Policy Wonk Castigates Net Neutrality

An anonymous reader writes "Tom Giovanetti, president of the Dallas, Texas based public policy think tank Institute for Policy Innovation envisions a chaotic world as a result of Net Neutrality. He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet, leading to failures of IPTV, VOIP, and emergency services which depend on VOIP. Is he right or wrong?." From the article: "... government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models. Net neutrality regulations would severely restrict broadband providers' right to enter into contracts and to try new business models while protecting the business models of Google and Ebay." Compare this with George Ou's commentary on this subject from yesterday.

Comments

Justifiable Reasoning

[duerra]

I think Tom Giovanetti's reasoning is very justifiable. Often times as humans we are quick to criticize, and very hypocrytical. We should ask ourselves how often we complain about the government regulating this or that and trying to solve problems that don't exist, while at the same time cheer on legislation that would have demanded things such as net neutrality. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't valid reasons for either or both, but it's a rhetorical question that I think we should all be asking ourselves.

Anyway, this is one of the reasons why I'd love to see the government set up a site for everybody to go to, where they can see each of their legislator's votes on issues, as well as a quick comment on the reasoning for voting that way (or longer per the legislator's desire), and put this out there in a very accessible location, and make this a manditory part of the legislative process. The site could be organized in a way such that citizens could easily see the reasoning behind other legislator's votes as well, so that counterpoints are clear to citizens.

This would all help us be better informed and make good decisions, as well as help the government keep itself in check ("I voted no on this legislation because it contains 'xxxxx' add-on legislation that I don't agree with"). Debates would always be there and available to citizens in a way that they can do it at their convenience, and don't have to try and dig up all this information themselves. Essentially, this idea would function a similar purpose as that of a judicial decision opinion (clarifying the decision). We don't need big media to give us all our info anymore. We can get it right from the source. The internet is a very powerful thing. LEVERAGE IT!

Anyway, I know that rant was slightly off topic, but I felt it to be relevant since originally my opinion was leaning towards enacting net neutrality legislation, but I still had my doubts, and this reasoning has made me think that maybe it's just better to wait and see what happens before we get too hasty to legislate, though I still do think that publically funded infrastructure should still be publically owned and unhindered.

Re:Justifiable Reasoning

[Russ Nelson]

maybe it's just better to wait and see what happens

No. See my letter to my congresscritter.

Re:Justifiable Reasoning

[CDarklock]

Hi Russ... I read you regularly, even though we don't always agree.

On this, we do. Right now, the commercial internet works because I pay someone to connect me to the internet and give me a certain amount of bandwidth. I do this for my connection at home, because I want bandwidth to get what I ask to see. I do this for my server at a data center, because I want bandwidth to get to people that ask to see me.

When I use bandwidth to my own server, like when I get my email, I pay twice for that bandwidth. I pay for sending the email from my server, and I pay for receiving the email at my desktop. And that's fine. It makes perfect sense to me.

What isn't fine is that now someone in the middle is saying that I should have to pay them extra so I can use the bandwidth I'm already paying to have. They seem to be of the opinion that I need to pay THREE people for the bandwidth I use. I understand that there are two ends to the connection, so I need to pay people on both sides. But this third charge is someone in the middle. How many "third" charges *are* there? How many networks does my data traverse on the way from point A to point B? Can they all charge me? When? If I go from network A to network B and then back to network A, do I have to pay network A twice?

This is a big-ass can of worms. We need to keep it well and truly sealed.

Re:Justifiable Reasoning

[BasilBrush]

The free market has been enormously enabled by net neutrality of the past decade. For a relatively small investment, individuals and companies have access to the world as a market, with the winners according to merit. Discrimination by different type and participants in network traffic will only result in more power to the people who already have power, and less power to those that don't, regardless of merit. That may be capitalism, with elements of monopoly in places... but it's certainly further away from the free market than where we are now.

What else is new?

[Guysmiley777]

Corporate shill says private companies should be allowed to control the internet. Film at 11.

Re:What else is new?

[Bimo_Dude]

Shill, indeed.

If you use this as a starting point, you'll find that one of this institute's corporate contributors is Exxon-Mobile. I wouldn't be surprised if companies auch as AT&T are also paying this guy.

FTS:

He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet

The fact is, the traffic on the net is already that way, and I don't see the Internet going down. This guy is full of shit.

Multiple observations:

[plasmacutter]

First off.. they have been saying one thing or another would "overload the internet" for ages and it has yet to happen.

second. i want to know what his stance on music downloading is given this quote:

"government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models."

if he's against "online piracy" than he is a hyppocrite.

hrmm...

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

Maybe they should think about taking "Life and Death" stuff off the internet, a back-hoe could take out a large part of the net for a day or two. If emergency reponse people are relying on vonage or skype for critical communications, that is a serrious problem.

MY HEAD ACHES NOW

[unity100]

Over a day and a half of fury about how the internet is being sold by the u.s. house to the big bucks, my head now aches.

I f.ckin do not believe how you, u.s. people can ALLOW for such debate to even take place, such s.hit rule the agenda, and do not blow your congressmen's senator's ears off about the matter.

The biggest revolution, since the french revolution, the internet, is being handed over to the minority elite.

This is our 'thing'. This is the 'thing' of our times. This is one of the most important thing in our times.

My head really aches, and im weary.

specious argument

[Eric Smith]

The internet today is mostly neutral, and people accesing Victoria's Secret haven't brought it down.

The telephone system is neutral, but some telephone numbers are clearly more popular than others. Yet this hasn't brought down the phone system.

The reality is that the engineering of the network (including capacity planning and expansion) is done precisely on the basis of traffic flows. There is also congestion control. The internet is not like the public highway system, where capacity problems take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to solve.

Even if a zillion people did all try to get to the Victoria's Secret web site all at once, that would probably not affect my ability to access my email or read CNN's web site.

TCP backs off; UDP does not

[Russ Nelson]

VOIP uses UDP. When you get network congestion, you simply get packets dropped and your -oice get- littl- ch-ppy. TCP stacks will send fewer packets per second when packets get dropped.

Ignoramuses keep bringing this issue up as if it's going to KILL THE INTERNET, so we MUST CHANGE INTERNET POLICY. They tried this back in the early 90's when IBM was running the T-1 Internet backbone through some subsidiary. What didn't work back then still won't work today. For an arbitrary packet on the Internet, you cannot tell in which direction the value is flowing; thus you cannot figure out who to charge.

I agree...

[wfberg]

Suchs laws would severely impact the contracts broadband companies can enter into.

That's the entire point.

They've been handed full or near monopolies on data communications, and with monopoly comes restriction.

Because they already have, already are, and will continue to screw over the consumer.

Heck, even companies that do not have monopolies have huge restrictions on screwing over their customers when it comes to conflicts of interest. For example; some investment banker isn't allowed to tell you how great company X is, if a different unit of his bank happens to be seriving company X's IPO. That's really just plain common sense.

Net non-neutrality is very simple, basic, econ 101 vertical monopoly. Nothing at all suspect about wanting to curb it. Yes, it happens to benefit other companies. In fact, making sur the vertical playing ground is even benefits the entire economy, and not just broadband companies rights to enter into contracts.

WRONG

[Kagato]

Basically, the premise of the tiered system is that companies like your tube, google, etc don't pay for all the bandwidth they consume. NPR's Market Place had a horrible story on last night claiming that with out extra cash from these large web sites, they can't expand bandwidth.

It's the dumbest argument ever. 1) Companies that large connect directly to top tier providers. These companies are paying hundreds of thousandsands of dollars to the top 10 internet back bone providers for fat pipes into the internet. 2) We have tons of dark fiber still running across the US. Companies liek Qwest invested millions upon millions of dollars in infrastructure for customers who still don't exist.

We don't have a bandwidth problem. We have a problem with a congress that doesn't understand infrastructure.

BTW: Here's the list of house member who voted NO the ammendment:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll239.xml

Policy wonk?

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

This "think tank" was founded by Republican Dick Armey in 1987.
As usual, you just need to follow the money in these matters and this is very revealing. The last year that records were kept regarding Dick Armey's contributions you'll see that his top contributor was Allegiance Telecom. Other notables in the "Dick Armey" include National Cable & Telecommunications Assn, Verizon, BellSouth and SBC. It's all here at open secrets.

Politicians remain lapdogs to their masters even after leaving the Hill

Trajedy of the commons

[goombah99]

We need to ask ourselves if this is a tragedy of the commons or a case where uniform access decreases costs or provides more public-goods. I don't know which it really is.

The tragedy of the commons is what happens when a resource is provided that lacks a proper mariginal cost for increased use. The classic example is private property versus unrstricted access to public grazing land. By charging a small price for admission per sheep to the land or by making it private, the incentive to overgraze it is removed and the total amount of meat sustainbly raise actually is higher. In this case if it's case where there is simply not enough baqndwith for everyone to do voip, and I don't pay any extra to do VOIP, then it's going to be over grazed and everyone gets a crappy connection. On the otherhand if the connection cost already is sufficient to expand the network to handle all the users that want voip or if we can prevent this from becomeing a power law network with critical links then it may be that the more users the better some sort of p2p works.

