A Case for Non-Net-Neutrality
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jan 05, 2007 04:48 PM
from the i-like-my-internets-biased dept.
from the i-like-my-internets-biased dept.
boyko.at.netqos writes "Network Performance Daily has an in-depth interview with Professor Christopher Yoo from Vanderbilt University Law School on his opposition to Net-Neutrality policies. While some might disagree with his opinions, he lays out the case for non-neutrality in an informed and informative manner. From the interview: 'Akamai is able to provide service with lower latency and higher quality service, because they distribute the content. This provides greater protection against DoS attacks. It's a local storage solution instead of creating additional bandwidth, and it's a really interesting solution. Here's the rub ... Akamai is a commercial service and is only available to people who are willing to pay for it. If CNN.com pays for it, and MSNBC.com does not, CNN.com will get better service.'"
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A Case for Non-Net-Neutrality
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Can't access (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 22 2006, @10:27PM)
Re:Can't access (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can't access (Score:5, Funny)
From TFA (emphasis mine):
Professor Christopher Yoo joined the faulty of the Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1999,...
Re:Can't access (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~ShimmyShimmy/ | Last Journal: Friday December 29 2006, @12:13AM)
Very Funny, correctly Implies corporate propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.mygothicheart.com/oh10101 | Last Journal: Sunday October 28, @06:34PM)
Everyone/Biz (I know) already pays for bandwidth, quality of service, and NetNutrality as a required public utility. If a Biz or Gov wants a private service, then they should pay for it and the infrastructure involved. To treat the Internet/infrastructure as a private-rights utility is NetNepotism and anti-competitive corporatism [AKA: totalitarian welfare].
invalid analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy is seriously a professor?
Re:invalid analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
He is a law professor that's an opponent of neutrality. Whether his distortions of the technology are because he knows the law better than the technology, or because he is expounding an ideologically-based viewpoint and trying to snow people over with FUD, or because of some other reasons is, I suppose, something you'll need to form your own opinion about.
Re:invalid analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Service that efficiently utilizes a neutral internet, allowing other similar services to exist: Good.
Changing the internet to give favor certain services at the expense of all others: Bad.
Re:invalid analogy (Score:4, Informative)
It's not common carriers - it's monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.xig.net/)
I'm definitely for Net Neutrality - AND I'm moderately libertarian. But if you're going to HAVE a government issued monopoly - like EVERY DSL and Cable company does - then they need to be regulated to be fair about what they carry.
This is NOT about someone paying for their service to be extra fast. This is about forcible bundling by monopolies. This is about a company like AT&T deciding that they want to offer a movie download service and everyone else's is going to take 1000x as long as theirs to download.
Oh, and while we're on the topic, it should always be legal for a municipality to create a competing free highspeed (including WiFi) service if that's what the voting taxpayers want. Making money off your monopoly is NOT a right, it's a priviledge. It doesn't not overrule the responsibility of government to be for the people.
Re:invalid analogy (Score:5, Informative)
The idea is that we utilize the massive amounts of data about the Internet's health and the insanely scalable alogorithms for matching end-users to the HTTP server that can best serve them (called mapping) to create generalized IP tunnels that send traffic across "routes" that know more about the Internet then BGP does.
Think about it. .
Did I mention that we are hiring like crazy?
Re:invalid analogy (Score:5, Interesting)
No they are not. BGP routes are based on the least number of traversed autonomic systems (ie. networks) - it's a path vector protocol. And you can still attach a metric value to specific peers when distributing the routes to your whatever you are running internally (IS-IS, OSPF, etc).
Of course you cannot tell anything from the internal state of your peering network (unless the peer is smart enough to stop advertising if, say, half of it's core network goes down even though connectivity is still possible). But hey, I'm nitpicking here...
Re:invalid analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.mobydisk.com/)
Good job guys.
