Yoo Too

Via Julian, Christopher Yoo has an interview at Network Performance Daily. Art Brodsky has a rebuttal, and Yoo ripostes.

I have to say I don’t find this argument by Yoo terribly persuasive:

Allowing broadband providers to use different protocols can also expand the number of dimensions along which networks can compete with one another for business. Employing different protocols might permit smaller network players to survive by targeting sub-segments of the larger market, in much the same way that specialty stores do when confronted with competition from a low-cost, mass-market retailer. For example, network diversity might make it possible for three last-mile networks to coexist: one optimized for traditional Internet applications (such as e-mail and website access); a second designed to facilitate time-sensitive applications (such as streaming video and VoIP), and a third incorporating security features to facilitate e-commerce and to guard against viruses, spam, and other undesirable aspects of life on the Internet. By mandating that the entire Internet operate on a single protocol, network neutrality threatens to foreclose this outcome and instead force networks to compete on price and network size-considerations that reinforce the advantages already enjoyed by the largest players.

The whole point of the Internet is that it is (as the name implies) interconnected. An “Internet” service that only connected you to a subset of the world’s computer users would be dramatically less valuable than the current, public Internet.

But for quality of service to work, it would have to work from end to end. Congestion can happen at any point along the network, so it makes little sense to do a lot of work offering performance guarantees for the last mile while the backbone remains a best-effort network. So as far as I can see, any prioritization scheme would have to be adopted by the whole Internet. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to have different ISPs running different protocols.

I’m also not sure I understand the point of the Akamai example, since I don’t believe anyone thinks that Akamai would become illegal under a network neutrality requirement. Obviously, if there’s language that would inadvertently ban Akamai, that would be something everyone would agree needs to be changed, but I haven’t seen an example of language that would make Akamai illegal.

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