Norms, networks and neutrality

Obviously Kevin doesn’t realize that the point of the blogosphere is not to be right, but to be right before everyone else. You’d think he’d have figured that out after the whole Iraq war thing.

I think the technical details underscore the difficulty guaranteeing net neutrality, but for most people they only obscure the issue.

The question as I understand it is better stated more simply: Should providers of Internet access (ISPs) be permitted to selectively control the access their customers have to Internet-based services (say, Vonage or peer-to-peer networks)?

There are many reasons an ISP might want to do this: they may charge service vendors to handle their content, or they may want to discourage the use of high bandwidth services like p-to-p filesharing services to improve network performance for other purposes.

So lets say the a group of end computers defect first. What then?

By preference I’m a consumer of text. I’m not at all certain that consumers of more demanding media, or their providers, shouldn’t pay more, to the extent that bandwidth is a limited resource.

When the company which provides my internet connection last forced me to upgrade, they enticed me with the offer of a faster connection, which I declined, since the latency of the sites I visit has a much larger effect on my experience than their throughput. But then I’m a textual deviate.

If your preferences run to music or movie downloads, it’s entirely reasonable to charge you a premium proportionate to your impatience, so long as bandwidth is fixed and the game is zero-sum.

So long as there is dark fiber, though, is this the case? Are we out of unused capacity yet?

This is all about the telcos not wanting to upgrade their data pipes, even though the other parts of the wired world are leaving us in their 100Mbps dust (and in places like Japan are getting it for about $40/month).

As has already been pointed out, note that the cable companies aren’t with the telcos on this. That’s because their pipes (which happen to be cables) can handle the demand already. The telcos’ data pipes can’t, and they don’t want to spend the money needed to upgrade them.

@Cian
Filtering by application is how ISPs already give their VOIP better quality.

I don’t think ISPs should care about the bit destination.
I do think they should be able fight amongst themselves about the costs of carrying each others traffic.

Umm, given everything you’ve just written and obviously read, how is this not a no-brainer?. You’ll have christian groups boycotting networks to try and shut down porn sites. you’ll have every interest group in the country pressuring every network to ban such and such sites. This will completely and utterly destroy the internet as any sort of communication tool, public forum, gigantic shopping mall.
Give people the power to exclude and they will exclude. this site won’t be covered by most networks. It will be left out because it’s liberal and bad for business. You say to move beyond the obviousness that the current system works. but why? If it works (and it obviously does or it wouldn’t have exploded over the last decade into most homes in this country) then don’t fuck it up by altering it and allowing human biases into the mix.

Geez, I don’t understand the hostility here. Why the deregulation of AM radio has turned it into a vast free market of ideas where anyone from Michael Savage to Rush to Imus gets to debate policy and theology ranges from Jesus-With-An-Axe to Jesus-With-Big-Fucking-Rock. Obvously, the market ensures that the political and theological concerns of the bandwidth owners and advertisers are separated completely from the choice of content.

I can’t wait to be able to choose between jesus.com and praise-the-leader.net! And think of the advertising competition.

There are almost always ways to improve working but imperfect systems and programs. Sure. But why even have this discussion now?

Until the last 4 years or so, I was not generally a “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” person. This congress and this executive have turned me into one. They have managed, in every single instance, to turn every possibility for improvement into a debacle.

There may well be some way to actually improve the internet but I am not going to sit by and let this group of corrupt incompetents push through the first idea that the telecos’ K Street buddies dreamed up.

I think it must be killed for now – simply killed. I don’t think we have the option of trying to debate the finer points here. Trying to argue out the details and assure that all the required fine tuning actually makes it into the law will be a major and time consuming effort under the very best of circumstances. This is certainly not that time.

Why not just charge higher rates for people who use more bandwidth?

That’s how it works now. I have a 3MB DSL with covad. I pay more than my next door neighbor who has a 768K line with Verizon. (Although my packets travel over Verizon copper and fiber before reaching a covad DNS server.) And, of course, the backbone providers charge ISPs for moving their packets. The more packets, the more they pay.

