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TPW 38: The Google Kerfuffle — Edge Caching & Net Neutrality

by on December 19, 2008 · 5 comments

In several of our previous podcasts (see episodes 34, 35,and 37), we’ve discussed what we’ve called the “Comcast Kerfuffle,” which was the controversy surrounding the steps Comcast took to manage BitTorrent traffic on its networks. Critics called it a violation of Net neutrality principles while Comcast and others called it sensible network management.

This week we saw a new kerfuffle of sorts develop over the revelation in a Monday front-page Wall Street Journal story that Google had approached major cable and phone companies and supposedly proposed to create a fast lane for its own content. What exactly is it that Google is proposing, and does it mean – as the Wall Street Journal and some others have suggested – that Google is somehow going back on their support for Net neutrality principles and regulation? More importantly, what does it all mean for the future of the Internet, network management, and consumers. That’s what we discussed on the TLF’s latest “Tech Policy Weekly” podcast.

Today’s 30-minute discussion featured two of our regular contributors at the TLF, who both wrote about this issue multiple times this week. Cord Blomquist of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote about the issue here and here, and Bret Swanson of the Progress & Freedom Foundation wrote about it here and here.  To help us wade through some of the more technical networking issues in play, we were also joined on the podcast by Richard Bennett, a computer scientist and network engineer guru who blogs at Broadband Politics as well as Circle ID and he also pens occasional columns for The Register.  Also appearing on the show was Adam Marcus, Research Fellow & Senior Technologist at PFF, who wrote a “nuts and bolts” essay full of excellent technical background on edge caching and net neutrality.

You can download the MP3 file here, or use the online player below to start listening to the show right now.

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Some basics about edge caching, network management, & Net neutrality

by on December 18, 2008 · 7 comments

The introduction below was originally written by Adam Thierer, but now that I (Adam Marcus) am a full-fledged TLF member, I have taken authorship.

My PFF colleague Bret Swanson had a nice post here yesterday talking about the evolution of the debate over edge caching and network management (“Bandwidth, Storewidth, and Net Neutrality“), but I also wanted to draw your attention to related essay by another PFF colleague of mine. Adam Marcus, who serves as a Research Fellow and Senior Technologist at PFF, has started a wonderful series of “Nuts & Bolts” essays meant to “provide a solid technical foundation for the policy debates that new technologies often trigger.” His latest essay is on Network neutrality and edge caching, which has been the topic of heated discussion since the Wall Street Journal’s front-page story on Monday that Google had approached major cable and phone companies and supposedly proposed to create a fast lane for its own content.

Anyway, Adam Marcus gave me permission to reprint the article in its entirety down below. I hope you find this background information useful.

Nuts and Bolts: Network neutrality and edge caching

by Adam Marcus, Progress & Freedom Foundation

December 17, 2008

This is the second in a series of articles about Internet technologies. The first article was about web cookies. This article explains the network neutrality debate. The goal of this series is to provide a solid technical foundation for the policy debates that new technologies often trigger. No prior knowledge of the technologies involved is assumed.

To understand the network neutrality debate, you must first understand bandwidth and latency. There are lots of analogies equating the Internet to roadways, but it’s because the analogies are quite instructive. For example, if one or two people need to travel across town, a fast sports car is probably the fastest method. But if 50 people need to travel across town, it may require 25 trips in a single sports car. So a bus which can transport all 50 people in a single trip may be “faster” overall. The sports car is faster, but the bus has more capacity. Bandwidth is a measure of capacity, of how much data can be transmitted in a fixed period of time. It is usually measured in Megabits per second (Mbps). Latency is a measure of speed, of the time it takes a single packet data to travel between two points. It is usually measured in milliseconds. The “speeds” that ISPs advertise have nothing to do with latency; they’re actually referring to bandwidth. ISPs don’t advertise latency because its different for each different site you’re trying to reach. Continue reading →

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Media Deconsolidation (Part 25): The Series So Far

by on December 17, 2008 · 5 comments

This is just a listing of the installments of my ongoing “Media Deconsolidation Series.” I needed to create a single repository of all the essays so I could point back to them in future articles and papers. For those not familiar with it, this series represents an effort to set the record straight regarding the many myths surrounding the media marketplace. These myths are usually propagated by a group of radical anti-media regulatory activists who I call the “media reformistas.” Sadly, however, many policymakers, journalists, and members of the public are buying into some of these myths, too.

