AT&T ready to filter our Internet for us
Here’s a worrisome report on AT&T’s willingness to inspect packets, filter out what it thinks are copyright violations, and limit peer-to-peer interactions. Because the reporting is sketchy and is coming through an advocacy group (that I support), I’m not perfectly confident that this is the whole story. But as a partial story, it’s damn disturbing. If Net traffic needs to be “shaped” (i.e., packets purposefully blocked or delayed) because of technical limitations, the carriers are the last people I trust to make decisions about what’s important and acceptable. And that, to me, is the essence of the argument for Net neutrality.
[LATER that same day:] And here’s why we shouldn’t trust the carriers to decide what “content” is most important to deliver and to deliver well: According to the NY Times, “Comcast is already the world’s largest buyer of content, and it is spending about $4.5 billion a year to assemble content from around the world to offer on demand.” The people who make money selling content are the last ones who should be deciding which content to prefer./
Regarding “If Net traffic needs to be “shaped” (i.e., packets purposefully blocked or delayed) because of technical limitations, the carriers are the last people I trust to make decisions about what’s important and acceptable …”
Well, I may be violating good sense but … who do you nominate to make such a decision, in the real world?
Seth,
that’s a BIG “if”!!! You’re accepting AT&T’s frame that traffic must be shaped. And, implicitly, you’re accepting that shaping by content (as opposed to, say, simply counting packets) or INtent (like, will they be able to intuit fair use?) is the way to go. There’s an alternative frame.; in a world where we have WTTH, STTH, ETTH and RTTH*, there’s no reason to believe that FTTH must be expensive or scarce, but with throughput potentially as abundant as air used to be, what would telco sell? Aha, they could sell “policing the kontent!”
David I
*WTTH, STTH, ETTH, RTTH == water pipes to the home, sewer pipes to the home, electical wires to the home, roads to the home.
David I – well, yes, I am, and it seems obvious that it must be. And yes, I also think technical constraints indicate some shaping is a good idea. Like, if a few people are slowing down the network for everyone else while trading 99% copyright infringing material, even though even though there might be 1% legit material, I would make an executive decision that the filesharers should be shaped down to lower priority. The reverse seems utter madness to me.
Question like this will always arise.
Which goes back to my question – who is nominated to make that decision?
Seth, supporting Net Neutrality would not prevent a carrier from blocking individual abusers ,as I understand it. Tiering of service — pay for more bandiwidth –already does one sort of shaping, and I think most pro-NN folks are fine with it. Rather, NN would prevent carriers from blocking categories of packets, based on type of application or source.
If the network is being overwhelmed by traffic, I’d personally rather have the carriers “shape” the traffic randomly rather than let them decide what they think is more important, their for-pay content, Hollywood movies, games, p2p, video chat, YouTube, or email with attachments. Primarily, this is because allowing them to discriminate based on type of data will create a near irresistible temptation to favor the data that they make money from. Further, giving them that control will provide them with a disincentive for providing enough bandwidth: They’d benefit from the scarcity. To submit the Internet to such a business model seems like madness to me.
0) Let’s remember, chicken-little to the contrary, we’re not talking about blocking in the BitTorrent case – that was about trying to throttle with the tools available, which are not perfect, but you manage a network with the tools you have, not the tools you wish you had.
1) Are you seriously saying that a time-sensitive VOIP packet should be treated with exactly the same priority as a file-sharing packet? Application discrimination is NECESSARY. Because anything else will have file-sharing killing VOIP and gaming.
2) The Internet is already under such a business model. The people pretending otherwise are conflating (sometimes deliberately, sometimes ignorantly), quality-of-service with price discrimination.
Do you believe it would be better to have an armed every-man-for-himself populace than a police force, because the law of the jungle is better than government which will have an incentive to enslave everyone because it benefits from fear and terror? (I’ve seen some Libertarians argue this seriously!) . That’s the type of ultra-extreme argument which is being made.
Seth, I have a hideous travel day and probably won’t be able to reply until tomorrow. But I will reply. There are alternatives to turning the carriers into the government of the Internet (to use your metaphor) and to random discrimination (my suggestion in my previous reply). More tomorrow…
Seth:
Allow me to address your original question: should ISPs have liberty to unilaterally engage in traffic shaping to deal with network constraints.
1) It is important to recognize the dangers associated with giving ISPs such authority as it is to recognize the benefits. I think it was Jon Peha from Carnegie Mellon who observed that no policy that limited ISPs could capture all the benefits while no policy that gave ISPs complete freedom could ignore all the dangers, so it is a question of acceptable trade offs.
