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Net Neutrality Being Examined by FTC
elrendermeister writes to tell us Computerworld Security is reporting that the Federal Trade Commission has formed an Internet Access Task Force to evaluate the validity of claims that large broadband providers should be able to limit or block web content from competitors. From the article: "Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras on Monday also called on lawmakers to be cautious about passing a Net neutrality law, which could prohibit broadband providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from giving their own Internet content top priority, or from charging Web sites additional fees for faster service. [...] 'While I am sounding cautionary notes about new legislation, let me make clear that if broadband providers engage in anticompetitive conduct, we will not hesitate to act using our existing authority,' she said. 'But I have to say, thus far, proponents of Net neutrality regulation have not come to us to explain where the market is failing or what anticompetitive conduct we should challenge.'"
Off the top of my head, here's one substantial difference. Television is strictly one-way communication, used to deliver a message to a segment of population (i.e. advertising). The Internet is two-way, capable of being used by nearly anyone for nearly any purpose.
After researching the subject of "net neutrality" I found that two considerably different definitions of the term are in use.
The first is the idea of preventing providers from shaping or blocking traffic based on the source or destination corporate entity - ie making google traffic super slow while making msn traffic extra fast. This is obviously troubling and should be subject to oversight. A vast majority of consumer broadband is already subject to regulatory oversight though, either through city franchise agreements or through state PUC's. While I'd support federal laws to curtail this if needed, wouldn't it be better to let the existing structures work if they have the means?
The second definition was in use heavily by the technical communities that are researching or providing data about net neutrality. This definition includes the first definition but also adds on basically any kind of traffic shaping or port blocking based on protocol or port, irrespective of the public WAN side source or destination. Examples of this are shaping to reduce the network impact of peering systems like bittorrent or other heavy users like NNTP and IPTV, and the policies blocking some services universally inside a tier such as not allowing inbound connections to server ports, outbound PPTP, VOIP over cellular data etc.
Shame on those technical folks that are trying to substitute the second definition for the first, they should know better. Trying to legislatively micromanage decisions every provider has to make to make for network usability and completely banning all forms of QOS would be a serious mistake. While I'd be pretty upset if i woke up tomorrow and found i was unable to use VPN protocols, I'd rather have to complain to my city about the franchise or switch providers than end up with a situation where washington banned a whole set of core network management technologies that have been in use for decades without which the internet would be much worse off.
Every study that i saw that included statistics or hard data actually fell under the latter definition and not the former. The reason is that it is relativey easy to detect port blocking and protocols that have different throughput characteristics and examples are fairly common. Trying to programatically detect shaping based on corporate entities or netblocks would be very hard unless it was extremely blatent - what are you going to do, measure connections to thousands of different content providers? Even then how could you tell if the bottleneck was put in place by your edge network or was just due to host side network capacity?
I'd expect any browser plugin that was built would do the same. While it would be useful to know what blocking and shaping you are subject to, trying to group it under of the umbrella of anti-competitive practices is highly deceptive.
This is all about VOIP, folks. Telcos try to stop VoIP it's plain and simple. It's not Google or Yahoo who's the target here, not even Youtube. Those companies won't be screwed much if their traffic was deprioritized by a little. VoIP on the other hand becomes unusable the second you deprioritize its realtime traffic. So telcos think they can keep their cell, landline and voip customers to themselves by deprioritizing traffic of other VoIP companies or making them pay through the nose (thereby making their rates less competitive).
That makes for good theater but bad law. You can't have secret laws in a free society; everything had to be out in the open. (I know, I know -- it's possible to bury a law so that no one knows it's there. Possible but sleazy.)
The point of a law like this would be to preserve net neutrality, not to punish people after they've broken it. We (OK, me; I can't speak for you) want it not to be broken in the first place.
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