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<font face="sans-serif">Read below an article that got published on NN
in the UK today.<br>
<br>
I do not think we, as a premier global CS group, can afford to *not* do
something about this issue. So many times a discussion on NN on this
list has run into this wall - it is a very complex issues with many
sides to it'. So ??? I dont think this is a good enough reason for
abdication. One often hears excuses like, with voice and video
domination the internet today NN is a meaningless concept. Not so at
all. We can have specific provisions whereby specific applications can
have different treatments while being content-provider neutral, this
latter being the key issue. Norway's NN guidelines have oftne been
mentioned in discussions here earlier. These guidelines allow space to
manage voice and vedio applications related issues. IS there any reason
why Norway's guidelines cannot be used globally, and why should IGC be
forcefully pushing for them. I fear that if soon enough there is not a
basic global consensus on NN guidelines even Norway like countries may
not be able to preserve NN, such is the globalness of the Internet and
its basic architectural principles. <br>
<br>
What I am arguing for is that we should not only propose NN as a
plenary topic and absolutely put our foot down that it must be accepted
as a plenary topic, or else we find the whole exercise meaningless and
may not even want to participate.... I mean the kind of warnings we
issue about Ms-ism. Parminder <br>
<br>
</font>
<h1 class="headLine" title="The end of the net as we know it">The end
of the net as we know it</h1>
<p class="quiet small minMarginBottom">Posted on 21 Jan 2011 at 13:34</p>
<p class="bold minMarginBottom">ISPs are threatening to cripple
websites that don't pay them first. Barry Collins fears a disastrous
end to net neutrality</p>
<p>You
flip open your laptop, click on the BBC iPlayer bookmark and press Play
on the latest episode of QI. But instead of that tedious, plinky-plonky
theme tune droning out of your laptop’s speakers, you’re left staring
at the whirring, circular icon as the video buffers and buffers and
buffers...</p>
<p>That’s odd. Not only have you got a new 40Mbits/sec fibre broadband
connection, but you were watching a Full HD video on Sky Player just
moments ago. There’s nothing wrong with your connection; it must be
iPlayer. So you head to Twitter to find out if anyone else is having
problems streaming Stephen Fry et al. The message that appears on your
screen leaves you looking more startled than Bill Bailey. “This service
isn’t supported on your broadband service. Click here to visit our
social-networking partner, Facebook.” </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Net neutrality? We don’t have it today</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The free, unrestricted internet as we know it is under threat.
Britain’s leading ISPs are attempting to construct a two-tier internet,
where websites and services that are willing to pay are thrust into the
“fast lane”, while those that don’t are left fighting for scraps of
bandwidth or even blocked outright. They’re not so much ripping up the
cherished notion of net neutrality as pouring petrol over the pieces
and lighting the match. The only question is: can they get away with it?</p>
<p><strong>No such thing as net neutrality</strong></p>
<p>It’s worth pointing out that the concept of net neutrality – ISPs
treating different types of internet traffic or content equally – is
already a busted flush. “Net neutrality? We don’t have it today,”
argues Andrew Heaney, executive director of strategy and regulation at
TalkTalk, Britain’s second biggest ISP. </p>
<p>“We have an unbelievably good, differentiated network at all levels,
with huge levels of widespread discrimination of traffic types. [Some
consumers] buy high speed, some buy low speed; some buy a lot of
capacity, some buy less; some buy unshaped traffic, some buy shaped.<br>
“So the suggestion that – ‘oh dear, it is terrible, we might move to a
two-tiered internet in the future'... well, let’s get real, we have a
very multifaceted and multitiered internet today,” Heaney said.</p>
<p>Indeed, the major ISPs claim it would be “unthinkable” to return to
an internet where every packet of data was given equal weight. “Yes,
the internet of 30 years ago was one in which all data, all the bits
and the packets were treated in the same way as they passed through the
network,” said Simon Milner, BT’s director of group industry policy.
“That was an internet that wasn’t about the internet that we have
today: it wasn’t about speech, it wasn’t about video, and it certainly
wasn’t about television.</p>
<p>“Twenty years ago, the computer scientists realised that
applications would grab as much bandwidth as they needed, and therefore
some tools were needed to make this network work more effectively, and
that’s why traffic management techniques and guaranteed quality of
service were developed in the 1990s, and then deep-packet inspection
came along roughly ten years ago,” he added. “These techniques and
equipment are essential for the development of the internet we see
today.” </p>
<p>It’s interesting to note that some smaller (and, yes, more
expensive) ISPs such as Zen Internet don’t employ any traffic shaping
across their network, and Zen has won the <em>PC Pro</em> <a
href="http://www.pcpro.co.uk/html/awards-2010/"
title="PC Pro Awards 2010">Best Broadband ISP award</a> for the past
seven years.</p>
<p>Even today’s traffic management methods can cause huge problems for
certain websites and services. Peer-to-peer services are a common
victim of ISPs’ traffic management policies, often being deprioritised
to a snail’s pace during peak hours. While the intended target may be
the bandwidth hogs using BitTorrent clients to download illicit copies
of the latest movie releases, legitimate applications can also fall
victim to such blunderbuss filtering. </p>
<p>“Peer-to-peer applications are very wide ranging,” said Jean-Jacques
Sahel, director of government and regulatory affairs at VoIP service
Skype. “They go from the lovely peer-to-peer file-sharing applications
that were referred to in the Digital Economy Act, all the way to things
such as the BBC iPlayer [which used to run on P2P software] or Skype.
So what does that mean? If I manage my traffic from a technical
perspective, knowing that Skype actually doesn’t eat up much bandwidth
at all, why should it be deprioritised because it’s peer-to-peer?”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nowhere has the effect of draconian traffic management been felt
more vividly than on the mobile internet</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nowhere has the effect of draconian traffic management been felt
more vividly than on the mobile internet. Websites and services blocked
at the whim of the network, video so compressed it looks like an
Al-Qaeda propaganda tape, and varying charges for different types of
data are already commonplace. </p>
<p>Skype is outlawed by a number of British mobile networks fearful of
losing phone call revenue; 02 bans iPhone owners from watching the BBC
iPlayer over a 3G connection; and almost all networks outlaw tethering
a mobile phone to a laptop or tablet on standard “unlimited data”
contracts. </p>
<p>Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, has this
chilling warning for fixed-line broadband users: “Look at the mobile
market, think if that is how you want your internet and your devices to
work in the future, because that’s where things are leading.” </p>
<p><strong>Video blockers</strong></p>
<p>Until now, fixed-line ISPs have largely resisted the more drastic
blocking measures chosen by the mobile operators. But if there’s one
area in which ISPs are gagging to rip up what’s left of the cherished
concept of net neutrality, it’s video. </p>
<p>Streaming video recently overtook peer-to-peer to become the largest
single category of internet traffic, according to Cisco’s Visual
Networking Index. It’s the chief reason why the amount of data used by
the average internet connection has shot up by 31% over the past year,
to a once unthinkable 14.9GB a month. </p>
<p><a
href="http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/364573/the-end-of-the-net-as-we-know-it/159070"
target="gallery"
onclick="newWin('gallery/features/364573/the-end-of-the-net-as-we-know-it/159070', 1024, 760); return false;"><img
src="cid:part1.02000803.09090205@itforchange.net" alt="Internet TV"
class="floatRight"></a></p>
<p>Managing video traffic is unquestionably a major headache for ISPs
and broadcasters alike. ISPs are introducing ever tighter traffic
management policies to make sure networks don’t collapse under the
weight of video-on-demand during peak hours. Meanwhile, broadcasters
such as the BBC and Channel 4 pay content delivery networks (CDNs) such
as Akamai millions of pounds every year to distribute their video
across the network and closer to the consumer; this helps avoid
bandwidth bottlenecks when tens of thousands of people attempt to
stream The Apprentice at the same time. </p>
<p>Now the ISPs want to cut out the middleman and get video
broadcasters to pay them – instead of the CDNs – for guaranteed
bandwidth. So if, for example, the BBC wants to guarantee that TalkTalk
customers can watch uninterrupted HD streams from iPlayer, it had
better be willing to pay for the privilege. A senior executive at a
major broadcaster told <em>PC Pro</em> that his company has already
been approached by two leading ISPs looking to cut such a deal.</p>
<p>Broadcasters willing to pay will be put into the “fast lane”; those
who don’t will be left to fight their way through the regular internet
traffic jams. Whether or not you can watch a video, perhaps even one
you’ve paid for, may no longer depend on the raw speed of your
connection or the amount of network congestion, but whether the
broadcaster has paid your ISP for a prioritised stream.</p>
<p>“We absolutely could see situations in which some content or
application providers might want to pay BT for a quality of service
above best efforts,” admitted BT’s Simon Milner at a recent Westminster
eForum. “That is the kind of thing that we’d have to explain in our
traffic management policies, and indeed we’d do so, and then if
somebody decided, ‘well, actually I don’t want to have that kind of
service’, they would be free to go elsewhere.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We absolutely could see situations in which some
content or application providers might want to pay BT for a quality of
service above best efforts</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It gets worse. Asked directly at the same forum whether TalkTalk
would be willing to cut off access completely to BBC iPlayer in favour
of YouTube if the latter was prepared to sign a big enough cheque,
TalkTalk’s Andrew Heaney replied: “We’d do a deal, and we’d look at
YouTube and we’d look at BBC and we should have freedom to sign
whatever deal works.”</p>
<p>That’s the country’s two biggest ISPs – with more than eight million
broadband households between them – openly admitting they’d either cut
off or effectively cripple video streams from an internet <br>
broadcaster if it wasn’t willing to hand over a wedge of cash.</p>
<p>Understandably, many of the leading broadcasters are fearful. “The
founding principle of the internet is that everyone – from individuals
to global companies – has equal access,” wrote the BBC’s director of
future media and technology, Erik Huggers, in a recent blog post on net
neutrality. “Since the beginning, the internet has been ‘neutral’, and
everyone has been treated the same. But the emergence of fast and slow
lanes allow broadband providers to effectively pick and choose what you
see first and fastest.”</p>
<p>ITV also opposes broadband providers being allowed to shut out
certain sites or services. “We strongly believe that traffic throttling
shouldn’t be conducted on the basis of content provider; throttling
access to content from a particular company or institution,” the
broadcaster said in a recent submission to regulator Ofcom’s
consultation on net neutrality. </p>
<p>Sky, on the other hand – which is both a broadcaster and one of the
country’s leading ISPs, and a company that could naturally benefit from
shutting out rival broadcasters – raised no such objection in its
submission to Ofcom. “Competition can and should be relied upon to
provide the necessary consumer safeguards,” Sky argued. </p>
<p>Can it? Would YouTube – which was initially run from a small office
above a pizzeria before Google weighed in with its $1.65 billion
takeover – have got off the ground if its three founders had been
forced to pay ISPs across the globe to ensure its videos could be
watched smoothly? It seems unlikely.</p>
<p><strong>Walled-garden web</strong></p>
<p>It isn’t only high-bandwidth video sites that could potentially be
blocked by ISPs. Virtually any type of site could find itself barred if
one of its rivals has signed an exclusive deal with an ISP, returning
the web to the kind of AOL walled-garden approach of the late 1990s.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/364573/the-end-of-the-net-as-we-know-it/159073"
target="gallery"
onclick="newWin('gallery/features/364573/the-end-of-the-net-as-we-know-it/159073', 1024, 760); return false;"><img
src="cid:part2.07090200.00040405@itforchange.net" alt="Stop sign"
class="floatRight"></a></p>
<p>This isn’t journalistic scaremongering: the prospect of hugely
popular sites being blocked by ISPs is already being debated by the
Government. “I sign up to the two-year contract [with an ISP] and after
18 months my daughter comes and knocks on the lounge door and says
‘father, I can’t access Facebook any more’,” hypothesised Nigel
Hickson, head of international ICT policy at the Department for
Business, Innovation and Skills. “I say ‘Why?’. She says ‘It’s quite
obvious, I have gone to the site and I have found that TalkTalk, BT,
Virgin, Sky, whatever, don’t take Facebook any more. Facebook wouldn’t
pay them the money, but YouTube has, so I have gone to YouTube’:
Minister, is that acceptable? That is the sort of question we face.”</p>
<p><strong>Where’s the regulator?</strong></p>
<p>So what does Ofcom, the regulator that likes to say “yes”, think
about the prospect of ISPs putting some sites in the fast lane and
leaving the rest to scrap over the remaining bandwidth? It ran a
consultation on net neutrality earlier this year, with spiky
contributions from ISPs and broadcasters alike, but it appears to be
coming down on the side of the broadband providers.</p>
<p>“I think we were very clear in our discussion document [on net
neutrality] that we see the real economic merits to the idea of
allowing a two-sided market to emerge,” said Alex Blowers,
international director at Ofcom. </p>
<p>“Particularly for applications such as IPTV, where it seems to us
that the consumer expectation will be a service that’s of a reasonably
consistent quality, that allows you to actually sit down at the
beginning of a film and watch it to the end without constant problems
of jitter or the picture hanging,” he said. Taking that argument to its
logical conclusion means that broadcasters who refuse to pay the ISPs’
bounty will be subject to stuttering quality. </p>
<p>Broadcasters are urging the regulator to be tougher. “We are
concerned that Ofcom isn’t currently taking a firm stance in relation
to throttling,” ITV said in its submission to the regulator. The BBC
also said it has “concerns about the increasing potential incentives
for discriminatory behaviour by network operators, which risks
undermining the internet’s character, and ultimately resulting in
consumer harm”. </p>
<p>Ofcom’s Blowers argues regulation would be premature as “there is
very little evidence” that “the big beasts of the content application
and services world are coming together and doing deals with big beasts
of the network and ISP world”. </p>
<p>The regulator also places great faith in the power of competition:
the theory that broadband subscribers would simply jump ship to another
ISP if their provider started doing beastly things – for example,
cutting off services such as the iPlayer. It’s a theory echoed by the
ISPs themselves. “If we started blocking access to certain news sites,
you could be sure within about 23 minutes it would be up on a blog and
we’d be chastised for it, quite rightly too,” said TalkTalk’s Heaney. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>First and foremost, users should be able to access and distribute
the content, services and applications they want</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet, in the age of bundled packages – where broadband subscriptions
are routinely sold as part of the same deal as TV, telephone or mobile
services – hopping from one ISP to another is rarely simple. Not to
mention the 18-month or two-year contracts broadband customers are
frequently chained to. As the BBC pointed out in its submission to the
regulator, “Ofcom’s 2009 research showed that a quarter of households
found it difficult to switch broadband and bundled services”, with the
“perceived hassle of the switching process” and “the threat of
additional charges” dissuading potential switchers. </p>
<p>“Once you have bought a device or entered a contract, that’s that,”
argued the Open Rights Group’s Jim Killock. “So you make your choice
and you lump it, whereas the whole point of the internet is you make
your choice, you don’t like it, you change your mind.”</p>
<p>The best hope of maintaining the status quo of a free and open
internet may lie with the EU (although even its determination is
wavering). The EU’s 2009 framework requires national regulators such as
Ofcom to promote “the ability of end users to access and distribute
information or run applications and services of their choice” and that
ISPs are transparent about any traffic management. </p>
<p>It even pre-empts the scenario of ISPs putting favoured partners in
the “fast lane” and crippling the rest, by giving Ofcom the power to
set “minimum quality of service requirements” – forcing ISPs to reserve
a set amount of bandwidth so that their traffic management doesn’t
hobble those sites that can’t afford to pay. </p>
<p>It’s a concept enthusiastically backed by the BBC and others, but
not by the ISPs or Ofcom, which doesn’t have to use this new power
handed down by Brussels and seems reluctant to do so. “There doesn’t
yet seem to us to be an overwhelming case for a public intervention
that would effectively create a new industry structure around this idea
of a guaranteed ‘best efforts’ internet underpinned by legislation,”
said Ofcom’s Blowers. </p>
<p>It’s an attitude that sparks dismay from campaigners. “Ofcom’s
approach creates large risks for the open internet,” said Killock. “Its
attempts to manage and mitigate the risks are weak, by relying on
transparency and competition alone, and it’s unfortunate it hasn’t
addressed the idea of a minimum service guarantee.”</p>
<p>At least the EU is adamant that ISPs shouldn’t be permitted to block
legal websites or services that conflict with their commercial
interests. “First and foremost, users should be able to access and
distribute the content, services and applications they want,” said
European Commission vice president Neelie Kroes earlier this year. <br>
“Discrimination against undesired competitors – for instance, those
providing voice-over the internet services – shouldn’t be allowed.”</p>
<p>Yet, Ofcom doesn’t even regard this as a major issue. “When VoIP
services were first launched in the UK, most [mobile] network operators
were against permitting VoIP,” Blowers said. “We now know that you can
find packages from a number of suppliers that do permit VoIP services. <br>
So I’m not as pessimistic as some may be that this kind of gaming
behaviour around blocking services will be a real problem.”</p>
<p>If the EU doesn’t drag the UK’s relaxed regulator into line with the
rest of the world, it will be British internet users who have the real
problem.<br>
</p>
<p class="quiet"><strong>Author:</strong> Barry Collins</p>
<div
style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><br>
Read more: <a style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153);"
href="http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/364573/the-end-of-the-net-as-we-know-it/print#ixzz1BpvJk95Y">The
end of the net as we know it | Broadband | Features | PC Pro</a> <a
style="color: rgb(0, 51, 153);"
href="http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/364573/the-end-of-the-net-as-we-know-it/print#ixzz1BpvJk95Y">http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/364573/the-end-of-the-net-as-we-know-it/print#ixzz1BpvJk95Y</a><br>
</div>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
PK</pre>
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