In Net Neutrality, It's Jeffersonet Vs. Edisonet

PetManimal writes "Curt Monash has a middle way on the Net neutrality debate. He writes that the classic 'Jeffersonet' — which includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and most websites created in the first 13 or so years of the Web — is 'the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide,' and cannot be compromised by a tiered Internet. On the other hand, a reliable, tiered scheme is required for what he calls the 'Edisonet' — which consists of 'communication-rich applications such as entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings of all kinds.' Commenting on Monash's proposal, blogger Richi Jennings points to a lack of investment in Internet infrastructure and IPv6 technologies at the root of the problem: '...if an application writer makes assumptions that ignore realities such as the speed of light or temporary congestion, their application's going to behave badly. But no premium QoS in the world is going to help that. My sense is still that the ISPs that are complaining about net neutrality are simply being greedy and don't want to invest money to cope with the growth in usage.'"

Comments

Am I not getting it?

[arun_s]

This net neutrality argument has been going on for quite awhile, is there something I'm not getting? From what I know (not much), protocols like MPLS have QoS features to distinguish between types of traffic, and they supposedly do a decent job of it. What more is needed then?
Is it not sufficient that packets be differentiated according to the Class of Service? Why do those that argue against Net neutrality seem to imply that differentiating among ISPs is somehow going to make an improvement?

Think about the business

[Oddster]

Before you cry afoul in agreement that the ISP's don't want to invest in new infrastructure and are greedy bastards, remember for one second that in telecommunications terms, the Internet is still very young. Before this, the last major jumps in the sector were television and satellites, 50 years ago. Before that was the radio a half century earlier, and another half century back gets us the telegraph. The Internet in its current form is barely 15 years old, and at most you could peg it at 20.

Much of the infrastructure was laid down during the dot-com boom days of the late 1990's, so much of the hardware itself is only a decade old, and at the time was quite expensive - there's a reason that Cisco is huge. The ISP's just have not seen the return on hardware investment in the Internet that they had in the phone business before undertaking any massive overhaul of the underlying network, as a transition to IPv6 would be.

The whole tiered internet system is (surprise!) purely motivated by the money to be made, of course. Yes, it might end up sucking balls for the home user, but then again, maybe they'll have the monetary incentive (or when it becomes viable, perhaps some startup company will) to upgrade the network, which is good for everybody - after all, they do need some kind of bandwidth to push more digital HD channels.

Personally, I would dislike my packets being lower priority than somebody else's. I'm just saying that you need to think about it from a utilities business perspective, not a technology business perspective - their business is a service, not a product as such.

Terrible English

[jez9999]

OK, this might seem like a nitpick, but I can't let it pass; I had to read this sentence a few times before I understood the true meaning, and I only did because I'm a native English speaker:

He writes that the classic 'Jeffersonet' -- which includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and most websites created in the first 13 or so years of the Web -- is 'the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide,' and cannot be compromised by a tiered Internet.

What you mean (or he means) is that it must not be compromised. 'Cannot' pretty much means the opposite.

Re:Middle Way? Bah!

[FireFury03]

But if you want to actually use some of that broadband bandwidth that you're already paying for, then I want to charge you extra

Ah, but the thing is that you probably aren't already paying for it. A lot of people seem to think that if they have a residential 8Mbps DSL then they are entitled to use that whole 8Mbps 24/7 (e.g. leave Bittorrent going all the time). However, the only reason residential connections can be so cheap is by having users contend with eachother for bandwidth - i.e. you can use up to 256Kbps (for example) on average and can burst up to 8Mbps. This is a good service really - most people want web pages, etc. to come down quickly (i.e. bursts up to a high speed) but much of the time their connection is idle (causing a low average usage).

I think the idea of forcing content providers to pay for the bandwidth on the consumer's end of the network is a terrible idea though (the consumer is already paying for their connection, why should the content provider pay more? If the consumer is choosing to use high bandwidth content then charge that consumer more, not the content provider). However, I am worried that outlawing non-neutrality would also squash the ISPs' ability to do legitimate traffic shaping.

For example, I think it's a very good thing for the ISP to prioritise protocols that _require_ a low latency (e.g. VoIP) over things like bittorrent (this sort of prioritisation isn't about making money, it's about providing a good service). But the key thing is that ISPs shouldn't be using prioritisation in order to allow massively underprovisioned services - it should be used purely to deal with unusual peaks in demand. On the odd occasion I fire up BitTorrent I should expect to get a reasonable amount of bandwidth out of it - if low priority traffic can never get the full bandwidth, the ISP is underprovisioned and that needs to be fixed.

Phone network neutrality?

[Half-pint HAL]

This is exactly the same as net neutrality. Both networks provide a means of remote communication.

The telephone network is not neutral and I don't think it has been, since perhaps the earliest days. Two words: Peak Rate.

The phone networks use variable charging to discourage people from using the resources when they're in demand -- peak time -- so that the resources are available to those who need them; it's called demand management, and it's more efficient than increasing supply ad infinitum. Mobile networks in the UK have a longer peak period than fixed line, because while fixed-line phones peak during office hours, mobile peak usage continues throughout the commute period.

Fixed-line performance traditionally didn't degrade gracefully under strain -- in general connections were simply refused. (digital exchanges are changing this though) Mobile networks slice up traffic and degrade "gracefully", but will let it get to the point where neither party can hear the other due to lack of granularity.

In these cases, demand limits itself -- people put the phone down. The claim is that the same thing happens with the internet -- people will only connect when they have a useful speed. However, if I'm at work, I don't care what response I get on my home PC if I choose to download DVD images of Linux builds, service packs for Windows, HD video etc etc for later use.

Net neutrality, inasmuch as it advocates no peak rate, turns things upside-down: it discourages people who need to use it during peak demand from using it. The downloaders don't need to -- they can run overnight -- but it's more convenient for them.

HAL.

Re:Phone network neutrality?

[Qzukk]

Net neutrality, inasmuch as it advocates no peak rate, turns things upside-down

But that's not what we're asking to block, and that's not what the CEOs are publicly demanding. We don't care what they bill their subscribers, after all, the subscribers are their customers.

Do you remember the days of MCI and "family calling" where you could talk to selected "in-network" people for lower rates than others? Now imagine that MCI let you do this for people who were using AT&T, but while they charge you only 5 cents a minute when you were talking to your mother who had subscribed to AT&T, they would send your mother a bill for $2 a minute for having the privilege of being called by an MCI subscriber. And thats what the ISPs are talking about: they want Google's, Amazon's, and iTMS's money, so they want to bill Google, Amazon, and iTMS for the "privilege" of being able to communicate with their subscriber base. They dress it up really nice with words like "preferred" and "expedited", but seriously, when was the last time you had a problem pulling up Google's site? Do you think Google has any incentive at all to pay to make their site pull up "faster" when it's already fast enough for their users? And this is where the implied threat appears: of course Google needs to pay, because if they don't, something might happen to their packets, and that would be a terrible shame.

Re:Socialism creeping in

[anothy]

The Internet is the result of a "spillover" of the dual-use technology. Developed by the DoD for itself, it turned out (or was wisely designed) to be usable by others. This was terrific and has since been matched only by GPS in popularity.

Mind you, ARPANET has paid only for the development of software and the standards -- it did not pay for the pipes or other hardware, that today's socialists demand be upgraded.

only half true. look at the evolution beyond the military personnel and facilities and their direct contractors. what do we see? public universities (america's most underrated socialist institutions) were the first non-DoD facilities on ARPANET. while i'm not sure who actually paid for the installation of the lines, the universities (and each point, individually, as it was added) paid their own maintenance costs. Bell wasn't paying to maintain this network.

and, of course, let's not forget that very much of that "private" network was built either with government subsidies or with money collected under the force of government ("universal service charge" and the like), not to mentioned sanctioned monopolies. i don't think it's unreasonable or illogical to assert that this imposes some degree of social obligation on them.

I believe, you just wanted to see the words "crypto-socialist" posted.

heh. i confess i really like the phrase, but that doesn't make it less true. it amazes me that more people don't see that aspect of the military. it's not like they go to any lengths to hide it.

i think you're basically over-optimistic about how the market will play out. monopolies really like to hold on to power, and tend towards decreasing costs rather than increasing services in a drive to increase revenue.

to be clear, i'm not particularly an advocate of net neutrality legislation. i'm fully in favor of the principle - i think it's important for everyone involved, in the long term, and for most people in the short term, too - and agree with the proponents of legislation that short-sighted corporate tendencies threaten it, but i'm explicitly undecided on whether legislation is the best solution. i just think the "ooo, socialism!" argument is a particularly stupid attack.

As for the distinction between Socialism and Communism -- yes, these are distinct. Their true adherents tend view the former as a prelude to the (inevitable) latter, however, so mixing them up is not really such a fallacy...

well, the Communists believe that. most modern socialists do not. take a look at nearly all of europe. lots of socialism in the mix there, but it's stable; neither viewed as nor attempting to be a prelude to communism. and, incidentally, it works very well. i suppose the confusion is largely understandable in that a lot of communist organizations call(ed) themselves socialists to seem less threatening, thus contributing to the poisoning of the word socialist.

It is highly off-topic here, though.

eh, gotta use that karma for something, right? ;-)