A few weeks ago, I blogged on Cato@Liberty about how technology beats law for curtailing video voyeurism. (You may have come across it here in my recent cavalcade of cross-posting.)
Now a TechDirt post shows how technology can beat law for promoting net neutrality. Broadband Reports cites technology to test how neutral a network is, putting users in a position to gauge what they’re getting from their ISP. A watchdog press (inculding folks like TechDirt) stands ready to amplify consumer concerns, adding seasoning to the stew that is a competitive marketplace.
This doesn’t solve the whole problem, but it solves an important part of the problem. As Tim points out, the alternative – public utility regulation of broadband – may address problems in the near-term while tying knots that take decades to unravel.
Alas, Dan Kaminsky, who’s debuting this tool at BlackHat this week, sees it as an adjunct for regulation. But it is just as powerful as a tool for consumers. Take some advice from the people who’ve seen Washington (not) work, people! Stay as far away as you can!
Speaking of which, I have nothing but sympathy for observers like TechDirt Mike, who rarely fails to note the dishonesty, truth-bending, disingenuousness, and astro-turfing that goes on in the net neutrality debate. My first job in politics/policy was advocating against single-payer health care (read socialized medicine) in California. Advocates on each side came to directly opposite conclusions about what the proposed law would do. Each side
honestly believed that the other was composed of complete liars.
Repeat: Run as fast as you can from coercive society! (politics) Run toward cooperation. (markets)
I’ve got a new op-ed over at the New York Times in which I compare today’s Internet regulation debate to the big “network neutrality” debate of the 19th Century: whether the federal government should regulate the railroad industry. As I explain, the pro-regulatory side won that debate, creating the Interstate Commerce Committee. And the results were not good: by the 1920s, the ICC was helping the railroads restrict entry and raise prices. In 1935, as a result of railroad and ICC lobbying, Congress gave the ICC authority over the trucking industry. And the surface transportation industry was uncompetitive for the half-century that followed. As a Ralph Nader report put it in 1970, the commission became “primarily a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market.”
Space constraints prevented me from elaborating very much on the history of the ICC, but there are a lot of striking parallels between the debate of the 1880s and today’s debate. One of the biggest issues was discriminatory pricing. Smaller farmers and merchants complained that the railroads offered larger shippers discounts that put the little guy at a disadvantage. There were even some arguments that railroad monopolies threatened democracy: the railroads tended to give politicians and prominent business leaders free passes on the trains, and there was even an accusation that a railroad refused to ship newsprint to a newspaper that was critical of the railroads.
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This is the most embarrassingly clueless critique of network neutrality regulations I’ve seen in months. Music lawyer Chris Castle explains that the real reason that copyleftists like Larry Lessig are pushing network neutrality regulations is to ensure that ISPs don’t discriminate against peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. In addition to being riddled with technical errors (A VPN is not faster than an ordinary Internet connection, and TCP/IP packets aren’t marked with “DNS addresses”), his argument doesn’t even make sense:
The fundamental reason that massive file bartering can continue is that it doesn’t cost users anything more to use their high speed Internet accounts to send an email to their granddaughter as it does their granddaughter to illegally download 5 gigabytes a day of copyrighted materials.
One can easily understand why the Lessig/Fisher cabal supports “net neutrality” given their continued support of massive copyright infringement through “nodding and winking” litigation. However, it is easy to see how Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand could be used to make free riders pay for their use of the Internet for illegal purposes.
Many BitTorrent and p2p connections are excruciatingly slow as it is. Imagine if end users of these products found themselves dumped to the end of the line unless they wanted to pay for higher speed connections.
As far as I know, no network neutrality proposals to date would prohibit bandwidth metering. And they certainly don’t prohibit charging extra for higher-speed connections. I suppose that neutrality regultions could prevent ISPs from singling out P2P packets specifically for discrimination, but it’s not clear why ISPs would want to do that. If P2P applications use more bandwidth than other applications, then charging high-traffic users more would discourage P2P use without running afoul of anti-discrimination rules. And if other applications are equally bandwidth hogs, presumably ISPs would be interested in controlling those too.
Castle also has a weird, sneering attitude toward encryption. Apparently the only reason a user would want to encrypt his traffic is to hide illegal file sharing. It’s not like users ever transmit confidential financial or medical information over the Internet.
