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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.'"
Akamai is a distributed hosting service, not a common carrier.
This guy is seriously a professor?
All the start-ups have no chance.
Remember, no one hears you scream when you are being censored.
I'm a little puzzled by the anti-net-neutrality stance on slashdot. So many of you are libertarian "marketplace will solve anything" types, so I'd think that you'd be philosophically against the government stepping in to prevent what companies do with their own infrastructure.
I mean, I'm against net neutrality, but I'm pretty liberal so that viewpoint meshes with my beliefs. But why are you all against it?
FTA: The broader comment is that the architecture of the Internet is based on a thirty year-old technology, TCP/IP. If you talk to most technologists, they believe TCP/IP is now obsolete.
How is this fundamentally bad? It's 30 years old and therefore unusable and obsolete? If anything, I would praise such a technology for being so versatile as to last this many years. Take the bullet for example. I don't hear the military complaining that it sucks just because it's over 250 years old.
Oh yeah, wasn't banning the use of evoting supposed to be bad because it was tying them to "an old technology"?
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
Sure, only those who can afford it can use a service like Akamai to get their bytes better transit over the 'net, but that's called capitalism. The core problem with non-net-neutrality is not that one person would be able to pay more than the others for better service, its that the same companies who provide the infrastructure would be the ones charging for tiered service. Akamai is a third-party, and while we all might think of them as infrastructure because they provide such a critical service to so many very very large sites, they aren't the telcos providing core access to the 'net itself.
It's like any other utility - power, water, gas, etc. - where it costs a lot to buy the equipment needed to access large amounts of the utility at once, but you still pay the same rates as the guy who can't afford the bigger water pumps, better power grid, etc.
The whole Akamai argument is a great argument for a non-neutral except for the minor point that Akamai doesn't in any way violate net neutrality.
Such a shame. Maybe if you're lucky, your ISP will offer an "upgraded" service to its end users, to get guaranteed fast access to sites that won't pay them. Let the free market reign!
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
I think we all understand the desire for QoS application tagging, to support high bandwidth low latency streams. I think net neutrality folks would be willing to accept a compromise which allowed for a public QoS standard. The real issue is transparency and censorship.
I don't want a private company to have the power and the right to censor material I might want to download, simply because directing my browser somewhere else might generate them more advertising revenue. Further, I want QoS tagging and bandwidth limits public. The Professor really avoided the private censorship and public accountability issues.
Bad professor! No cookie for you.
Admittedly most of the common carriers you think about HAVE monopolies, but that's not the point.
I'm definitely for Net Neutrality - AND I'm moderately libertarian. But if you're going to HAVE a government issued monopoly - like EVERY DSL and Cable company does - then they need to be regulated to be fair about what they carry.
This is NOT about someone paying for their service to be extra fast. This is about forcible bundling by monopolies. This is about a company like AT&T deciding that they want to offer a movie download service and everyone else's is going to take 1000x as long as theirs to download.
Oh, and while we're on the topic, it should always be legal for a municipality to create a competing free highspeed (including WiFi) service if that's what the voting taxpayers want. Making money off your monopoly is NOT a right, it's a priviledge. It doesn't not overrule the responsibility of government to be for the people.
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Just because we tend towards libertarianism doesn't mean we're chumps. Many of us have also been around long enough to remember that at the core it isn't the company's infrastructure, it's the public's, developed and paid for with our tax dollars. We willingly pay every month to use an ISP's infrastructure to access this shared asset, but we aren't dumb enough to think that they own it, any more than we think the airlines own the sky.
Furthermore, there is a very real argument that breaking net neutrality will break the internet, and real net neutrality legislation makes as much sense as the laws against destroying roads or jamming radio waves.
And finally, libertarians don't (or shouldn't) intrinsically trust corporations (or, for that matter, their neighbors) any more than they trust the government. Having some corporation decide when and if my packets get through isn't somehow more acceptable than having China of the NSA do it. I pay to access the internet, and I expect exactly that.
--MarkusQ
"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."
