[governance] net neutrality

[Roland Perry]

In message <4D3BCC0F.5020303 at itforchange.net>, at 12:04:55 on Sun, 23 
Jan 2011, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> writes
>Read below an article that got published on NN in the UK today.
>
>I do not think we, as a premier global CS group, can afford to *not* do
>something about this issue. So many times a discussion on NN on this
>list has run into this wall - it is a very complex issues  with many
>sides to it'. So ???

Yes, by all means discuss it. There are indeed many sides to it.

The article you quote below is really about the delivery of high volume 
content over ADSL in the UK. (Yes, we have to understand what the 
technological issue is.)

Most UK households are sufficiently close to a Telephone Exchange (or 
Central Office in USA-speak) that they can get a reliable connection at 
around 2-8 megabits/second, with no sharing with other subscribers 
involved.

The bottleneck in this form of network architecture is the domestic 
connectivity between the several thousand telephone exchanges and the 
wider Internet. I say "domestic" because most of the content the writer 
describes is available in, and from, the UK only. There's not much 
cross-border traffic of that kind.

And it's that bottleneck which Akamai type solutions are addressing, and 
also that bottleneck where a lot of the money goes. So it's like we 
discussed yesterday - quite simply a volume issue. And at a price of 
about a dollar a gigabyte (perhaps an hour of HD television) for the 
sort of content he's describing. Users need to decide whether to spend 
thirty dollars a month on a buying a capped 30-hours-worth, or 
pay-as-they-go.

In the mean time, virtually all their other consumption is down in the 
noise level (people who don't watch streaming video easily cope with 
monthly caps of as low as a Gigabyte).

>The end of the net as we know it
>Posted on 21 Jan 2011 at 13:34
>ISPs are threatening to cripple websites that don't pay them first.
>Barry Collins fears a disastrous end to net neutrality
>You flip open your laptop, click on the BBC iPlayer bookmark and press
>Play on the latest episode of QI. But instead of that tedious,
>plinky-plonky theme tune droning out of your laptop’s speakers, you’re
>left staring at the whirring, circular icon as the video buffers and
>buffers and buffers...
>That’s odd. Not only have you got a new 40Mbits/sec fibre broadband
>connection, but you were watching a Full HD video on Sky Player just
>moments ago. There’s nothing wrong with your connection; it must be
>iPlayer. So you head to Twitter to find out if anyone else is having
>problems streaming Stephen Fry et al. The message that appears on your
>screen leaves you looking more startled than Bill Bailey. “This service
>isn’t supported on your broadband service. Click here to visit our
>social-networking partner, Facebook.”
>  Net neutrality? We don’t have it today
>The free, unrestricted internet as we know it is under threat. Britain’s leading ISPs are attempting to construct a two-tier internet, where
>websites and services that are willing to pay are thrust into the “fast
>lane”, while those that don’t are left fighting for scraps of bandwidth
>or even blocked outright. They’re not so much ripping up the cherished
>notion of net neutrality as pouring petrol over the pieces and lighting
>the match. The only question is: can they get away with it?
>No such thing as net neutrality
>It’s worth pointing out that the concept of net neutrality – ISPs
>treating different types of internet traffic or content equally – is
>already a busted flush. “Net neutrality? We don’t have it today,”
>argues Andrew Heaney, executive director of strategy and regulation at
>TalkTalk, Britain’s second biggest ISP.
>“We have an unbelievably good, differentiated network at all levels,
>with huge levels of widespread discrimination of traffic types. [Some
>consumers] buy high speed, some buy low speed; some buy a lot of
>capacity, some buy less; some buy unshaped traffic, some buy shaped.
>“So the suggestion that – ‘oh dear, it is terrible, we might move to a
>two-tiered internet in the future'... well, let’s get real, we have a
>very multifaceted and multitiered internet today,” Heaney said.
>Indeed, the major ISPs claim it would be “unthinkable” to return to an
>internet where every packet of data was given equal weight. “Yes, the
>internet of 30 years ago was one in which all data, all the bits and
>the packets were treated in the same way as they passed through the
>network,” said Simon Milner, BT’s director of group industry policy. “That was an internet that wasn’t about the internet that we have today:
>it wasn’t about speech, it wasn’t about video, and it certainly wasn’t
>about television.
>“Twenty years ago, the computer scientists realised that applications
>would grab as much bandwidth as they needed, and therefore some tools
>were needed to make this network work more effectively, and that’s why
>traffic management techniques and guaranteed quality of service were
>developed in the 1990s, and then deep-packet inspection came along
>roughly ten years ago,” he added. “These techniques and equipment are
>essential for the development of the internet we see today.”
>It’s interesting to note that some smaller (and, yes, more expensive)
>ISPs such as Zen Internet don’t employ any traffic shaping across their
>network, and Zen has won the PC Pro Best Broadband ISP award for the
>past seven years.
>Even today’s traffic management methods can cause huge problems for
>certain websites and services. Peer-to-peer services are a common
>victim of ISPs’ traffic management policies, often being deprioritised
>to a snail’s pace during peak hours. While the intended target may be
>the bandwidth hogs using BitTorrent clients to download illicit copies
>of the latest movie releases, legitimate applications can also fall
>victim to such blunderbuss filtering.
>“Peer-to-peer applications are very wide ranging,” said Jean-Jacques
>Sahel, director of government and regulatory affairs at VoIP service
>Skype. “They go from the lovely peer-to-peer file-sharing applications
>that were referred to in the Digital Economy Act, all the way to things
>such as the BBC iPlayer [which used to run on P2P software] or Skype.
>So what does that mean? If I manage my traffic from a technical
>perspective, knowing that Skype actually doesn’t eat up much bandwidth
>at all, why should it be deprioritised because it’s peer-to-peer?”
>  Nowhere has the effect of draconian traffic management been felt
>  more vividly than on the mobile internet
>Nowhere has the effect of draconian traffic management been felt more
>vividly than on the mobile internet. Websites and services blocked at
>the whim of the network, video so compressed it looks like an Al-Qaeda
>propaganda tape, and varying charges for different types of data are
>already commonplace.
>Skype is outlawed by a number of British mobile networks fearful of
>losing phone call revenue; 02 bans iPhone owners from watching the BBC
>iPlayer over a 3G connection; and almost all networks outlaw tethering
>a mobile phone to a laptop or tablet on standard “unlimited data”
>contracts.
>Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, has this
>chilling warning for fixed-line broadband users: “Look at the mobile
>market, think if that is how you want your internet and your devices to
>work in the future, because that’s where things are leading.”
>Video blockers
>Until now, fixed-line ISPs have largely resisted the more drastic
>blocking measures chosen by the mobile operators. But if there’s one
>area in which ISPs are gagging to rip up what’s left of the cherished
>concept of net neutrality, it’s video.
>Streaming video recently overtook peer-to-peer to become the largest
>single category of internet traffic, according to Cisco’s Visual
>Networking Index. It’s the chief reason why the amount of data used by
>the average internet connection has shot up by 31% over the past year,
>to a once unthinkable 14.9GB a month.
>Internet TV
>Managing video traffic is unquestionably a major headache for ISPs and
>broadcasters alike. ISPs are introducing ever tighter traffic
>management policies to make sure networks don’t collapse under the
>weight of video-on-demand during peak hours. Meanwhile, broadcasters
>such as the BBC and Channel 4 pay content delivery networks (CDNs) such
>as Akamai millions of pounds every year to distribute their video
>across the network and closer to the consumer; this helps avoid
>bandwidth bottlenecks when tens of thousands of people attempt to
>stream The Apprentice at the same time.
>Now the ISPs want to cut out the middleman and get video broadcasters
>to pay them – instead of the CDNs – for guaranteed bandwidth. So if,
>for example, the BBC wants to guarantee that TalkTalk customers can
>watch uninterrupted HD streams from iPlayer, it had better be willing
>to pay for the privilege. A senior executive at a major broadcaster
>told PC Pro that his company has already been approached by two leading
>ISPs looking to cut such a deal.
>Broadcasters willing to pay will be put into the “fast lane”; those who
>don’t will be left to fight their way through the regular internet
>traffic jams. Whether or not you can watch a video, perhaps even one
>you’ve paid for, may no longer depend on the raw speed of your
>connection or the amount of network congestion, but whether the
>broadcaster has paid your ISP for a prioritised stream.
>“We absolutely could see situations in which some content or
>application providers might want to pay BT for a quality of service
>above best efforts,” admitted BT’s Simon Milner at a recent Westminster
>eForum. “That is the kind of thing that we’d have to explain in our
>traffic management policies, and indeed we’d do so, and then if
>somebody decided, ‘well, actually I don’t want to have that kind of
>service’, they would be free to go elsewhere.”
>  We absolutely could see situations in which some content or
>  application providers might want to pay BT for a quality of service
>  above best efforts
>It gets worse. Asked directly at the same forum whether TalkTalk would
>be willing to cut off access completely to BBC iPlayer in favour of
>YouTube if the latter was prepared to sign a big enough cheque,
>TalkTalk’s Andrew Heaney replied: “We’d do a deal, and we’d look at
>YouTube and we’d look at BBC and we should have freedom to sign
>whatever deal works.”
>That’s the country’s two biggest ISPs – with more than eight million
>broadband households between them – openly admitting they’d either cut
>off or effectively cripple video streams from an internet
>broadcaster if it wasn’t willing to hand over a wedge of cash.
>Understandably, many of the leading broadcasters are fearful. “The
>founding principle of the internet is that everyone – from individuals
>to global companies – has equal access,” wrote the BBC’s director of
>future media and technology, Erik Huggers, in a recent blog post on net
>neutrality. “Since the beginning, the internet has been ‘neutral’, and
>everyone has been treated the same. But the emergence of fast and slow
>lanes allow broadband providers to effectively pick and choose what you
>see first and fastest.”
>ITV also opposes broadband providers being allowed to shut out certain
>sites or services. “We strongly believe that traffic throttling shouldn’t be conducted on the basis of content provider; throttling access to
>content from a particular company or institution,” the broadcaster said
>in a recent submission to regulator Ofcom’s consultation on net
>neutrality.
>Sky, on the other hand – which is both a broadcaster and one of the
>country’s leading ISPs, and a company that could naturally benefit from
>shutting out rival broadcasters – raised no such objection in its
>submission to Ofcom. “Competition can and should be relied upon to
>provide the necessary consumer safeguards,” Sky argued.
>Can it? Would YouTube – which was initially run from a small office
>above a pizzeria before Google weighed in with its $1.65 billion
>takeover – have got off the ground if its three founders had been
>forced to pay ISPs across the globe to ensure its videos could be
>watched smoothly? It seems unlikely.
>Walled-garden web
>It isn’t only high-bandwidth video sites that could potentially be
>blocked by ISPs. Virtually any type of site could find itself barred if
>one of its rivals has signed an exclusive deal with an ISP, returning
>the web to the kind of AOL walled-garden approach of the late 1990s.
>Stop sign
>This isn’t journalistic scaremongering: the prospect of hugely popular
>sites being blocked by ISPs is already being debated by the Government. “I sign up to the two-year contract [with an ISP] and after 18 months
>my daughter comes and knocks on the lounge door and says ‘father, I can’t access Facebook any more’,” hypothesised Nigel Hickson, head of
>international ICT policy at the Department for Business, Innovation and
>Skills. “I say ‘Why?’. She says ‘It’s quite obvious, I have gone to the
>site and I have found that TalkTalk, BT, Virgin, Sky, whatever, don’t
>take Facebook any more. Facebook wouldn’t pay them the money, but
>YouTube has, so I have gone to YouTube’: Minister, is that acceptable?
>That is the sort of question we face.”
>Where’s the regulator?
>So what does Ofcom, the regulator that likes to say “yes”, think about
>the prospect of ISPs putting some sites in the fast lane and leaving
>the rest to scrap over the remaining bandwidth? It ran a consultation
