[governance] ETNO can't win

[Carlos A. Afonso]

The ETNO proposal: all but naive

Carlos A. Afonso
Instituto Nupef
Baku, Nov.8, 2012

In the open forum space this morning ETNO's  (European Telecommunications Network Operators'  Association) representative presented his arguments in defense of more profits by regulation. Telcos are envious of the way application and content services are making money through their (telcos') pipes.

Recently the CEO of Oi, the largest telco operating in Brazil and associated with Portugal Telecom, revealed an envy of application providers who, in his view, manipulate traffic at will, and the "poor telcos" cannot do the same. He was seconded by the Brazilian minister of Communications, who insisted net neutrality is a "romantic" myth which should be abandoned.

They of course hate to see their fixed line phone networks being abandoned and being replaced by mobile and, worst of all, by a demon called voIP. But are particularly envious of the creativity of content and application providers' innovative ways to do business and want to grab a share of their profits with the help of governments, local regulators and the ITU.

So they want the ITU to somehow insert in the international telecommunications regulations (ITRs) being reviewed this year criteria to charge for traffic of packets passing through their tubes so that anyone who sends packets pays for it. Strange as it may sound, this is what they do today already.

An application or content provider already prepays an operator (by buying capacity of, say, some gigabits per second per month) -- so the sender already pays, and this is a very profitable business for telcos, since this is an entirely unregulated market and all they have to do is to keep the link alive. But for telcos a product called "transit capacity" is the only known in any market which is not intended to be used as specified. An ISP buys capacity but cannot use it in full. If they do, they will have to pay more. How much more? This should be kept to the will of the telco selling capacity, ETNO is saying to ITU.

We can see the current Internet gamut of services as two basic types: the ones who require that a stream be delivered to its destination in real time (video/audio streaming, interactive real time services such as voIP), and the ones which do not require real time delivery (email, an HMTL page, even chats). These correspond to exactly defined Internet protocols, the treatment of which is already embedded in routers and advanced switches -- for example, no one has to do not anything for the well-configured network to recognize a voIP stream and act accordingly, unless a deliberate traffic interference device degrades it.

But telcos want to interfere and then charge the final user for eliminating the interference -- what they call "QoS" or quality of service. In other words, they wish to degrade the net and get more money from you (the content or application provider, the smaller ISPs, the home user) to fix it.

The point is that they are doing this at will now -- the ETNO folks just want somehow to legalize this practice with the help of ITU, by throwing away the concept of net neutrality at the link layer.

As I said in my speech in the Baku IGF's opening ceremony, the internet layer and the layers above it (transport layer and applications layer) should not be included in any way in the regulations, while the free flow of Internet packets should be guaranteed in the link layer, in line with network neutrality in which Internet packets are never touched by the operators providing the physical connectivity infrastructure.

And I repeat: let the Internet flourish freely to the benefit of those who live at its edges, which are all of us.

Carlos A. Afonso
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