The opponents of broadband regulation have produced an amusing animation that pretty effectively skewers the campaign for “net neutrality.” Why, yes, of course it’s produced by large corporations seeking after their own interests. But the piece effectively points out that the campaign for federal regulation of broadband is also a product of large corporations seeking after their own interests.
So, if it’s a debate between two large corporate interests, we can drop the
ad hominem and just discuss which group of large corporations is trying to protect its property and its investments, and which group of large corporations is trying to win rents through the legislative and regulatory process. Figured it out yet? Good.
There’s a great great post over at the abstract factory about the real issues in the debate over neutrality regulation. He points out that the horror stories trotted out by the pro-regulatory side are mostly bogus:
Political outfits–ranging from MoveOn to the Christian Coalition–are worried that network providers will begin to discriminate based on the political content of messages. This is pretty unlikely. It’s not easy for an algorithm to look at a bag of bytes and classify its political content; and network providers probably can’t pay for the computational power required to apply such an algorithm to the many terabytes of data that flow across their networks daily.
And even if they could, why would they? There’s no percentage there. In fact, I can think of two very strong reasons for them not to start filtering based on political content. First, there would be an enormous consumer backlash. Second, there would be enormous political fallout. The latter would include not only backlash against abuse of quasi-monopoly power, but possibly the imposition of responsibility for the content that flows across the pipes. Once you begin filtering based on political content, lawmakers may poke their heads in and wonder why you aren’t filtering out all that kiddie porn and gambling and such too–and if something gets through your filters, why can’t we hold you liable? The network providers don’t want to open that can of worms.
So, political censorship isn’t the real issue here. Nor, pace Moby et al., is it interconnection with small media providers versus large ones. Verizon’s not terribly likely to block access to your music blog. They might, someday, contract with certain service providers for improved performance. For example, they might strike a deal with iTunes to store songs in a local proxy cache, so that Verizon customers would observe slightly improved performance with iTunes, but not your music blog. That doesn’t strike me as either disastrous or a betrayal of the Internet’s principles. Networking researchers have been proposing schemes like this for years. In fact, Akamai’s basically a third-party version of this scheme: people pay them to store content in caches close to where it’s demanded, so Akamai-cached websites perform better than non-Akamai websites. Akamai’s been operating since 1999, and so far the Internet hasn’t been torn asunder.
He goes on to explain that the more plausible danger is discrimination on the basis of application–phone companies trying to block Skype because it cuts into their landline telephone business, for example. He’s quite right that the pronouncements of telco execs that Google needs to pay more for “my pipes” were assinine. Google pays for its own connection to the Internet. It’s
consumers that pay the Baby Bells for the bandwidth they use. Telcos don’t connect their customers to the Internet out of the goodness of their hearts.
And his conclusion is also spot-on:
So I’m really glad that people are paying attention to network neutrality. But I’m also alarmed that so few of those people seem to understand what’s really going on here, and I’m skeptical that now is the time to make laws about it. So far, the Internet’s still neutral. My bottom-line recommendation would be to watch and wait.
He says other smart and sensible things as well, so go read the whole thing.
Moby thinks we should regulate the Internet. If the telecom policy experts at the Christian coalition didn’t persuade you that neutrality regulation is a good idea, then technology whizzes like R.E.M., Q-Tip, the Indigo Girls, Jill Sobule, Wilco, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, the Roots, and the Dixie Chicks certainly will!
Meanwhile, the pro-regulation side continues to demonstrate its incredible talent for doublespeak:
Net Neutrality is the long-held principle that ensures small music blogs and independent news sites open just as easily on people’s computers as large corporate sites. Companies like AT&T are spending millions lobbying Congress to pass legislation that critics charge would set up a discriminatory tollbooth system on the information superhighway. The proposed legislation would allow Internet providers to decide which Web sites work best on people’s computers based on who pays them the most, favoring large corporations with deep coffers while marginalizing everyday people, community groups and small businesses.
AT&T, of course, is not “lobbying Congress to pass legislation” about neutrality regulation. Rather, they are
opposing new regulations on the subject. It takes a fair amount of rhetorical contortionism to take the posture of the beleaguered defender of the status quo, when you are, in fact, the one pushing new regulations. For example, Moby (no doubt reading talking points prepared by others) says there will be “a huge public backlash” if Congress “sells out the Internet.” If so, it will be one of the strangest backlashes in history. Most backlashes are spontaneous outpourings of anger against an action the public dislikes. But this “backlash” would be a carefully stage-managed reaction to Congress’s decision to leave things as they are. Of course, given the way the “Save the Internet” crowd is describing the issue, most of the people participating in the “backlash” wouldn’t know they were the ones lobbying for new legislation.
