At last week’s UCLA Technology & Aging Conference, representatives from Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Toyota and other big-name firms discussed how technology is reshaping lifestyles for older individuals. However, important policy implications directly connected to these new tools went unspoken.
RFID (radio frequency identification) tags that can monitor the status of older individuals, face-recognition video systems that allow two-way video calls when someone simply enters the room, and robot-assisted remote telesurgery are just a few of the amazing systems described at the conference.
Eric Dishman, Intel’s director of product research and innovation, discussed his company’s goal of getting “rid of the nursing home” and putting “technologies in people’s homes.” Dishman is working from a distributed computing point of view, where caregiver expertise can arrive across time, and medical technology can be distributed from outdated institutions to an individual’s most frequented location.
Technology like RFID tags connected with wireless networks can help create an “always on” health monitoring system, thereby transitioning society away from a “mainframe” medical model and redirecting it toward a smaller, more personalized, PC-type model. This is a great idea, yet the unspoken truth is that this type of communication requires healthy, innovative networks. That raises a key question about Net neutrality, an issue spun and respun by many.
Essentially, it involves a fight over whether network operators, such as Verizon or Comcast, are allowed to continue to set the price for their services and prioritize information that rides on their pipes.
History shows that government regulatory and price controls have a negative effect on innovation, and applying them to the Internet — as Net neutrality advocates want to do — would be disastrous for rolling out newer, faster and more efficient network services. This makes one wonder if Intel’s research and innovation department ever talks with its lobbying arm, because in 2006 the company foolishly jumped on the Net neutrality bandwagon.
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This is cross-posted from my newly re-designed site at www.soniaarrison.com.
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It seems a little like this is an attempt to find a problem that could be created by net neutrality; if this is the case you need to provide more specifics, because the likely net work bandwidth requirements for the applications you are describing would be quite low, and it is doubtful they would be adversely affected by net neutrality. In fact, if I was designing such a system I would probably want the network to respect the end-to-end principle--an important component of net neutrality.
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But let's suppose such a system is so large and so demanding, it couldn't really coexist with all the other traffic. In a world without neutrality, Big Telecom can charge these services for high speed connections, prioritize them, and fail to deliver on another innovative platform's high speed connection package. This seems... acceptable, except that nobody really gets what they're paying for.
With network neutrality, the ISP would have to expand their bandwidth. Update routers, lay down cable, invest millions of dollars, but the key word is invest. Keep in mind, this future medical technology uses bandwidth and Internet connections, which means they're being paid for.
In other words, with net neutrality, in this weird, semi-plausible instance, the worst case scenario is that Big Telecom has to invest in new infrastructure to handle growing traffic, knowing full well people will pay for all that traffic.
That's hardly problematic.
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As an Architect who works much in the healthcare field, IT is causing a revolution in healthcare delivery, driving things like new concepts in triage, bedside registration, automated delivery of pharmaceuticals. Much of this innovation is using open source software, which would seem to rely, ultimately on a set of standards, and therefore, to be friendly to net neutrality.
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Future net neutrality proposals could extend to networks used for remote surgery, but I don't see how the NN bills now pending in Congress would regulate the networks likely to be used for remote surgery.
RFID health monitoring, on the other hand, sounds like a persuasive reason to oppose neutrality beacuse it could feasibly be impacted by
neutrality laws. The elderly might soon wear tags to transmit health information like heartbeat to remote monitoring services. Presumably this data would travel from the RFID tag to the monitoring service via the Internet, over the old person's residential ISP. Enigma may be correct in stating that the quantity of health data being transferred would be fairly insignificant, but even still, the data must reach its destination as rapidly as possible without degradation or delay so that a heart attack or cardiac arrest can be detected immediately and emergency personell can be dispatched.
@Genius--the tubes are getting increasingly clogged, especially during peak hours. Many ISPs can't deliver all the promised bandwidth during times of heavy use. And even when ISPs are deliverng full bandwidth, not all packets reach the destination at the same speed. Also, plenty of backbone routers are now delaying some traffic by a few hundred milliseconds to make way for higher priority traffic. If traffic prioritization were illegal and time-sensitive medical packets were delayed, that could mean the difference between life or death.
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I would favor an unregulated environment if I could trust it. Proposing that we have unfettered capitalism begs the real world question that ISPs have already demonstrated that they cannot be trusted. Further, the role of any capitalistic enterprise is profit.
Ryan, for example, postulates that net neutrality would have an adverse effect on remote surgery and that we would need an unregulated environment to allow packets to be prioritized. OK, but what if the ISP says that you would be charged $100,000,000 per second for that remote surgery connection! Hey, its a free market, you are on the surgery table and have no other option. Can't afford it, I guess you die. Too bad we didn't have net neutrality.
