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The Journal has an editorial today on Kevin Martin’s crusade against Comcast that generally reaches the right conclusions—network neutrality regulations aren’t necessary, and even if they were the FCC doesn’t have the authority to impose them unilaterally. But in the process, they repeat a line that is repeated fairly often by free-marketeers, but is nevertheless seriously confused:

Net neutrality proponents want all Internet traffic treated “equally.” They would prohibit Internet service providers from using price to address the ever-growing popularity of streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive programs that cause bottlenecks.

I don’t know of any plausible interpretation of any network neutrality proposal that would preclude ISPs from using price to address bandwidth scarcity. To the contrast, as Adam noted earlier today, network neutrality advocates like Tim Wu are quite clear that metering, bandwidth caps, and charging different rates for different connection speeds would be legal under leading network neutrality proposals.

In fact, this passage gets things almost precisely backwards. What network neutrality proposals are designed to do, rather, is to prevent ISPs from dealing with congestion using non-price, content-based routing policies. Snowe-Dorgan, for example, would have required that ISPs “Not impose a charge on the basis of the type of content, applications, or services made available via the Internet into the network of such broadband service provider.” “Quantity of bandwidth consumed” is not on that list.

This is part of the broader problem of opponents of network neutrality regulation becoming knee-jerk critics of network neutrality as such. The arguments against network neutrality as a technical principle aren’t especially strong, and they’re especially likely to be confused when they’re made by people who know very little about how the Internet works. As I’ll argue in my forthcoming Cato Policy Analysis, the best reasons to oppose network neutrality regulation isn’t because network neutrality is a bad idea (it isn’t), but because network neutrality opponents (1) overestimate the fragility of network neutrality and (2) underestimate the unintended consequences that are likely to flow from new regulations.

As an aside, it’s kind of ironic that so many network neutrality critics have found themselves in the position of critiquing the structure of an industry—long-haul Internet access—that was forged by more than a decade of brutal market competition. The Internet’s current “neutral” architecture and the web of contractual relationships that binds it together has endured for a quarter-century precisely because it’s phenomenally efficient. Google and Yahoo don’t pay Verizon and AT&T for “last mile” bandwidth because those kinds of payments would greatly increase the Internet’s billing overhead with no real benefit. Ordinarily, when the marketplace produces an outcome, free marketeers are inclined to leave well enough alone. But in their zeal to stop network neutrality regulation, a lot of free marketeers have become amateur network architects, insisting that unless AT&T can charge YouTube extra money for video downloads (or whatever), the Internet will grind to a halt. There are some real network engineers who make arguments of this sort, and they should be taken seriously, but when it’s made by people whose expertise is in the social sciences, it just makes them look silly.

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In today’s New York Times, Tim Wu writes in favor new regulation of the Internet and uses a number of bad analogies to do so. Let us count the ways.

My colleague Adam Thierer has already noted that OPEC is a group of mostly government-run oil companies whereas U.S. broadband service providers are private companies operating in an intensely competitive environment.

Wu bungles another analogy between oil and bandwidth. Wu writes, “Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy….If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel” — implying that bandwidth prices, for lack of competition, are about to skyrocket.

But in the last decade, the nominal price of oil has risen by a factor of 12. In the same time period, the nominal price of U.S. residential bandwidth has dropped by a factor of five or more. Mobile phone bandwidth has dropped in price even more. Thus $10 worth of oil in 1998 now costs around $120. Ten dollars of residential bandwidth in 1998 now costs about $2 or less.

Wu could not have chosen a worse metaphor.

Oil prices are mostly governed by the Fed’s monetary policy (not OPEC, yet another Wu blunder), and we don’t know which way oil prices are headed. But we know for sure bandwidth prices measured in dollars-per-bit-per-second will continue falling dramatically. The imperial forces of Moore’s Law and the equally powerful innovations of fiber-optic, memory, and hard-disk storage technology assure it.

This isn’t to say broadband networks are cheap. No, they are very expensive. They will cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next five to 10 years. It is to say silicon and optical technologies are massively productive and will deliver ever greater services at ever lower prices. As Wu states, Americans may actually spend more and more dollars on monthly communications services overall. But per bit, they will be spending dramatically less. All this means is communications is becoming a vastly more important part of our lives.

By all means, let us explore and develop “alternative sources of bandwidth” as Wu desires. Unlike natural resources such as oil, which, while abundant, are at some point finite, bandwidth is potentially infinite. The miraculous microcosmic spectrum reuse capabilities of optical fiber and even wireless radiation improve at a rate far faster than any of our macrocosmic machines and minerals. It is far more efficient to move electrons than atoms, and yet more efficient to move photons. Left unfettered, these technologies will continue delivering bandwidth abundance.

But Wu fools no one with his slight of hand — attacking a phantom bandwidth “OPEC” — when his real goal is to establish and further empower his own cartel of scarcity-rationing bandwidth bureaucrats.

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How credible are these rumors? It seems like it should be possible to confirm or deny them by either monitoring Skype network traffic (to see if it’s sending data to a third party) or by reverse-engineering the Skype binaries. It also seems like if the “back door” were made available to a significant fraction of the world’s governments, it would be a hard thing to keep secret.

On the other hand, the showdown I predicted has not yet occurred, so it’s conceivable that Skype reached some kind of accommodation with US and EU regulators and quietly pushed a back door out with new versions of the software.

Update: One Slashdot commenter points to This report from Black Hat on efforts to reverse-engineer Skype. Looks like they’ve gone out of their way to thwart both tactics. Everything’s encrypted, and the peer-to-peer architecture means that the client sometimes randomly transmits data when you’re not making calls.

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Awesome:

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

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Last week CNN Money reported on the latest development in the $1 billion lawsuit that media giant Viacom has filed against Google noting that:

Viacom has agreed to let Google strip identifying information from YouTube viewers’ data before complying with a judge’s order to hand over the records as part of a copyright infringement lawsuit.

This is a small victory for YouTube as it was able to at least provide some assurance to its user base that their viewing history would be protected. But this smaller triumph doesn’t change the larger picture: This lawsuit is pointless.

Continue reading →

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I’ve got an article in the print edition of Reason about Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to make the DMCA look ridiculous. It’s now available online. One of the hazards of writing about technology for a publication with a months-long publishing process is that articles sometimes end up out-of-date before they hit newsstands. That happened in this case: I wrote the article in May, shortly after Microsoft announced it would shut down the licensing servers for MSN Music customers. Then Microsoft flip-flopped in June, too late to re-write the article.

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James Grimmelman has a great short paper called “The Google Dilemma” that discusses the social implications of search engine results. Check it out.

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