In particular, I have spent much time here debunking the notion that rampant consolidation is taking place and that media operators are only growing larger and devouring more and more companies. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Over the past several years, traditional media operators and sectors have been coming apart at the seams in the face of unprecedented innovation and competition. The volume of divestiture activity has been quite intense, and most traditional media operators have been getting smaller, not bigger. As a result, America’s media marketplace is growing more fragmented and atomistic with each passing day.

Anyway, here’s the series so far…

Continue reading →

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Bandwidth, Storewidth, and Net Neutrality

by on December 16, 2008 · 14 comments

Very happy to see the discussion over The Wall Street Journal‘s Google/net neutrality story. Always good to see holes poked and the truth set free.

But let’s not allow the eruptions, backlashes, recriminations, and “debunkings” — This topic has been debunked. End of story. Over. Sit down! — obscure the still-fundamental issues. This is a terrific starting point for debate, not an end.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) and caching have always been a part of my analysis of the net neutrality debate. Here was testimony that George Gilder and I prepared for a Senate Commerce Committee hearing almost five years ago, in April 2004, where we predicted that a somewhat obscure new MCI “network layers” proposal, as it was then called, would be the next big communications policy issue. (At about the same time, my now-colleague Adam Thierer was also identifying this as an emerging issue/threat.)

Gilder and I tried to make the point that this “layers” — or network neutrality — proposal would, even if attractive in theory, be very difficult to define or implement. Networks are a dynamic realm of ever-shifting bottlenecks, where bandwidth, storage, caching, and peering, in the core, edge, and access, in the data center, on end-user devices, from the heavens and under the seas, constantly require new architectures, upgrades, and investments, thus triggering further cascades of hardware, software, and protocol changes elsewhere in this growing global web. It seemed to us at the time, ill-defined as it was, that this new policy proposal was probably a weapon for one group of Internet companies, with one type of business model, to bludgeon another set of Internet companies with a different business model. 

We wrote extensively about storage, caching, and content delivery networks in the pages of the Gilder Technology Report, first laying out the big conceptual issues in a 1999 article, “The Antediluvian Paradigm.” [Correction: “The Post-Diluvian Paradigm”] Gilder coined a word for this nexus of storage and bandwidth: Storewidth. Gilder and I even hosted a conference, also dubbed “Storewidth,” dedicated to these storage, memory, and content delivery network technologies. See, for instance, this press release for the 2001 conference with all the big players in the field, including Akamai, EMC, Network Appliance, Mirror Image, and one Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of . . . Novell. In 2002, Google’s Larry Page spoke, as did Jay Adelson, founder of the big data-center-network-peering company Equinix, Yahoo!, and many of the big network and content companies. Continue reading →

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Edge-Caching vs. Preferential Treatment

by on December 16, 2008 · 28 comments

Claims that Google has abandoned its stance on network neutrality have been thoroughly debunked, as Cord and Adam note below. Over at Broadband Reports, Karl Bode explains that Google is seeking edge-caching agreements, not preferential treatment. Edge-caching involves Google housing its content on servers located inside consumer ISP networks, cutting bandwidth costs by allowing users to access Google content located just a few hops away.

Even though edge-caching doesn’t violate network neutrality as defined by Google, it’s still one of the many advantages that big players have over new entrants. Edge-caching isn’t a “fast track,” as the WSJ imprecisely terms it, but rather a short track—functionally, there’s a lot of similarity between the two. As Richard Bennett has explained time and time again, being close to end users is quite advantageous even without preferential treatment, as it eliminates the need to push vast amounts of data across the congestion-prone core of the public Internet.

We’ve heard about how edge-caching enables content providers and ISPs to cut their bandwidth bills and make more efficient use of finite network resources. Both of these are true, but there’s more—edge caching makes it much less likely that users will experience long load times or buffering hiccups while watching streaming video online. That high-def YouTube clip might take a few extra seconds to buffer if it has to make its way through congested central network exchanges—not so, however, if that video is housed just a few hops away, within your ISP’s network.

Continue reading →

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Net Neutrality & the White Hot Spotlight of Public Attention

by on December 15, 2008 · 43 comments

Over just the past 24 hours, there’s been quite a hullabaloo surrounding the Wall Street Journal’s controversial front-page story on Google’s edge caching plan and whether it violates Net neutrality. (See Cord’s post and Bret’s). Lessig calls it a “made-up drama“, David Isenberg says it’s “bogus” and “bullshit,” and Google’s Rick Whitt has said it’s much ado about nothing.