Thus another way of looking is this is that the thing we need to fear is too few corporation controlliing the internet and resulting in bottlenecks on backbones. In the long run to get high bandwidth we will need p2p that does not traverse a central backbone.

Assuming that the p2p scaling effect will not be sufficient and the tragedy of the commons wil happen then the way out is to have a pricing schedule. We can put that schedule on the users or on the content providers. the latter is what the backbone owners want since it means no net neutrality and control. The former would be better but I can imagine the cheap ass slashdotters used to paying a tiny sum for all-they-can eat internet won't like it.

Re:Trajedy of the commons

[ShieldW0lf]

This is all bullshit.

The costs involved in telecommunications are in the laying of infrastructure. The cost to operate it after it is built is insignificant by comparison. Furthermore, the cost to operate it doesn't decrease appreciably with less users. You still need to run the lines regardless. It's not like when half the people turn their connections off they get to turn off half the lines and save electricity.

And this nightmare scenario, where too many people downloading a hot wardrobe malfunction cause the rest of the internet to stop, that has NEVER HAPPENED. The fact of the matter is that all this chaos exists because it has been demonstrated to be the most reliable means of running telecommunications in the public sector ever created. He talks about how all these essential services are moving online. They're not moving online because it's the cool thing to do and all the firefighters and EMS workers want to be hip. They're doing it because it's MORE reliable than the pre-existing ivory tower administered systems that predate it.

The reason why it's more reliable is because it is NOT STRATEGIC. It is TACTICAL. Highly structured systems where you say "we need to do it precisely this way and everything will work" rely on perfect information and perfect judgement, which do not exist. Chaotic systems like the internet work better because they say "we're not capable of making all these determinations and decisions on how the system should work, so we're going to lay down a set of tactics that will allow individual components to react co-operatively and intelligently to problems".

It's like the difference between a good boss, who recognizes the strength your individuality brings to the table and attempts to make it useful, and a bad manager, who tries to micromanage you and just ends up making you (and the entire system) less effective.

The internet, in it's chaotic form, is a SMART internet. Every node has the capacity to make tactical decisions, and thus react to problems that no other node even recognizes exists. Tiering, rather than attempting to progress this powerful idea, is a fundamental rejection and dismissal of that intelligence and the value it brings to the table.

I'll cap my little rant by mentioning that this whole thing about the internet being a resource in short supply is a ridiculous joke. Capacity has been growing faster than usage for a long time now, and we're at the point where free wireless mesh networks can be set up for next to nothing. Small cities with limited budgets and technical resources have demonstrated that they have the capacity to do this with no help all from any existing carrier. We could, with minimal investment in infrastucture, set up wireless networks of sufficient speed that they could assume all the burdens off the wired net for all in-city traffic, and with an intelligent caching system, it could assume a lot of the burden for inter-city traffic too. So for negligible investment (compared to laying fibre) we could practically unburden the entire existing internets physical infrastructure and use it for some new purpose without losing any of the communications we currently enjoy.

In a nutshell, the mans position is either utterly ignorant foolishness or a blatant lie intended to manipulate the people who are exposed to his bullshit, to the detriment of us all. Having seen how very warped the views of people who are isolated from reality with other intellectuals can become, I'm not quite cynical enough to say with any confidence which one it is.

Re:Makes Sense

[wyldeone]

I wouldn't want the government to control the internet. I would rather see the consumer make a choice and go with whichever Broadband provider suits their own personal beliefs and politics. I would rather see a more unreliable internet than see the US gov't decide what is considered "Neutral" or not. This guy seems to be more libertarian than most of the senate. I like him.

Yeah, while that's a great ideal, it's not the reality right now. Personally, I have two choices for broadband interent: Comcast cable, or SBC DSL. A duopoly hardly is a good environment for fostering consumer choices. While capitalism is great and all, it breaks down when there are monopolies (or duopolies; they don't really allows for much more competition than monopolies). As it does not make sense for multiple companies to hang wires all around the country, a monopoly is assured. In order to protect other services which might use the wires of that monopoly (wires which were, by the way, laid partially with public money) from the monopolies' own interests (i.e., other VoIP providers from the monopolies' own VoIP service), regulation is neccessary.

Put more simply, this has nothing to do with reliability. This is about a few companies controlling the internet.

Disincentive to increase bandwidth

[pyza]

Let me see if I'm understanding this.

If there is enough bandwidth then everyone's traffic will get through regardless of Net Neutrality. If there is congestion though, without Net Neutrality only traffic from sites that paid the extortion fee will get through.