The agreement between CNN and Akamai results in better service for CNN and its users regardless of the endpoints from which it's accessed CNN upgraded its network without having to pay off every carrier along the way to those endpoints. Seems rather like net neutrality made things simpler and easier for Akamai.
I want faster bandwidth, I need merely pay $5/mo extra to RCN for it. Again, the contract between me and my provider. If I want faster downloads from Fileplanet, I can pay for a membership. Another private contract.
This can apply to peering, and thus poof goes net neutrality, and really that's all fine, because it's again their endpoints -- if RCN wants to run Akamai nodes and get Akamaized content faster, that's their choice, they can control the ingress of traffic as they choose. However, when the carrier decides to throttle the traffic that's now within their network to my endpoint based on whether a third party has paid the carrier fee, I'm starting to feel like I should have been a party to this contract and gotten consideration for it.
I've got no problem with a tiered Internet, as long as it doesn't solely involve a middleman taking from both sides of the communication endpoints with no meaningful input from either.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Communism?
If you want to insert political metaphors for how a technological solution works, then the entire Internet, by design, is Communistic.
Peers are peers. Neighbors talk to and shre with their neighbors their access, because when they need it back, their neighbors will share their access. Any peer is free to talk to any other peer, and arrange to share access between them, irrespective of what other peers they are talking to.
It's exactly this "communism" philosophy that makes the Internet work as well as it has for more than 20 years. Calling it "communism" is simply McCarthyism brought into the discussion about whether "Two legs bad Four legs good" is an appropriate business model for a system designed to be "Any legs good".
Market and business decisions, and local legislation and access rules aside, the reason people in China can look at servers in the US or France or Istanbul, is solely because the internet is unbiased in how it handles traffic. A packet is a packet, and on it travels to and from where it needs to go. There is no (in most cases, shaping is another discussion) "Paid" flag on the packet that lets routers know this packet is coming from or destined for a service which paid the protection fee and now gets to run roughshod over the network.
The Telcos who are whining about net-neutrality are whining because they're trying to double-dip, and they're being called on it. I pay my service provider for access. Bob's Widgets pays their access provider for their uplink. Everyone is paid up. The Telcos are upset that market forces have deemed that access is not worth as much money as they _want_ to charge for it, so they're trying to charge for both ends of the transaction from one side of the pipe, when the other end has already been paid.
This isn't about some large user being subsidized - my end has already been paid for at what the market has deemed the "proper" price. This is about Common Carriers trying to come along after the fact and say "We didn't charge you enough for the last 10 years, here's a bill for what you should have been paying".
If Net Neutrality is true Communism, then what the Telcos want is what Communism turned into in post-USSR Russia - the Haves and the Have Nots.
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He's wrong. Kind of takes the sting out of a hyperbolic rant when your first sentence is a lie. ( Iknow it's just a mistake, but no one makes mistakes anymore, it's always "lies")
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
Net Neutrality means that carriers cannot discriminate based upon the type of traffic you're sending. HTTP traffic and SSH traffic would be treated equally. Whether that's a good thing is for you to decide.
As I understand it, this isn't correct either. The goal is that traffic be treated equally regardless of source and destination. Most people agree that prioritizing traffic by protocol is beneficial for everyone.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
Net neutrality *actually* means everyone pays the same for net use, regardless of how much they use the net.
Net non-neutrality means people pay according to how much they use.
Two things:
1) AT&T sold me "unlimited internet access". If they wanted me to pay for how much I use, they should have specified that in the contract.
2) AT&T does not have a contract with Google and therefore has no real right to charge Google anything, since Google does not use their ISP service, I use it.
Or are you going to claim that if you have a Cingular cellphone and call a friend with a T-Mobile cellphone, then T-Mobile has the right to bill you an unspecified amount (say... $1000/minute, it's not like I have a contract letting me know how much I'm going to be billed for the call in advance) for the call in addition to what I paid Cingular?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
You're an idiot and have no idea about the issue.