>on net neutrality earlier this year, with spiky contributions from ISPs
>and broadcasters alike, but it appears to be coming down on the side of
>the broadband providers.
>“I think we were very clear in our discussion document [on net
>neutrality] that we see the real economic merits to the idea of
>allowing a two-sided market to emerge,” said Alex Blowers,
>international director at Ofcom.
>“Particularly for applications such as IPTV, where it seems to us that
>the consumer expectation will be a service that’s of a reasonably
>consistent quality, that allows you to actually sit down at the
>beginning of a film and watch it to the end without constant problems
>of jitter or the picture hanging,” he said. Taking that argument to its
>logical conclusion means that broadcasters who refuse to pay the ISPs’
>bounty will be subject to stuttering quality.
>Broadcasters are urging the regulator to be tougher. “We are concerned
>that Ofcom isn’t currently taking a firm stance in relation to
>throttling,” ITV said in its submission to the regulator. The BBC also
>said it has “concerns about the increasing potential incentives for
>discriminatory behaviour by network operators, which risks undermining
>the internet’s character, and ultimately resulting in consumer harm”.
>Ofcom’s Blowers argues regulation would be premature as “there is very
>little evidence” that “the big beasts of the content application and
>services world are coming together and doing deals with big beasts of
>the network and ISP world”.
>The regulator also places great faith in the power of competition: the
>theory that broadband subscribers would simply jump ship to another ISP
>if their provider started doing beastly things – for example, cutting
>off services such as the iPlayer. It’s a theory echoed by the ISPs
>themselves. “If we started blocking access to certain news sites, you
>could be sure within about 23 minutes it would be up on a blog and we’d
>be chastised for it, quite rightly too,” said TalkTalk’s Heaney.
>  First and foremost, users should be able to access and distribute
>  the content, services and applications they want
>Yet, in the age of bundled packages – where broadband subscriptions are
>routinely sold as part of the same deal as TV, telephone or mobile
>services – hopping from one ISP to another is rarely simple. Not to
>mention the 18-month or two-year contracts broadband customers are
>frequently chained to. As the BBC pointed out in its submission to the
>regulator, “Ofcom’s 2009 research showed that a quarter of households
>found it difficult to switch broadband and bundled services”, with the “perceived hassle of the switching process” and “the threat of
>additional charges” dissuading potential switchers.
>“Once you have bought a device or entered a contract, that’s that,”
>argued the Open Rights Group’s Jim Killock. “So you make your choice
>and you lump it, whereas the whole point of the internet is you make
>your choice, you don’t like it, you change your mind.”
>The best hope of maintaining the status quo of a free and open internet
>may lie with the EU (although even its determination is wavering). The
>EU’s 2009 framework requires national regulators such as Ofcom to
>promote “the ability of end users to access and distribute information
>or run applications and services of their choice” and that ISPs are
>transparent about any traffic management.
>It even pre-empts the scenario of ISPs putting favoured partners in the “fast lane” and crippling the rest, by giving Ofcom the power to set
>“minimum quality of service requirements” – forcing ISPs to reserve a set
>amount of bandwidth so that their traffic management doesn’t hobble
>those sites that can’t afford to pay.
>It’s a concept enthusiastically backed by the BBC and others, but not
>by the ISPs or Ofcom, which doesn’t have to use this new power handed
>down by Brussels and seems reluctant to do so. “There doesn’t yet seem
>to us to be an overwhelming case for a public intervention that would
>effectively create a new industry structure around this idea of a
>guaranteed ‘best efforts’ internet underpinned by legislation,” said
>Ofcom’s Blowers.
>It’s an attitude that sparks dismay from campaigners. “Ofcom’s approach
>creates large risks for the open internet,” said Killock. “Its attempts
>to manage and mitigate the risks are weak, by relying on transparency
>and competition alone, and it’s unfortunate it hasn’t addressed the
>idea of a minimum service guarantee.”
>At least the EU is adamant that ISPs shouldn’t be permitted to block
>legal websites or services that conflict with their commercial
>interests. “First and foremost, users should be able to access and
>distribute the content, services and applications they want,” said
>European Commission vice president Neelie Kroes earlier this year.
>“Discrimination against undesired competitors – for instance, those
>providing voice-over the internet services – shouldn’t be allowed.”
>Yet, Ofcom doesn’t even regard this as a major issue. “When VoIP
>services were first launched in the UK, most [mobile] network operators
>were against permitting VoIP,” Blowers said. “We now know that you can
>find packages from a number of suppliers that do permit VoIP services.
>So I’m not as pessimistic as some may be that this kind of gaming
>behaviour around blocking services will be a real problem.”
>If the EU doesn’t drag the UK’s relaxed regulator into line with the
>rest of the world, it will be British internet users who have the real
>problem.
>Author: Barry Collins
>Read more: The end of the net as we know it | Broadband | Features | PC
>Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/364573/the-end-of-the-net-as-we-know-it/print#ixzz1BpvJk95Y
>--
>PK???
>
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-- 
Roland Perry
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