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doc_strangeI've wondered whether the drive to "Net Neutrality" is little more than a drive to force private property to act like public property, without the deep government interference... except where the government decides which violations of "neutrality" to prosecute/fine/etc., creating an ad hoc regulatory scheme out of the current administration's political goals. Ultimately, I see it as a struggle for the control stick, and little more. But the struggle for the control stick isn't one of simple greed (Internet provisioning is not itself actually a very profitable business; just look at the pure-play backbone shops' quarterlies for profit; it has to be married to content and, ultimately one way or another, ad revenue), but of something deeper, social, and perhaps a complicated product of 250+ years of complex government-private interaction in regulation, license, and tax. I'm ultimately concerned the arguments are happening skew to whatever real problems are out there (I think that about a lot of social issues), so here are some disconnected thoughts on the topic to get some dialog going here. I appreciate any helpful new ways to slice the potato.
I hate comparing the Internet to roads (or tubes or what have you), but the neutrality argument occurs at a 50,000 foot level, at which it is probably worth thinking of them all as systems of transit, commerce, and communication. Therefore, while I am about to go into some tech policy, I'd like to keep the history of roads in the US in mind, particularly the period of booming long-haul road growth, driven by private firms and public-private trust organizations and then bought up by the public with the actual consent of the turnpikes' various owners. Let's note the for-profit turnpikes had similar profit margins as today's Internet providers, which is to say, not so much despite decades of thinking it would all pay of some day. And then, conversely, let's note the current trend to semi-re-privatize the operation of our public toll roads (e.g., the Chicago Skyway).
Ok, so back to neutrality, the struggle for control also raises the question of whether issues of non-neutrality are actually going to affect the public interest at a level of significance that new laws will resolve. The argument is that sites that are bandwidth pigs will be bandwidth limited by end users' ISPs, or by their own ISPs, or that the backbone providers will limit and control bandwidth among peers and partners. For pay of course. I.e., providers will limit popular sites or popular high-speed access services seen as bandwidth pigs that need to be controlled lest a few harm the experience of the rest and the providers go under. The neutrality argument is they will do that in anti-competitive ways, not just to keep their own customers on equal footing and the data flowing smoothly.
That premise breaks down some on examination. Oh, it happens a little. But it has had negative results for the limiter when the power has been abused anti-competitively.
Backbone providers already do some non-neutral things - not by content but by peer quality and/or contract. They peer openly where it is mutually valuable, which is almost everywhere. Where it isn't seen that way, they try to limit flow or charge, often with bad consequences for the organization that thinks it has the upper hand as its own end-users raise hue and cry. Let's recall all the Level 3, Sprint, and Cogent flaps. The issue is that their own users are a mix of consumers and providers: Providers who can be bandwidth capped or charged more for bandwidth if they use it, and users who want access or they will go elsewhere if they can. In short, any backbone provider making its coin from a balance of end user and data provider customers will find the issue to ultimately be not worth pursuing for simple business reasons someone in their optimization dept. failed to notice.
ISPs may see it differently, but then, if (say) Bob's DSL Provider decides that people are killing its speeds by pulling tons of video, it can - and does today - traffic shape by traffic TYPE, but only at the point where its own total bandwidth is tapped out. In the areas easiest to provide access and where profitability is good for reasons of low overhead, customers have many choices. Let's all recall how poorly cable providers did despite monopoly until they started to allow (and advertise themselves as) FASTER speeds. Why bother trying to limit by provider? If they do limit customers' speeds to a popular data provider, they risk losing their customers, who are quite fickle these days in any place they can be (let's not get into places where monopolies are held, since that has its own area of regulation that could be used with no new laws necessary).
Or such abuses see the public make a flap over it, which is perhaps far worse than customers leaving. Indeed, the whole net-neutrality issue seems to have risen, based on huge flaps that have themselves corrected the bad behavior. Public sentiment is so strong against content filtering and source-based shaping, that creating laws around this may actually shelter the organizations doing what we now consider unsavory. Let's recall the CAN-SPAM Act, which more or less legitimized spamming in the effort to stop it.
That all reminds me of the roads question. And the telephone company question. We broke up the telcos from a public-private monopoly partnership into a bunch of competitive units (which, like the Blob, are slowly coming back together...). Now we want to, in a way, force the competing Internet providers to act like one happy family (and whether they are presently mostly doing that is eclipsed by the flaps over where they are not).
