Don’t be neutral on Net Neutrality
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- What is (or isn’t) net neutrality?
The Wikipedia has an answer, defining it as a “neutral broadband network” free of, “restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams”.
It goes on »»»
Neutrality proponents claim that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model for the purpose of profiting from their control of the pipeline to remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and buoy their otherwise uncompetitive services. Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important as a preservation of current freedoms. Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, Tim Berners-Lee, father of the web, and many others have spoken out strongly in favor of network neutrality.
While »»»
Opponents of net neutrality include large hardware companies and members of the cable and telecommunications industries. Critics characterised net neutrality regulation as “a solution in search of a problem”, arguing that broadband service providers have no plans to block content or degrade network performance. In spite of this claim, certain Internet service providers have intentionally slowed peer-to-peer (P2P) communications. Others have done exactly the opposite of what Telecom spokespersons claim and have begun to use deep packet inspection to discriminate against P2P, FTP and online games, instituting a cell-phone style billing system of overages, free-to-telecom “value added” services, and anti-competitive tying (”bundling”). Critics also argue that data discrimination of some kinds, particularly to guarantee quality of service, is not problematic, but highly desirable. Bob Kahn, Internet Protocol’s co-inventor, has called “net neutrality” a slogan, and states that he opposes establishing it, warning that “nothing interesting can happen inside the net” if it passes: “If the goal is to encourage people to build new capabilities, then the party that takes the lead in building that new capability, is probably only going to have it on their net to start with and it is probably not going to be on anybody else’s net.”
‘Yes, net neutrality exists, and has existed …’
“Until the strengths of the Internet Protocol are acknowledged explicitly in standards-making and legislative policy-making channels, net neutrality is just that: follow the principles of practice in the Internet Protocol,” says Seth Johnson who is, among other things, a US information policy advocate.
“The key advantage is its general purpose nature,” he says, stating, “If you’re talking about something that takes that away, then we need to distinguish that from what the standards are designed to provide already,” going on
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Yes, net neutrality exists, and has existed: it is the natural result of having many competing autonomous routers on a common carriage medium, which must do what IP does in order to interoperate and make connectivity possible across independent routers and networks all over the world.
It was when we lost common carrier and lots of ISPs that we lost that dynamic — as a result, now “network management” can be a ruse for killing net neutrality.
In that situation, you simply have to hold the network providers to the general purpose nature of the platform.
Seth is also the online organiser for New York Fair Use and coordinator of the DPS Project. He’s based in New York, but net neutrality is something which’ll affect everyone online and, ultimately, off, and when the project asks, “Is there a place for fresh thinking and new recommendations in the infamous ‘network neutrality’ debate?” – the question can be applied everywhere, including Canada.
The DPS Project goes on »»»
In the following document we recommend the prosecution of distorted offerings of Internet connectivity as “deceptive practice.”
When several incumbent telephone carriers announced their plans to give preferential treatment to favored Internet sites, a wide range of Internet users and designers felt in their guts that it somehow violated the very meaning of the term “Internet.” On the other hand, many of these people feel uncomfortable letting Congress set parameters for Internet service. It is safer to deal with Internet offerings as a market issue, not to legislate fundamental protocols or router behavior.
As a way to break the impasse, we offer the following draft language. We believe the gut feeling — that one cannot discriminate and still call the service “Internet” — is founded in reality. The very term “Internet” suggests that participants assume their traffic will be passed without interference; the concept is backed up by over thirty years of standards and ISP behavior.
In effect, under the present circumstances, the system of developing specifications, which involves the writing and review of formal documents known as RFCs, which has held since the beginning of the Internet, would be tossed out by a few large providers and equipment manufacturers and replaced by corporate fiat. The loss of an open, consistent, and predictable platform would also crimp innovation at higher levels.
Thus, we recommend that Congress clarify the meaning of offering Internet connectivity and set up rules for the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the definition.
‘… filter, augment, and otherwise monitor…’
Still over the border in the States, “IEEE recently ran a lengthy article in the latest (July 2009) issue of Spectrum, their major monthly publication, called A Radical New Router — essentially describing and promoting a smarter network router to better manage traffic,” blogs Kyle Brady, continuing »»»
Overall, an interesting piece that could prove highly useful in the industry, but throughout, the author and inventor of the technology, Lawrence G. Roberts, makes references to the so-called need to filter, augment, and otherwise monitor certain kinds of traffic – specifically, peer-to-peer (P2P) content. This base assumption from which he operates over many sequences of logic is incorrect, despite producing good insights into the current state, and possible future, of the modern global network. Not to mention having participated in its invention.
Whenever the subject of bandwidth usage and availability comes up in any public forum, P2P traffic is inevitably blamed with “hogging” bandwidth, “clogging pipes”, and other such euphemisms that imply wrongdoing and questionable use. The reality, no matter what the telecommunications or cable companies say, is that bandwidth is not disappearing into the ether due to the massive usage of protocols like BitTorrent. These myths and halftruths are perpetuated by internet service providers (ISPs) because they can produce a better bottom-line by spending less on equipment and infrastructure to support their userbase – as well as the copyfight-abuse organizations like the RIAA and MPAA because, when taking the longview, they have the same goals: reducing P2P traffic by any means necessary in order to potentially achieve higher profit margins.
Examples abound of ISPs delivering the speeds expected, or close to expected, for common traffic like web-browsing, email, and IM conversations, but getting heavily choked to lower levels (sometimes resembling dialup speeds) when a Torrent file is active – regardless of legality, content, or source. When the ISP will even admit to doing so, which is rare, they tend to blame their need for such filtering based on total bandwidth availability – “5% of the users in some networks [consume] 75% of the bandwidth”, to quote Roberts’ article. While it is hard for the ISPs to support such claims with hard evidence, this is improbable at best – how can a user consume that much bandwidth when they are prevented from doing so in the first place?
“The tech community likes to think that ‘the cloud’ is the future of computing, meaning accessing remote rich applications via a web browser, and this means an increase in network traffic, purely by default – this is already being seen thanks to Facebook, Google, and countless others,” says Kyle, gong on P2P traffic is a part of the “massive increase in bandwidth use,”, but is, “by no means the singular culprit”.
In the days of Usenet and bulletin board services, who could have predicted a common, open, and mostly free global network? – he asks, adding:
“If the network administrators of the time had decided to prevent an evolution of protocols, merely on the basis of profit, the modern Internet would not exist.
“This is not to say that prioritizing network traffic, as the majority of the Spectrum article addresses, is not valuable. Packaging data streams such as video and audio together for processing and transmission could have substantial benefits on network stresses and overall activity patterns – evolving from ‘dumb’ to ’smart’ routers is a necessary step in expanding the capacity, functionality, and ability of the Internet. However, there is a considerable difference between ‘prioritizing’ and ‘filtering’ – prioritizing means temporary delays that the end-user will never notice, on the scale of milliseconds, while filtering is restricting or preventing entirely the transmission of data.”
Stay tuned and if you’re Canadian, as Tom Koltai suggests,
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
July, 2009
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