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On Entangling and Testing Net Neutrality
P3titPrince writes "In an NYT op-ed today, Timothy B. Lee argues that legislation specifically guaranteeing Net Neutrality would in fact be less effective than just allowing the status quo." From the article: "It's tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage. Economists have dubbed this process 'regulatory capture,' and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970's. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition." Relatedly, winnabago writes "Computerworld reports on a potential method for testing a net connection for neutrality. Somewhat similar to Traceroute, the software uses spoof packets that appear to be from a potentially throttled source and compares the transmission time to that of neutral traffic."
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The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.
That's EXACTLY what's already happening. The telecom companies have long been doing this and the whole net neutrality discussion is being prompted by those same telecom companies wanting to loosen the rules (you know, using their lobbyists to get favorable regulation). Further, I would argue that the return on investment from lobbying is so large that any business of sufficient size will invest heavily in lobbyists. They'd be dumb not to.
Net Neutality needs to happen before we give the telecom companies any more leighway in other areas. The reason is simple. If we do not do this, then if we find that we need to impose it after the fact, they will have already invested billions in business built around the new regulatory structure. At that point, they can legitimately claim it would be expensive and onerous to do it. Today, if we put this regulation in, it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the network they already have.
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These people are just stating the obvious. Very rarely will government regulation have any good effect in the long term; it just slows down innovation and takes years to go away.
Do YOU trust your congressman to not just create a huge beauracracy, with new laws being stuck on whenever they want to "protect the children/fight terrorism".
The net-neutrality legislation might actually make the problem worse. But at least it bans flag-burning, provides federal funding for Air America, declares Feb. 13 to be "National Nathaniel Hawthorne Awareness Day", and pays for 6 years of new shoes for Sen. Harkin! That's what counts the most.
Where were you when the voynix came?
The "big corpos" can also afford to sue the ISPs into the ground if they try to extort them, and customers getting degraded service can jump to another ISP. That is, if deregulation happens, allowing actual competition.
It's really quite simple. If you let congress get involved in the internet, then everybody is going to be lobbying congress 100x more than they are now. Things will turn against the public's interest pretty quickly. And quite frankly, I don't trust the government to get it right to begin with. Any net neutrality legislation will be poorly-worded, include all kinds of pork, and ultimately takes attention away from more important issues.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
You know, I'm for net neutrality, the way I'm for world peace, ending world hunger, and all that stuff -- in the abstract.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I'm sure Osama Bin Laden is for world peace, too -- but I doubt when I speak of world peace I envision the same thing. Or rather, if everyone could agree on a common vision of world peace, we'd have achieved it, we do not have world peace precisely because while everyone might claim to be for world peace, everyone has different views on what that means.
So of course everyone is for net neutrality -- people running around going "Oh noez, big companies are going to take away our freedoms! You're not against freedom, are you?" People running around going "Equality! Neutrality! Freedom!" etc. Of course no one is going to say they're against those things.
But... how do you expect to legistlate or regulate such things if you can't get a concrete definition?
Does net neutrality mean that ATM and frame-relay QoS services go away? (I know of some ISPs who bought frame relay circuits with lots of CIR, and of ISPs who bought frame circuits with virtually 0 CIR -- I know whose traffic has priority on the network (to those who think the net today is neutral -- HAH!))
What about equal access to colocation facilities? Who gets to go in and play with the wires? Be kind of annoying to find out some no-name company registered in another country has 'accidently' attached something to your physical connection... I know of colocations where you can't go without a union guy around, and facilities where techs would refuse to go at night without an armed escort. Someone going to pay for those things for the little guys so everyone is 'equal' and 'neutral'?
Equal opportunities to build network gear? I mean, should that start up being able to stick in custom gear into a colocation whenever they want, or do we want to have some testing first to make sure it's not going to catch fire?
Handicap access? Should we treat everyone's network connection the exact same in terms of QoS, or lack of QoS? Should we have 'equal treatment' in a technical sense, or make sure everyone has 'equal access' to services?
We could just shutdown the Internet completely -- that would be 'equal' and 'net neutral' to everyone. Sort of like Armeggedon would result in world peace after everyone is dead. Certainly satisfies the requirements... right?