Frankly, I can’t blame Moby and company for being alarmed. I’d be alarmed too if all I heard was MoveOn’s version of the story.
Larry Lessig proudly points out that network neutering isn’t a left-right issue. His evidence? The Christian Coalition has signed on to the pro-NN coalition.
Why?
Mrs. Combs said, “Under the new rules, there is nothing to stop the cable and phone companies from not allowing consumers to have access to speech that they don’t support. What if a cable company with a pro-choice Board of Directors decides that it doesn’t like a pro-life organization using its high-speed network to encourage pro-life activities? Under the new rules, they could slow down the pro-life web site, harming their ability to communicate with other pro-lifers – and it would be legal. We urge Congress to move aggressively to save the Internet–and allow ideas rather than money to control what Americans can access on the World Wide Web. We urge all Americans to contact their Congressmen and Senators and tell them to save the Internet and to support ‘Net Neutrality’.”
I can only say that whoever talked Mrs. Combs into making this statement did a hell of a sales job. Too bad the pitch was massively misleading. Let’s count the ways that this scenario is ridiculous:
In the first place, no one seriously expects broadband ISPs to restrict traditional websites. Websites are sufficiently low-bandwidth that current connection speeds are more than enough to transmit them to consumers. The worry is over high-bandwidth, latency-sensitive next generation services like VoIP and video on demand.
A few months ago I posted about a site called Consumeraffairs.com that referred to supporters of net neutrality regulation as a “rag tag band.” Pointing out that any coalition that includes the likes of Microsoft and Google simply cannot be “rag tag,” I concluded that “even wearing Underdog’s cape, net neutrality rules just won’t fly”.
Now it seems that while they didn’t quite get the substantive message, consumeraffairs.com has picked up some of the terminology. In a story posted yesterday, it lauded Rep. James Sensenbrenner for introducing a net regulation bill, saying “when it comes to the issue of net neutrality, Sensenbrenner is on the side of the underdog.”
At the risk of becoming repetitive, the underdog in this particular catfight includes the following companies (along with their rank on the Fortune 500 list):
Microsoft (48)
Intel (49)
Amazon.com (272)
Google (353)
Yahoo (412)
ebay (458)
Add to this the potential support of financial services firms, and underdog is looking like a pretty big pooch. This is not to say that regulation opponents don’t have some heavy-hitters on their side (for instance, a pack of tech manufacturers announced their opposition Wednesday). But it doesn’t take a bloodhound to see that this isn’t a big guy v. little guy fight.
Underdog’s cape still just doesn’t fit.
Ars points out how Skype plans to use, and has used, consumer demand to prevent being blocked by ISPs.
Skype’s battleplan is simple. If their user base is large enough, companies will think twice about tampering with Skype traffic. When Brazil’s biggest telecom pulled the plug on Skype, the outcry in the country was big enough that the decision was soon reversed. [The head of Skype’s European operations, James] Bilefield said, “The community has the power to change things.”
If consumers want unfiltered Internet access, they’ll get it. Regulators, go away.
Update: Hmmm… our template seems not to be wide enough to accomodate cartoons. Click it (or the permalink below) to read the whole thing.
Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge blogs about the fantastic success of the British telecom market:
The advertisement on the wall in the subway station was hard to believe–a broadband service with 24 meg download for about $45 per month. That was the good news. Unfortunately, the service isn’t available in the U.S. The ad was on the wall of tube stop in London and the company, Be, http://www.bethere.co.uk is British. Just to rub it in a little, it gets better. There is also a cheaper option, about $25 per month, which still gets you the 24 mbps download, but with a slower upload speed. This in a city in which a bottle of water will set you back about $2.25.
Now, let’s contrast that combination of price and service with an ad in today’s Washington Post, in which Verizon will sell you the blinding speed of 768 kbps for $17.99 per month with a yearly contract.
And for one more bit of shopping–Verizon’s FIOS service, their fiber optic super-speedy, up to 30 mbps version. What will that cost you? According to the Verizon web site, up to 30 mbps can be had for between $180 per month and $200 per month.