Does this not lead to a situation where it is ideal for an ISP to maintain a certain level of congestion at all times in order to ensure that there exists a reason to pay the extortion fee?

One the other hand with Net Neutrality in place it's in the ISP's best interest to maintain an adequate level of bandwidth to make sure everyone's traffic gets through.

Hell no he's not right

[TheCabal]

Why the hell would any mission critical or emergency service be using the Internet as a medium for transport? These services should be on their own redundant private networks.

People have been predicting the death of the Internet for years. First 56k modems were going to do it, then the glut of DSL and cable subscribers. Now it's going to be all the fibre to premises customers and Google. After that it will probably be WiMAX because now we're going to have kilometers of wireless coverage that anyone can jump on. These people seem to forget that bandwidth is a two-way street. You might have 5Mbps down, and all your neighbors, but the hosted server most likely has a bandwidth lock at 1Gbps or so... that's your limiting factor, not how much bandwidth you can pull down.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The Institute for Policy Innovation

[alizard]

is a bunch of far right corporate spokesdroids. Below is a partial list of their donors. I suspect that a great many of you will recognize them. A.Lizard

• Armstrong Foundation
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
• Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation
• Carthage Foundation
• Jaquelin Hume Foundation
• Earhart Foundation
• JM Foundation
• F.M. Kirby Foundation
• Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
• Sarah Scaife Foundation
• John M. Olin Foundation
• Roe Foundation

IPI's president Tom Giovanetti wrote in an email exchange with Australian blogger Tim Lambert that "IPI has an absolute policy of protecting our donors' privacy". [12]

"If you are correct that organizations like IPI are being funded by companies who have an interest in these areas, the more you rail against us and "expose" us, the more heroic you make us appear to our assumed benefactors, and the checks just keep coming," he wrote. [13]

Unfortunately for their donor "privacy", 503(c) organizations have to file lists of their donors every year. Assume that the telcos will show up in the next filing statement... and that the "policy wonk" is a corporate shill who'd be bloviating in favor of Net Neutrality if Google had paid IPI first. Or NAMBLA if that pedophile organization had paid IPI off to generate "neutral" opinions.

Here's another IPI opinion:

The reality is that open source can trap a customer into an outsourcer relationship more readily than commercial software. This is because commercial platforms expose standard APIs for third party applications and any consultant can develop for them. open source will go the way of other IT industry fads that were once trumpeted as the way of the future, like Macintosh computers, business AI, 4GL programming languages and Y2K.

UN-Justifiable Reasoning

[kozumik]

There are some justifications for guaranteed bandwidth. For example, one could see a portion of the net being split off for VOIP use only and it would make sense to protect that from spikes in pron DLing or whatever. So yes, I can see some arguments for protected bandwidth. But this whole debate is smoke screen for a monopoly grab and deregulation. Net Neutrality should be the norm and exceptions carved out of that on a case by case basis where justified. NOT the other way around.

The loss of Net Neutrality goes way beyond that and strips every protection against monopoly on the internet. FACT: with the loss of Net Neutrality, anyone who doesn't have a contract with a Telco assuring them a chunk of bandwidth (i.e. everyone except the largest companies) no longer has any right to be on the internet and can be completly shut down. Blocking traffic is completly at the discretion of Telcos now.

What the loss of Net Neutrality does is to completely deregulate the internet and allow Telcos to shut down any site they choose. That's no exaggeration. Now, there are no consumer protections and no guidelines on what's fair and what's not in regards to filtering.

Anyone who thinks the free market is going to ensure fair competition is a real dunce. History shows the natural outcome of a completely unfettered market is an anti-competitive monopoly. That's why we had to regulate to prevent monopolies for pete's sake!

To make matters worse, other deregulation a while ago means Telco monopolies are no longer required to offer their lines service to small ISP. In other words they don't even have to share their government sanctioned monopoly on the last mile anymore. So, there goes the competitive market as small ISP are gradually squeezed out over the coming years.

This is going to lead to aggressive and highly anti-competitive Telcos running turf wars on an unfettered and unethical internet. Fair competition will vanish quickly. If for example a rival company (insert mega-corp of choice) wants to pay more to shut down your bandwidth than you can pay to buy your bandwidth, that's perfectly legal now. If Oracle for example had wanted to pay to buy People Soft's internet bandwidth to depress their stock price and ease the takeover, perfectly legal now. If MS wans to pay confidentially to hobble Linux servers or companies using them, again, perfectly legal now.

The loss of Net Neutrality means there is now no regulation and turns the internet and Telcos into monopolies capable of extorting protection money, and calling that protection: perfectly legal fees.

I really can't believe the lack of awareness and apathy on this issue from supposedly tech savvy people.