The point of the linked article is that net neutrality implicitly assumes the continuation of the internet culture driven by cooperation and the sharing of slack resources. We can no longer make that assumption. But the solution is not to authorize packet discrimination for a price. Even if cheating is possible and hard to prove, we want it to be regarded as cheating.

Myself, I think the federal government should partner with Google, light up some dark fiber and make itself a backbone provider that operates without traffic charges. The economic benefits of an open internet dwarf the costs this would entail.

I happen to think the telcos won’t be able to do this. The internet is too intertwined with too many aspects of running American businesses.

On the commenters who’ve said they don’t care; they just want to get served text, it’s worth noting that 2000 characters of text at, say, the Washington Post is accompanied by substantially more content than that, in the form of advertisements

I don’t know about the technical issues but this sounds to me like nothing more than a corporate protection racket. “Uhh, you got a nice site here… hate to see it… you know… slow down, hmm? Your customers might not like it… specially since the site you’re competin’ with is stilll nice and fast—they know how to show some respect. So whadda YOU gonna do to protect yourself?”

How is this not extortion?

As to consumers paying a premium for items that require more bandwidth, they already do. DSL and cable costs such a premium for faster, broader bandwidth service. From what I’ve read this new objective would undermine faster access that consumers already pay for by extorted favoritism on the transmission end.

The whole point of this is to maintain the status quo. Big telcos want to change it and so it has been necessary to codify the principles of the net. It is quite simple. The bill Ron Wyden introduced boiled down to (as reported on Cnet):
Any content provider must be awarded bandwidth “with equivalent or better capability than the provider extends to itself or affiliated parties, and without the imposition of any charge.”
Or how about this:
“No packet may be discriminated against based on origin.”
Enforcement is a technical issue, but it isn’t too hard. Is a client receiving packets from a content provider as efficiently as the content from the service provider? If not, it is possible they are violating the law. Investigation ensues.

Obviously, the enforcement details need to be worked out (you don’t want everyone calling the FCC because their Internet connection “seems slow”), but they are hardly intractable.

Duncan’s very simple point, which he clearly enunciated on Eschaton.

Sorry, but Duncan clearly enunciated nothing on Eschaton, as per his custom. He responded with what could be charitably called a petty schoolyard taunt, but Duncan’s post was so slight, and Kevin’s so innocuous, that one would have to read quite a bit of material beyond the posts in question to glean any motivation for Atrios’s post beyond the urge to reiterate that Kevin Drum is onh his shit list.

Your own response (“Whatever the theoretical merits of making this or that change in the status quo, the bunch currently in power in Washinton must NOT be trusted with doing anything at all. These guys could turn motherhood and apple pie into just another K street scam”), a mere two sentences, enunciated vastly more concerning the subject than Atrios’s, which served more to articulate some grudge with Kevin Drum than anything else.

It is a no brainer.

The same “different kinds of discrimination” exist in equities trading. That does not mean that ‘market timing’ or ‘late trading’ should get Congress’ seal of approval. And THat is what the telcoms are seeking, Congress’ OK to pick our pocket (and in the process quite the rabble getting the sheeple all worked up usin’ teh fancy Intrawebs!)

lungfish, I thought the following by Atrios was very clear indeed:

More generally this is a telco lobbyist written bill being run through a Republican congress without much public discussion pushed by people like known steward of the public good Dick Armey.

I’m sure one can concoct some technical explanations why some fantasy change to net neutrality could be a good thing, but that’s not what’s going to happen here. One could also propose some fantasy change to Social Security which could be a good thing, but all that does is play into the hands of those who will, in fact, be making the change. And killing the internets.

Look, Henry it is very simple, Republicans are scumbag fucktards and anyone who doesn’t call them scumbag fucktards is an idiot and/or a wanker. We can discuss policy details later, after we win back congress. And anyone discussing policy, instead of calling Republicans scumbagging fucktards, is getting in the way of us winning back congress, and is an idiot.

So, for now, in response to any proposed bill, the only proper response is a short post that goes someting like this –

Look at what those scumbagging fucktards are up to now!

