Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Perhaps it's not so much about the content of messages, but their nature.

Haven't carriers legitimately channelled airmail envelopes, letters, postcards, newspapers, parcels, quite differently?

Why shouldn't carriers be able to convey video and voice differently to e-mail? The only concern is that there is no discrimination based upon intellectual content, e.g. whether it is seditious, pornographic, defamatory, copyright infringing, etc.

However, just because services may like to shape their traffic, doesn't mean that they'll spend any effort taking notice of content. As long as there are no monopolies in the market, customers can ditch any network that disagrees with their priorities.

The first step in making a network inefficient is to regulate it (enforcing homogeneity). This isolates it from the market pressures that would otherwise improve its efficiency.

There are of course pressures counter to the market, pressures to regulate based upon content, these require regulation as a first step, because the market otherwise prevents regulation.

Content discrimination is definitely and obviously bad for us and the Internet. But so is having the carriers decide that, say, movies are more important than games, or buying stuff is more important than email. If there are technical reasons why we need to discriminate among types of content (movies, phone calls, etc.) -- and I am far from convinced that we are technically required to do so (and since I'm not a techie, my opinion wouldn't count anyway) -- anyway, if there are technical reasons we need to discriminate, the carriers are the LAST people I want to entrust with that decision.

Your link currently points to Isen's Is Apple missing the iPhone Market? post, and I think you meant to link to his NATOA Talk on Network Neutrality.

on AT&T's decision to censor messages it considers critical of AT&T

Sigh ... it won't do any good (remember, if you're not on the A-list, YOU DON'T GET HEARD!!!), but:

Debunking AT&T Censoring Criticism Via Terms-Of-Service

The link to Isenberg's Talk goeth here...

Late as usual David, but, as other commentators have already pointed out please do make the first link point to my NATOA talk here:
http://isen.com/blog/2007/10/my-natoa-talk-on-network-neutrality.html

Crosbie Fitch brings up the tired old different-classes-of-mail argument.
This is an analogy, and like all analogies, we should be careful where it applies and where it does not. It applies to the *sender* -- and in that instance it is perfectly relevant; I can buy a slow DSL connection, or pay more money for a faster fiber connection. Fitch's analogy works for this case.

But the Post Office analogy is simply not relevant to the kinds of Net Discrimination the carriers are doing and planning. The Post Office does not have a right to look into my envelope to see what kind of transaction is represented. Nor do they have a right to say I've received too many envelopes (or, worse, too many from certain parties) so they're going to slow down my mail delivery, as the carriers do in "traffic shaping."

Sigh. The Internet is not a truck, it is a perpetual series of mis-applied analogies.

David I, nicely put. Apropos the failure of the post office metaphor, I'd even be open to end users being allowed to specify particular sites or types of bits (if that can be done technically) that they want delivered faster. This month, I'd like World of Warfcraft to fly but iTunes to creak. Next month I'd like the x-rays from my doctor to fly and email to creak. The point about Net neutrality is WHO gets to decide. End-users? Maybe. Carriers? No no no no no.

PS: I fixed the errant link. Sigh.

It is a little disingenuous to over-extrapolate an analogy and infer that if it consequently fails, that the original point fails.

I flew on a small plane recently. Passengers were allocated seating according to weight. This is a fundamentally different carriage policy from a seating allocation based on genetic markers.

The first is designed to optimise the aircraft's balance in everyone's interest. The second is to unfairly privilege/enfranchise one class versus another - and moreover, has quite an overhead due to time and expense of performing blood tests, etc.

So the neutrality proponents are up in arms saying regulation is required to ensure no blood testing is performed.

The non-regulation proponents are saying blood tests would be highly uneconomic in any case, and the problem of neutrality regulation is that they can then no longer balance the plane properly - should that actually be cost effective.

No, Crosbie, we're saying that if "shaping" is required, the decision about which bits get preference should not be made by the carries who have a vested interest in the decision. It should be made either by the established engineering-based Net governance groups or by end users. Or maybe there are other ways of providing Net access that wouldn't suffer from the constraints the carriers are warning about.

I've heard from the cable co's own mouths that their aim is to provide "optimal customer experience" by delivering Hollywood movies stutter free. That's fine, but who are they to decide which "experiences" I want stutter free? They're going to slow down my game or your distributed computing app so they can sell more downloads of the latest movie starring The Rock? They're going to take money to give a competitive advantage to Yahoo over Google but also over the new search engine being developed in a garage?

If we have to make decisions about "shaping" Network traffic, the carriers are precisely the wrong ones to be given that control.

(No analogies were harmed in the making of this comment.)

No, Crosbie, we're saying that if "shaping" is required, the decision about which bits get preference should not be made by the carries who have a vested interest in the decision. It should be made either by the established engineering-based Net governance groups or by end users. Or maybe there are other ways of providing Net access that wouldn't suffer from the constraints the carriers are warning about.

I've heard from the cable co's own mouths that their aim is to provide "optimal customer experience" by delivering Hollywood movies stutter free. That's fine, but who are they to decide which "experiences" I want stutter free? They're going to slow down my game or your distributed computing app so they can sell more downloads of the latest movie starring The Rock? They're going to take money to give a competitive advantage to Yahoo over Google but also over the new search engine being developed in a garage?

If we have to make decisions about "shaping" Network traffic, the carriers are precisely the wrong ones to be given that control.

(No analogies were harmed in the making of this comment.)

In my latest analogy I didn't point out that the passengers' weights were not measured by the air carrier. The passengers declared their own weights - which were truthful out of self-interest.

Perhaps we're both interested in well balanced planes, and against unfair discrimination, but I see the pressure to achieve this as ably provided by a free market (monopoly free - no captive audience), whereas perhaps you see a need for regulation?

I have no doubt that IETF can (probably over a decade ago) be relied upon for standards concerning self-describing traffic (this is voice, this is gaming, this is file sharing, this is xml, etc.).

Perhaps you fear that some video traffic will be labelled 'this is MPAA' or 'this is MS update' or 'this is Billy Graham live', etc.

Unless someone introduces regulation into the Internet, these labels are entirely voluntary, which means that they can be ignored if they don't improve performance.

If there's regulation, then MPAA will be able to prosecute anyone who mislabels BitTorrent data as MPAA data.

There is extreme pressure by channel owners to create ownable channels in new mediums. Such ownership can only be achieved in a regulated environment.

The first step toward a regulated environment is to regulate 'neutrality'.