*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*
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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