Right now a website (or other content provider) pays for the bandwith they use and the user (ie: you and me) pays for their internet access. Last I checked the former is based directly on bandwith used (more or less) while the later has lots of nice plans with various speeds (and in some places with bandwith restrictions depending on how much you pay). As a result, right now how much you pay is relatively based on how much you use the net.
What companies want to do is charge content providers a SECOND time. In other words not only do you pay Verizon for your DSL and not only does YouTube pay for their bandwith but now YouTube "has to" pay Verizon as well. Sure they could no pay but then Verizon will simply slow them down to a crawl unless they do.
In other words without net neutrality it's not goign to be based on how much you use the net (as it is now and internet providers can make it directly based on usage if they wish) but on how much the content is worth to the content provider. So streamign media would essentially cost extra for a content provider compared to downloading a file for later playback even if both use the same amount of bandwith.
By this argument, robbery and murder must be OK. You can buy house alarms, weapons and bodyguards. If I buy them and my neighbor does not I'll be OK and my neighbor will get robbed and murdered. Here's the rub... just because there are services to stop bad things happening, it does not make those bad things OK.
With any service, there's a fixed cost for hooking the thing up, plus a marginal cost for actually using it. For the internet because the ratio of marginal costs to fixed costs is quite low, usage of bandwidth has been treated as free in recent times (it wasn't always so - in the 80s you paid by the packet and boy was it expensive).
That is ok while the capacity is high enough that users are not competing for bandwidth. As soon as it starts to saturate you've got the problem that there is no way to efficiently allocate capacity to users as long as the marginal cost of bandwidth is zero.
But a solution to this problem needs to be based on usage, not service type. That's the key point here - service type should not be permitted to be used as a proxy for usage.
Further, because most of the network is a natural monopoly, government regulation is not counter to liberal principles on markets. Its obvious that the local loop is a natural monopoly. The backbone is also, because of network effects.
Further, allowing service differentiating is allowing the monopolist to control the market for which services can be provided, and by whom.
So legislating for net neutrality is both a fair use of legislative power and is in support of, not counter to, free market principles.
Squirrel!
I don't know what this guy is pretending to be, a lawyer or a geek, but his arguments are all extremely uninformed.
... would allow a degree of non-neutrality" - there again, confusing anti-QoS with anti-vertical-monopoly (Net Neutrality); in fact, using "non-neutrality" as a synonym for QoS. It's not.
1) "The number of possible connections has gone up quadratically with the number of total users; so the Internet has become much more complex."
So? Is this a technological problem that is in any way related to the issue of Net-Neutrality? We seem to be handling this just fine at the moment, and if we run into problems we switch to IPv6, don't we?
2) People use different applications with different QoS needs. Providers should be allowed to provide priority to certain types of traffic.
Again, entirely unrelated to the issue of Net-Neutrality. You can get all sorts of QoS deals from ISPs, e.g. MPLS. The issue with Net-Neutrality is the ISP giving priority to their own traffic, so they gain an unnatural advantage over competing services not owned by the ISP - a vertical monopoly.
3) TCP/IP is obsolete, and companies should be allowed to experiment with protocols.
TCP/IP is not only working just fine, but it's adapted all the time. It's up to version 4, and IPv6 can be implemented by any one who chooses to. There are many protocols that use UDP over IP, and even many protocols that use IP, but neither TCP nor UDP. The past few years there have been many quiet revolutions in protocols; from dialling in using SLIP to PPP, to getting cable (docsis 1.0) to getting ADSL, then ADSL2+, p2p protocols like bittorrent emerging and chanching just about daily, people using VOIP, companies deploying VOIP on an enterprise scale (right down to global telecommunications giants switching to, egads no!, an all-IP backbone for voice).
Again, this has nothing to do with preventing vertical monopolies.
Then there are some things that just paint him as someone who has no idea what he's talking about..
