[governance] [lack of] Net Neutrality for Mobile Internet in different shapes and forms?
Roland Perry
roland at internetpolicyagency.com
Sat Mar 19 06:20:32 EDT 2011
In message
<AANLkTimNELUwNo7pJCjoCNJD0x77t9bnfjavpDxm3eWW at mail.gmail.com>, at
18:30:30 on Sat, 19 Mar 2011, Salanieta T. Tamanikaiwaimaro
<salanieta.tamanikaiwaimaro at gmail.com> writes
>These are very interesting email exchanges by the list. The questions I
>have are to what extent then should content be controlled and what are
>the rules for the prioritisation of traffic and who decides? Is it the
>ISP that decides or is the regulator that decides and the ISPs enforce.
In the current UK case, the ISPs have identified some traffic (P2P and
NNTP) which they say is causing most of the congestion. The regulator is
asking them to be transparent about the measures introduced to
rate-limit those two kinds of traffic.
It's not as sophisticated as it could be (I don't like to see text-only
NNTP restricted because that's collateral damage). But I can now see who
is going to be introducing measures.
>What are the Traffic rules?
>
>Should the person or persons downloading videos (whether they are
>pirate or not) be profiled and given the option to purchase a different
>product line so that they do not crowd up the Network?
In most cases they already have that option. In most cases they simply
choose not to pay the extra.
>Or would the Network be crowded anyway?
The network will still be crowded, but the ISP can prioritise the
traffic of its higher-paying customers over that part of the network
which matters. It can also use the higher revenue to buy higher
bandwidth infrastructure (for everyone to benefit from).
>Does this mean that policy writers who will think about the dynamics
>behind what would be rules to guide open networks, would they have to
>have some kind of economic model to govern the supply and demand of the
>various types of traffic within a country's national network?
I'm sure the ISPs have very sophisticated models of the traffic flow
inside their networks.
>I don't know these answers and am not certain I am asking the right
>questions but I would really love to understand the dynamics of
>Internet Governance surrounding these issues.
It's a consumer protection issue mainly. Although there's quite a lot of
Internet Governance which is there to protect the rights of consumers
(eg many of the rules regarding the behaviour of domain name registries
towards their customers).
Roland.
>
>Sala
>
>On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 7:00 AM, Roland Perry <
>roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:
> 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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