‘Throttling’ not about Net neutrality
p2pnet news | Freedom:- The following was submitted as a letter to the Editor of the Hill Times.
It wasn’t included in the publication last week >>>
Re: Federal government, CRTC right not over-regulating internet, says Cisco Systems.
There is an interesting observation about the responses to the debate about throttling. Phone companies want the Internet to act more like phone services where people are charged per transaction (per call, per minute, per packet, per byte).
Cable companies want the Internet to act more like cable service (bundles of “channels”, tiers of access services, etc). Cisco wants to sell more expensive routers which are capable of deep packets inspection and prioritization, even though in many situations increased fiber capacity is cheaper than these routers.
Canadian Internet Service Providers, represented by CAIP, simply want to offer Internet Services without the packets of their customers being inspected or manipulated by third parties.
Cisco claims they support the ability of an ISP to use whatever policies they want to manage congestion and other issues within their network. I agree with the sentiment, but believe that there are two issues where regulation is clearly required.
First, it makes no more more sense for every ISP to run their own cables to every customer premise as it does for ever retailer to run their own roads. While governments own the road infrastructure and the distribution network for many other public utilities like electricity, we have historical decisions which special cased phone and cable companies. Recognizing convergence we may need to modernize to a high-speed municipal communications infrastructure upon which competing phone, cable, Internet and other companies can build their services.
In the short term we need to strengthen and enforce existing competitive access regulation which Bell Canada seems to be violating with their throttling. In this case Bell is not the ISP, but a third party which is disallowing the ISP from managing their own network. T
his isn’t regulation of the “Internet”, given that the data sent between the customer and the ISP should not legitimately be considered “Internet” packets. Any inspection to determine the contents of traffic to ISPs should be considered both a violation of the regulation and of federal privacy law.
Anyone who claims that ISPs should be allowed to manage their own networks and set their own policy should be strongly opposed to what Bell is doing.
The other area where regulation is needed is in transparency of network operations. Customers can’t make informed decisions about what ISP to hire if ISPs are not required to disclose management policy decisions, or if they are allowed to mislead the public. We are all subjected to Bell Sympatico commercials claim that their services is “consistently fast, never shared”, something which this throttling issue has proven false.
In my case I have hired two different ISPs (Storm and Teksavvy), and both have far less over-subscription (sharing of capacity) than Sympatico does. Unfortunately Bell’s likely illegal throttling seeks to take away the competitive advantage from ISPs that manage their networks better than Bell does.
I support the concept of Internet Network Neutrality, but believe that competative forces may offer better protection of this principle than government regulation. This requires that third parties not be able to inspect or manipulate the services offered by competing ISPs.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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April 23rd, 2008 at 10:43 am
The only hole in your analogy with roads is that the ISPs are using other hardware. If it were simply about the last mile copper, there would be no issue, or throttling for that matter. Bell Canada is a private company (I know all the monopoly history…) and has to get a return on the capital invested within a certain time frame (quarter, year…). The proposal to build out the capacity required for the extreme growth in the internet as we know it would be simply impossible to do financially and with the workforce available.
If you really want a competitive landscape, the CRTC should regulate the physical layer ONLY. The rest should be open competition as you suggest. The crux of the current regulation is that the door is open to smaller entrants who do not have the capital to build out a large core network for themselves including all the hardware that would entail. Until the day that happens, you will see carriers limiting the wholeseller as much as their retail side already is, no more, no less.
As for privacy law, the content of the packet is not being inspected, simply the type. You could be sharing videos of your kids with friends or downloading pr0n. The carrier does not care. In my view, there is no privacy issue. I am not a legal expert though and I am sure the CRTC will bring plenty of those in as they look in to the outcry, justified or not.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:09 am
Bell Canada may (or may not) be a private company, but the network was built with public money and government subsidies, and that infrastructure that was in place to lease resellers the access didn’t actually “belong” to Bell. Concurrent new infrastructures built for Bell’s own purposes may be considered theirs, but the CRTC tariffs installed on the point of deregulation were very clear – that last mile was not “internet” and was bought and paid for by the resellers – Bell had absolutely no business interfering with it.
As for the “packet inspection”, opening packets, either on your own network or someone else’s (Bell is doing both), and regardless of method or purpose, IS illegal.
The purpose of the DPI IS to determine the contents.
How do you think the decision to throttle is made, if they don’t know what kind of data they’re stalling? And, with all the “policing” being demanded by MAFIAA (who are already on a crusade to kill P2P and BitTorrent), do you really think it’s appropriate for a provider to be allowed to have that wealth of info logged by DPI?? Remember, a provider is supposed to be protected from any liabilities, as long as they’re NOT AWARE of WHAT they’re allowing through.
It has already been proven that there is NO BANDWIDTH SHORTAGE, so why invent this propaganda about “bandwidth-hogging file sharers”?…
It has also been proven that today’s HTTP traffic, with its streaming video, online television and music, and picture sharing, etc., is consuming the majority of the bandwidth. Funny how all these providers are getting ready to release their own versions of these online services, YET, we’re supposed to believe this BS that their networks can’t handle file sharing??! C’MON!!
Can you say, “Weapons of Mass Destruction”?!…
Just as Dubya is trying to destroy America’s Constitution and create a Police State, based on a collection of lies – so is Bell trying to ignore elements of the Canadian Constitution, current CRTC restrictions, and Fair Practice Law, while preparing itself to BE THE LAW over the Canadian Internet – DPI, throttling file sharers, eliminating competition, and continuing to sell a product it had no intentions of giving (and still collecting FULL PRICE), while kissing Entertainment Industry butt… A perfect example of a police state, for the Internet!
(Obviously, net neutrality is as far from Bell’s dream as fair competition.)
April 27th, 2008 at 11:37 am
@Devil’s Advocate
That’s why I run my tracker connections through Tor and force transfer encryption. They’re already throttling me, but if they want to know what I’m sharing, they’ll have to work for it.