Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Net Neutrality Debate - Terms decide the issue.

I have posted quite a bit about the network neutrality debate. In this post I have decided to handle some of the problems with the terms being thrown around by the telcos and cable companies paid pundits. These individuals often are using deliberately misleading langauge to skew the debate. It's time to control the language of the debate, since many of the opponents of net neutrality often lie during the debate. Here's a great example of a straight faced lie in the editorial section of the Washington Times

"So, for example, Comcast would have to charge Microsoft the same price to send broadband-consuming video content as the individual blogger who uses far less band space.


This is simply false. Microsoft would be charged far more since it consumed far more bandwidth (not fucking band space - band space is the fucking rental garage your band practices in and stores it's gear in). Net neutrality in no way means that prices are the same, it means you don't discriminate on individual packets. With that's example let's dig right into the common false talking points being repeated by these pundits.

1. Google/Yahoo/Microsoft want a free ride.

This of course is completely false. These companies have mammoth isp bills running into the millions of dollars a month. They pay for their bandwidth. No one is getting anything for "free." The end consumer pays for their bandwidth. The telcos want to bill someone twice for the same service, namely access to the someone else's content. It's roughly akin to forcing a telemarketer to pay extra money to "call" AT&T customers. Imagine that if you wanted to telemarket someone, you would be forced to pay additional money to the phone company as they are its customers. Yet that is EXACTLY what the telcos want to do.

2. "Smart networks" are better than "dumb networks"

This recent talking point was highlighted by Tom Giovanetti who said in a recent Mercury news OP/ED piece,

"Smart is always better than stupid. Smart networks are better than stupid networks, and smart public policy is better than stupid public policy."


This is a clever bit of punditry indeed. Since prima facie it would seem reasonable that smart network is better than a dumb network. People like smart. Smart sounds good. Yet the choice of terms is setting the debate. I would suggest when talking about this particular issue, I would always recommend properly framing the debate in the real terms of what is really happening. Let's plug in the accurate terms and see how Tom's quote sounds.

"Discrimination is always better than non discrimination. Discriminatory networks are better than non discriminatory networks."


So when discussing this online or on a television show, make sure to describe the situation accurately. Telcos want the ability to discriminate between services and then charge a fee to those services they want to. The problem is this isn't even good engineering. By trying to examine every packet in the network, you inevitably build a a more brittle failure prone network. The Internet was designed to be a flexible platform different than the switched phone network or a cable. As Farhad Manjoo has pointed out in Salon,

"Unlike other large communications systems -- phone or cable networks -- the Internet was designed without a specific application in mind. The engineers who built the network didn't really know what it would be used for, so they kept it profoundly simple, making sure that the network performed very few functions of its own. Where other networks use a kind of "intelligence" to define what is and what isn't allowed on a system, the various machines that make up the Internet don't usually examine or act upon data; they just push it where it needs to go.

The smallest meaningful bit of information on the Internet is called a "packet"; anything you send or receive on the network, from an e-mail to an iTunes song, is composed of many packets. On the Internet, all packets are equal. Any one packet hurtling over the pipe to my house is treated more or less the same way as any other packet, regardless of where it comes from or what kind of information -- video, voice or just text -- it represents. If I were to download a large Microsoft Word e-mail attachment at the same time that I were to stream a funny clip from Salon's Video Dog, the Internet won't make any effort to give the video clip more space on my line than the document, even if I may want it to. If the connection is too slow to accommodate both files at the same time, my video might slow down and sputter as the Word file hogs up the line -- to the network, bits are bits, and a video is no more important than a Word file.

The notion that the Internet shouldn't perform special functions on network data is known as the "end-to-end principle." The idea, first outlined by computer scientists Jerome Saltzer, David Clark, and David Reed in 1984, is widely seen as a key to the network's success. It is precisely because the Internet doesn't have any intelligence of its own that it's been so useful for so many different kinds of things; the network works consistently and evenly for everyone, and, therefore, everyone is free to add their own brand of intelligence to it."

Let's take a look at Internet Two - the super high speed network that is a test bed for new internet technologies. In the same article "Gary Bachula, vice president for external affairs of Internet2, a nonprofit project by universities and corporations to build an extremely fast and large network, argues that managing online traffic just doesn't work very well. At the February Senate hearing, he testified that when Internet2 began setting up its large network, called Abilene, "our engineers started with the assumption that we should find technical ways of prioritizing certain kinds of bits, such as streaming video, or video conferencing, in order to assure that they arrive without delay. As it developed, though, all of our research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth. With enough bandwidth in the network, there is no congestion and video bits do not need preferential treatment."

Today, Bachula continued, "our Abilene network does not give preferential treatment to anyone's bits, but our users routinely experiment with streaming HDTV, hold thousands of high-quality two-way videoconferences simultaneously, and transfer huge files of scientific data around the globe without loss of packets."

So in other words the telcos attempt to prioritize traffic is less about making it work and more about extracting more money by providing less bandwidth.You can find a full transcript of Bachula's testimony before the Senate here. Let's keep in mind something - I2's bandwidth usage far exceeds anything AT&T is proposing to build for consumers. They are testing thousands of high definition channels simultaneously. As Bachula also points out,

"For example, if a provider simply brought a gigabit Ethernet connection to your home, you could connect that to your home computer with only a $15 card. If the provider insists on dividing up that bandwidth into various separate pipes for telephone and video and internet, the resulting set top box might cost as much as $150. Simple is cheaper. Complex is costly.

A simple design is not only less expensive: it enables and encourages innovation."

How much bandwidth are we talking about at Internet2 installations? More than you can possibly imagine, Bachula goes on;

"At Internet2 universities today, we routinely provide 100 megabits per second to the desktop, and many of our schools offer 1000 megabit (1 gigabit) per second connections to their faculty and students. We have done so using commercially available, open-standards technology and our traffic flows on the very same fiber used by today’s Internet service providers. Today’s typical home broadband connection – which admittedly is a big step up from dial-up – is only about 1 megabit. So the goal of broadband legislation should be to encourage ever-increasing bandwidth.


3. We will not degrade anyone's internet experience or access and if we do, then you can go to the government to fix the problem.

This is the strangest talking point of all. Most of these pundits spend a large part of their post talking about how the government shouldn't regulate the internet. Then any proposed remedy for censoring access to the Internet or services is going to the FTC to complain. Ok and in 10 years after your start-up is bankrupt you might have a favorable decision. Furthermore the random spouting of telco ceos such as AT&T Ceo Ed Whitacre and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg seem to indicate that's precisely what they are planning on doing. See here, here, and here. They then say they won't "affect the Internet". If you aren't going to change anything why say you are? Oh the previous examples where he was actually thinking about what he was going to do and then someone, probably his lobbyist, pointed out that was a bad idea to mention what they were actually going to do. As I pointed our previously, Comcast has cut off access to Craigslist - a text only site that competes with Comcast's newspaper classifieds.

Control the terms of the debate and you control the debate. We need to continue to push hard for a network that has it's intelligence on the edge of the network for continued flexibility and growth. The end to end principle of the net must be maintained.