[governance] [lack of] Net Neutrality for Mobile Internet in different shapes and forms?

[Roland Perry]

In message <4D81631B.6030808 at itforchange.net>, at 06:55:47 on Thu, 17
Mar 2011, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> writes
>I think there is enough commonality about what people consider under
>the Net neutrality (NN) rubric. Norway's NN guidelines, and the recent
>NN decision by US's FCC will make it clear.

Only in as much as they define what those administrations mean by NN.

>It is not at all true that in UK primarily download speeds is what is
>meant by most when they speak of NN. For instance, the BBC Director
>General's comments at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/19/mark-thompson-internet-bbc
>makes it clear.

He's obviously lobbying from one point of view. Talking about his
apparent "right to deliver" content without paying anyone, at all.

But the money has to come from somewhere, and in the UK that's the end
users paying their monthly subscriptions to their ISPs. Unfortunately,
the majority aren't paying enough money to provision the network
sufficiently to deliver *everything* they demand *simultaneously*.

He went on to say:

        "Net neutrality ... mean[s] that, not matter how many fast lanes
        there are, the basic internet services – standard lane if you
        like – should itself provide a very good, and consistently and
        fairly delivered, service."

        "Supporting net neutrality does not mean being against premium
        high-speed services which households can choose to subscribe to
        and which guarantee the very highest quality experience of
        catchup and other internet resources,"

The problem being that his content is already *past* the point at which
it's straining the basic service. I doubt he'd be very happy to be told

        "OK, we can deliver your service at 'full speed' as long as you
        redesign it for half the bandwidth requirement".

As well as

        "and in the busy hour it might still be slowed down by someone
        else in the same household you are delivering your catch-up TV
        to, downloading a pirate [sorry, Parminder] movie and hogging
        the bandwidth they can afford to pay for".

And how ironic that the measures the ISPs are taking are such, that they
serve to protect the delivery of *his* content - by filtering out, by
time-of-day and protocol, the "competing" flows of P2P and NNTP which
would otherwise drown out his content (and/or make the user exceed their
monthly bandwidth cap very quickly, at which point nothing gets
through).

>No idea why Roland should insist that the contours of
>the debate are not 'relatively' clear in this regard.

Because there's still a great deal of muddle, between (but not limited
to):

o The speed of the local loop (physics lesson: why can't everyone get
   8Mbits per second however frail their copper is).

o The existence of monthly bandwidth caps, because most people buy their
   service "down to a price". The cheapest residential broadband
   representing as little as an hour of BBC iPlayer content a month.

o The congestion on backhaul links, which means you can't have every
   household downloading at full local loop speed at the same time.

>especially insidious is to link advocacy of NN to piracy.

Perhaps you could ask one of the most famous Torrent servers why they
are called "Pirate Bay", and confirm with some Usenet serving
organisations that their subscribers are downloading large collections
of 'Warez'.

But even if this material was in the public domain, my underlying point
stands - who is the "content provider" who could pay (either want to
pay, or afford to pay) the networks to deliver this P2P/NNTP content to
the end users. The ISPs know that there is no such entity, so aren't
stupid enough to be looking for a financial contribution from them.

>Roland, if when you hear p2p you just think piracy, that the biggest
>value of the Internet platform from a progressive point of view is lost
>on you.

I don't "just think piracy", but I'm realistic enough to think that very
few people are in fact using it to download Linux distribution CDs, or
all the other special pleading. And I'm not even suggesting banning P2P,
or banning any class of content from P2P. All that's proposed is
rate-limiting P2P/NNTP during the busiest hours, so people can use
iPlayer at all.

Finally, I confess to being a bit annoyed at the potential collateral
damage which is the limiting of text-based Usenet (my own ISP doesn't
rate limit NNTP). But if they did, I'm potentially suffering from a
delay in my (and my correspondents') freedom of speech. Although even
then, I can "route around" that damage by using Google Groups instead of
a classic NNTP service.
-- 
Roland Perry
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