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A Case for Non-Net-Neutrality
boyko.at.netqos writes "Network Performance Daily has an in-depth interview with Professor Christopher Yoo from Vanderbilt University Law School on his opposition to Net-Neutrality policies. While some might disagree with his opinions, he lays out the case for non-neutrality in an informed and informative manner. From the interview: 'Akamai is able to provide service with lower latency and higher quality service, because they distribute the content. This provides greater protection against DoS attacks. It's a local storage solution instead of creating additional bandwidth, and it's a really interesting solution. Here's the rub ... Akamai is a commercial service and is only available to people who are willing to pay for it. If CNN.com pays for it, and MSNBC.com does not, CNN.com will get better service.'"
Just so everyone's clear, this is also the Professor Yoo whose theory of the unitary executive underlies Bush's claims of vast (and hitherto unknown) power - power to do things like read your mail, listen to your phone calls, and look at your bank transactions - all without a warrant or any judicial review. As well as the rejection of the 1,000 year old doctrine of habeas corpus.
Review the Alito hearings if this isn't familiar to you.
Isn't the guy who defended Senator "It's a series of tubes" Ted Stevens also from Vanderbilt? I think that university needsd to stop hiring idiots to teach.
TCP has been improved since it was originally created. Any good network technology course will expose you to this. BSD was innovative because it significantly improved TCP performance both between BSD hosts and non-BSD hosts.
As a small example, take TCP slow-start. Or TCP window adjustment based on ping. None of those things were in the original TCP spec.
To say that TCP is a 30-year old technology as if there was no significant improvement is more than a bit of a misnomer.
As for OSI - I'm going to take a internet position - show me a working, viable implementation. You can't anymore. The problem was all OSI implementations were proprietery, erasing any advantage they _might_ have held over TCP/IP. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are SNA and DCE.
I work for Akamai; Akamai does offer a general-transport better-than-BGP service called Sure Route IP.
.BGP routes based on the least number of hops. . .there are many problems inherant in that. We route based on ping data, bandwidth, cost, reliability, etc, etc, etc.
The idea is that we utilize the massive amounts of data about the Internet's health and the insanely scalable alogorithms for matching end-users to the HTTP server that can best serve them (called mapping) to create generalized IP tunnels that send traffic across "routes" that know more about the Internet then BGP does.
Think about it. .
Did I mention that we are hiring like crazy?
I'm reading his papers, and I'm not too impressed. Read his "Network Neutrality and the Economics of Congestion", where he pontificates on that subject.
Where he goes off track is at "Fortunately, policymakers wishing to address theses problems can draw on the extensive theoretical literature exploring the economics of congestion. Much of the literature has focused on the choice between flat-rate pricing and usage-sensitive pricing. The primary finding of this literature is that competitive markets will reach an efficient equilibrium if each user is charged a usage-sensitive price set equal to their marginal contribution to congestion. 28" Reference 28 is to "28 See, e.g., Eitan Berglas, On the Theory of Clubs, 66 AM. ECON REV. 116, 119 (1976).", which is a classic paper on periodic vs per-use pricing for things like gyms and swimming pools, but is not about congestion at all.
Yao does get some things right. He recognizes that the billing cost (he says "transaction cost", but means billing overhead) for things like the Internet is higher than the cost of providing the service, and this distorts the economics from the pay-for-what-you-get model economists usually like.
But then he goes off into a right-wing rant on why vertically integrated monopolies are good. The competition between the vertically integrated monopolies will supposedly prevent prices from rising. However, he states that as an article of faith, without support. Historically, when a market gets down to small number of players, (two or three), price competition tends to weaken. The fewer the players, the easier de-facto collusion becomes.
He ignores many issues. Time scale, for example. Congestion is a problem on a scale of minutes, while carrier-switching by end users occurs on a scale of months. He also ignores contractual lock-in and technical lock-in, which makes carrier switching more expensive. If the end user's strategy is to minimize their costs over the next year, then carriers can raise their rates each year by any amount less than the cost of switching, and get away with it. He ignores that completely. (This is a chronic problem with economists. Like control theorists, they study feedback systems, but unlike control theorists, they don't consider time domain issues like stability, settling time, oscillation, and phase locking issues much.)
There's also the technical issue in Internet congestion that the congestion is mostly at the edges. If you have your own wire to the central office, as with DSL, why should there be price differentiation depending on what data you're sending and receiving? Yet it's the DSL providers who don't want network neutrality. It's not the backbone providers. Thus, congestion isn't the real issue. Wanting a bigger piece of the TV viewer's entertainment spending is.
There are people who've written well about the economics of network congestion, but this guy isn't one of them.
Not every cable company is a "government issued monopoly" any longer. In the past they had been, and in many cases the incumbents are still profiting from having been one in the past, but that is a very simplistic view of our telecom industry and belies the real problems going on in it. And I am for net-neutrality and for busting monopolies and the residual gains from them.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
> I'm quite curious as to how/why Akamai is expanding
Millions of suckers not using adblock?
*.akamai.net/*
I'm happy for you. But unless you are claiming that any pair people who share two of these properties must logically share the third, the point is completely irrelevant.
Initially, through the Advanced Research Projects Agency, but later though a host of channels such as creating easements through the use of immanent domain, targeted tax breaks (which represent a cost to all other tax payers), etc.
Agreed. That's why no one is calling for network communism. But there is a big difference between saying they "have no way to make money" and saying that they can't charge twice for the same service. I pay to be connected to the internet, and exchange packets with others. So does Google. The carriers are already making piles of money of of the service as it stands. Trying to slip an additional charge in there with an implied threat of failing to provide the service that we have both contracted (and paid) for is fraud, plain and simple.
--MarkusQ