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

Re:They have it backwards

[grcumb]

A system with guaranteed bandwidth aka "net neutrality" aka "truth in advertising" would allow you to spend your bandwidth however you want. This seams like it would foster adoption of high bandwidth service such as "entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings". A tiered system would probably let you use low bandwidth things like email, web, and text chat at your full speed, but would charge you extra or throttle you for high bandwidth items. A tiered Internet is the enemy of newer multimedia services.

In short, no. You're right, but that's not the point.

You're falling victim to the common misconception that this is all about charging consumers more for 'premium content'. That is a straw man constructed by those who want to destroy net neutrality.

This is all about toll roads. The telcos want to charge everyone who uses their network, every time, and they want to do so prejudicially, letting their friends through cheaply, and charging killing rates to others. As things stand right now, Google pays one price to access the Internet, and everyone who has paid to access the Internet can access them. The price determines the quality of the service, but they only pay it once.

What the net neutrality 'debate' is about is that the Telco A wants to charge every bit of traffic that passes onto its network from Telco B, regardless of the fact that Telco B has already been paid for Internet access. In other words, Telco A is setting up a toll booth, and charging companies for something they've already paid for.

(There are numerous permutations to this scenario, but that's the simplest way I can express it.)

This practice is the precise antithesis of the end-to-end network that we like to call the Internet. Net Neutrality is not about consumer choice, it's not about quality of service, and it's not about new business opportunities. It's about whether we still want an Internet. If you do, then you must support Net Neutrality.

It's sorta like this

[Moraelin]

It's sorta like this: it's not about what protocols you implement, but about who you allow on "your" network, and at what price or at what speed.

What protocols don't solve is being able to say, "ok, if you want high speed access on _my_ network, you have to pay extra." That's the problem. From just a neutral protocol's point of view, for example VOIP is VOIP is VOIP. A non-neutral approach could say, for example, "ok, you can use VOIP with our client and our paid service, but Skype users can eat shit and die... or at least get their pipe throttled until they have an incentive to switch to ours." Or, "you can play WoW on our network because Blizzard gave up and paid the tax, but you might notice a lot of latency and disconnects in SWG because Sony wanted to play hardball." Or viceversa, although it would probably count as a crime against humanity to make people play SWG ;) Or "you can get high speed access to MSN Search, because Steve Balmer was more than happy to pay to 'fucking kill Google', but you might have problems using Google or getting your site indexed by Google."

It's all about walled gardens and monopolistic practices. You only make so much money with just one interchangeable product or service, so you'll want some kind of trade obstacles that give you some kind of a (semi)captive market. You'll want that people who want your product or service X, also have the incentive/FUD/lack-of-choice to also buy the less competitively priced Y and Z from you. That's where the money is.

If you look around you, that's how most people who make money, make it.

E.g., take iTunes. Not the worst case of shearing penned sheep, to be sure, but nevertheless an example of how it works. ITunes itself doesn't make Apple much money, and it actually caused the music companies to make a lot less money than with a CD. The companies wanted to kill the single, but iTunes made them kill the album. Previously they'd sell you a whole CD, now you just buy 1-2 tracks at 1$ each, and they don't even get the whole dollar. ITunes is basically priced not to make Apple or the music companies a profit, but to keep any possible competitor unable to make a profit.

However, iTunes just happens to have this proprietary DRM that works only on an iPod. (Yes, as Steve Jobs is quite happy to tell you, the DRM is there because the RIAA wanted DRM. But, no, they didn't ask for a DRM that works only on his players. The lock in is _not_ RIAA's demand.) The iPod is quite a bit overpriced. If you want to use iTunes, you pretty much need an iPod. And IIRC, Apple sells around 1 iPod for every 10 songs sold on iTunes. So iTunes doesn't make Apple much money, in fact, it barely makes enough to keep the servers running, but makes you buy another product from them.

The key to making money there is the whole not being neutral.