In short, after taking all that in, the question is not whether we need to enforce neutrality on private players. It is whether we are at a point where turning privately held turnpikes into public utilities will benefit the general commercial good, or hinder progress. Given our recent history with taking public flaps and regulating the underlying issue, I think we're likely to make things worse right now. The non-neutrality issues remain mostly theoretical as market reactions and public sentiment whip the violators of the neutrality principle back into line. Where that doesn't happen, the provider is often in the right - a "partner" is really a life-sucking abuser of the provider's open access, getting for close to free (as a "peer") what their own competition has to pay for. I don't think Congress, with or without the help of our tapped tech committees (made of people with significant financial stakes in some of the players) is in a position to get anything so fluid right.
They screwed up spam - something practically on fire at the time, which much of the big money opposed, and which >95% of people despised. How can they possibly get "net neutrality" right when it is only just smoldering, when we've only just begun to see how the players will work it out on their own, where the "helpful techies" almost all have massive financial stakes in seeing a warped version of "neutrality," and when most people barely understand the issues?
I hate comparing the Internet to roads (or tubes or what have you), but the neutrality argument occurs at a 50,000 foot level, at which it is probably worth thinking of them all as systems of transit, commerce, and communication. Therefore, while I am about to go into some tech policy, I'd like to keep the history of roads in the US in mind, particularly the period of booming long-haul road growth, driven by private firms and public-private trust organizations and then bought up by the public with the actual consent of the turnpikes' various owners. Let's note the for-profit turnpikes had similar profit margins as today's Internet providers, which is to say, not so much despite decades of thinking it would all pay of some day. And then, conversely, let's note the current trend to semi-re-privatize the operation of our public toll roads (e.g., the Chicago Skyway).
Ok, so back to neutrality, the struggle for control also raises the question of whether issues of non-neutrality are actually going to affect the public interest at a level of significance that new laws will resolve. The argument is that sites that are bandwidth pigs will be bandwidth limited by end users' ISPs, or by their own ISPs, or that the backbone providers will limit and control bandwidth among peers and partners. For pay of course. I.e., providers will limit popular sites or popular high-speed access services seen as bandwidth pigs that need to be controlled lest a few harm the experience of the rest and the providers go under. The neutrality argument is they will do that in anti-competitive ways, not just to keep their own customers on equal footing and the data flowing smoothly.
That premise breaks down some on examination. Oh, it happens a little. But it has had negative results for the limiter when the power has been abused anti-competitively.
Backbone providers already do some non-neutral things - not by content but by peer quality and/or contract. They peer openly where it is mutually valuable, which is almost everywhere. Where it isn't seen that way, they try to limit flow or charge, often with bad consequences for the organization that thinks it has the upper hand as its own end-users raise hue and cry. Let's recall all the Level 3, Sprint, and Cogent flaps. The issue is that their own users are a mix of consumers and providers: Providers who can be bandwidth capped or charged more for bandwidth if they use it, and users who want access or they will go elsewhere if they can. In short, any backbone provider making its coin from a balance of end user and data provider customers will find the issue to ultimately be not worth pursuing for simple business reasons someone in their optimization dept. failed to notice.
ISPs may see it differently, but then, if (say) Bob's DSL Provider decides that people are killing its speeds by pulling tons of video, it can - and does today - traffic shape by traffic TYPE, but only at the point where its own total bandwidth is tapped out. In the areas easiest to provide access and where profitability is good for reasons of low overhead, customers have many choices. Let's all recall how poorly cable providers did despite monopoly until they started to allow (and advertise themselves as) FASTER speeds. Why bother trying to limit by provider? If they do limit customers' speeds to a popular data provider, they risk losing their customers, who are quite fickle these days in any place they can be (let's not get into places where monopolies are held, since that has its own area of regulation that could be used with no new laws necessary).
Or such abuses see the public make a flap over it, which is perhaps far worse than customers leaving. Indeed, the whole net-neutrality issue seems to have risen, based on huge flaps that have themselves corrected the bad behavior. Public sentiment is so strong against content filtering and source-based shaping, that creating laws around this may actually shelter the organizations doing what we now consider unsavory. Let's recall the CAN-SPAM Act, which more or less legitimized spamming in the effort to stop it.
That all reminds me of the roads question. And the telephone company question. We broke up the telcos from a public-private monopoly partnership into a bunch of competitive units (which, like the Blob, are slowly coming back together...). Now we want to, in a way, force the competing Internet providers to act like one happy family (and whether they are presently mostly doing that is eclipsed by the flaps over where they are not).
In short, after taking all that in, the question is not whether we need to enforce neutrality on private players. It is whether we are at a point where turning privately held turnpikes into public utilities will benefit the general commercial good, or hinder progress. Given our recent history with taking public flaps and regulating the underlying issue, I think we're likely to make things worse right now. The non-neutrality issues remain mostly theoretical as market reactions and public sentiment whip the violators of the neutrality principle back into line. Where that doesn't happen, the provider is often in the right - a "partner" is really a life-sucking abuser of the provider's open access, getting for close to free (as a "peer") what their own competition has to pay for. I don't think Congress, with or without the help of our tapped tech committees (made of people with significant financial stakes in some of the players) is in a position to get anything so fluid right.
