[governance] Re: What is Network Neutrality

[Meryem Marzouki]

Le 14 janv. 09 à 16:35, Ralf Bendrath a écrit :

>>>
>>> http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-do-we-mean-by- 
>>> net-neutrality.html

>>> Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers
>> who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should  
>> not be
>> allowed to use their market power to control activity online.  
>> Today, the
>> neutrality of the Internet is at stake as the broadband carriers want
>> Congress's permission to determine what content gets to you first and
>> fastest. Put simply, this would fundamentally alter the openness  
>> of the
>> Internet."
>
> This is at least misleading, because the telephone analogy does not  
> hold
> here. Once a phone circuit is established, it is reserved for your  
> call,
> while on the internet, you have congestion issues.

Any analogy is misleading, actually, but still helpful to figure out.  
Obviously the telephone companies has been used here as an analogy  
with the must carry obligation, rather than with the circuit  
switching protocol. i.e. when I call you using my telephone company,  
I don't expect them to manage in one way or another that the  
communication couldn't be established, or is bad to the extent that I  
give up calling you. Especially if my phone company reasons are that  
it entered in a dispute with your own phone company, or it knows that  
we'll be speaking English, and it has decided to prioritize say,  
spanish language over its voice infrastructure, or whatever.
Want another analogy? Printed newspaper distribution. Big mainstream  
media having vertically integrated their business activities, thus  
owning the monopoly distributing business, and distributing their own  
daily newspaper early morning while distributing alternative  
independent daily newspaper with a one day delay. Isn't there also a  
congestion issue here (number of employee for the distribution,  
number of vehicles transporting newpapers, etc.)?

> So if my broadband
> carrier does QoS and sends my VoIP or streaming video over a faster  
> pipe
> than my bittorrent or ftp traffic, I don't see it as a problem, and
> actually, a lot of networks do it.

QoS is not a matter of speed and bandwidth only, and is not  
determined by the application. And QoS has always been there, far  
previous any net neutrality discussion. Same applies to ISO layers..

> The key here is that such QoS (which always is /discrimination/ of  
> some
> packets for the sake of speeding up others) should /at most/ be  
> done on
> the basis of the /protocol/, but not in any case on the basis of the
> traffic source[1] or the actual content.
>
> Best, Ralf
>
> [1] Even here, it's a bit more tricky: If my ISP has different  
> peering or
> interconnection agreements with different sources, the traffic  
> coming from
>  different autonomous systems may be discriminated as a result.

It is the case, actually, and you can easily check this using tools  
like visualroute (http://visualroute.visualware.com/). Try it with  
ras.eu.org, zedat.fu-berlin.de, and itforchange.net, and you'll get  
an idea of how traffic originating from a same node (Visualware, in  
Ashburn, Virginia), is "discriminated" when trying to reach me, you  
or Parminde. And the winner is.. Parminder:)

But the point is, roughly speaking, that different contents/ 
applications entering the same pipe of a given AS shouldn't be  
discriminated by this AS because of its nature, and this should apply  
to any AS on the internet route.

> I guess
> the point is that they should not use their market power to enter into
> /arbitrary/ interconnection agreements because some other network  
> provider

Then we would have to define what is arbitrary and what is not, which  
doesn't advance the discussion.

> also offers competing content etc. Again, the whole point is  
> "competing",
> which leads to NN as non-exclusionary business deals.

What kind of competition? What is competition and what is not? VoIP  
vs. mobile operators? IPTV vs. cable TV operators? you vs. me (or me  
vs. you:))? Actually, anyone is competing with everyone needing to  
share the same bandwidth, or rather the same internet, and there's  
only one.. Back to it's publicness feature.


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