Sounds pretty terrible! In the United States, you have to pay about 4 times as much for slightly more bandwidth, or you can pay slightly less for 1/30 the bandwidth. However, with a little bit of research it becomes apparent that Brodsky might be cherry-picking his examples just a little bit.
Let’s start with the high end. For $45–exactly the same price as Be’s unlimited plan–you can get FiOS from Verizon at a speed of 15 megs down and 2 megs up. That’s clearly slower downstream, although not incredibly slow, and slightly faster on the upload speed.
As for the low end, in my area Charter’s offering you a 3 Mbit service for $19.99 for the first six months, after which it goes up to $29.99. 24 is obviously a lot more than 3! At least, until you read the fine print: Brodsky doesn’t mention that the low-end $25 Be plan has a 1 GB download cap. That means that if you download at full speed, you get to saturate your 24 mbit connection for a whopping 5 and a half minutes every month. If you shell out another $5/month, you can get another 5 GB, which means you can download at full speed for half an hour every month. Clearly, this plan is not designed for people who would make much use of the full 24 mbit link.
I’d like to learn more about the British model. It does sound like they have more compeition which is intrigueing. But in any event, if you do an apples-to-apples comparison, it doesn’t look to me like the British are very far ahead of us in price/performance.
Larry Lessig periodically links to this 2000 article in the Prospect about network neutrality. In it, he makes the closest thing I’ve seen to a convincing argument that network neutrality regulation was responsible the Internet’s growth:
But there is one part of the Internet where end-to-end is more than just a norm. Here the principle has the force of law, and the network owner cannot favor one kind of content over another or prefer one form of service over another. Instead the network owner must keep its network open for any application or use the customers might demand. Competitors must be allowed to interconnect; consumers must be allowed to try new uses. In this part of the Internet, “open access” is the rule.
This part of the Internet is–ironically enough–the telephone network, where because of increasing regulation imposed by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1970s–leading to a breakup of AT&T by the Justice Department in 1984 and culminating with the Telecommunications Act of 1996–the old telephone network has been replaced with a new one over which the owner has very little control. Instead, the FCC spends an extraordinary amount of effort making sure the telephone lines remain open to innovators and consumers on terms analogous to the terms required by an end-to-end principle: nondiscrimination and a right to access.
The argument here is that by ensuring that any consumer could call any ISP in his or her area code, the FCC’s regulation of the telephone network had the unintended consequence of imposing a de facto network neutrality rule on telecom companies, thereby ensuring that the Baby Bells couldn’t leverage their ownership of phone lines to control the Internet.
This isn’t a crazy argument. I’m rather annoyed that my local telco, SBC (now AT&T) requires me to get Yahoo-branded Internet service, even if I’d rather connect via another ISP. The fact that anybody could become an ISP by connecting to the public phone network indisputably had a positive impact on competition among ISPs.
Still, this argument doesn’t strike me as being quite right.
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Robert X Cringely has an interesting article about the future of digital content distribution and peer-to-peer networks. I think his big thesis–that the existing one-to-many, end-to-end model for distributing video content won’t scale–is right. But I think he’s missing a few things when he points to peer-to-peer technologies as the savior.
Here’s the technical problem: Right now, if ABC wants to deliver 20 million copies of
Desperate Housewives over the Internet, it woul have to transmit the same stream of bits 20 million times to its ISP. The ISP, in turn, might have to transmit 5 million copies to each of 4 peers. Those peers, in turn, might have to transmit a million copies to each of 5 of its peers. And so on down the line, until each end user receives a single copy of the content. That’s wasteful, because sending 20 million redundant copies of a file uses a lot of bandwidth.
In a perfect world, ABC should only have to transmit one copy to its ISP, and the ISP, in turn, should only have to transmit one copy to each interested peer, and so on. Each Internet node would receive one copy and transmit several, until everyone who wants a copy is able to get one. Geeks call this multicast. It’s theoretically part of the TCP/IP protocol suite, but for a variety of technical reasons I don’t fully understand, it hasn’t proved feasible to implement multicast across the Internet as a whole.
However, there are plenty of quasi-multicast technologies out there. One of the most important is Akamai’s EdgePlatform. It’s a network of 18,000 servers around the world that serve as local caches for distributing content. So when a company like Apple wants to distribute 20 million copies of a file, it doesn’t have to transmit it 20 million times. Instead, it transmits the content to Akamai’s servers (and presumably Akamai’s servers distribute it among themselves in a peer-to-peer fashion) and then users download the files from the Akamai server that’s topologically closest to them on the network.
Continue reading →
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