Senators, ISPs, and Network Neutrality

Polarism submitted a good article about net neutrality that is currently running on Ars. It's a good explanation of where the pieces of the problem are, the government issues, the industry issues, etc. Worth a read.

Comments

List

[ndansmith]

Joshua Marshall's Talking Points Memo has a list of where senators stand on Net Neutrality here. It still needs work, so if you have any information about your senator, you can contribute that info to TPM and they will update the list.

More importantly, if you don't like where your senators stand, give them a call.

Re:Why the red herring?

[dfjghsk]

and to clarify the point about peering agreements:

Peering agreements only exist between two providers who pass roughly equal amounts of traffic between eachother. It's just an agreement that say: I'm passing 1000TB of traffic to you, and your passing 1000TB to me, so we'll carry each others traffic for free.

If one of the companies loses market share, they will not renew the agreement. Take a look at what happened with Level1 and Cogent (IIRC)

Re:Why the red herring?

[arivanov]

As someone who used to be a network architect in a Tier 1 global telco I can say only two words: Utter bollocks. Get a clue would ya?.

Traffic is carried between two autonomous systems on the Internet if there is a transit or peering agreement. In your example either Covad or Comcast is paying for transit from AT&T. Otherwise they will not get the routing table entries for each other. AT&T is definitely not doing it for free. If Covad and Comcast were directly connected it could have been either a peering agreement under which they exchange traffic at no cost to each other or once again a transit (one of the buying from the other).

What is happening here and what Net neutrality is all about is that in the US the public peering points used to be run by big telcos like MCI (f.e MAE East or MAE West). MCI and friends deliberately made them suck really bad around 7 years ago so that people switch to buying transit. The telcos themselves switched to private peering agreements. Thus, the tier 1 cartel creation was complete (it started to coalesce around 3-4 years prior to that). As a result in the US an ISP like the ones you mention usually has 2-3 transit connections for which it pays and very few private peerings where it exchanges traffic.

Compared to that in EU a similar ISP has 2-3 transit connections and 20-30+ peering agreements across public peering points. The private peerings can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This changes the overall traffic pattern considerably and most of the traffic is going across peering points not across a tier 1 telco like AT&T. As a collegue of mine jokingly put it a few years back: "The UK Internet backbone consists of one floor in a building in Docklands". In other words the Linx has become the backbone. As a result the transit ISPs can no longer hold their customers for ransom with QoS threats the way the Tier 1 cartel is doing it in the US.

Futher to that, the fix for the no-net-neutrality is trivial. Someone with the resources to do this who does not have the conflict of interest (the way MCI used to) should reestablish the public peering points and run them using the same model and rules as the successfull ones on this side of the pond like Linx, DGIX, etc. The resources to run this are a drop in the ocean for the likes of Google and Yahoo and it will restore the healthy network economics in less then half a year. In fact it will be cheaper than moaning and trying to graft congresskriters.

And if they do not do this the telcos will get them by their balls and their wallets will quickly follow. Frankly, I would be surprised if we do not see Google Peering or Yahoo Peering by the end of the year