Net neutrality: ‘killing your competition’
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- There was friendly joshing between the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRCT) and Bell Aliant Communications Partnership and Bell Canada lawyers when the former wrapped Day Six of its hearings into net neutrality in Canada.
At its conclusion, chairman Konrad von Finckenstein joked with the Bell reps, “We spent a bit more time with you than the others, but since you caused this in the first place … ”
“Laughter,” says the official CRTC transcript.
All pals together. Nudge nudge. Wink wink.
But Canadians aren’t amused as they watch efforts by the big Canadian telecom companies to turn the Net into a privately owned cash cow steam ahead.
Michael Geist has a day-by-day run-down of the salient points »»»
1. The rate of network traffic growth is slowing. This was raised midway through the first week by Professor Odlyzko and was subsequently confirmed by several ISPs. The revelations ran counter to the general sense before the hearings that ISPs cannot keep pace with the rate of growth. In fact, it turns out the opposite is true – reasonable new investment in the networks can address current growth rates.
2. There is a wide variation in the use of traffic management tools with a different approach for pretty much every major ISP. There are those that throttle all the time (Cogeco), during large chunks of the day (Bell), only during congested periods (Shaw), or not at all (Telus, Videotron). There are those that throttle upload only (Rogers) or upload and download (Bell). There are those that use “economic measures” such as bit caps effectively (Videotron) and others that doubt it can be an effective approach on its own (Bell). This points to the fact that granular rules will be difficult, but broader principled tests are essential.
3. The rules for retail and wholesale will be different. The hearing surprisingly included a near-rehearing of the Bell v. CAIP case. Wholesale services were much discussed as the CRTC recognized the potential of independent ISPs to inject additional competition into the marketplace. Based on the evidence, it would appear that the problems with wholesale are largely a Bell problem. Many other ISPs that offer wholesale services do not traffic manage or have such small wholesale businesses that the impact is fairly small. Bell is a big player in the wholesale side and they have designed their network in a manner that makes it difficult to fully exploit the competitive potential of smaller entrants. While CAIP argued for rules against wholesale throttling but against retail restrictions (thereby abandoning consumer interests), the opposite seems more likely to occur.
4. Disclosures are woefully inadequate in Canada. Each day brought new and surprising revelations about how little ISPs tell their customers about their traffic management practices. By far the most egregious was Rogers, which admitted that it charges tiered pricing for faster upload speeds but that all tiers were throttled to the same speed when using P2P. In other words, the Extreme subscriber who pays $59.99 per month and is promised fast upload speeds (1 Mbps) actually gets the same upload speed as the Express subscriber who pays $46.99 per month and is promised upload speeds of 512 kbps. There were similar stories from many other ISPs, who disclosed actual speeds that bring P2P down to a virtual crawl. Disclosure has improved over the past year as the issue has gained prominence, but there clearly is a long way to go.
5. Managed networks vs. public Internet. ISPs do not focus on the fact that many run managed IP networks offering telephony and IPTV on the same pipe as the public Internet services. When asked whether the two impact each other, the answer came back that it could. In fact, ISPs were at pains to say that while it could happen, it would not happen since they ensure that they provision enough bandwidth for their managed services. Yet in examples such as Bell’s three users promised 5 megs but with only 10 megs to share, it was apparent that the same cannot be said for oversold public Internet services.
6. The Commission takes privacy seriously. The ISPs seemed surprised that the Commission regularly asked about the privacy impact of throttling and deep-packet inspection. The Commission was similarly surprised when Bell admitted that Canadian privacy law would permit the use of DPI data for marketing purposes with the customer’s consent.
“Where to from here?” – Geist wonders, adding »»»
The parties will have a couple of weeks to file final submissions and a decision will likely take several months. My best guess is that the Commission will likely leave the wholesale side alone, though a best case might be to place restrictions on traffic management where the provider has the capability of differentiating between wholesale customers. Bell says that they cannot do so today, but the introduction of usage based billing might change that equation.