Regardless, here’s the important thing not to overlook about this episode: It is a prime example of the what Tim Lee has referred to as “the fundamental problem of backlash” that ensues whenever there is even a hint of a potential violation of network neutrality (however one defines it). As Tim argued in his excellent Cato paper on Net neutrality, “No widespread manipulation would go unnoticed for very long,” and a “firestorm of controversy would… be unleashed if a major network owner embarked on a systematic campaign of censorship on its network.” (p. 23). Indeed, this (non-)story about Google’s edge-caching plans have spawned an intense “firestorm of controversy” over the past 24 hours and it doesn’t even involve serious network meddling or censorship! I’ve been trying to keep up with all the traffic about this on TechMeme and Google News during that time, but I have given up trying to digest it all. (Take a look at those snapshots I pasted down below to get a feel for the volume we are talking about here).

In that regard, I love this quote from the always-bloodthirsty Tim Karr of the (inappropriately-named) regulatory activist group Free Press:

If Google or any other tech company were secretly violating Net Neutrality, there would be an absolute and cataclysmic backlash from the grassroots and netroots who have made Net Neutrality a signature issue in 21st Century politics. The Internet community would come crashing down on their heads like Minutemen on Benedict Arnold.

Indeed, that’s exactly what we saw today. But it wasn’t just pro-regulatory fanatics like Free Press. The entire tech and business blogoshere and even some of the mainstream media were on top of this. That’s the “fundamental problem of backlash” at work, and with a vengeance.

TechMeme Google headlines

Google headlines 2

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Net Neutrality forever! Wait, never mind…

by on December 15, 2008 · 9 comments

Big news in these parts.

The celebrated openness of the Internet — network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic — is quietly losing powerful defenders. Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

TLFers and commenters: Go.

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Google Policy Fellowship Applications Due December 12

by on December 4, 2008 · 4 comments

Full-time students looking for a summer job in technology policy should apply today!  From my  October post about this:

Google has just announced that it is now accepting applications from undergraduate, graduate and professional students for its summer 2009 Google Policy Fellowship. Three think tanks employing TLFers are among the host organizations participating in the program: The Progress & Freedom Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Applications are due by December 12, 2008. The program will run for ten weeks during the summer of 2009 (June-August). Apply today!

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Google Bandwidth Study Proves Very Little

by on December 4, 2008 · 24 comments

Precursor LLC released a study that claims to have calculated Google’s total bandwidth use declaring “Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.”

The study is an attempt to foil Google’s pursuit of Net Neutrality as a federal policy by claiming that Google is already a kind of free-rider and its policy goals will only allow it to mooch more.

The study estimates the total bandwidth “used” by Google in a circuitous way.  It calculates the bandwidth Google-originating data uses while traveling around the web, adds that to bandwidth used by search bots sending data back to Google, then assigns a dollar value to that bandwidth, and then compares that to an estimate of Google’s total outlays for bandwidth (a number which had to estimated as Google does not disclose this number).

The result: Google doesn’t pay for all the bandwidth used by data flowing in and out of its servers.

But this is true for any site on the web!

Continue reading →

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Googlephobia: Part 6 – The Left Begins to Turn on Google

by on November 29, 2008 · 36 comments

Over the past year or so, many market-oriented critics of Google, like Scott Cleland and Richard Bennett, have criticized the company for aligning itself with Left-leaning causes and intellectuals. Lately, however, what I find interesting is how many leading leftist intellectuals and organizations have begun turning on the company and becoming far more critical of the America’s greatest capitalist success story of the past decade. The reason this concerns me is that I see a unholy Right-Left alliance slowly forming that could lead to more calls for regulation not just of Google, but the entire search marketplace.  In other words,  “Googlephobia” could bubble over into something truly ugly.

Consider the comments of Tim Wu and Lawrence Lessig in Jeff Rosen’s huge New York Times Magazine article this weekend, “Google’s Gatekeepers.” Along with Yochai Benkler, Lessig and Wu form the Holy Trinity of the Digital Left; they set the intellectual agenda for the Left on information technology policy issues. Rosen quotes both Wu and Lessig in his piece going negative on Google. Wu tells Rosen that “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.” Moreover:

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