100 Mbps max.)
What you describe is already being done by the likes of T-Mobile and other wireless carriers such as their BingeOn program, to little fanfare.
The average consumer unfortunately has little to care about net neutrality. But in the long term it will hurt the tech economy as they have all risen from net neutrality.
T-Mobile's BingeOn is more of zero-rating than penalizing the speed/accessibility of non-approved "partners", but IMHO it's still a violation of the principle of Net Neutrality.
> T-Mobile's BingeOn is more of zero-rating than penalizing the speed/accessibility of non-approved "partners",
Erm ... so, if users want to access non-approved "partners", that's way more expensive ... but that does not affect accessibility? If you really think that, you simply fell for their psychological trick. It's simply irrelevant whether the accessibility is limited technically or economically, as one is always convertible into the other (if they limited access technically, you could still restore access by offering them enough money).
> The average consumer unfortunately has little to care about net neutrality.
That's simply not true. BingeOn is hurting the consumer. T-Mobile could just as well simply add x GB of traffic per month to their plans that you could use with any services you want, that would result in the same costs for them, and avoid the discrimination. But instead they manipulate their customers into assuming incorrectly that BingeOn is somehow a free gift from T-Mobile, to get them to form an opinion that is against their own interest. It's nothing but deception.
> Second, the program is supposedly open for anyone to join.
Except it (a) isn't, and (b) even if it theoretically were, the model of having to follow the rules of every ISP on the planet to fall under their respective zero-rating plan, or even just the overhead of coordinating with them doesn't scale, and thus is inherently only an option for large companies. Being accessible globally via IP is a matter of renting a small virtual server for a few bucks a month. Being zero-rated by thousands of ISPs is a major undertaking.
Yeah, I know, but imagine if it was fully automated on both ends. The platonic ideal of letting all medium-bitrate video be cheaper is okay or at least not awful.
It would still be awful, because it would disadvantage other forms of content that have the same bandwidth needs but are not video, and also anything that doesn't have "both ends".
And also, obviously, that ideal is completely unrealistic: Either the ISP gets to look into the video stream to verify that it is indeed video, which would be awful, or what you in effect end up with is a flat rate for "medium bit rate connections", which would be fine, but absolutely not what any of those ISPs want.
Sorry, VPN's require business grade internet starting at 300$/month.
Nothing stops them from throttling VPN connections, or even all encrypted traffic. Read up on The great firewall of China and how it really does stop VPN connections. Further, it's much easier for ISP's to block stuff because the first hop for every connection you make is through them.
VPNs stick out in Wireshark or other packet captures like a red flag, and blocking most VPNs is as simple as closing port 500. (Port 500 is the default. Who changes default settings?)
In Wireshark, normally you'll see flurries of variable-sized traffic across 53 then either 80 or 443. But for a VPN, you just see a constant flow of boring packets over 500.
Why doesn't China's national firewall block port 500? Possibly because it would also block the personal VPNs of the leadership of the Chinese government.
It's a little more insiduis than that. They don't want to make it clear by blocking things what they can and can't track. Instead they degrade service from things they have little control over to things they do.
It is not difficult to block traffic you don't understand. Require end users to only use plaintext protocols, even go so far as install your own certs to MITM them. Make it a requirement for using the service.
Just charge any business that needs encryption several million per year, and everyone else can get fucked.
Even beyond the FCC backing this sort of business now, what other part of the government would care to stop that? The only other parts in charge of anything touching on communication technologies are all law enforcement and they are already explicitly stated that they want access to all encrypted communications
The can and will come at it from the other side. They will charge Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, etc. money to get access to "their" network. And of course, those charges will be passed on to you resulting in higher bills.
Of course power users will figure out ways around the restrictions. What we're fighting for is the general consumer use case and what eliminating neutrality does to the innovative potential of the Internet. Eliminating neutrality will entrench existing players in the marketplace. New internet-connected startups will not only have to compete on product, they'll also be artificially disadvantaged by the gatekeepers.
These new startup's customers' packets can be deprioritized by the customers' ISPs unless the new startup pays a bribe.
The bribe that existing big players (Facebook, Netflix) need to pay will be significantly less (or even zero) because of the leverage of their large customer base and brand recognition. The ISP may face blowback from its users for degrading service to those existing players. The fledgling startup doesn't have this leverage, so the ISP can extort it.
You realize that there are two sides to every internet connection right? It doesn't matter if you are running your end through a VPN, they can slow / filter it from the content provider to you.
Presumably they are talking about a VPN service hosted somewhere outside of your ISP's network, so your ISP could only throttle traffic between you and your VPN service but not between the VPN service and the content provider.
The VPN's ISP or the content provider's ISP or any transit provider in the middle could throttle between the VPN service and the content provider, but there is far, far more competition among ISP's suitable for server farms and transit providers than there is among residential ISP's so they are much less likely to be able to get away unreasonable throttling.
The traffic isn't completely circumventing your last mile ISP. Just because you tunnel over that connection doesn't mean they're not serving your traffic.
Likely the outcome would be "we couldn't identify this traffic as one of our approved providers, so we used the lower of the rates we offer."
e: the second bit of that was to compare to the plan offered by a peer comment, with e.g. netflix, youtube served at higher rates and the rest at lower. So you would never see the higher rates.
"Well, sir, if you look in our terms of service, it says quite clearly that if most of your traffic goes to a set of services that we have determined are most likely VPNs because we control most of the end-traffic on the internet, well then we can disconnect you. I know, sir, machine learning is wonderful as I'm sure you've read on Hacker News that you visit regularly. What's that? You swear it isn't VPN traffic? Ok, can you provide any evidence to that effect? You can't? Ok, well, you have been disconnected sir, and if you like, you can pay a $300 fee to get reconnected and rejoin our new VPN plan at $150 per month. If you want to use our VPN plan that will be $30 per month on top of all the other services you will need to select"
I suspect you can. You can certainly analyze the timing and lifetime's to identify VPN's vs HTTPS (at the expense of a few websocket false positives). And I suspect you could even characterize entropy.
Even if this were true, it would be very easy for an ISP to insist that their own certificates be trusted as part of the terms of usage. This would give the ISP data access.
Thats because you will limited unless you use specific services.
In Germany, two operators (T-Mobile and Vodafone) offer special "passes" for different services. These do not count against your monthly quota (if you use up all your data, you will be limited to about 64 kbit/s).
So, yes, you can use a VPN, but this will count against your data cap. While, if you use the services they choose for you, you basically get "free" extra data.