The big ISP's now would like to get in the same kind of position. They have a service which doesn't make a fortune, and as long as they stay neutral, they have no way to coax/coerce you into buying an overpriced product to go with it. They'd like to be able to do something like that, because that's where the money is.

Re:It's sorta like this

[ASBands]

I think the best comparison (and the one that historically goes with my point of view on the matter) is to compare ISPs to the telephone companies when the telephone first started out. In the beginning of the 20th Century, after the Edison patent expired and when the telephone network was recognized as the most important part of the system, marketing types would come to your front door and say "Join our network! Your good friend, Mr. Google is on our network, if you'd like to call him, you should join us!" So you would. The next day, another salesperson would come and say "Join our network! Your doctor, Dr. Kaspersky is on our network, if you'd like to call him, you should join us!" Not wanting to make Mr. Google sad, you'd just get the second phone installed. The next day, another salesman would come by and say, "Join our network! Your furniture mover, Mr. Ballmer is in our network, if you'd like to call him, you should join us!" Not wanting to make Mr. Google or Dr. Kaspersky sad, you'd join the new network as well. Pretty soon, you'd have 10 telephones in your living room. So the government stepped in and made the public telephone system, which coincidentally works almost exactly the same (fundamentally) as the internet does today.

This is exactly the same as net neutrality. Both networks provide a means of remote communication. The internet may move a lot more information and may be growing at an ever-increasing rate, but it was built a century later. The internet is still a relatively new system - we're still learning just how big the enormous amounts of data we can transport, but the ISPs are still complaining about laying new lines. Phone networks are old technology, but all the telephone companies switched to digital telephony in the 60s to allow the massive amount of people getting phone services.

It costs money to keep a public network running, but once the the public telephone system was established, nobody was calling to bring back the old system. The problem is that the internet is a little bit more complicated than telephones and so the politicians don't fully understand the repercussions of their actions. We need somebody in Washington to stand up and explain that the series of tubes that make up the internet is the same as the series of tubes that make up the telephone network (and with VoIP are becoming the same tubes) and that they've already made legislation regarding it that works and they don't need to waste their time.

IPv6 isn't really relevant

[billstewart]

Leaving aside the parent article's sense of humor on the topic, Richi's blog article doesn't really add up technically. IPv6 will eventually be necessary to handle the IPv4 address shortage, and maybe some of the mobile IP work in IPv6 won't get ported to IPv4, but probably anything useful will.

IPv4 has several flavors of priority marking, including TOS and DSCP; most of the MPLS (private routed IP) carriers out there are using DSCP to provide 3 to 6 priority levels, which their customers typically use to give high priority to VOIP, maybe high priority to video, medium priority to corporate data applications, and low priority to things like email, web, and ftp that aren't latency-sensitive. Some ISPs support these markings on their public internet service as well, at least on some of their services (e.g. higher-speed corporate-priced circuits, but not necessarily on DSL where the routers don't always support it.) The real limitation there is getting ISPs to agree with each other on which of the 64 available markings to use, how many values, and of course, how to charge (preferably a flat rate.)

As far as peering infrastructure investment goes, the big carriers are spending madly on this to prevent bottlenecks. It's a bit different in the US, where ~20-25 big carriers peer with each other, than in the UK, where everybody peers at LINX, but the problem for Richi should be whether his ISP buys enough LINX bandwidth to keep up with their users. Last I heard LINX and AMSIX were doing mostly ok on keeping up with demand, as long as the ISPs kept up.

Static IP addresses are really a critical issue, and NAT traversal problems are closely related. IPv6 may make this a bit easier, but basically it's an ISP administrative convenience issue (so they don't have to help customers configure PCs) and a firewalling issue (NAT's a cheap beginning on real firewalls, so everybody uses it), and the various flavors of IPv6 autoconfig may eventually replace some of it.

IPv6's big problems for now are router performance, chicken&egg issues with content providers and lack of motivation until the big addressing crunch hits.