Re:invalid analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday October 26 2002, @11:59PM)
The Problem Is (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://1fp.us/ | Last Journal: Friday March 10 2006, @11:22PM)
Remember, no one hears you scream when you are being censored.
Re:it's strange (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not their own infrastructure. The internet "pipes" are layed on public property and has natural monopoly of service.
The free market requires multiple competing solutions. With giganting telecoms, and no competing choices, apparently the government steps in.
Re:it's strange (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://openlaws.com/)
There is a big difference between the free market where individuals and corporations may use their own property in order to make money and a common carrier that often relies on an exclusive license, either through licensed spectrum or license to lay physical cable across public rights of way in order to do its business. Both spectrum and rights of way across land are finite public resources which make a free market both practically impossible and the attempt to impose one undesirable. The public simply has a right to say how the publics' right of way is used and what benefits we expect in return. The essence of this artificial monopoly that common carriers are bestowed with is that rights of way are taken away from general public use in order to provide a necessary or good service that could otherwise not be provided.
Tending to view things with a view towards freedom, I do think there is a limit to what can be expected of a common carrier, but the fees which can be charged and to whom they can be charged are well within the publics right to dictate. And if the common carrier doesn't want to live by the rules, then they can take their cables up and make way for someone who will abide by the people's will. Really then it is simply a practical matter about what kind of rules will create a system which will be potentially rewarding enough for private corporations and individuals to risk investing in. There are also considerations about fairness and not changing the rules after investments have been made, but those are also risks that investors take when operating on the public right of way.
There is nothing inconsistent with libertarianism about understanding when government authority is needed and when it is not. Libertarianism is about maintaining good laws which are consistent with and are measured by how they promote individual freedom as a means to happiness, it is not about doing away with laws arbitrarily. The difference is that other political philosophies put other sometimes conflicting values equal to or above those, not that they do not also consider these as important values.
Being libertarian doesn't mean you're a chump (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday January 19 2007, @04:54PM)
Just because we tend towards libertarianism doesn't mean we're chumps. Many of us have also been around long enough to remember that at the core it isn't the company's infrastructure, it's the public's, developed and paid for with our tax dollars. We willingly pay every month to use an ISP's infrastructure to access this shared asset, but we aren't dumb enough to think that they own it, any more than we think the airlines own the sky.
Furthermore, there is a very real argument that breaking net neutrality will break the internet, and real net neutrality legislation makes as much sense as the laws against destroying roads or jamming radio waves.
And finally, libertarians don't (or shouldn't) intrinsically trust corporations (or, for that matter, their neighbors) any more than they trust the government. Having some corporation decide when and if my packets get through isn't somehow more acceptable than having China of the NSA do it. I pay to access the internet, and I expect exactly that.
--MarkusQ
Since when is Old Tech == Bad Tech? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~ShimmyShimmy/ | Last Journal: Friday December 29 2006, @12:13AM)
How is this fundamentally bad? It's 30 years old and therefore unusable and obsolete? If anything, I would praise such a technology for being so versatile as to last this many years. Take the bullet for example. I don't hear the military complaining that it sucks just because it's over 250 years old.
Oh yeah, wasn't banning the use of evoting supposed to be bad because it was tying them to "an old technology [internetnews.com]"?
Re:Since when is Old Tech == Bad Tech? (Score:5, Informative)
As a small example, take TCP slow-start. Or TCP window adjustment based on ping. None of those things were in the original TCP spec.
To say that TCP is a 30-year old technology as if there was no significant improvement is more than a bit of a misnomer.
As for OSI - I'm going to take a internet position - show me a working, viable implementation. You can't anymore. The problem was all OSI implementations were proprietery, erasing any advantage they _might_ have held over TCP/IP. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are SNA and DCE.
Yeah, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like any other utility - power, water, gas, etc. - where it costs a lot to buy the equipment needed to access large amounts of the utility at once, but you still pay the same rates as the guy who can't afford the bigger water pumps, better power grid, etc.
