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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.'"
I can't read the site because it's loading sooooooooooooooooooo damn slow. Oddly enough, cnn.com and msn.com load instantly. So, unfortunately, I can't read his defense of net non-neutrality. I guess I'll just check out some of these shopping links instead.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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.
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.
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
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.
You didn't pay for it. You didn't do the R&D. You spent 40 years promoting Minitel, calling the internet a waste of cold-war defense spending. Now finally, you're complaining about being left out of the internet.
I'm somewhat neutral on this topic.
'sig' deleted due to the stupidity of it's 'nature'
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.
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.
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.
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? I'm a little confused. You're against net neutrality and that coincides with you being a liberal? I'm a liberal and I support net neutrality - Verizon, AT&T, or Time Warner Cable have no right to limit the access of anyone to any type of content because they won't pony up fees to their respective carriers. Not to mention that net neutrality boils down to government regulation of business, which seems to be a core liberal value IIRC. So explain to me how your being against net neutrality meshes with your liberal beliefs.
Exactly. Net non-neutrality amounts to handing over a bunch of public infrastructure to the Telco cartel to have them turn around and extort us.
Never mind the models whereby you could actually pay to slow a competitor's traffic. It's all the worst of Google Ad Words wrapped into what has become an essential service.
There is also an aspect of net-neutrality that protects you. If the mega-corp-dominated infotainment industry isn't keeping you informed on what you really need to know, you might turn online for the information. Net neutrality could kill the blogosphere and would at the very least further stratify the digital divide.
I'm a little puzzled by the anti-net-neutrality stance on slashdot. So many of you are libertarian
I'd expect a libertarian to be anti-net-neutrality, so what is surprising to you? Did you mean pro-net-neutrality?
Anyway, I'm for it because first as others have pointed out the 'net is not these companies' own infrastructure. It was paid for in large part by the government, and it was the government who granted them the land access as well. They are using public resources, and they should be expected to treat it as such.
Also, the usefullness of the net -- and services like Akamai -- depends on it being neutral. It is the fundamental peer-to-peer nature of the net that has made it what it is. Or let me bring it home to you more directly: Slashdot -- which remember was not a for-profit venture for much of its existence -- would have died a long time ago as soon as it got large enough for, say, Sprint to say "you have to pay us for your packets that cross our network or we'll severely degrade them", and we wouldn't be having this discussion. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's an argument for or against net neutrality.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
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.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Exactly what I was thinking. GP obviously doesn't understand the issue if he thinks that anti-net-neutrality meshes with being a liberal. Quite the opposite. Anti-net -neutrality is pro telecom giant monopoly, which is pretty obviously a conservative position. Get a clue.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
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?
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 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.
I pay for my web server to have X-amount of bandwidth a month.
I pay my ISP at home for access to the the internet.
So now I will have to pay my ISP even more so they don't slow down my access to my webserver from my home.
Using Akamai is just paying for bandwidth for your server. It is nothing but hosting. It really has nothing to do with net neutrality.
That is the core of this problem. The users are paying for network access. The people producing the content are paying for network access. The ISPs want the content providers to pay them even if they are not the ISPs customers!
Kind of a data black mail or protection racket. I can see them now, "Yous know it would be a real shame if some of your packets where to get lost, if you know what I mean. You really wouldn't want that now would you?"
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
I'm against part of what I see in 'net neutrality', but against other parts.
It seems to me there are two mixed up issues in net neutrality: One is common carrier rules, and the other is tiered internet, and in reality they don't have too much to do with each other. Supposedly a tiered internet implies lack of common carrier rules, but I disagree.
I'm in favor of common carrier rules so that ISPs cannot hold their customers ransom to content providers. i.e., they shouldn't be able to block or filter packets based on who is sending them. (in other words, the packets are anonymous - you can't look at who they're from)
But what does that have to do with a tiered internet? As I understand, a tiered net is a bit more like having 4 (or whatever) nets. What stops each of these nets from being just as anonymous as the one we have now? I've heard one idea that it somehow allows ISPs greater ability to filter packets, but can't they already do that with traffic analysis anyway? (and I hear some have even tried to do so, and rightfully got sued) The article suggests another idea, that if we want common carrier rules, we have to have strict inflexible protocols stuck forever as they are now for it to work, and this would halt progress and block us from ever using a tiered net. I haven't read the guy's work, but don't we just need a rule that 'you can't discriminate against anyone'? No need to force everyone to use some particular protocol.
And by the way, a tiered internet could be a good thing for everyone, if the economics works out: It could help stop ISPs overselling their service, since they could more easily partition out their service to customers, rather than the one-size-fits-all we have now. Content providers who don't need the extra advantages of the 'higher' tiers also wouldn't have to pay for them, while those who do need them can get them.
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'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.
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.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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This article continues our series examining the issue of Network Neutrality.
Professor Christopher Yoo joined the faulty of the Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1999, and his research focuses primarily on how technological innovation and economic theories of imperfect competition are transforming the regulation of electronic communications.
In addition to clerking for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and working at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson under the supervision of now-Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., he has also published "Network Neutrality and the Economics of Congestion" [PDF] in Georgetown Law, and "Beyond Network Neutrality" [PDF] in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.
We asked him to share his thoughts on Net Neutrality with us.
Not ALL of us are starry-eyed pie-in-the-sky idiots. Besides the issue that such things never work (I am most certainly not a libertarian: I am a liberal by the literal definition of the word) there's also the issue that nearly every ISP today, besides satellite, is some kind of state-supported or -protected monopoly. Now you say, how is that possible? I can get Cable and DSL! The cable company typically has a monopoly on delivering cable and no other cable company can do it in the same town; the phone company usually has a monopoly on data transmission on power lines or phone poles (depending on how things are set up) although that's not the case where I live, where power, cable, and phone are all on the same poles.
If they have a state-granted monopoly then I think it's only right that they be forced to provide a neutral connection - because obviously my tax dollars are supporting their monopoly. Otherwise, I think they should be permitted to do whatever they like. But if they receive ANY support or if any opponents do not get the same support, then they need to be forced to be neutral. I wouldn't be so worried if they actually WERE just a private company.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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 Libertarian stance on this: anything and everything the government touches will get fucked up, and the cause of the problem with net neutrality is the lack of competition, so that problem should be solved and not one of net neutrality.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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.
The problem with this whole situation is that the FCC ruled that the current crop of cable telecoms are NOT common carriers and are not bound by the law governing common carriers. That decision is why Net Neutrality is even an issue.
And what I want to know is: what the hell did the telecoms do with that $200 billion in handouts they got to run fiber to curb by 2006? One of the reasons they claim they need to be able to double and triple dip for cash on the same content is that they can't pay for F2C. The government gave them a crapload of handouts (OUR tax money) and they squandered...and now they want to charge US for stepped service to replace the money they squandered...and we'll probably STILL not get F2C in another 10 years!
1 is the square root of all evil.
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: