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

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.

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.