Subject: Re: Bringing back Internet transparency

From: Simon Leinen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 11:16:30 +0200

Noel Chiappa writes:
>> From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
>> "what people want" (ISP operators, or at least some of them), was an
>> artificial way to differentiate home customers from commercial
>> providers.
>> I.e., they wanted to create a differentiation that wasn't part of the
>> Internet architecture, so they put one in.
>> NATs did other things ... but IMO mostly as a by-product of this
>> primary motivation.

> I'm not so sure about that.

> For the first couple of years that I had an ISP connection (which soon
> had an early NAT box on it), whenever I called up the ISP (then, and
> still, one of the largest in the US) with a service call, the first
> thing I had to do was unplug the NAT box and plug in a host directly!

I don't think your anecdote contradicts Joe's claim.

In the eyes of your ISP, you were misbehaving, because you were
violating their assumption that you would use ONE (1) computer with that
connection.  If you had been what they consider an honest citizen, you
would have gotten a "commercial" connection to connect more than one.

(Your service calls were just an opportunity for them to remind you
about that. :-)

Another early assumption about the consumer Internet connection was that
you wouldn't use it all the time, but only when you needed it.  This
"session" concept was natural for modems or ISDN connections, but was,
somewhat artificially, included in xDSL, presumably to conserve the
valuable customer experience of "connecting" and "disconnecting".

> It was only after everyone's house had multiple PC's (which was really
> only after wireless became common - I don't think too many people were
> willing to wire their houses for Ethernet :-) that they kind of
> expected there to be a NAT box there.

Yes, eventually the ISPs had to adapt their assumptions.

> But in any event, it's doesn't void my point: if people want
> something, we have two choices: i) blow people off, and they'll adopt
> some point solution that interacts poorly with everything else, or ii)
> give people the _capabilities_ they need/want (and thereby have some
> chance at minimizing the brain damage - since generally people don't
> care _how_ it works, as long as it _does_ what they want).

> I guess this is just a long-winded, engineering take on 'the customer
> is always right'.

Yes, but it's harder than that.  In the NAT case, were our (we being the
IETF) customers the ISPs, the users (in this case "end users" who
insisted on connecting multiple devices without going incurring the
costs of becoming "commercial" customers), the vendors of then-current
equipment, the vendors of potential circumvention solutions (NATs)?

These groups of customers probably didn't agree on what they wanted.

Were all of them right?
-- 
Simon.

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2013 11:25:27 -0400

On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 5:16 AM, Simon Leinen <[email-masked]> wrote:

> These groups of customers probably didn't agree on what they wanted
>

I think it was a little uglier than that.

ISPs and backbone providers were well represented in the IETF, home users,
rather less so. The ISPs had a clear interest in killing of NAT which
threatened the ISP business model.

People internalize their employers interests very easily and without
knowing that they have done so. I have an acquaintance from Oxford who
spends his time 'researching' climate change for the Koch brothers. He has
no qualifications in the field. His 'research method' is essentially the
method of Winston Smith in 1984.  But he is completely convinced that he is
a legitimate researcher and that he is right and the nobel prize winners
whose work he is misrepresenting are engaged in an international conspiracy.

So when people were trying to mau-mau me into rejecting NAT as
ideologically unsound, I had a different perspective.

It is never going to be in the customers interest to let their internetwork
provider know what their internal network looks like. Never-ever-ever. I
don't want my ISP to know because then they might sell that information to
other people and I would be getting all sorts of demands for payment.

The business logic means that it will be NAT today, NAT tomorrow and NAT
forever. Whether I am a commercial or a residential user, I am going to use
that NAT box to protect my economic interests versus my supplier. And that
will be the case regardless of how many IP addresses are available.

The IETF was originally the product of a group of people who looked at the
telephone system and could see how to do the job differently. I don't see
many people who look at the Internet in that way. The IETF has become more
like what it has replaced.

The issue is not just welcoming newcomers, it is welcoming newcomers who
can look at problems with a fresh perspective and reject ideological
approaches. And that is why I am going to continue to point out the the
governance model of the IETF is expressly designed to exclude dissident
thinkers.

-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/

---

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 10:01:21 -0700

> would have gotten a "commercial" connection to connect more than one.

Another data point is Google's recent reversal on network transparency 
focused on artificially differentiating between perceived "commercial" 
and "individual" customers:

http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2013/07/sort/time_rev/page/1/entry/4:390/20130731102314:B16998B8-F9EC-11E2-AF78-DB9DE151F03B/

My experience has been that there are four ways ISPs try to break the 
Internet's assumption that "all nodes are equivalent" (any port, any 
time, any where, IMO), with:

	1. asymmetric BW provisioning and throttling

	2. NATs

	3. short-lease DHCP (i.e., spinning IP addrs every day or
	faster, to interfere with registering an assigned IP in the DNS)

	4. legal means

ISPs use a combination of these, but the cheapest one is NATs.

Joe