Great argument on Akamai, except... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great argument on Akamai, except... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 22 2006, @10:27PM)
Competition for the Last Mile (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Sunday December 04 2005, @12:42PM)
Huh? How is the last-mile market competitive? Where I live, I have 1 option for high-speed internet: the cable company. The phone company refuses to build a switching station to offer DSL. As far as I'm concerned, I'm living in a monopoly market, the very opposite of the one described in the article.
I wouldn't have a problem with network non-neutrality if the ISP market was a competitive one, allowing me to switch to a better ISP if my current provider was not meeting my needs. Given that I don't live in that kind of a market, I support network neutrality as it provides a compromise solution that meets the needs of most people while causing as little harm as possible.
You didn't get net neutrality because... (Score:3, Funny)
(http://heroinewarrior.com/)
Professor Yoo (Score:4, Informative)
Review the Alito hearings if this isn't familiar to you.
Re:Professor Yoo (Score:5, Funny)
(http://ptth.net/squish/ | Last Journal: Monday October 01, @11:26AM)
He's ignoring the central issue (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.daduh.org/ | Last Journal: Friday July 20, @11:20AM)
I don't want a private company to have the power and the right to censor material I might want to download, simply because directing my browser somewhere else might generate them more advertising revenue. Further, I want QoS tagging and bandwidth limits public. The Professor really avoided the private censorship and public accountability issues.
Bad professor! No cookie for you.
The case *against* net neutrality? (Score:4, Insightful)
The agreement between CNN and Akamai results in better service for CNN and its users regardless of the endpoints from which it's accessed CNN upgraded its network without having to pay off every carrier along the way to those endpoints. Seems rather like net neutrality made things simpler and easier for Akamai.
I want faster bandwidth, I need merely pay $5/mo extra to RCN for it. Again, the contract between me and my provider. If I want faster downloads from Fileplanet, I can pay for a membership. Another private contract.
This can apply to peering, and thus poof goes net neutrality, and really that's all fine, because it's again their endpoints -- if RCN wants to run Akamai nodes and get Akamaized content faster, that's their choice, they can control the ingress of traffic as they choose. However, when the carrier decides to throttle the traffic that's now within their network to my endpoint based on whether a third party has paid the carrier fee, I'm starting to feel like I should have been a party to this contract and gotten consideration for it.
I've got no problem with a tiered Internet, as long as it doesn't solely involve a middleman taking from both sides of the communication endpoints with no meaningful input from either.
Robbery and Murder Must Be OK Then (Score:3, Insightful)
He's solving a different problem (Score:3, Insightful)
With any service, there's a fixed cost for hooking the thing up, plus a marginal cost for actually using it. For the internet because the ratio of marginal costs to fixed costs is quite low, usage of bandwidth has been treated as free in recent times (it wasn't always so - in the 80s you paid by the packet and boy was it expensive).
That is ok while the capacity is high enough that users are not competing for bandwidth. As soon as it starts to saturate you've got the problem that there is no way to efficiently allocate capacity to users as long as the marginal cost of bandwidth is zero.
But a solution to this problem needs to be based on usage, not service type. That's the key point here - service type should not be permitted to be used as a proxy for usage.
Further, because most of the network is a natural monopoly, government regulation is not counter to liberal principles on markets. Its obvious that the local loop is a natural monopoly. The backbone is also, because of network effects.
Further, allowing service differentiating is allowing the monopolist to control the market for which services can be provided, and by whom.
So legislating for net neutrality is both a fair use of legislative power and is in support of, not counter to, free market principles.
Yao on network pricing - paper somewhat bogus (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.animats.com)
I'm reading his papers, and I'm not too impressed. Read his "Network Neutrality and the Economics of Congestion" [upenn.edu], where he pontificates on that subject.
