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

Fri Mar 18 15:00:58 EDT 2011

In message 
<93F4C2F3D19A03439EAC16D47C591DDE034AC994F9 at suex07-mbx-08.ad.syr.edu>, 
at 12:53:48 on Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Lee W McKnight <lmcknigh at syr.edu> 
writes
>To wade back in for a second..did I miss something?
>
>The last thing the Internet needs is termination fees...that would be 
>the complete triumph of the 19th century over the 21st.

That's the USA perspective on NN. That a content provider should be able 
to have his content distributed throughout the Internet without paying 
at the point he hands the data over.

The opposite view is that networks require content to satisfy their user 
eyeballs, and are getting it for free... what you say below:

>Second, Content Delivery Networks exist...to get content from the cloud 
>to end users, reliably.  Pretending they don't...or wishing they would 
>go away....I don't see the point of that.

Yes, although there's also the cost of getting the data through the 
cloud.

>They are paid by the people who care, ie the content owners, whether 
>that content is a movie; or an ad.

But they are only being paid by the eyeballs!

>As I have said before, the reason the Net Neutrality debate is 
>confusing is...because the term itself is an intentional obfuscation 
>from its first utterance; pushed by Google for its own purposes; and 
>then abandoned by Google when its business interests changed (ie its 
>deal with Verizon last summer.)

That was about the cost of delivering YouTube to mobile phones (in 
excess of the monthly cap the phone user happened to have), wasn't it?

>That the rest of us are still struggling to make sense of it...just 
>shows how clever the original obfuscation was.

A non-discriminatory network is a fairly clear objective, but will tend 
to result in all content being jammed and all equally difficult to 
access. There's also to issue of quantity - is an episode of "Friends" 
at 350 Megabytes really equally important as 350 Megabytes of email?

I realise some would say you can't make decisions like that, but if 
someone in my household was stopping my email arriving because they were 
hogging the line with video, they'd be told to stop pretty quickly (or 
at least wait till I was done).

>If, on other hand, we actually focused on 'what is an open Internet' - 
>as the FCC to its credit did last December (ok, before being taken to 
>court by Google's new best pal Verizon, and original bad boy of net 
>neutrality Comcast (for throttling p2p and specifically BitTorrent, 
>without any transparency as to what it was doing) - maybe, just maybe, 
>we could stop proposing reviving 19th Century notions for our current 
>century.

The notion from the UK is to make it clear what you do.

>Or is that too much to hope for? The Internet economy is indeed, 
>complicated and involves all sorts of transactions and 'free' 
>services.....keeping the thing open and transparent as Jeanette longs 
>for is more the point than trying to manage a command and control 
>regulatory system which neither fits the technology, nor the incredibly 
>dynamic users/creators ie all of us. imho.

But you risk ending up with a virtual football stadium with twice as 
many spectators as seats. What happens then?

>___________________________________
>From: governance-request at lists.cpsr.org 
>[governance-request at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Jeanette Hofmann 
>[jeanette at wzb.eu]
>Sent: Friday, March 18, 2011 11:51 AM
>To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Roland Perry
>Subject: Re: [governance] [lack of] Net Neutrality for Mobile Internet 
>in different shapes and forms?
>
>The magic you are referring to consists of the fees paid by the
>subscribers. The subcribers pay what they are charged. I would have
>loved to pay more if more bandwidth had been available in the area of
>London where I used to live. Alas, that option did not and still does
>not exist.
>
>The big telcos which immediately complain when the regulators considers
>minimum standards of bandwidth or modest rules of transparency also
>complain about the market because competition is so fierce. What exactly
>do they want? Return to the comfortable times of monopoly where they
>controlled both service standards and prices?
>
>The idea that termination fees would enable ISPs to control content,
>suppliers and innovation scares me. Don't you find that a problem as well?
>
>jeanette
>
>On 18.03.2011 16:12, Roland Perry wrote:
>> In message <4D83708D.9030803 at wzb.eu>, at 15:47:41 on Fri, 18 Mar 2011,
>> Jeanette Hofmann <jeanette at wzb.eu> writes
>>
>>>> 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*.
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am surprised you frame things that way. This sounds like the typical
>>> telco point of view. Content providers do also pay for the bandwidth
>>> they are using don't they?
>>
>> Even in the most content-provider friendly scenario, they only pay for
>> the bandwidth from their server to the "cloud". They then expect it to
>> reach its destination by magic.
>>
>> If all ISPs had a good balance of high-volume content providers, and a
>> large number of subscriber eyeballs, it might just even out. But real
>> life's not like that.
>>
>>> If all of that is not enough money for expanding the infrastructure,
>>> the ISPs should perhaps raise the monthly fees we pay for our internet
>>> connection?
>>
>> They try, but consumers are too keen on being part of a "race to the
>> bottom", where they'll buy the cheapest service on offer, and them
>> complain it doesn't give them the highest performance possible.
>>
>> I know that this makes me sound jaded, but I've been in the industry too
>> long (since the early 90's as a connectivity provider) and it's simply
>> the way the market works.
>>
>>> Charging content providers for delivery to end users is suspected to
>>> create all sorts of unpleasant side-effects we cannot possibly want.
>>
>> The original model was that an ISP with most of the local market would
>> be getting a few large payments from content providers and a lot of
>> small payments from eyeballs. Which meant that each was making a
>> contribution to the overall cost.
>>
>> This breaks down, because the market goes global, and ISPs specialise in
>> servers or eyeballs.
>>
>> Add in IXPs (which I think are a very good idea) and you get the current
>> standoff between content that says "you can't afford not to deliver me
>> to your end user customers, they will walk to another provider
>> otherwise", and eyeballs who say "you can't afford not to be available
>> to me for free, without me you have no business".
>>
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-- 
Roland Perry
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