How to achieve QoS? He points out that TCP (the obsolete protocol, mind you) has a Type of Service field! How ironic. Wasn't he argueing we need new protocols? Like, oh, I don't know, MPLS, which he seems to be unaware of? But then, he also seems to be under the impression that you can't choose between ISPs that offer different levels of QoS, which is patently untrue. (Nor would they not be allowed to exist if we had Net Neutrality. They just would be forced to be fair)
Then he goes on to say Akamai (not an internet service provider, not engaging much in vertical monopolies) is "an entirely different architecture". No it's not, they use DNS and obsolete TCP just like anybody else. There is nothing at all new about this architecture, mind you - in fact, it's pretty much what usenet does. We used to call sites with content closer to you "mirrors". The only nifty thing akamai adds is redirecting you to the nearest host on the DNS level. Oh, in fact, DNS root servers do the same thing on a BGP level even. And they also cache their zones. Still neutral, though.
"deep packet inspections
Oh, and the question about neutrality? Who controls the QoS, in his grand vision? He doesn't even answer it.
If you want to be anti-Net-Neutrality, fine, argue that vertical monopolies are good, or that vertical monopolies won't happen, or that Net-Neutrality laws wouldn't be effective. Don't bring up straw man arguments.
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Professor Yoo should stick to law. He has made technical mistakes that make him look like a fool.
First, Mr. Yoo states that technologists believe TCP/IP is obsolete. (WTF?!?!?!!?) He seems to have made that up, which brings his credibility into question. I can't even find a single article that mentions that concept in a search. As a technologist, I can assure him that TCP/IP is considered robust, and pointing out it's age doesn't change that.
Next, Mr. Yoo's describes why network neutrality might hold things back, but gives an example that has nothing to do with Network Neutrality. Akamai caches data and routes it efficiently, which is something these "obsolete" protocols like TCP and HTTP have special provisions for. None of that violates network neutrality in any way.
Lastly, Mr. Yoo underestimates the value of standardization. He states that "...standardization by itself runs the risk of becoming an obstruction to technological progress." We are very fortunate that Mr. Yoo does not hold a position in government policy, or we would all have incompatible TVs, electrical outlets, and the cohesive internet of today would not exist at all.
If Mr. Yoo wants to build his own private network on his own non-standard protocols, I invite him to try. In the mean time, my company will continue to operate using the efficient, standard, neutral internet we have today.
The internet is already being treated like a toll road. To connect, you pay an ISP. Taking the analogy further: To talk to Google, you send a packet to them, and they respond back with a packet. The current system has you pay your ISP for your packet (upload speeds) and Google's packet (download speeds) over their network. Google pays their ISP for your packet (their download speeds) and Google's packet (their upload speeds) over their network. Then the two ISPs cooperate to make the connection work. Thus, each ISP is paid for both packets.
Net neutrality is great because you know that no matter who you connect to (or how), it will be treated the same way by each ISP. Without it, you might have blazing fast speeds from ISP A (in Seattle) to ISP B (in New York, owned by the same parent company, perhaps), but horrendously slow speeds from ISP A to ISP C (also in Seattle, but given lower priority for competing).
There are many other ways ISPs could game the system if they didn't have to be neutral about packets: sending mail to certain servers might cost more, or hitting certain websites, or using certain protocols.
Getting rid of net neutrality suddenly opens up all new possibilities for the ISPs to work on segmenting their users. At this point, they segment purely on bandwidth (10Mbit down costs more than 1Mbit down), which makes sense for upkeep. If they can start inspecting packets, they can segment based on the type of access you need (charge more if you're receiving HTTP GET/POST messages, instead of just sending them, for example). Pure capitalism would be alright with this -- segmentation is how most businesses work, and if the Internet were a product worth something by itself, that would be great. However, the Internet doesn't work like most businesses.
Your example about toll roads highlights the difference: we consider the Internet to be a public good. Roads are free (or charge tolls solely based on the amount of use) because they're a public good. Charging more based on where you need to go on a certain road (getting to the mall costs less than getting to your friend's house, even though you take the same route) seems crazy when you think that you paid for the road to begin with (taxes, or the toll money itself). We want the roads/Internet to be as cheap as possible for all users because the economy is driven by destinations, not travel. Making travel as cheap as possible helps the majority of businesses. Same with the Internet.