They screwed up spam - something practically on fire at the time, which much of the big money opposed, and which >95% of people despised. How can they possibly get "net neutrality" right when it is only just smoldering, when we've only just begun to see how the players will work it out on their own, where the "helpful techies" almost all have massive financial stakes in seeing a warped version of "neutrality," and when most people barely understand the issues?
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 04:36 pm (UTC)- It seems silly to me that people are having these discussions at all, given that some ridiculous majority of the fiber in the world is still dark. This is one of those problems that, at least in terms of resources, seems like it ought to be a non-problem, and yet it is. Okay, some of it is a last-mile problem, but not all of it -- three years ago here in Leuven they took up all the sidewalks and laid fiber to all the buildings, yet I'm still on WiMax because ... why?
- I suspect that a lot of the concern about net neutrality actually comes from concerns over how the game has played out in the mobile space. The big telco players have a deadlock on the available spectrum and they like this whole notion of renting trickles of it back to users on locked-down platforms. (And why shouldn't they? It makes them boatloads of money.) But now the boundary between "mobile" and "wireless" is blurring, and this Matters to mobile providers -- every packet that goes over wifi is a packet they're not expending spectrum on. Can you imagine the uproar if Sprint started fingerprinting packets that came from iPhones (probably not that difficult of a task) and routing them at a lower priority? Verizon and AT&T would fall all over themselves advocating for network neutrality.
- The remark immediately previous went a very different direction from what I had originally intended, which was to point out that with the advent of devices like the iPad, and walled-garden networks rather than walled-garden services, the threat of a get-em-coming-and-going model for bandwidth in general is suddenly much more real, and there are those of us who are very concerned about what that means for freedom of speech, particularly since (as I like to keep harping) the spectrum is supposed to be a public resource -- and it very much isn't, thanks to nearly a hundred years of the FCC managing it as if it were scarcer than it is.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 08:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 08:41 pm (UTC)The most important one is the law of unforeseen consequences. Imagine, if you will, a world in which every traffic-shaping decision is fodder for a lawsuit. The current administration is likely to throw a bone to its class-action lawsuit backers by putting a private cause of action into any law.
Even worse, this will be a backdoor to regulation of content. Imagine that "unsavory" web sites (or disfavored, e.g., Pirate Bay) can be denied realistic bandwidth and as such starved out of existence. ("By law, any web site with X-rated photos may not have more than Y of the 'public' bandwidth.")
The flip side of all this is that, in the end, government does tend to grant monopolies for the last mile of the Internet: cable rights, air rights, etc. Here in the Big City I can easily change providers and as such the checks and balances that are inherent to capitalism continue to work. Out in the sticks... that's something else.
On the whole, I put my trust in capitalism over government regulation any day of the week.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 02:19 pm (UTC)Before delving into the complications, it is transparently obvious that one owner for both conduit and one or more brands of content is a conflict of interest. It is in the interest of the consumer that the direct provider of the conduit not be committed to some brands of content over others.
One of the most aggressive fallacies is that Google, for instance, uses immense bandwidth "without paying for it". This is deliberately deceitful because the recipients are each paying for the bandwidth. I receive large amounts of mail "without paying for it."
The opportunity to double-charge by charging "content providers" for preferred accessibility in addition to charging subscribers as they are already charged now promises enormous increases in profit for no increase of expenditure or product.
If some minority of bandwidth hogs were a real problem, it could be easily handled by tiering pricing by raw volume, which, in fact, is already industry practice. (I've read the fine print on several "unlimited" plans.)
And Moshe, isn't vertical integration counter to disaggregation? You know perfectly well that the internet was invented by the government, and how unlikely it is that anything like it would exist otherwise. (Would you really want the great Redmond brain trust dreaming up ever more arcane ways of preventing the Microsoft Internet® from being compatible with the FOSS Internet?)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 05:04 pm (UTC)Since people raised MANY points, and some, like me, were providing several angles on the discussion, let's try to be specific with what we do and don't agree with. "Um, no" is only helpful if we all know specifically what point in a large set of comments is being described with a "no."
ETA: Ok, TOMORROW... Sorry - busy week...
um, no
Date: 2010-03-10 06:01 pm (UTC)Some of my personal core beliefs about "reality" include, “One size fits all . . . doesn't” and “Reality is hybrid”. The position that the Platonic essence of "free enterprise" is somehow innately and irremediably superior to the Platonic essence of "government" is ludicrous.