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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.'"
Huh? How is the last-mile market competitive? Where I live, I have 1 option for high-speed internet: the cable company. The phone company refuses to build a switching station to offer DSL. As far as I'm concerned, I'm living in a monopoly market, the very opposite of the one described in the article.
I wouldn't have a problem with network non-neutrality if the ISP market was a competitive one, allowing me to switch to a better ISP if my current provider was not meeting my needs. Given that I don't live in that kind of a market, I support network neutrality as it provides a compromise solution that meets the needs of most people while causing as little harm as possible.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Bullshit.
You and Prof. Christopher Yoo make the same fundamental mistake. Net Neutrality is *not* about preventing people from optimizing the Internet!
It *is* completely about preventing abuse of monopolistic power by telco companies. (This is espcially urgent in light of the reconstitution of the old AT&T). It is to prevent telcos from offering "protection" for your valuable content.
AT&T: That's an awful nice video service you've got there Mr. YouTube. It sure would be a shame if somthing were to happen to all those pretty little bits flowing over our network...
YouTube: What could happen to them?
AT&T: -laughter- Hey guys...he wants to know what could *happen*! -more laughter-
People always say that this can't happen because of competition. Again, bullshit. What ISP you use doesn't matter in the slightest; at some point, your bits *will* cross AT&T's network. If you don't pay the "protection", your poor little bits might have one hell of a time making it to their destination.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
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 twbecker mentions in his reply to your post, I think you don't exactly have it straight, either, so I just want to clarify a little more on what he said. It's not about the type of traffic (although that's the type of argument they give), it's about discriminating based on who provides the content. If there was a way to prioritize VoIP in general, without giving preferential treatment to Comcast over Vonage, that wouldn't be as bad (although I'm not sure I trust anyone out there -- ISPs, the government, or content providers -- to decide what types of traffic are more important than others), but the real potential problem is that Comcast can screw with the Vonage traffic so that the service basically doesn't work anymore... All of a sudden, it looks like Comcast's VoIP is the only service that "works" in your area, so that's what you're stuck with (no matter how good or bad the service might be).
The problem is that the ISP's want to provide content now, and they are wanting to extort money out of all of the companies who have actually worked for years to build their content services, just to stay on equal footing with the ISP's. It's funny how one of the arguments of the ISP's against neutrality is "There's no evidence that we would mess with your traffic, so you shouldn't make it illegal to mess with it", but at the same time, they're speaking out against Google and others, saying that those content providers are getting a "free ride" on their Inter-tubes (never mind the fact that the content providers are already paying their own Internet service bills, and their customers are paying their own bills, so nobody is actually getting a free ride). Websites like Hands off the Internet are really frustrating, because it's such a twisted, astroturfing, messed up view, accusing the people who want a level playing field of trying to get money from the average joe. When actually, it's been the telecoms screwing over average joe with all of the extra charges we were paying for years that were supposed to have brought us all great broadband service years ago.
Think about it. . .BGP routes based on the least number of hops.
No they are not. BGP routes are based on the least number of traversed autonomic systems (ie. networks) - it's a path vector protocol. And you can still attach a metric value to specific peers when distributing the routes to your whatever you are running internally (IS-IS, OSPF, etc).
Of course you cannot tell anything from the internal state of your peering network (unless the peer is smart enough to stop advertising if, say, half of it's core network goes down even though connectivity is still possible). But hey, I'm nitpicking here...