Where he goes off track is at "Fortunately, policymakers wishing to address theses problems can draw on the extensive theoretical literature exploring the economics of congestion. Much of the literature has focused on the choice between flat-rate pricing and usage-sensitive pricing. The primary finding of this literature is that competitive markets will reach an efficient equilibrium if each user is charged a usage-sensitive price set equal to their marginal contribution to congestion. 28" Reference 28 is to "28 See, e.g., Eitan Berglas, On the Theory of Clubs, 66 AM. ECON REV. 116, 119 (1976).", which is a classic paper on periodic vs per-use pricing for things like gyms and swimming pools, but is not about congestion at all.
Yao does get some things right. He recognizes that the billing cost (he says "transaction cost", but means billing overhead) for things like the Internet is higher than the cost of providing the service, and this distorts the economics from the pay-for-what-you-get model economists usually like.
But then he goes off into a right-wing rant on why vertically integrated monopolies are good. The competition between the vertically integrated monopolies will supposedly prevent prices from rising. However, he states that as an article of faith, without support. Historically, when a market gets down to small number of players, (two or three), price competition tends to weaken. The fewer the players, the easier de-facto collusion becomes.
He ignores many issues. Time scale, for example. Congestion is a problem on a scale of minutes, while carrier-switching by end users occurs on a scale of months. He also ignores contractual lock-in and technical lock-in, which makes carrier switching more expensive. If the end user's strategy is to minimize their costs over the next year, then carriers can raise their rates each year by any amount less than the cost of switching, and get away with it. He ignores that completely. (This is a chronic problem with economists. Like control theorists, they study feedback systems, but unlike control theorists, they don't consider time domain issues like stability, settling time, oscillation, and phase locking issues much.)
There's also the technical issue in Internet congestion that the congestion is mostly at the edges. If you have your own wire to the central office, as with DSL, why should there be price differentiation depending on what data you're sending and receiving? Yet it's the DSL providers who don't want network neutrality. It's not the backbone providers. Thus, congestion isn't the real issue. Wanting a bigger piece of the TV viewer's entertainment spending is.
There are people who've written well about the economics of network congestion, but this guy isn't one of them.
His arguments are all totally wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
1) "The number of possible connections has gone up quadratically with the number of total users; so the Internet has become much more complex."
So? Is this a technological problem that is in any way related to the issue of Net-Neutrality? We seem to be handling this just fine at the moment, and if we run into problems we switch to IPv6, don't we?
2) People use different applications with different QoS needs. Providers should be allowed to provide priority to certain types of traffic.
Again, entirely unrelated to the issue of Net-Neutrality. You can get all sorts of QoS deals from ISPs, e.g. MPLS. The issue with Net-Neutrality is the ISP giving priority to their own traffic, so they gain an unnatural advantage over competing services not owned by the ISP - a vertical monopoly.
3) TCP/IP is obsolete, and companies should be allowed to experiment with protocols.
TCP/IP is not only working just fine, but it's adapted all the time. It's up to version 4, and IPv6 can be implemented by any one who chooses to. There are many protocols that use UDP over IP, and even many protocols that use IP, but neither TCP nor UDP. The past few years there have been many quiet revolutions in protocols; from dialling in using SLIP to PPP, to getting cable (docsis 1.0) to getting ADSL, then ADSL2+, p2p protocols like bittorrent emerging and chanching just about daily, people using VOIP, companies deploying VOIP on an enterprise scale (right down to global telecommunications giants switching to, egads no!, an all-IP backbone for voice).
Again, this has nothing to do with preventing vertical monopolies.
Then there are some things that just paint him as someone who has no idea what he's talking about..