I hope Mr. Castle’s understanding of the law is better than his understanding of the Internet.
There are some interesting comments that you might have missed in response to James Gattuso’s post last week about VoIP quality and network neutrality. Mike Masnick takes him to task for reading more into the Brix report than is merited.
Brix CTO Kaynam Hedayat notes that his company doesn’t take a position on neutrality regualtions, but he added these clarifications:
– Based on comments from the testyourvoip user community more than half the tests were run for pre-qualification purposes (prior to signing up for VoIP). In those cases the users did not know if they had problems or not prior to running the tests.
– Close to one million tests were conducted for this study.
– The types of impairments and degradation factors that we analyzed point to network congestion. We are further analyzing the data to understand the location of congestion (core, last mile, etc.).
– Via the testyourvoip portal we measured and continue to measure “end-to-end” VoIP quality on the internet.
– The tests are conducted between the user’s desktop to one of seven locations across the globe as selected by the user. The seven locations are connected to the internet via high BW connections without any impairments (they are monitored).
Cog linked to this Ed Felten post questioning whether QoS was a good argument for neutrality regulation. Felten concludes that it’s not–that in many cases simply throwing more bandwidth at the problem is a better solution. For what it’s worth, I find Cog and Felten’s position pretty persuasive. Guaranteeing QoS is a difficult engineering problem that’s likely to require rolling out a lot of new and expensive networking hardware across the network, if it can be made to work at all. Simply building out more capacity is likely to be a more cost-effective option, and it has the salutary side effect of increasing peak bandwidth in addition.
On the other hand, Felten, Cog, and I could be wrong. It may be that QoS can be deployed in a cost-effective manner, and that non-QoS network management techniques simply won’t give us the quality of service we need for high-bandwidth, interactive applications. Which is why we should leave network owners with some freedom to experiment. No one has a monopoly of wisdom on network design, and if anyone did, it certainly wouldn’t be Congress or the FCC!
Don’t look now, but your VoIP service may be getting worse. According to a report released this week by Brix Networks, an Internet monitoring firm, VoIP quality measurably declined in the past 18 months. Specifically, it found that 20 percent of VoIP calls had “unacceptable” quality, as opposed to 15 percent a year and a half ago. (The data was gathered from testyourvoip.com, a web site operated by Brix).
The chief tech offier of Brix, Kaydam Heydarat, says the decline is the result of VoIP having to compete for resources on an increasingly crowded web. If that sounds familar, it should–opponents of mandated net neutrality have long argued that congestion could hurt time-sensitive applications such as VoIP if network owners aren’t allowed to prioritize traffic. As Mr. Heydarat says: The network is ready for VoIP… But now that there are more services running over the same pipe, carriers need to differentiate packets and prioritize service.”
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One of the most frequently asked questions in the net neutrality debate has been why big Internet companies like Google and Microsoft support regulation so strongly. If, as they say, an unregulated market would squeeze out the little guy, you’d think these big companies would be dead set against regulation. And if opponents are right, regulation would make the Internet on which these companies depend much less efficient.
This should make more than a few shareholders of these companies nervous. So much so that one group–the Free Enterprise Action Fund–wants a shareholder vote to require Microsoft to prepare a report on its stance toward this regulation.
The Fund, it should be noted, is not a neutral observer. It is a mutual fund specifically geared toward “investment and advocacy to promote the American system of free enterprise.” But it raises a reasonable point. “We feel they should be worried about innovation and competition rather than perhaps running to the government for regulation,” says Tom Borelli of the Fund. ” “If they have thought this through and they know what they’re doing, what’s wrong with a report to your shareholders explaining your rationale?” he asks.
Good points. Of course, the proposed shareholder vote will probably not take place–corporation law provides plenty of ways to avoid such embarrassing things. Still, it would be interesting to see such a vote, and if Microsoft shareholders think regulation is in their best interest.
I just got a copy of my friend Tim Carney’s The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money I’ve only had time to thumb through it so far, but I thought I’d mention a fascinating chapter on the Enron debacle.
Tim explains how the California power crisis was largely due to the “deregulation” of electricity that Enron lobbied for. I put deregulation in scare quotes because although the regulatory changes introduced in 1998 did increase competition in some aspects of the electricity market, this was far from a free market. Indeed, as Carney documents, Enron lobbied for rules that would rig the market in its favor: the price of power it sold into the California market was unregulated, but the transmission networks which carried that power had an “open access” regime in which prices for the use of the power grid were set by the government. California also prohibited the utilities from generating electricity themselves, forcing the utility companies to buy their power from middlemen like Enron.