If an SP can charge premiums to move (prioritize) packets on the internet, who is to say that the priority traffic would really be "critical" data. For all I know drug dealers could buy up all available high priority bandwidth leaving your small local rural hospital with no money and no internet access. Of course what I am saying is absurd.
My point is that those who are opposed to net neutrality have failed to present a well reasoned logical argument, that recognizes the flaws of unfettered capitalism, in a manner that would make me switch my viewpoint.
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Primarily, net neutrality is a regulatory framework for residential ISPs. Commercial Internet access servics are already widely sold with committed information rates and bounded delay guarantees. The hospital example would be handled by one of these commercial accounts and is really outside the scope of NN regulations.
So the question that NN proponents have to answer is why residential Internet customers should be forever banned from purchasing the kind of service tiering that's already commonplace in the commercial sector. Is it because they're so stupid they need to be protected from themselves by the Nanny Government?
ISPs may be an effective duopoly in many areas, but customers can still get the benefits of competition and diversity if the ISPs are allowed to sell service packages that provide different price points. NN regulators don't want that to happen, of course.
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Still, your conception of the marketplace is flawed. Your hypothetical nightmare scenario of ISPs charging extreme sums for packet priotization is not going to happen. Similarly, drug dealers buying up all the prioritization is absurd. Are you worried about heroin addicts buying up all the syringes, leaving none for sick people who actually need them?
I admit that because there are too few ISP choices, providers have excessive market power and can do "bad" things that they couldn't do in a more competitive marketplace. But competition is increasing all the time, and in a few years I predict that last-mile constraints will be largely resolved thanks to emerging wireless alternatives. But this is a separate issue for another debate.
@ Richard--good point. Dedicated, commercial-grade networks aren't subject to neutrality laws proposed so far. But wouldn't you agree that the underlying drive for openness, neutrality, and non-discrimination poses political risks for commercial networks that don't seem vulnerable today? I fear the growing push for neutrality might eventually be extended to other spheres.
You also make a good point that NN would prevent future service tiers offering different levels of packet prioritization. Soon, bandwidth won't be the only thing consumers buy. Low latency and packet loss may soon be another factor in consumers' purchasing decisions. But NN as it stands means such market experimentation with new pricing structures won't happen.
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Well, Richard you seem to be an implacable foe of any regulation, and seem to believe that any government initiative is a bad one.
However, back in the real world, governments are involved in regulating many of the rates that consumers pay for telephone, water, and electricity, to name a few utilities.
So my questions to you are:
1. Do you really think those efforts are wrong, too?
2. Is there something special about the provision of residential broadband that precludes the normal functioning of government as a regulator of natural monopolies?
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Back before Ma Bell secured regulation to protect itself from competition, many homes had several competing firms providing telephone service on different sets of wires.
Even today, most people have at least TWO firms providing broadband service--phone and cable companies. If 2 firms can manage to not only survive, but to prosper and keep investing more, there is probably room for more entrants were it not for artificial barries.
Plus, Verizon is building FiOS from scratch. That's a brand new infrastructure being added to 2 existing ones. If the investment incentive is sufficient to justify Verizon spending billions laying new fiber--despite the obstacles from local franchising authorities--surely there is enough profit opportunity to spur investment in new broadband lines in other areas.
And soon there may be broadband-grade wireless alternatives. 50-megabit LTE perhaps? In a few years even the most ardent supporters of natural monopoly regulation will have to admit that wireless internet has eliminated the last-mile problem.
Electricity is not a natural monopoly for the same reasons. There is no reason multiple firms cannot provide power over different sets of lines, or even the same set of lines. Grid deregulation has yet to be tried on a massive scale. (California only deregulated the production, not the grid, resulting in massive problems.)
Water pipes may be a "real" natural monopoly justifying government regulation. This is because the costs of laying pipes are enormous, even compared to laying wire, but the value of the good that flows over these pipes (water) is fairly low.
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@Ryan, my examples were purposely absurd.
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Future health care technologies that require reliable networks might never emerge--or at least be delayed--on account of expansive neutrality laws that some proponents of net neutrality would support. So in a sense, it is perfectly reasonable for Sonia to argue that a world in which all networks were neutral might have more death than a world in which network owners could discriminate free from government intervention.
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Were that that were true; it's not for many in my area. There is only one option, with some areas of Saint Louis County having no options, other than satellite, which isn't really a direct competitor to ADSL or Cable broadband.
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