I’m encouraging you to read up and support Network Neutrality for the Internet. It’s definitely a complex issue, but I encourage you to take a stance and write your elected representatives to tell them to support Net Neutrality.
Recently, The Department of Justice issued a report arguing against any type of network neutrality regulations saying they would ultimately be anti-competive and hinder the free market. In my mind, Network neutrality is about protecting consumers and ensuring non-discriminatory pricing and equal access for all data on the Internet. The same Internet which has been funded by citizens and conceived through research in public institutions. Up to this point, the Internet has been network neutral and we have seen the rise of some amazing things happen on the Web and Internet from virtually little upfront investment. Without net neutrality its easy to imagine circumstances in which customers and companies are essentially levied tolls for what they ‘use’ or offer in addition to the current ISP charges for access.
Another argument from the report that urks me is the claim that if end-consumer broadband ISPs aren’t allowed to charge application and content providers directly (who aren’t necessarily their customers), they won’t be able to keep up with the Internet’s growth in regards to capacity and service needs, passing undue costs to the end-consumer. Companies and consumers already pay the operators of their respective networks for these costs of growth and maintenance, and sometimes citizens even subsidize the expansion of broadband networks through tax dollars (to the private sector for the greater good of the public Internet access).
The fact is, the telecommunications industry is already one of the most monopolistic industries in America today. It’s like the DoJ was so deluded as to say there’s healthy free market activities in the airline industry where major airlines often take corporate welfare bailouts when in the throws of bankruptcy. When’s the last time that there was individual consumer choice over your cable provider? It wasn’t until the recent past that people were given a choice over their long distance providers. The DoJ’s free market rhetoric is disingenous in the face of the industry’s current state for end-consumers. Recent reports that Comcast is shutting off broadband subscribers from their ‘unlimited’ service due to ‘overuse’ without stating any solid policies is the brash behavior of a company enjoying the fruits of too little consumer choice. If network neutrality is not maintained, the only free market that will be fettered is the one which via the Internet has created thousands of jobs and spurred countless innovative technologies and services in the past 15 years.
There’s a thought-provoking column at ArsTechnica proposing that no regulation might be better in the short term because it keeps the network operators under their best behavior and various other reasons. It’s got some weight behind it, but the DoJ report stating that there are studies showing that network operators must charge content providers (web sites) fees directly to keep up with the capacity needs of the Internet suggests they are leaving an open legal door for operators to be on their worst behavior.
As an aside, I would actually be interested in an extensive list of emerging network computing technologies threatened by potential Network Neutrality legislation (e.g. features of ipv6 like flow labeling would be under scrutiny in its application). Legislation does pose the risk of trampling network layer innovation but it’s good to understand what the value of these technologies are, and if they are simply necessary for the future success and progress of the Internet or an overzealous solution to a neutral alternative. From what I’ve read, most deal with providing guaranteed quality of service to the Internet for real-time applications like video streaming.
I read the op-ed article by David Farber and Michael Katz that talked about the real-time needs of a heart monitor application, but my initial thought was ‘Isn’t that was Internet 2 was for?’ and ‘Are you really relying on the Internet cloud for a heart monitor?’ It wasn’t a compelling example for me (I don’t have a hard time imagining a seperate network of networks for life supporting services like health care, fire, emergency response, etc…), but perhaps I’m not taking into account the technical and cost benefits of evolving a single internet to support uses like telemedicine by leveraging the Internet’s (*huhem*) network effect.
The definition of network neutrality suffers from many overloaded meanings in the face of technical topics such as providing quality of service and traffic prioritization (it doesn’t suffer in the face of existing standards for transmission rates and limits because those are widely accepted). Opponents of NN will often point out this ambiguity in the definition arguing that it is against NN to provide QoS and prioritization of traffic since it violates treating all packets equally. Henning Schulzrinne calls this argument a red herring as Network Neutrality does not restrict QoS features as so long as they remain content neutral. So technology offerings for QoS or the prospect of such should not be subject to pricing models or carrier policies that simply take into account the type of application or content data being delivered to consumers.
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