How to achieve QoS? He points out that TCP (the obsolete protocol, mind you) has a Type of Service field! How ironic. Wasn't he argueing we need new protocols? Like, oh, I don't know, MPLS, which he seems to be unaware of? But then, he also seems to be under the impression that you can't choose between ISPs that offer different levels of QoS, which is patently untrue. (Nor would they not be allowed to exist if we had Net Neutrality. They just would be forced to be fair)
Then he goes on to say Akamai (not an internet service provider, not engaging much in vertical monopolies) is "an entirely different architecture". No it's not, they use DNS and obsolete TCP just like anybody else. There is nothing at all new about this architecture, mind you - in fact, it's pretty much what usenet does. We used to call sites with content closer to you "mirrors". The only nifty thing akamai adds is redirecting you to the nearest host on the DNS level. Oh, in fact, DNS root servers do the same thing on a BGP level even. And they also cache their zones. Still neutral, though.
"deep packet inspections
Oh, and the question about neutrality? Who controls the QoS, in his grand vision? He doesn't even answer it.
If you want to be anti-Net-Neutrality, fine, argue that vertical monopolies are good, or that vertical monopolies won't happen, or that Net-Neutrality laws wouldn't be effective. Don't bring up straw man arguments.
This guy knows nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.mobydisk.com/)
First, Mr. Yoo states that technologists believe TCP/IP is obsolete. (WTF?!?!?!!?) He seems to have made that up, which brings his credibility into question. I can't even find a single article that mentions that concept in a search. As a technologist, I can assure him that TCP/IP is considered robust, and pointing out it's age doesn't change that.
Next, Mr. Yoo's describes why network neutrality might hold things back, but gives an example that has nothing to do with Network Neutrality. Akamai caches data and routes it efficiently, which is something these "obsolete" protocols like TCP and HTTP have special provisions for. None of that violates network neutrality in any way.
Lastly, Mr. Yoo underestimates the value of standardization. He states that "...standardization by itself runs the risk of becoming an obstruction to technological progress." We are very fortunate that Mr. Yoo does not hold a position in government policy, or we would all have incompatible TVs, electrical outlets, and the cohesive internet of today would not exist at all.
If Mr. Yoo wants to build his own private network on his own non-standard protocols, I invite him to try. In the mean time, my company will continue to operate using the efficient, standard, neutral internet we have today.
Not quite (Score:5, Interesting)
As twbecker mentions in his reply to your post, I think you don't exactly have it straight, either, so I just want to clarify a little more on what he said. It's not about the type of traffic (although that's the type of argument they [handsoff.org] give), it's about discriminating based on who provides the content. If there was a way to prioritize VoIP in general, without giving preferential treatment to Comcast over Vonage, that wouldn't be as bad (although I'm not sure I trust anyone out there -- ISPs, the government, or content providers -- to decide what types of traffic are more important than others), but the real potential problem is that Comcast can screw with the Vonage traffic so that the service basically doesn't work anymore... All of a sudden, it looks like Comcast's VoIP is the only service that "works" in your area, so that's what you're stuck with (no matter how good or bad the service might be).
The problem is that the ISP's want to provide content now, and they are wanting to extort money out of all of the companies who have actually worked for years to build their content services, just to stay on equal footing with the ISP's. It's funny how one of the arguments of the ISP's against neutrality is "There's no evidence that we would mess with your traffic, so you shouldn't make it illegal to mess with it", but at the same time, they're speaking out against Google and others, saying that those content providers are getting a "free ride" on their Inter-tubes (never mind the fact that the content providers are already paying their own Internet service bills, and their customers are paying their own bills, so nobody is actually getting a free ride). Websites like Hands off the Internet [handsoff.org] are really frustrating, because it's such a twisted, astroturfing, messed up view, accusing the people who want a level playing field of trying to get money from the average joe. When actually, it's been the telecoms screwing over average joe with all of the extra charges we were paying for years that were supposed to have brought us all great broadband service years ago.
Re:Net Neutrality is Communism (Score:5, Interesting)
You and Prof. Christopher Yoo make the same fundamental mistake. Net Neutrality is *not* about preventing people from optimizing the Internet!
It *is* completely about preventing abuse of monopolistic power by telco companies. (This is espcially urgent in light of the reconstitution of the old AT&T). It is to prevent telcos from offering "protection" for your valuable content.
