[governance] What is Network Neutrality

[McTim]

Hi,

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Ralf Bendrath
<bendrath at zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
>> 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".

The most memorable quote was from AT&T. Chairman Ed Whitacre, "For a
Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes
for free is nuts!"

of course, those companies already pay once to use those "pipes", but
he wanted them to pay twice.  This position is what is "over".


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.)
>

agreed, but one can run a cache for free as well as buying one from Google.

> 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).

I haven't seen that kind of offering yet, do you have a link?

>> 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.

Parminder's confusion probably comes from conflating speed with bandwidth.

Speed depends, in part, on amount of bandwidth, but bandwidth =! speed.

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.

Like voice and as you mentioned gaming, or other real time apps.

Those packets do want to be prioritised.  Other packets, like torrents
can wait, as delivery is not time sensitive.  Where these decisions
are made are in the routers.  Can someone tell me how to program a
router so that it is "progressive and human-rights based" ?  ;-)

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
http://stateoftheinternetin.ug
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