[governance] Net neutrality: Definitions

[Karl Auerbach]

On 08/17/2010 01:57 AM, Tapani Tarvainen wrote:

> Feelings aside and without judging which way it should be,
> that is not true in many countries.
> In particular, if you are doing business, you do *not*
> have the right to discriminate arbitrarily against selected
> clients in Finland

I had not heard about that in Finland.  But is it really as you suggest 
it is?

Let's use the Finish railway system as test case.

Does the Finish railway require riders to pay a fare?  In other words, 
can someone walk up and demand unpaid carriage as a matter of right?

And I notice that on the Finnish rail there several classes of fares, 
including a business class at 1.5x the standard fare.  Can one demand 
business class carriage without paying the additional fare?

The point of this is to suggest, as you suggested, that "not paying 
money" seems to be accepted as a reason to discriminate in Finland (as 
it seems to be in many other places.)

Why might the carriage of packets over privately owned and operated 
network links and routers be any different?

We somehow get the idea that the internet is free.  Google, for example, 
is not free.  It is charging a bundle (I know, because my company pays 
part of that bundle) for advertising, thus causing the well known 
pass-through of costs by advertisers onto consumers via increased prices.


>> You can not demand that third party providers carry packets to and
>> from your ISP.  Even less do you have standing to demand that those
>> third party providers give your packets equal or premier treatment.
>
> Actually, yes I can - ok, not premier but equal in some sense:
> if they discriminate against my packets they must have a valid
> reason in many countries, USA to the contrary.
> (Although there are *some* restrictions even in the US against
> some types of discrimination, like race- or gender-based,
> if I'm not mistaken. Don't know if any such would apply here.)

US law may not be quite what you think it is.  Yes we do have very 
strong rules against many, perhaps most, kinds of discrimination by 
governmental bodies.  However, the rules against discrimination are 
typically rather less strong when it comes to discrimination by private 
actors.  (The laws in that regard are rather complex in terms of the 
source of the authority to impose the laws and also in their limitations 
vis-a-vis things like our first amendment rights of speech and religion.)


>> I get the sense that you are also attempting to equate the carriage
>> of IP packets over privately owned links and routers in the net as
>> if those were some sort of public place, along the lines of the
>> cases in which private shopping malls were equated to public streets
>> for purposes of things like gathering signatures on petitions.
>
> Don't know about him, but the restrictions I mentioned are
> rather considered "fair business practices".

It is generally considered "fair" to allow denial of service to those 
who do not pay.  I see, for example, that the Finnish postal service 
does require payment to carry a letter; it would not be surprising if 
they chose to give lesser service, or no service, to an unpaid letter.

Yes, the incremental cost of carrying an internet packet is orders of 
magnitude smaller than carrying a paper letter.  (Although the initial 
capital expense to build the carriage system may be rather larger for 
internet paths than for postal paths.)  But in neither case is the cost 
zero.  And the costs do cumulate to numbers that are substantial enough 
that they can't easily be dismissed into some general notion of overhead.


>> You can pound your keyboard against the cold iron of the perception
>> of those who are spending the money that they own and thus control
>> the assets they paid for.
>
> There are lots of limitations on what you can do with your
> property, especially if you want to do business with it.

I agree.  But those limitations rarely ever require that the private 
actor give free services.

That does not mean that there are no cases where social demands do 
require free services.  Even here in the US there are a few such cases 
where free service must be granted.

For example, because of our awful medical system, emergency hospitals 
are required to accept any and all comers without concern for payment 
until all emergency beds are occupied.  But that kind of policy tends to 
cause unwanted downstream effects - For example the private hospital 
operators - in my local community the operator is the Dominican branch 
of the Catholic church - has reduced the number of emergency beds so 
that they reach the capacity limit before they loose to much money. 
That means that in my somewhat isolated coastal town we often have 
insufficient emergency room capacity.

The point of this is that no matter how much we would like otherwise, 
private actors are going to flow like quicksilver away from 
uncompensated costs.  That flow may be overt and obvious like my 
hospital emergency room example, but it might be more subtle - as when 
someone simply does not consider building network capacity in the first 
place because they don't want to be stuck giving it away for free.

With all of this discussion I may have given the impression that I'm 
opposed to net neutrality.  Quite the contrary, I believe that net 
operators should not discriminate on grounds of content, source, or 
destination.  I do, however know that different kinds of content require 
different handling - conversational voice being the most common example. 
  And I also know that people won't build an adequate network service if 
they suspect that it could turn into an uncompensated cost hole.

(Some folks think that VoIP works just fine on today's net, and that 
thus we can get away with an undifferentiated best-effort internet. 
Yes, VoIP does work today - but it does only by the fortuitous 
circumstance that we haven't yet filled all the pathways with competing 
traffic.  Thus, for the moment, there is sufficient excess capacity to 
keep VoIP packet jitter within [barely] tolerable bounds.  But that 
situation is unlikely to remain as providers try to squeeze more return 
out of their investments.)

		--karl--
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