[governance] Re: Re: [WSIS CS-Plenary] Fwd: Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic

[Dan Krimm]

Let me try to clarify Milton's statement (with which I fully agree).

There is a difference between managing bandwidth generally, and picking on
certain applications to block them utterly (resetting a BitTorrent upload
does not "manage bandwidth", it abjectly *blocks* the operation of the
application with no analysis of bandwidth per se).

While I can occasionally see *some* moderate justification for
*prioritizing* certain applications over others in specific circumstances
(emergency communications, other real-time applications like VoIP as a
single universal data class without application- or
origin/destination-specific differentiation), specifically *disadvantaging*
applications because they have some vague supposed secondary link to some
unresolved issue of possible copyright infringement is a sharply different
policy when it comes to handling finite bandwidth resources.  Heck, there
isn't even a determination that the BitTorrent data stream in any specific
case is *large* or *infringing* and so this is a very crude step at
targeting supposedly nefarious behavior by users.

At the very least, Comcast should tell users up front that "there are
limits" to what users may do on their network (otherwise it constitutes
fraudulent advertising when they say you can send and receive any data
without constraint).  But beyond that, they should not be allowed to
*interrupt* data transmission intentionally (above and beyond the effects
of general congestion or general bandwidth caps).

There is a great blog post by MAP's Harold Feld on this recently that I
recommend:

http://www.wetmachine.com/item/912

Dan

PS -- Net neutrality is about common carriage.  As long as your policies
are identical for all people who wish carriage (of themselves or of their
data), then it is neutral in the sense intended by those who use the term.
When you start differentiating by origin or destination, or by content, it
becomes non-neutral.  Differentiating by application type is a bit
trickier, but if it is allowed at all, there needs to be very careful
circumscription of what cases and what sorts of methods can be justified.
The default policy should be no differentiation by application, and each
case of differentiation should be required to prove its case in relation to
that default.

The best public policy would be simply to disallow any application-based
differentiation at all, which would underscore the incentive to deal with
bandwidth in the most efficient manner: by building out the infrastructure
(or working to improve data compression protocols) to satisfy bandwidth
peak demand.

And if there is a problem with bandwidth usage that must be managed, then
either let congestion manage it by force or impose bandwidth limits on
users and enforce those policies on a bandwidth basis.  Equating
applications with bandwidth is at best imperfect and at worst a ticket to
abject gatekeeper abuse.



At 10:55 PM +0000 10/22/07, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>On Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 06:10:11PM -0400,
> Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote
> a message of 114 lines which said:
>
>> It's important to understand the distinction between net neutrality,
>> which means nondiscriminatory access to internet resources, and
>> bandwidth management.
>
>Besides playing with words, you do not explain how they are
>different. If "managing bandwidth" mean shaping differently HTTP and
>SIP, it *is* a violation of Net neutrality, even if SIP is not
>"blocked".
>
>> Networks have a right to manage their bandwidth.
>
>This is a very vague statement. Is tearing down BitTorrent connections
>(what Comcast does) "managing bandwidth"?
>
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