2) There are a wide variety of approaches that address the problem you cite (bandwidth constraints and protecting certain types of applications) without giving ISPs the authority to unilaterally shape traffic. These are not necessarily as efficient for some purposes as letting ISPs shape traffic, but they may represent a better trade off betwen the harms of ISP control over traffic and the failure of certain applications.
Here’s my list:
a) Until we eliminated the restrictions on carriers shaping traffic in 2005, ISPs did not have the right to traffic shape and we got in in a variety of ways. Either we accepted that certain functions (like voice) needed to adapt to the “best efforts” environment (and therefore stayed on the network optimized for voice, just as video stayed on the networks optimized for video) or people got clever and proposed edge-based QoS solutions. As a result, folks developed all manner of clever solutions to the problem of how to move content better and faster. This gave us caching (Akami, others), peer-2-peer (BitTorrent is popular because it makes it possible to move big files, which people WANT to move), virtual private networks, and a host of other possibilities.
b) Alternatively, we could let the USER decide on how to optimize bandwidth by providing incentives to increase efficiency and set priorities. The crudest means of doing
this are to set bandwidth caps or revert to metered pricing.
More intelligently, you can let customers pay for services like Comcast’s power boost, which take excess capacity as available and let you apply it to specific users or applications.
Even better, we can let users decide how to
shape their own traffic. For example, rather than let Comcast decide to favor VOIP over BitTorrent globally, we could tell end users “you have a 5 GB/week cap.” In addition, you are limited in your throughput to 3 MBPS. But, if you choose to set certain traffic on “interruptible” or “delay”, you can get “bonus capacity.” Or you can get bonus capacity when the system signals you additional capacity is available.
Which leads to my final point. The very idea of traffic control is that you have to give the ISP the power to decide what is best. But wouldn’t it actually MAXIMIZE network efficiency to treat capacity as a spot market and let users decide? This does not require any great sophistication (assuming the right software). Furthermore, because we keep hearing that it is a relatively few number of sophisticated “bandwidth hogs” that are causing all the heartburn, altering the incentives of these few highly sophisticated actors to change their behaviors will have a substantial global effect.
But the Telcos and Cable Cos do not like this choice, because they want to own the customer.
I’ve blogged about this thread here. Basically, I’m with Harold’s comments above. In addition, I point out that when we conflate the issue of congestion and the issue of copyright, we buy into the telco-cableco frame. The Netheads should frame these as two separate problems, congestion at the infrastructure layer,copyright at the application layer.
Regarding “Until we eliminated the restrictions on carriers shaping traffic in 2005 …”
I lost you there. As far as I know, technical network management has never been restricted. The Brand X case was about pricing and access.
[...] Feld also has weighed in on David Weinberger’s blog: Which leads to my final point. The very idea of traffic control [...]
A disclaimer first: My opinions are mine and not my employer’s. Love this discussion and cant resist chiming in.
Seems to me that the conflation argument is a bit beside the point, because congestion is largely a red herring. And copyright is a just convenient way to win support from the content folks. The issue is that pipe owners are increasingly content and application providers, too, and want the right to provide those at higher levels of service than competitors’ offerings.
VOIP is the best example: I now have comcast’s triple play, and the VOIP I have is much better than when I had separate ISP and VOIP providers. Coincidence? I doubt it. Yet there are plenty of powerful people who dont see this as discrimination, but free enterprise, especially since it’s hard to prove that the reason isn’t degradation but better technology.
The net neutrality forces keep stalling out because they have not put forth a winning response to this that doesn’t involve some fairly significant regulatory machinations. You can talk about imposing minimum service-level requirements on ISPs for app vendors, etc., but it’s just not very clean. And we havent even talked about enforcement.
I am confident we will see more and more examples of discrimination, but until people in power can see an answer that doesnt look like common carrier rules, nothing will change IMHO.
As Google often says, this dynamic owes largely to the pipe duopoly (increasingly at the backbone level, too). Which is why I think the only chance for real change is a third type of pipe (wireless, BPL, satellite, whatever) that is truly viable, widespread and competitive. Then there might be enough choices that businesses and consumers can vote with their feet.
[...] of doom from printing currency against it. The most interesting discussion turned up in the comments at David Weinberger’s blog, in a conversation between Seth Finkelstein, David Isenberg, and Harold Feld. The conclusion that [...]
Thanks for including me! I find it fascinating seeing how others are doing in their efforts to make money online too.
I have higher expectations this month compared to last month. I have already earned 3x the AdSense earnings this month as I earned last month, and we’re only 9 days into the month
I also believe technical constraints specify some shaping is a good idea. Like, if a few people are slowing down the network for everybody. The Internet is already under such a business model………