Network neutrality discussion
In essence, this is a discussion about Quality of Service on the internet. Ultimately, the internet is based on working interconnections between people and organizations, and I believe this interconnection *is not* fundamentally threatened regardless of whether Congress mandates “Net neutrality”, or not.
“Network neutrality” means: the service to people and organizations using the internet is not differentiated based on the destination/origination, content or amount of bandwidth used. This means that currently, for example, you’re not charged, and I’m not charged, for your reading this blog, nor are you charged for video conferencing with your friend using .Mac or AIM just because it’s audio and video. You are not charged for sending an e-mail, nor is anyone for receiving one.
The FCC mandated the principle of network neutrality, and everyone has basically followed suit, until the Supreme Court ruled that DSL and Cable providers are not subject to the same rules and regulation that are telecommunication providers. This ruling by the Supreme Court has been understood to mean that currently there are no rules or regulation that applies to DSL and Cable Internet service providers. This means it’s up to Congress to make those rules and regulations.
The object of debate, is whether Congress should include any language mandating network neutrality. That is, Congress will not require ISPs to differentiate classes of service, in other words, they’re not about to make you or anyone else pay for visiting different websites, sending an e-mail, or using different technologies like video or audio over the internet, but, they might *allow* it.
In my opinion, this debate is a non-issue.
The assumptions of the debate are three:
1. That bandwidth is a scarce commodity 2. That technology exists, or might profitably exist, to measure not only bandwidth for all users and identify content (that is, if you’re using video, audio, or something else) and the destination (the website you’re visiting, for example), and charge discretely and accurately. 3. And, of course, it assumes there already isn’t some discrimination of one sort or another. That is, that net neutrality exists.
All three assumptions are false.
1. If bandwidth is a scarce commodity, why doesn’t it cost more than it did last year? In fact, bandwidth prices continue to drop, or remain flat across the industry. RateXchange, a company founded to trade bandwidth futures, gave up its central mission in 2002. Why? It can be interpreted that this is because there is no profitable market for bandwidth futures. This is the central economic problem ISPs are facing. Many pundits predict the price of bandwidth continuing to decline until its cost is almost $0. What many don’t factor into their predictions, is what we’ve learned about CPU power. That is, while the price per unit may decline to close to zero, the total number of units that may be sold at once increases, and compensates.
2. While there is technology to measure bandwidth usage, there are no mature technologies about which I am currently aware to track origination/destination, type of traffic, and can *account* for such traffic, much less for millions, or hundreds of millions of users.
3. We already discriminate on the internet. One person pays a little for dial up, others pay more for high bandwidth. Some providers prevent you from using port 25 to send e-mail to external mail servers. Some colleges prevent peer-to-peer file exchange. Service providers have their own agreements between each other that shape how traffic is passed between them. Corporations have firewalls that deliver quality of service. Net neutrality is an illusion to begin with, it’s an ideal, not a reality.
Of course some telecommunication companies may be interested in charging for access to their customers. Their interest will be short lived when they begin to lose customers to competitors because of short-sighted pricing decisions.
This written, if congestion becomes a problem on the internet, and that’s a big if, here’s one concept suggested by Microsoft’s Research division, to manage prospective congestion, although there remains the non-trivial problem of accounting for this “pricing”:
Congestion Pricing and a Distributed Game:
http://research.microsoft.com/network/disgame.aspx