On the retail side, I think a four-pronged approach is possible. First, the Commission could adopt the Open Internet Coalition/CIPPIC style test based on Oakes that permits traffic management practices so long as they further a pressing and substantial objective, are narrowly tailored to the objective, and are the least restrictive means of achieving the objective.
- This test would give useful guidance to ISPs and ensure that there are appropriate limits on traffic management practices that have no clear correlation with network congestion.
- Second, the Commission can affirm the role of current law against undue preferences and work to stop any attempt to leverage network management for unfair advantage.
- Third, it can establish minimum disclosure requirements including information on traffic management practices such as time, targets, and speeds when shaping.
- Fourth, the Commission can establish a prohibition against the use of DPI data for any purpose other than network management.
Of course, the Commission could decide to do nothing and simply retain the power to address complaints as they arise. If that approach is adopted, I think there would be significant political pushback, with political parties seeking net neutrality legislative reform.
‘Ignorant, stupid, or both …’
p2pnet reader Irate Pirate also has a few thoughts.
“The big ISP’s don’t want the government putting their nose into private affairs,” he says. “They claim that they will always act in a fair and honest manner, in accordance with whatever is best for their customers. In all of the history of this planet, has there ever been a business that wasn’t tempted to abuse their powers when the temptation was present?
“If the CRTC truly believes these companies will always act in the best interest of their customers, they are either ignorant, stupid, or both.
“No matter what claims the ISP’s may make, ultimately they will always do whatever is best for their bottom line. It’s obvious from the hearings that they look at their bandwidth as a physical commodity. When it comes to selling any product of limited quantity, the idea is always to sell as little of that quantity as possible for as high as price as possible if you can get away with it. DPI is a win win because it helps to do exactly that.
“The potential for privacy intrusion is merely a future side benefit when no ones looking (killing your competition, targeted ads, etc).”
IP continues »»»
Monopolies make all of this worse. It’s apparent from the hearings that the big ISPs want the CRTC to believe running their business is highly competitive but I don’t believe them. I’m not 100% sure but I’d hazard a guess that most provinces only have one or two broadband options (if their lucky). I guess I shouldn’t be surprised seeing as how Ontario and Quebec tends to think they make up the bulk of Canada and that all the other provinces don’t exist. My point is that while I would applaud an economic solution over a technological one, there isn’t nearly enough competition throughout Canada to make it all that much of a better solution. If an ISP isn’t allowed to slow down traffic, they will simply move to a cost per byte solution to achieve the same end effect.
The biggest reason this option is less desirable for ISPs is because it creates a potential PR problem. Throttling is the cheap quiet solution, one where the majority of their customers are none the wiser about how they are not getting what they paid for. Bit caps and charging per byte on the other hand requires being up front with customers and making them aware that they will probably be charged more. There is also the increased costs associated with running such a system.
DPI is set it and forget it while charging per byte requires accurate tracking and resolving all the billing issues that would inevitably pop up. Economic solutions thus carry a greater risk of ISPs losing customers.
A major part of the problem is how the internet should be considered a necessary public service that belongs to all of humankind. ISPs, especially those with large networks and a lot of money invested, don’t see it that way. They see the internet as belonging to them. It is their network and they should be able to do anything they want with it. I’m guessing that this type of thinking is why we don’t see peering. Clearly the keys to the internet should have never been given to private corporations in the first place. What we’re ending up with is a bunch of loosely connected private networks, not at all anything like what the internet was originally meant to be.
It’s clear to me that if governments doesn’t start creating clear guidelines for a true and proper public internet that is 100% neutral, what we’ll end up with is something akin to what we see with China and other totalitarian countries.
Another thing that kept popping up is upload versus download. The ISPs seem to be saying there is no connection between the two. Perhaps that is true at the moment, but what happens when all the other privately owned networks out there start throttling upload speeds? Wouldn’t downloads eventually slow to a crawl? Bells statements make them sound like what people using p2p apps like to call a leech. They take but they don’t give. As far as I know, for every download someone has to upload. No uploading means no downloading.
