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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.
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.
so I'd think that you'd be philosophically against the government stepping in to prevent what companies do with their own infrastructure.
It's not their own infrastructure. The internet "pipes" are layed on public property and has natural monopoly of service.
The free market requires multiple competing solutions. With giganting telecoms, and no competing choices, apparently the government steps in.
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!
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"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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well said and simply put.
There is a big difference between the free market where individuals and corporations may use their own property in order to make money and a common carrier that often relies on an exclusive license, either through licensed spectrum or license to lay physical cable across public rights of way in order to do its business. Both spectrum and rights of way across land are finite public resources which make a free market both practically impossible and the attempt to impose one undesirable. The public simply has a right to say how the publics' right of way is used and what benefits we expect in return. The essence of this artificial monopoly that common carriers are bestowed with is that rights of way are taken away from general public use in order to provide a necessary or good service that could otherwise not be provided.
Tending to view things with a view towards freedom, I do think there is a limit to what can be expected of a common carrier, but the fees which can be charged and to whom they can be charged are well within the publics right to dictate. And if the common carrier doesn't want to live by the rules, then they can take their cables up and make way for someone who will abide by the people's will. Really then it is simply a practical matter about what kind of rules will create a system which will be potentially rewarding enough for private corporations and individuals to risk investing in. There are also considerations about fairness and not changing the rules after investments have been made, but those are also risks that investors take when operating on the public right of way.
There is nothing inconsistent with libertarianism about understanding when government authority is needed and when it is not. Libertarianism is about maintaining good laws which are consistent with and are measured by how they promote individual freedom as a means to happiness, it is not about doing away with laws arbitrarily. The difference is that other political philosophies put other sometimes conflicting values equal to or above those, not that they do not also consider these as important values.
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.
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.
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?