Policy Wonk Castigates Net Neutrality

An anonymous reader writes "Tom Giovanetti, president of the Dallas, Texas based public policy think tank Institute for Policy Innovation envisions a chaotic world as a result of Net Neutrality. He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet, leading to failures of IPTV, VOIP, and emergency services which depend on VOIP. Is he right or wrong?." From the article: "... government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models. Net neutrality regulations would severely restrict broadband providers' right to enter into contracts and to try new business models while protecting the business models of Google and Ebay." Compare this with George Ou's commentary on this subject from yesterday.

specious argument

[Eric Smith]

The internet today is mostly neutral, and people accesing Victoria's Secret haven't brought it down.

The telephone system is neutral, but some telephone numbers are clearly more popular than others. Yet this hasn't brought down the phone system.

The reality is that the engineering of the network (including capacity planning and expansion) is done precisely on the basis of traffic flows. There is also congestion control. The internet is not like the public highway system, where capacity problems take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to solve.

Even if a zillion people did all try to get to the Victoria's Secret web site all at once, that would probably not affect my ability to access my email or read CNN's web site.
 

Policy wonk?

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

This "think tank" was founded by Republican Dick Armey in 1987 [sourcewatch.org].
As usual, you just need to follow the money in these matters and this is very revealing. The last year that records were kept regarding Dick Armey's contributions you'll see that his top contributor was Allegiance Telecom. Other notables in the "Dick Armey" include National Cable & Telecommunications Assn, Verizon, BellSouth and SBC. It's all here at open secrets. [opensecrets.org]

Politicians remain lapdogs to their masters even after leaving the Hill

Re:hrmm...

[Tackhead]

> Maybe they should think about taking "Life and Death" stuff off the internet, a back-hoe could take out a large part of the net for a day or two. If emergency response people are relying on vonage or skype for critical communications, that is a serious problem.

In a real life-or-death emergency when the phones are down, all you really need is couple of feet of fiber and a shovel. Use the shovel to bury the fiber, and when the backhoe driver shows up, you can ask him to drive you to the hospital.

Trajedy of the commons

[goombah99]

We need to ask ourselves if this is a tragedy of the commons or a case where uniform access decreases costs or provides more public-goods. I don't know which it really is.

The tragedy of the commons is what happens when a resource is provided that lacks a proper mariginal cost for increased use. The classic example is private property versus unrstricted access to public grazing land. By charging a small price for admission per sheep to the land or by making it private, the incentive to overgraze it is removed and the total amount of meat sustainbly raise actually is higher. In this case if it's case where there is simply not enough baqndwith for everyone to do voip, and I don't pay any extra to do VOIP, then it's going to be over grazed and everyone gets a crappy connection. On the otherhand if the connection cost already is sufficient to expand the network to handle all the users that want voip or if we can prevent this from becomeing a power law network with critical links then it may be that the more users the better some sort of p2p works.

Thus another way of looking is this is that the thing we need to fear is too few corporation controlliing the internet and resulting in bottlenecks on backbones. In the long run to get high bandwidth we will need p2p that does not traverse a central backbone.

Assuming that the p2p scaling effect will not be sufficient and the tragedy of the commons wil happen then the way out is to have a pricing schedule. We can put that schedule on the users or on the content providers. the latter is what the backbone owners want since it means no net neutrality and control. The former would be better but I can imagine the cheap ass slashdotters used to paying a tiny sum for all-they-can eat internet won't like it.

Re:What else is new?

[Bimo_Dude]

Shill, indeed.

If you use this [sourcewatch.org] as a starting point, you'll find that one of this institute's corporate contributors is Exxon-Mobile. I wouldn't be surprised if companies auch as AT&T are also paying this guy.

FTS:

He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet

The fact is, the traffic on the net is already that way, and I don't see the Internet going down. This guy is full of shit.

The Institute for Policy Innovation

[alizard]

is a bunch of far right [sourcewatch.org] corporate spokesdroids. Below is a partial list of their donors. I suspect that a great many of you will recognize them. A.Lizard

• Armstrong Foundation
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
• Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation
• Carthage Foundation
• Jaquelin Hume Foundation
• Earhart Foundation
• JM Foundation
• F.M. Kirby Foundation
• Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
• Sarah Scaife Foundation
• John M. Olin Foundation
• Roe Foundation

IPI's president Tom Giovanetti wrote in an email exchange with Australian blogger Tim Lambert that "IPI has an absolute policy of protecting our donors' privacy". [12]

"If you are correct that organizations like IPI are being funded by companies who have an interest in these areas, the more you rail against us and "expose" us, the more heroic you make us appear to our assumed benefactors, and the checks just keep coming," he wrote. [13]

Unfortunately for their donor "privacy", 503(c) organizations have to file lists of their donors every year. Assume that the telcos will show up in the next filing statement... and that the "policy wonk" is a corporate shill who'd be bloviating in favor of Net Neutrality if Google had paid IPI first. Or NAMBLA if that pedophile organization had paid IPI off to generate "neutral" opinions.

Here's another IPI opinion [ipi.org]:

The reality is that open source can trap a customer into an outsourcer relationship more readily than commercial software. This is because commercial platforms expose standard APIs for third party applications and any consultant can develop for them. open source will go the way of other IT industry fads that were once trumpeted as the way of the future, like Macintosh computers, business AI, 4GL programming languages and Y2K.

Re:Sure it happened -- more likely now too.

[kozumik]

Where were you on 2001-Sep-11?

That's a comple non-sequiter and really ignorant or a deliberate lie.

9-11 was due to individual sites lacking the SERVER capacity to hand traffic, causing server crashes and such. The fiber backbone and the last mile had PLENTY of bandwidth to carry the traffic. So the argument that the net needs toll lanes to handle capcity, that is just complete and utter bullshit.

The telcos just want the power to throttle traffic at their whim to create a new revenue model which is basically bandwidth protection and extortion. Toll booths are the perfect analogy.

And no, there is NO market competition becasue all packets going over the internet must pass through each company network at some point, at which point it can be killed, throttled, whatever.

So each packet is actually going through multiple monopolies that are now able to charge fees from a position of monopoly. NOT going across multiple networks that are competing to lower fees. BIG DIFFERENCE.