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Robert McMillen: What Everyone Gets Wrong In the Debate Over Net Neutrality
ygslash writes "Robert McMillen of Wired claims that we have gotten Net Neutrality all wrong. While we are all busy arguing about whether there should be regulations preventing large content providers from getting preferential bandwidth, McMillen says that not only have the large content providers already had preferential bandwidth for ten years, but that by now this has become an inherent part of the structure of the Internet and in practice cannot be changed. Instead, he says, the Net Neutrality discussion should be about ensuring a free and open competitive market for bandwidth, so that anyone who wants bandwidth can purchase it at a fair price.
...but he got it right? Sure, why not.
Why can't we have both what McMillen is asking for, AND prevent fast lanes. That seems the *most* logical of all. They are not exclusive, they are two separate systemic problems.
While there might be outliers, I generally do not hear the pro-NN crowd claiming that direct peering or colocation should be outlawed, only that traffic should not be shaped based off its origin. So if some data comes in through, say, Level 3, all that should matter is that the data is coming through that pipe, not where it originated from on someone else's network.
No. Net neutrality is about ISP's not violating their contracts with their customers.
My ISP works for ME. I pay them to provide X amount of service. As such they are legally required to provide me with X amount of service, even if take full advantage of their service and use X amount of service every single second of the day. They can't promise me 10gb/second, and then only give me 10gb/second for ten minutes a day, switching to 5 gb/second after those ten minutes.
They are perfectly allowed to give me MORE than 10gbs a second, if someone else - like say Google - offers to pay for it.
But they can decide to not give me 10gbs because netflix refuses to bow down to extortion from them, even if I am using all 10gbs every second of every day of every month. Nothing netflix or other companies do gives them permission to break their contract with me.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Why does everything need a normative judgment attached to it? The interesting part of TFA is the information about the structure of the internet and how that has developed (or not) over the past ten years (as this was new to me, though it may not be to you), not the author's opinion about what he thinks are the right topics to debate and which ones are wrong.
Libertarian market driven approaches of 'perfectly informed' customers having access to 'flexible supply' are only workable on paper. Sure, it would be nice if we could get there, but meanwhile our situation continuing to deteriorate. Time to abandon this quixotic quest.
What we need is "mostly works for most people most of the time", and to get there we need policy with teeth that mandates Net Neutrality. Sure, it won't prevent all abuses, but we only need to prevent worst of them and let the rest play out in courts.
...is not a worthy goal. Robert McMillen is essentially saying "the market is historically uncompetitive" (and thus broken) "but that's not the point" (i always love it when people tell me that their point is the point) "you should be able to receive [only] that broken product at a fair price". If he actually believes and understands what he's saying then he's promoting a system of government supported monopolistic and anti-capitalistic cronyism. (i'll leave it to Godwin to apply a label to that system)
When someone with technical background says "It cannot be changed" it smells corruption. There are times when things cannot be changed because technical constrains (that should fade with time), time, money, etc. Everything can be changed if it is well designed and based on something real. But this is based on money and profit, it can change, and it should be chaged, as soon as possible. This is not a technical problem or limitation, this is stupidity at the service of profit.
http://www.quasarcr.com/
If you offer internet access you can't offer any vertically integratred services that will cause conflict of interest in the way you run the network.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
What the author of the article gets wrong is the idea that there can ever be a "free and open" market for bandwidth. The holders of the most bandwidth are always going to be major corporations, because they can pay for the infrastructure necessary to keep them going. Sure, I'd love to have my own backbone connection and the server infrastructure to back it up, but in practice that will never happen unless I take out a bunch of loans and somehow manage to start my own ISP (and not be immediately sued out of existence by Big Telco or Big Cableco). It's a financial issue, not one of net neutrality.
The real issue here is that the United States will never have bandwidth and speeds equivalent to those seen in parts of Europe and Asia unless we start regulating what the ISPs can sell and how they can sell it. Right now, an ISP can promise a connection that goes "up to" any arbitrary amount of bandwidth and get away with it even if they never deliver speeds anywhere close to the upper limit. This allows them to charge more and more for the same inadequate connection. If we start regulating their advertising and start forcing the ISPs to upgrade infrastructure to remain competitive, that's how we'll get the connection speed other countries do. That, in my mind, is part of what net neutrality is - being able to buy comparable connection speeds for a reasonable price no matter where in the world you are or which ISP you're dealing with.
I fail to see how CDNs and direct peering agreements between ISPs and content providers are particularly relevant to the debate over Net Neutrality. As an analogy:
Comcast owns all of the land and roads in a city (or region, or neighborhood). Google wants to deliver goods to customers in that city, but their warehouse is in another city. Google and Mom-n-Pop Content Provider, Inc. both use the same publicly funded highway to get their goods into the city, and the same Comcast-owned roads to deliver to customers throughout the city. Comcast can deliver goods faster because they have a warehouse in the city. So Google pays to build an air-delivery network (peering) and a warehouse in the city (CDN). I don't see the problem with any of this. The analog to net neutrality, then, becomes whether or not to allow Comcast to (abuse its monopoly ownership of the roads to) raise or lower the speed limit for individual delivery trucks, based upon whether or not they belong to Google, Comcast, or Mom-n-Pop.