Thus, net neutrality is good for two reasons: cost stays down and benefit stays up. Removing net neutrality would reverse both of these.
(TLDR: The Internet is only worthwhile if there are people on it. Dropping neutrality makes it harder for people to communicate, lowering the benefit for everybody.)
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
A university (school of law) professor; knowledgeable on, "technological innovation and economic theories of imperfect competition transforming the regulation of electronic communications" or pseudo-professional marketeer platform supporting corporate-welfare-state values [AKA: FUCK THE PUBLIC]. I would break down the above quoted statement, but that would lend credence to obvious bullshit meant for politician consumption. I am sure the professor's comments will be endlessly quoted, referenced, and used in many presidential/congressional/senatorial/FCC/... reports and white-papers to justify voting for special corporate interest laws/bills that destroy democracy and capitalism.
Everyone/Biz (I know) already pays for bandwidth, quality of service, and NetNutrality as a required public utility. If a Biz or Gov wants a private service, then they should pay for it and the infrastructure involved. To treat the Internet/infrastructure as a private-rights utility is NetNepotism and anti-competitive corporatism [AKA: totalitarian welfare].
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
1) Net Neutrality means backbone network providers cannot charge content providers to supply them with preferred service 2) See #1 It doesn't prevent individuals from anything, it doesn't force you to receive all traffic at the same speed for instance. I don't think it would even prevent your ISP or network backbone providers from prioritizing certain types of traffic. They just can't charge content providers for preferred service. This levels the playing field for content providers, so my personal website would be able to be delivered just as well as google's for instance.
Funny. cos' I thought a troll was a large, ugly, stupid hominid with regenerative capabilities and a 10 foot reach. Gets to be a pain, because PCs, usually medium hominids, suffer 2 attacks of opportunity before they get within melee range of this beast... unless they are using a pole arm. *shoots self*
Concerning Professor Yoo's argument: I agree that it confuses network neutrality with "hosting neutrality". The network proximity of a particular host does change the latency for transactions involving that host, but doesn't change the topology or behavior of the network that it operates on. (i.e. it doesn't change the "common carrier" status afforded to a particular ISP).
This does open up one aspect of network neutrality that I hadn't thought of though. Would it violate network neutrality for a service provider (not an ISP) to create their own network "behind" the internet that distributes content faster than using the Internet?
An example: Imagine Google dropping off proxies that, network wise, are more "local" to their users than their main servers. When users connect to the proxy, it forwards the message to Google's main servers using the "dark fiber" that Google bought long ago. A diagram to aid understanding.
And then the question that stems from this: If it's ok for Google to do it, is it also an acceptable practice for ISPs to offer the same service? Note that the only difference is the presence of the "dark net" (by which I mean the dark fiber owned by Google, not the traditional definition).
I imagine that this, effectively, circumvents net neutrality. Down the line, it may lead to the same effect as net privatization, because those that could pay for the privilege of the "darknet" would have a greater opportunity to speak. However, it would create two "zones" for ISPs, instead of just the common carrier line. In the "dark zone", ISPs do not have common carrier status. Thus, they may choose which signals cross the line. In addition, they are legally responsible for all content that goes across the line (they may be sued for DMCA & obscenity violations, etc). In the "Internet zone" they still have common carrier. They must allow all communications, but they gain legal protection from those signals' contents.
It should go without saying that only "dark" content could go through the dark zone. Otherwise, an ISP could control free speech by directing content through the dark zones that it manages. Furthermore, an ISP's dark zone, to function within the context of this idea, must utilize the Internet at its end points, and it should not segregate traffic originating from foreign ISPs. This way, if I have Earthlink wifi in San Francisco, Verizon DSL cannot prevent me from connecting to their dark zone, nor create routes that limits the use, and thus effective benefits, to only Verizon's customers. This should occur for several reasons: