[governance] What is Network Neutrality

[Ralf Bendrath]

Parminder schrieb:
> Ralf
> 
> I am very confused about your email, and so request some clarifications.
Hope I can help.

> You seem to say that there is *no* (or little) difference between
> positions of Obama and Lessig as shows from their recent statements that
> I quoted.
> 
> " (no one) should be able to ...... charge different rates to different
> Web sites" (Obama)
> 
> "network providers should be free to charge different rates for
> different services long as the faster service at a higher price is
> available to anyone willing to pay it."  (Lessig)
> 
> Arent the two manifestly opposing positions ? 

Don't confuse upstream and downstream.

Obama was speaking about access providers at the downstream end, who
should not discriminate different websites. As Milton said, this is one of
the core issues of NN, and it is also related to the various "filtering"
efforts with regard to "offensive" or "illegal" content. (For the question
if this debate is over, or which part of it, see below.)

Lessig was speaking about "services", which is the upstream end. Of
course, whoever rents a faster pipe can get faster upstream for his
service, even based on different qualities (latency, jitter, pingback,
maybe even number of hops, ...). His point is that this should be
available to anyone willing to pay the same price for the same service
quality, therefore preventing tying and discrimination of content from
competitors in case a network provider is also offering his own content.
It does not contradict Obama's statement, but is orthogonal to it.

> At another place in your email, however, you seem to agree that Obama
> speaks against a tiered internet, 
Define "tiered internet", please. I did not use this term.

> but your position here is that this is
> no longer a relevant issue.
I was referring to the debate around two years ago, when some big ISPs
said they want extra money from e.g. Youtube, "because they are
responsible for so much of our last mile traffic". This is what Obama
referred to, and this is dead IMHO. No-one has figured out how the exact
business model would look like, how e.g. Version would be able to force
Youtube into such a contract, etc. And of course the last mile customers
are already paying for that part of the network and bandwidth. (A nice
win-win approach here is edge caching, which of course should be available
under the same conditions to anyone willing to pay for it.)

The underlying issue of course has not gone away, it is last mile
bandwidth restrictions, over-subscription etc. Now the ISPs have started
throttling specific services like bittorrent, but have also been beaten up
for this (see the Comcast case). This part of the "battle" is far from
over. We may see more price differentiation in the last mile market and a
movement away from flat fees (as we already see in the mobile market),
which may be a good thing for less heavy users (I could get faster
pingbacks if I paid my ISP 1,50 Euros more a month. But since I don't play
online games, I can save this money). We may also see that users want to
keep flat fees and move to ISPs that are investing in more bandwidth. But
I am not sure what a progressive and human-rights-friendly approach would
be like around these issues, except that I should always be able to get a
fully unfiltered internet access if I pay for it.

> Lessig wrote in 2006 "Net neutrality means simply that all like Internet
> content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the
> network." (
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/07/AR2006060702108.html
> ). 
I don't think this was one of the best publications Lessig wrote. Packets
never have moved at the same speed over the whole internet. It always
depends on uplink and downlink bandwidth, but also on the peering
agreements the different autonomous systems have with each other, on the
number of hops, on where intercontinental cables exist etc. I *guess* what
Lessig meant (or at least what is relevant here today imho) is that at any
given point in the network, packets passing through it should be treated
equally. This is the "good old best effort" internet, and this is under
heavy attack by recent technological innovations like deep packet
inspection, layer-7 switches, application-based routing etc. But again,
this is not easy black or white. This stuff can be used for malware
filtering or for more efficient network operation, but also for
discriminating specific applications and content. Again, this is all very
technical, so fuzzy terms like a "tiered internet" don't help claifying
much, I am afraid. In any case, this technology will not go away, and I
fully support discussing a progressive and human-rights based approach
towards it. But is is a radically different approach from the model
"Youtube pays my ISP extra money, so I can still watch online videos in
the future" which Obama referred to.

Best, Ralf
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