AT&T: That's an awful nice video service you've got there Mr. YouTube. It sure would be a shame if somthing were to happen to all those pretty little bits flowing over our network...
YouTube: What could happen to them?
AT&T: -laughter- Hey guys...he wants to know what could *happen*! -more laughter-
People always say that this can't happen because of competition. Again, bullshit. What ISP you use doesn't matter in the slightest; at some point, your bits *will* cross AT&T's network. If you don't pay the "protection", your poor little bits might have one hell of a time making it to their destination.
The Internet is Communism (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.thisismyown.com/)
Communism?
If you want to insert political metaphors for how a technological solution works, then the entire Internet, by design, is Communistic.
Peers are peers. Neighbors talk to and shre with their neighbors their access, because when they need it back, their neighbors will share their access. Any peer is free to talk to any other peer, and arrange to share access between them, irrespective of what other peers they are talking to.
It's exactly this "communism" philosophy that makes the Internet work as well as it has for more than 20 years. Calling it "communism" is simply McCarthyism brought into the discussion about whether "Two legs bad Four legs good" is an appropriate business model for a system designed to be "Any legs good".
Market and business decisions, and local legislation and access rules aside, the reason people in China can look at servers in the US or France or Istanbul, is solely because the internet is unbiased in how it handles traffic. A packet is a packet, and on it travels to and from where it needs to go. There is no (in most cases, shaping is another discussion) "Paid" flag on the packet that lets routers know this packet is coming from or destined for a service which paid the protection fee and now gets to run roughshod over the network.
The Telcos who are whining about net-neutrality are whining because they're trying to double-dip, and they're being called on it. I pay my service provider for access. Bob's Widgets pays their access provider for their uplink. Everyone is paid up. The Telcos are upset that market forces have deemed that access is not worth as much money as they _want_ to charge for it, so they're trying to charge for both ends of the transaction from one side of the pipe, when the other end has already been paid.
This isn't about some large user being subsidized - my end has already been paid for at what the market has deemed the "proper" price. This is about Common Carriers trying to come along after the fact and say "We didn't charge you enough for the last 10 years, here's a bill for what you should have been paying".
If Net Neutrality is true Communism, then what the Telcos want is what Communism turned into in post-USSR Russia - the Haves and the Have Nots.
Re:Net Neutrality is Communism (Score:5, Insightful)
Net non-neutrality means people pay according to how much they use.
Two things:
1) AT&T sold me "unlimited internet access". If they wanted me to pay for how much I use, they should have specified that in the contract.
2) AT&T does not have a contract with Google and therefore has no real right to charge Google anything, since Google does not use their ISP service, I use it.
Or are you going to claim that if you have a Cingular cellphone and call a friend with a T-Mobile cellphone, then T-Mobile has the right to bill you an unspecified amount (say... $1000/minute, it's not like I have a contract letting me know how much I'm going to be billed for the call in advance) for the call in addition to what I paid Cingular?
Re:Net Neutrality is Communism (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now a website (or other content provider) pays for the bandwith they use and the user (ie: you and me) pays for their internet access. Last I checked the former is based directly on bandwith used (more or less) while the later has lots of nice plans with various speeds (and in some places with bandwith restrictions depending on how much you pay). As a result, right now how much you pay is relatively based on how much you use the net.
What companies want to do is charge content providers a SECOND time. In other words not only do you pay Verizon for your DSL and not only does YouTube pay for their bandwith but now YouTube "has to" pay Verizon as well. Sure they could no pay but then Verizon will simply slow them down to a crawl unless they do.
In other words without net neutrality it's not goign to be based on how much you use the net (as it is now and internet providers can make it directly based on usage if they wish) but on how much the content is worth to the content provider. So streamign media would essentially cost extra for a content provider compared to downloading a file for later playback even if both use the same amount of bandwith.