Yesterday I engaged in a lively luncheon debate about Net neutrality regulation with Ben Scott of Free Press at a Catholic University Law School event on “Implementing the National Broadband Plan.” To open the debate, I made a very quick 5-Part Case against Net Neutrality Regulation. I argued that the the objections to a Net neutrality regulatory regime can be grouped into 5 major categories: (1) Legal; (2) Economic; (3) Engineering; (4) Practical; and (5) Philosophical / Principled. Down below you will find my working notes to see how I then elaborated on each objection in a bit more detail. And then Ben and I engaged in some spirited banter for the next 45 minutes.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the video of our debate is online just yet, but once it is I will post it here. However, the folks from NextGenWeb asked me to shoot a short 2 1/2 min video clip after the debate summarizing my remarks. If you can stand the sight of my big fat head in your browser for that long, here ya go:
The 5-Part Case against Net Neutrality Regulation
The objections to a Net neutrality regulatory regime can be grouped into 5 major categories: (1) Legal; (2) Economic; (3) Engineering; (4) Practical; and (5) Philosophical / Principled. Each objection will be briefly summarized below: Continue reading →
Claims that Google has abandoned its stance on network neutrality have been thoroughly debunked, as Cord and Adam note below. Over at Broadband Reports, Karl Bode explains that Google is seeking edge-caching agreements, not preferential treatment. Edge-caching involves Google housing its content on servers located inside consumer ISP networks, cutting bandwidth costs by allowing users to access Google content located just a few hops away.
Even though edge-caching doesn’t violate network neutrality as defined by Google, it’s still one of the many advantages that big players have over new entrants. Edge-caching isn’t a “fast track,” as the WSJ imprecisely terms it, but rather a short track—functionally, there’s a lot of similarity between the two. As Richard Bennett has explainedtime and time again, being close to end users is quite advantageous even without preferential treatment, as it eliminates the need to push vast amounts of data across the congestion-prone core of the public Internet.
We’ve heard about how edge-caching enables content providers and ISPs to cut their bandwidth bills and make more efficient use of finite network resources. Both of these are true, but there’s more—edge caching makes it much less likely that users will experience long load times or buffering hiccups while watching streaming video online. That high-def YouTube clip might take a few extra seconds to buffer if it has to make its way through congested central network exchanges—not so, however, if that video is housed just a few hops away, within your ISP’s network.
In 2007, Nemertes Research conducted the first-ever study to independently model Internet and IP infrastructure (which we call “capacity”) and current and projected traffic (which we call “demand”) with the goal of evaluating how each changes over time. In that study, we concluded that if current trends were to continue, demand would outstrip capacity before 2012. Specifically, access bandwidth limitations will throttle back innovation, as users become increasingly frustrated with their ability to run sophisticated applications over primitive access infrastructure. This year, we revisit our original study, update the data and our model, and extend the study to look beyond physical bandwidth issues to assess the impact of potential logical constraints. Our conclusion? The situation is worse than originally thought!
We continue to project that capacity in the core, and connectivity and fiber layers will outpace all conceivable demand for the near future. However, demand will exceed access line capacity within the next two to four years. Even factoring in the potential impact of a global economic recession on both demand (users purchasing fewer Internet-attached devices and services) and capacity (providers slowing their investment in infrastructure) changes the impact by as little as a year (either delaying or accelerating, depending on which is assumed to have the greater effect).
This is a subject that my colleague Bret Swanson has written a great deal about, so I’m sure he’ll be commenting on this study at some point. Even if you don’t agree with the conclusion Nemertes reaches, as Richard Bennett notes, the report is well worth reading just the background information on public and private peering, content delivery networks, and overlay networks.
Tim Lee has been taking some heatherefrom Richard Bennett and Steve Schultze about various aspects of his new Net neutrality paper. I haven’t had much time this week to jump into these debates, but I did want to mention one important portion of Tim’s paper that is being overlooked. Specifically, I like the way Tim took head-on some of the silly free speech arguments being put forth as a rationale for net neutrality regulation. As Tim notes in the introduction of the paper:
Concerns that network owners will undermine free speech online are particularly misguided. Network owners have neither the technology nor the manpower to effectively filter online content based on the viewpoints being expressed, nor do profit-making businesses have any real incentive to do so. Should a network owner be foolish enough to attempt large-scale censorship of its customers, it would not only fail to suppress the disfavored speech, but the network would actually increase the visibility of the content as the effort at censorship attracted additional coverage of the material being censored.
I think that’s exactly right and, later in his paper (between pgs 22-3), Tim nicely elaborates about the “Herculean task” associated with any attempt by a broadband provider to “manipulate human communication.” Not only is it true, as Tim argues, that “no widescale manipulation would go unnoticed for very long,” but he is also correct in noting that the public and press backlash would be enormous.
Again, I agree wholeheartedly with all these sentiments, but I think Tim missed another important angle here when discussing the unfounded fears about corporate censorship and the misguided attempts to use free speech as a justification for imposing net neutrality regulations.
If we’ve learned anything at all about from the history of Internet-as-utility, it’s that this strained analogy only applies in cases where there is no existing infrastructure, and probably ends best when a publicly-financed project is sold (or at least leased) to a private company for upgrades and management. We should be suspicious of projects aimed at providing Wi-Fi mesh because they’re slow as molasses on a winter’s day.
I don’t see any examples of long-term success in the publicly-owned and operated networking space. And I also don’t see any examples of publicly-owned and operated Internet service providers doing any of the heavy lifting in the maintenance of the Internet protocols, a never-ending process that’s vital to the continuing growth of the Internet.
Sherman:
Pursuing a public utility model while also desiring competition are fundamentally contradictory goals. Utilities are designed not to compete. Do you, or does anyone you know, have a choice of providers for water, sewage or electricity?
My second question would be: is there anyone in the technology world who sees public utilities as a model for innovation? A 1.5 megabit connection (T1) was an unimaginable luxury when I started in tech in the mid-90’s. It was for well-funded companies only. Today, it is a low-end consumer connection and costs around 80% less. Has your sewage service followed a similar trajectory?
A public utility is designed to be “good enough” and little more. There is no need, and little room, for differentiation or progress. Your electricity service is essentially unchanged from 20 years ago, and will look the same 10 years from now. Broadband, on the other hand, requires constant innovation if we are to move forward — and it has been delivering it, even if we desire more.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
Comments 
Posted in: Broadband & Neutrality Regulation 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
