Net neutrality: ‘horrifically ambiguous’
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Net neutrality can’t happen. Not ever, says Tom Koltai.
Repeatedly.
But could the term itself be as much of a problem as the problem?
It’s, “horrifically ambiguous, at best,” says Christopher Parsons in a Reader’s Write addressing Tom’s post.
Chris (right) is working for his PhD at Victoria University on Vancouver Island, BC, and he has a special interest in DPI (deep privacy invasion – our phrase, not his).
“Personally, I’d be happier if we dumped that chant and start speaking about the very specific underwriting the chant, and think through who developed those principles and the motivations,” he says.
But before he gets to that, “I don’t think that Canadians should be enthused about DPI-based throttling, especially given how it is occurring today,” says Chris, going on »»»
There are legitimate worries with application-specific throttling (and the technology itself, given the chance of lawful access provisions being put into law). Application-specific throttles tend to disrupt whatever the ‘new technology of the day’ happens to be, which makes it more difficult for emerging technologies to take hold in markets. Giving ISPs a pass on P2P establishes precedent for them to discriminate against future ‘problem traffic’ and genuinely be the gatekeepers of the next century. If we must throttle, the need should be clearly demonstrated to the public (i.e. not just filed in confidence) and then done in a protocol-agnostic fashion.
One of the issues that is regularly noted in Canadian discourse is that the major telcos are also major content providers – this means that limiting the activities of some users who are using P2P to access content can actually be a boon to the telco business model. I’ve no idea if this is a similar case in Australia. From my perspective, if a dominant carrier wants to throttle the hell out of their retail users, that’s fine. It becomes a *real issue* when the same dominant carriers throttle all wholesale traffic as well. There are alternate ways of dealing with wholesalers, that could include higher traffic costs when their users are generating disproportionate amounts of congestion on the network – this might see wholesalers to deploy appliances of their own to address congestion while ensuring QoS, and effectively encourage new ways to deal with these issues. DPI need not be the only solution to these issues; you might see smaller ISPs adopt P4P, or other techniques and technologies to alleviate congestion.
Most of the telecommunications carriers recognize that pricing mechanisms *will* affect usage patterns, the issue is the time that it takes for those patterns to be changed. Cogeco, in their filings to the CRTC, was reasonably explicit about this. At the moment, however, Canadian wholesalers of DSL are in a situation where Bell can change the contract and are only required to inform the downstream ISPs if there are ‘material changes’. The issue: ‘material’ remains just as ambiguous as the definition of ‘congestion’ for the ISPs presently involved in the bandwidth management proceeding.
(On an aside: I’ve spoken with owners of small (under 10K users) ISPs, and they’re scared to death that Bell could come out of nowhere and just raise rates and only provide a 30 day warning (an increased rate constitutes a ‘material’ change). Bell just doesn’t tend to play well with others, but the ISPs most worried about being screwed are terrified to speak up, for fear that Bell will turn their eye on them. The market here has a titan or two, and those who are trying to eek out existences off the titans’ networks are worried about being crushed like gnats.)
When there are frequent power shortages that limit the provision of electricity to homes, this is recognized as a critical public issue, just as when there isn’t enough water in Australia to prevent a drought. In Canada, there are continuing efforts to digitize information flows and shift more and more away from ‘analog’ modes of data transmission. As a result, there are going to be increasing expectations, on the part of Canadians, that digital communications systems are able to transmit data as reliably as analogue means of transmission. Now, I agree with Tom – ISPs operate best effort networks. At the same time, we’re in a situation where Canadians are expecting more and more services to be piped over networks, and ISPs’ marketing machines are spewing rhetoric about how they can meet these expectations. Unfortunately, in ISPs’ competition to win market share, they are failing to inform customers that these networks are best effort. I imagine that if less ‘car rhetoric’ was used to describe packet flows, and there was a concerted effort to actually educate consumers, that there would be fewer complaints. I also tend to treat my fellow Canadians as smart enough to understand packet flow dynamics, given some time and a bit of attention span…
Stay tuned.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Not ever – ‘Canadian surfers don’t know physics’, July 8, 2009
deep privacy invasion – Deep Packet Inspection: netscapes of power, July 7, 2009
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