As I've said, IANANE, so feel free to point out any relevant inconsistencies in this analogy. On an 'unrelated' note, Amazon...
I have to say that while I agree that the marketing is devious, in practice my bandwidth has always been at least as good as the "up to" amount the companies have promised. I don't defend these companies in general, but the "up to" speeds & marketing is going to be a hard one to argue against if it's not currently a problem.
I think the lack of market competition is a much bigger problem than marketing techniques. Customers can't "vote with their dollars" because their only two realistic options are 1. internet or 2. no internet.
Net neutrality isn't about forbidding high-traffic companies from finding efficient ways to handle that traffic. Doing what Netflix usually does, having a local cache server hosted within the ISP, works because it reduces the amount of traffic leaving the ISP. As long as the ISP charges the same amount to everyone doing so (0 is a good amount - it's a benefit to them - but if they want to charge a nominal fee, fair enough), it's neutral.
Net neutrality is about not letting ISPs slow down traffic unless they get paid twice.
If the only difference between two sites is that one paid the danegeld and the other didn't, they aren't making one faster - they're making the other slower. Deliberately degrading the performance of everyone else is NOT neutral.
This guy is totally wrong, on so many levels. Yeah, ok, so the last 10 years we've been seeing providers buying preferential treatment from carriers. For most of us, the common Joe, we're not going to feel this, not in 10 years. It's just happening slowly, quietly. I imagine as it progresses further, smaller content providers will be seeing the preferential treatment of larger ones forcing slow downs on them. Given more time, smaller providers and startups will face crushing competition with the big guys who can afford to buy up all the bandwidth. Don't even get me started on content providers whom are also carriers.
And saying just because it's been going on for 10 years that we can't go back? WHAAATT? Is this guy insane? So just because they've been building up contracts of preferential treatment we can't say, "Hey, you need to cut that out now." No sorry, common carrier status for all carriers and be done with this issue. I call shill.
Everyone's arguing about this or that net neutrality opinion... They're missing the big point. The internet is a miracle, and we shouldn't fuck it up.
I didn't have the internet when I grew up. When I wanted to know something, I had to go to the library and read for hours. When I wanted to communicate with someone, I had to write a letter and wait weeks. When I wanted to shop remotely, I had to get a catalog, fill out a form, send a check, and wait 4-6 weeks for delivery...
The idea of instantaneous (or near enough) access to all the knowledge and culture of humanity was a science fiction pipe dream that would only come in a fantastic future. We don't have flying cars, but we DO have access to all the knowledge and culture of humanity. That's AMAZING. That's a miracle.
We finally invented the future. It's here. We have an amazing tool. Now some assholes want to gate it off and double dip, to charge you more than they should, and to charge the giver of knowledge or culture more to be seen, even though we're both already paying for connection.
This is outrageous. This is why we need net neutrality. Real net neutrality. The pipes should not be allowed to dictate WHO gets to play in the bright future.
Net Neutrality is about preventing the providers from fiddling with your bandwidth simply because they want to extort money.
QoS was never part of Net Neutrality. If a Google or an Amazon wants to pay 1Mbps for a line directly to my house, that is FINE with me. They pay for the QoS and peering agreements at that point. However that does not mean the provider can now give me 9Mbps instead of 10Mbps because the Googles of this world paid for 1Mbps direct lines. And that is what this is all about. Comcast/TWC wants to sell my 10Mbps that I have over and over again to the highest bidders so I have 1Mbps to the Google, 1Mbps to the Netflix, 1Mbps to the Amazon and 7Mbps for the rest of the world. I want my 10Mbps and decide who I want to get services from.
I paid Comcast/TWC for the 10Mbps, I could reasonably assume that they give me 10Mbps to the "Internet". They pay for peering at an Internet Exchange. Google pays for peering at an IX, Netflix pays for peering at an IX. The IX makes sure that there is plenty of bandwidth at the IX to have the 10Mbps from Google to go to Netflix and TWC. The problem is now TWC wants to squeeze the Netflixes and the Googles simply because they are a large portion of the traffic they've been seeing and thus they're an easy target. TWC has been oversubscribed 1000:1 and even though data requirements have increased 10-fold, I am still at the same speed that I had 10-15 years ago. So now they need to actually get along with the rest of the world and they don't want to, they'd rather someone else pay for it (over and over again).
In a free market, I would go to whoever gave me the fastest connection to the Netflix. However in the US at least there is no choice so I am at the mercy of my provider. And even though they are a monopoly, they also don't want to be classified as a utility since then they could be regulated and forced to play fair like my other utilities.
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It's funny you should mention package delivery because we already have a great example of this: the Netflix DVD-by-mail service.
This has always been a very efficiently handled product since the relevant middle man has no conflict of interest.
It's amazing how much less problematic that dinosaur of a product is. You have first sale protecting the right of Netflix to continue offering stuff and a parcel service that is a common carrier.
Meanwhile, the streaming service is surrounded on all sides by evil jack*sses with some entrenched monopoly interest.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... McMillen gets it wrong, too.
Net neutrality isn't achieved through regulation at all. It's achieved by public ownership of the physical infrastructure and demoting the ISPs and even backbone providers to contractor status serving the common good. What would happen if American roads and highways weren't for the most part publicly owned and instead were all toll roads privately owned by the construction companies that laid them? Who would benefit from that situation, do you suppose?