My fear is that the internet could be reduced to an unusable mess some day if ISPs are allowed to use throttling as a means of managing bandwidth instead of building bigger, faster networks. Throttling is cheap, upgrading to optic fiber or better is expensive. Or do I have all of this figured out wrong? I’m not a network geek or anything and I still haven’t read up on peering.
ISPs (and Tom*) like to use cars and roads as their analogies (sorry Devil’s Advocate, I’m sick of them too heh). The one I keep seeing is how someone downloading a movie is the same as someone stopped in their lane on the highway, preventing anyone else from ever using that lane again. I’ve having trouble with this one (besides the obvious question as to why others can’t simply go around the stopped car lol). Wouldn’t someone who is throttled while downloading a movie be like a car driving very slowly down his lane of the highway? If so, wouldn’t the ideal solution be to get him to his destination as fast as possible so that the lane is freed up? I know someone is going to reply that no matter how fast you allow that downloader to go, he will always be taking up that lane. But that doesn’t make sense either! I can only go by my own usage of course, but I don’t download movies and music 24/7/365 (I don’t think anyone can as hard drive capacity would be just one issue).
“So far,” Irate Pirate adds, “I’ve only downloaded two audio albums, three movies and a couple of TV shows over the last month. Some months it’s less than that. I fail to see how increasing speeds (aka capacity) to get “automobile drivers” off the road as fast as possible can be seen as anything other than good. In fact if the ISPs had made sure there was enough bandwidth available on a per person basis to begin with, we wouldn’t even be talking about these issues right now.
“Am I right?”
*’Tom’ is economist Tom Koltai, himself a former Internet Service Provider. A regular p2pnet contributor based in Australia, with considerable determination, he presented the view from what many, if not most, surfers see as the Dark Side – the ISP side.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
July, 2009
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July 16th, 2009 at 11:25 am
The CRTC should take a road trip to Europe to see competition working and then start they questioning of Bell. CRTC doesn’t know of any other business model than the one they have now. Thus things will never change. This hearing is mostly for the gallery, then everyone goes back to the same ways with some having a little fatter wallets than before.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
As I have reminded Professor Geist several times directly during the hearing, there’s an even simpler problem here that the CRTC seems tempted to ignore altogether:
If these ISPs market “unlimited” packages of connectivity at certain upload/download speeds, and then immediately throttle these connections (either brute-force or via DPI) specifically so that they have more capacity to sell to more suckers – err, “customers” – marketed as unlimited, this is called “fraud.” It is not a question of debate, or net neutrality, or peer to peer traffic characteristics. Fraud. If I opened a gas station that sold “unlimited” gasoline for $500 a month, and then immediately only let people get 20 gallons before I said “oh, wait, no, can’t use more than that – I won’t have any gas for other customers and how am I supposed to make a profit anyway?” – people would laugh at me, before I was charged with fraud and sent to prison for stealing money from my customers by lying about what I was selling.
These ISP are flouting long-established law when it comes to the treatment of advertised services and the consequences of intentionally lying about what you are selling – and directly profiting from it. There’s no clause in this body of law that says “oh, well, you can lie about what you sell if you really need the profits” or “well, everyone ‘knows’ that if you say you are selling one thing but deliver another, that’s what we expect so it’s all cool” – nope.
This has nothing to do with notifying customers AFTER they have purchased that you have “changed the rules” and won’t deliver what they are paying for. Nor does it matter if you bury, in 30 pages of tiny-font legalese, a note that you “reserve the right to deliver whatever the hell you feel like delivering.” If your ads say “unlimited bandwidth 2 megabits down, 800kb up” and you decide to deliver only 200kb up so you can make more money, you are committing commercial fraud.
Every one of these lying, monopolistic, self-service ISP shills should be in prison for stealing money from their customers via retroactive “capping” of advertised capacity. The fact that they are doing this capping not only to make more money, but also to handicap potential competitors and engage in other sorts of sleazy behavior makes the whole thing worse – but doesn’t change the underlying fraud. They are called “laws” because they apply to EVERYONE – not just those lacking enough lobbyists to bend the rules for their own benefit.