Sure, it benefits folks in more affluent urban areas to suggest opening up the 'last mile' (sic), because perhaps the local governments could afford to maintain the last mile (or half mile, or wireless, etc.) Of course, if someone is living in a rural area (like, say, in the Appalachia, where mountains and valleys make wireless a bit iffy) where the 'last mile' might be more like the last five miles... Well! I suspect in those areas there are phone companies that would be thrilled to dump non-profitable infrastructure maintainenance on small rural governments.
Let's hash out some *real* policy details -- starting from the hardware, physical network deployments, physical network operations and maintenance, and working our way up. Let's see how long 'everyone' (sic) is for 'net neutrality' (sic). What is it? How will one test for it? How will one measure it? How will one enforce it?
But, be assured, I am quite for net neutrality, net freedom, and all that stuff. Like world peace. Of course, if I could implement net neutrality the way *I* want it... a lot of you might start the massive whining. For those reasons, I an quite against any legistlation for net neutrality until someone offers a real policy plan -- realistically, the network will never be perfectly neutral. The question is where can we get agreements on what will have to be compromised on (security/reliability of facilities/infrastructure vs. ability to innovate and deploy, emergency services vs. every day use, handicap access vs. 'normal' access, rural low density connectivity vs. urban high density areas vs. access costs vs. maintenance/opex, etc.)
I don't see much policy, mostly I see whining.
I can see the tv ads now "our ISP doesn't slow down VoIP provider X, so switch to our internet tubes today!"
Provided there are options, things will be just fine. The trick is to make sure the consumer has options. Right now the government has all kinds of barriers to make sure that the only option you have is the one they have given monopoly rights to. That's your problem.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Talk about being able to punish bad actors. If this research leads to a little GUI desktop app that tells what packets your ISP is throttling and how much, bad actors will have nowhere to hide. Geeks everywhere will blog the offenders into submission, and "Cable Modems w/no throttling!" suddenly becomes a very nice selling point. Wish I could have made it to Black Hat...
The first, what happens if encryption makes it impossible to really tell what anything is? How does a non-net-neutral ISP then determine tiered prices for the content? Does encryption effectively enforce Net Neutrality?
Encryption just shoots yourself in the foot, since an ISP can just put all encrypted traffic into the lowest-speed or highest-cost tier. So instead of the ISP penalizing VoIP, now they will penalize all your traffic.
However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative?
So do you have a problem with accessing google right now? Vonage? Amazon? If there is no problem, then why would Google, Vonage or Amazon pay for "better" access? You're missing out the strongly implied threat that if Google, Vonage, and Amazon do NOT pay up, then "something will happen" to make them wish they had. It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it, and it's still not ethical today.
Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.
No, they have access to their ISP's infrastructure, with the assumption that their ISP is supposed to manage their connection to the other networks.
If I traceroute the path from here to Google, I go through Covad (our ISP), BBnPlanet, L3, and finally Google's network. So according to you, in addition to Covad charging me as a customer, BBnPlanet, L3 and Google's own network have the right to charge me as well? If I go to a Kinko's and pay them to ship a box via FedEx, I should expect to get a bill from FedEx in the mail?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Doesn't make it right, but I'd like to see them jail every internet user on the planet when they all do the same thing.
Back in the '60s a lot of people thought the solution to the drug laws was civil disobedience - lots of people buying and using drugs clogging the legal system, forcing the government to throw in the towel.
You can see how well THAT worked.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is a truly bad comparison. After deregulation new airlines (e.g. People's Express) could get started while previously single-state restricted airlines (e.g. PSA and SouthWest) could expand outside of their state. In fact it took big states like California and Texas just to support a state restricted airline before.
Afterwards all airlines got relatively equally access to the necessary resources (e.g. airports), and I could choose among a large selection of air carriers for my trip.
This isn't the same as when there's one coax cable and one copper twisted pair coming to my house. I don't have a good choice of competition in this monopoly market.
I'll tell you who I am willing to choose however. It will be the first company who brings fiber to my curb at non-extortionaire prices.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Call me a communist, but I never really bought into this concept of a Holy Sacred Market with all these mystical powers or self regulation. It seems to me that a cartel can raise as effective a barrier to competition as a regulator.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Simple, companies lay down their own copper or fiber. Verizon already did it a few towns away from me, as they've been doing around the country.
Okay. Now *you* set up a company and start doing the same. What? You can't afford it? You don't have the *massive* resources at your disposal that a company like Verizon does? Oh. Hmm... so much for competition, then.
See, competition ain't competition if it's among, say, 2 or 3 big players who can choose to collude to fuck you up the ass. Welcome to the telecom industry.