Here is some material generated by PFF scholars:
My short paper “Net Neutrality: Video Dialtone Redux?” A quote:
Right now there are huge opportunities for growth and expansion of broadband networks and services, including content. And problems as well, from spam to capacity limits, from authentication problems to quality of service issues. Hopefully these issues all have technical solutions, but deploying those solutions is going to take some capital. Do we really want to narrow the business models that can be used to raise and recover that capital down to… video dialtone for the Net?
Testimony of Kyle Dixon before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, February 07, 2006.
Testimony of Randolph May before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, March 30, 2006.
“The Economics of Net Neutrality: Why the Physical Layer of the Internet Should Not Be Regulated,” by Christopher S. Yoo, PFF Progress on Point 11.11, July 2004.
See also “Are ‘Dumb Pipe’ Mandates Smart Public Policy? Vertical Integration, Net Neutrality, and the Network Layers Model,” by Adam Thierer, Journal of Telecommunications & High-Technology Law, Vol. 3, Issue 2, 2004.
More links below:
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The New York Times has the latest evidence that Hollywood is clueless when it comes to selling its products on the Internet. Hollywood has finally gotten around to offering users the opportunity to purchase and download movies online:
New movies will cost about $20 to $30 to download; older titles will cost as little as $10. The downloads will be available on the same day that the DVD is released–quicker than rentals, which are put online about 45 days later and cost $2 to $5.
Last time I looked, you can get DVDs of new videos for less than $20 from Amazon.com. So an Internet download will be more expensive than buying the movie on DVD. But at least there will be some new functionality, right?
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I’ve been meaning to comment on Ed Felten’s fantastic four–part discussion of the nuts and bolts of network discrimination for a while now. In particular, I think his second installment hints at a strong argument against network neutrality legislation:
If a network provider is using minimal delay discrimination, and the high-priority traffic is bursty, then low-priority traffic will usually sail through the network with little delay, but will experience noticeable delay whenever there is a burst of high-priority traffic. The technical term for this kind of on-again, off-again delay is “jitter”.
Some applications can handle jitter with no problem. If you’re downloading a big file, you care more about the average packet arrival rate than about when any particular packet arrives. If you’re browsing the web, modest jitter will cause, at worst, a slight delay in downloading some pages. If you’re watching a streaming video, your player will buffer the stream so jitter won’t bother you much.
But applications like voice conferencing or Internet telephony, which rely on steady streaming of interactive, realtime communication, can suffer a lot if there is jitter. Users report that VoIP services like Vonage and Skype can behave poorly when subjected to network jitter.
And we know that residential ISPs are often phone companies or offer home phone service, so they may have a special incentive to discriminate against competing Internet phone services. Causing jitter for such services, whether by minimal or non-minimal delay discrimination, could be an effective tactic for an ISP that wants to drive customers away from independent Internet telephone services.
Here’s the problem: let’s say Congress has passed a strong network neutrality rule and charged the FCC with enforcing it. Comcast installs some new network equipment that happens to increase the jitter on its networks. Some Vonage user gets annoyed and files a complaint with the FCC.
The FCC investigates. Comcast says that they installed the new routers for reasons that were unrelated to impeding VoIP traffic. Perhaps the new router offers improved performance in other respects, such as increased throughput or better network-maintenance features. Although they suspect Comcast’s executives chose the routers deliberately to increase jitter, they have no way to prove it. The FCC will be forced to make a judgment call: did Comcast violate network neutrality or not?
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.