Any deviation from the above approach means you are an idiotic tool of the fucktarding scumbags.

My thoughts as a scumbagging fucktarder are –

Theoretically service providers need to discriminate between high(and mid and low) tier customers. When I am downloading porn, and a high burst comes through, my packets priority can be downgraded, but the packets of another high tier customer using this VOIP thingy would need to be given priority.

Otherwise everyone would need to pay more for service or service would suck for services prone to having problems with this jitter thingy.

Any way after reading ‘everything’ that is how it seems to me.

So theoretically it seems like there is a legitimate need to ignore net nuetrality. But maybe I am wrong?

What incentive does Comcast have for screwing VOIP users? Do they provide phone service over their lines?

Maybe Cian could expand on her/his post above?

Theoretically service providers need to discriminate between high(and mid and low) tier customers. When I am downloading porn, and a high burst comes through, my packets priority can be downgraded, but the packets of another high tier customer using this VOIP thingy would need to be given priority.

This is not what is being talked about here. You are confusing the smoke with the fire.

What is being talked about is services being given provision based on their relationship with the provider, which is not a particularly valuable thing unless you are intentionally downgrading the service of others.

Perianwyr,

That isn’t what I got from Ed’s posts.

‘Scenarios for network discrimination typically involve an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who looks at users’ traffic and imposes delays or other performance penalties on certain types of traffic. To do this, the ISP must be able to tell the targeted data packets apart from ordinary packets. For example, if the ISP wants to penalize VoIP (Internet telephony) traffic, it must be able to distinguish VoIP packets from ordinary packets.’

But you are probably right and I am probably wrong. I think Cian tried to tell me(everyone) that above.

‘Filtering according to who the destination is – is not reasonable.’

It is ok to give my IP priority(I pay for more service) and my packet type priority but it is not ok not give my destination priority? Because that is how you would – services being given provision based on their relationship with the provider?

Do I have it right now?

“What incentive does Comcast have for screwing VOIP users? Do they provide phone service over their lines?”

Suppose for a moment you ran Comcast and your objective was to maximize revenues. Your customers are paying Vonnage and even Skype to carry voice over your monopoly cables. You go to Vonnage and say, “gimme a share or I will make the same offer to Skype or even run Comtron-VOIP myself” or you go to the local telco monopoly and say, “gimme and i will impose a surcharge on VOIP packets on my wires” or ….

The cable companies and telcos have government imposed monopolies on last mile. Back in the days when the US was a raving left-wing socialist state, the evil feds required such monopolists to be “common carriers” so that they would not be tempted to play such games. But now that we live under the Leader in a Rich People’s Republic, we know that interfering with the power of monopilies is BAD and we accept happily whatever deals they offer us and ask for another.

Second, efforts to unbundle the local loop in Europe – i.e. to allow new entrants to compete effectively with dominant telcos in providing broadband. This was great in principle – but in practice proved more or less impossible to implement (the dominant telcos proved adept at exploiting loopholes in the regulation to hobble their competitors).

That was also the case in the US during the time of enforced line sharing.

Strangely in Hong Kong, perhaps due to a regulatory organisation unwilling to put up with ILEC shenanigans, line sharing was quite successful. Broadband penetration is one of the highest in the world, data pipes are cheap, and quickly installed. {Of course, now that the market has been grown to saturation, the ILEC tycoons, Li Ka-shing and son Richard, have gone back to their paid politicians and had line sharing eliminated to drive the mature market back in to the monopolies’ hands.}

I really wish Jon Postel were still alive.

The concept of filtering based on content (i.e. video, text, etc.) makes sense and would allow for a more efficient use of bandwidth. I believe that it providers started filtering based on destination there would be a customer revolt. Internet service providers have no incentive to prevent their subscribers from viewing desired content. Consumers are more savvy than our tired, old politicians think. If one provider blocks or slows specific sites, that subscriber can easily pick another provider. The ability of customers to freely switch internet providers prevents the need for added regulations.

Exactly right, twpk. I fear big government’s regulation far more than I do the telcos and the market…