Of course, we know the rest of the story: with retail prices tightly controlled and wholesale prices unregulated, wholesale prices spiked and utilities began bleeding red ink. Enron made a bundle, and California got rolling blackouts.
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I’m consistently amazed with Microsoft’s XBOX 360 and XBOX Live Network, and not just because of the games I can play on it but because of everything else I can do.
I was reminded of that tonight when I got on the XBOX Live Marketplace to look for a new “NCAA Football 2007” game demo from EA Sports that I wanted to download and check out before buying the game. When I got to XBOX Live, however, the first thing I was greeted by was a notice about the latest “Artist of the Month.” So, I gave that a listen.
Then, my wife came into the room and said something about getting a babysitter sometime soon so we could go see a new movie. But she wasn’t sure what she wanted to see, so I pulled up the movie and TV previews page on XBOX Live and downloaded clips from “Superman Returns,” XMEN 3,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and several other movie clips… all in glorious 720p high-def with stunning digital surround sound. (Indeed, downloading all these high-def clips via XBOX encourages me to just wait for home release of the flix because they look much better on my home projector than they do at the theater!)
A short while after that, my kids came into the room so I decided to pull up something for them. I downloaded some clips from Pixar’s new movie “Cars” and then also downloaded a free version of the arcade classic “Frogger” for my daughter to try out. Here was a game that I pumped countless quarters into as a kid back in 1981, and now my daughter was sitting with me playing it for free 25 years later. On the sofa in our basement. With a wireless controller. On an 8-foot wide projection screen. My how times change!
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Headlines are meant to draw readers in, and this one did me: Broadband’s Double-Digit Growth Coming to an End.
Something’s gone wrong with broadband! Quick! To the BroadbandMobile!
In the next instant, I realized that something had actually gone right. You see, double-digit change in percentage-based figures can’t keep going forever. In fact, it can’t last more than about ten time-periods. (Because then you’d have 110% of something, which only makes sense in rock ‘n’ roll, where the loudest speakers go to 11.)
Adoption of broadband is slowing as people who want it have already got it and people who don’t want it persist in not having it. (Bizarrely to people who live every minute of every day online, some people live no minute of every day online – ever. That is perfectly acceptable.)
There is undoubtedly a tiny margin of poor people who can’t afford broadband. But “can’t afford” is subjective. Many prioritize things other than broadband to buy with their limited resources (which is fine – remember,
sans broadband is an acceptable way to live).
But the news report says this is all bad news:
One of the goals of US public policy when it comes to broadband is to ensure all US residents have access to broadband. President Bush said in 2004 that he wanted universal access to broadband in 2007, an achievement that appears unlikely at this point.
That’s the Universal Service Fund about which Daniel Berninger asks: What have we gotten for our $50 billion dollars?
In the end, this report amounts to an argument that satiation is a basis for subsidy. Huh.
Bill Herman has another long and thoughtful rejoinder to my critique of Herman’s original response to Felten’s paper, as well as the responses of Ed Felten and Brad Templeton. I’m honored to be lumped into the same category with those guys!
Herman does a thorough and fair-minded job of summarizing my concerns, so I don’t have a whole lot to add. As he says, I think the dangers of regulation outweigh the dangers of possible discrimination. He thinks the reverse. So let me just comment on the issue that I think is the crux of the matter:
If (a) telcos and cable cos are impossible to regulate, or (b) the FCC is fundamentally corrupt and/or incompetent, then we have bigger problems on our hands the net neutrality, and we certainly should not passively accept this state of affairs. But if this is the case, then there’s nothing we can do, but there’s nothing we can do to make it worse.
Oh, but we can make it worse. The important point is that right now, the FCC has absolutely no authority over the vast majority of the Internet. It has no authority over the backbone. It has no authority over the high-speed pipes that Google and Microsoft use to get on the Internet. It has no authority over high-speed dedicated lines used by medium-sized businesses. It has no authority over the WiFi connections in hotel rooms and coffee shops. Most importantly, if a serious competitor to the Bells and the cable companies come along, the FCC would have no authority over it.
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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.