Rambling thoughts about the drive to "Net Neutrality"
I've wondered whether the drive to "Net Neutrality" is little more than a drive to force private property to act like public property, without the deep government interference... except where the government decides which violations of "neutrality" to prosecute/fine/etc., creating an ad hoc regulatory scheme out of the current administration's political goals. Ultimately, I see it as a struggle for the control stick, and little more. But the struggle for the control stick isn't one of simple greed (Internet provisioning is not itself actually a very profitable business; just look at the pure-play backbone shops' quarterlies for profit; it has to be married to content and, ultimately one way or another, ad revenue), but of something deeper, social, and perhaps a complicated product of 250+ years of complex government-private interaction in regulation, license, and tax. I'm ultimately concerned the arguments are happening skew to whatever real problems are out there (I think that about a lot of social issues), so here are some disconnected thoughts on the topic to get some dialog going here. I appreciate any helpful new ways to slice the potato.
I hate comparing the Internet to roads (or tubes or what have you), but the neutrality argument occurs at a 50,000 foot level, at which it is probably worth thinking of them all as systems of transit, commerce, and communication. Therefore, while I am about to go into some tech policy, I'd like to keep the history of roads in the US in mind, particularly the period of booming long-haul road growth, driven by private firms and public-private trust organizations and then bought up by the public with the actual consent of the turnpikes' various owners. Let's note the for-profit turnpikes had similar profit margins as today's Internet providers, which is to say, not so much despite decades of thinking it would all pay of some day. And then, conversely, let's note the current trend to semi-re-privatize the operation of our public toll roads (e.g., the Chicago Skyway).
Ok, so back to neutrality, the struggle for control also raises the question of whether issues of non-neutrality are actually going to affect the public interest at a level of significance that new laws will resolve. The argument is that sites that are bandwidth pigs will be bandwidth limited by end users' ISPs, or by their own ISPs, or that the backbone providers will limit and control bandwidth among peers and partners. For pay of course. I.e., providers will limit popular sites or popular high-speed access services seen as bandwidth pigs that need to be controlled lest a few harm the experience of the rest and the providers go under. The neutrality argument is they will do that in anti-competitive ways, not just to keep their own customers on equal footing and the data flowing smoothly.
That premise breaks down some on examination. Oh, it happens a little. But it has had negative results for the limiter when the power has been abused anti-competitively.
Backbone providers already do some non-neutral things - not by content but by peer quality and/or contract. They peer openly where it is mutually valuable, which is almost everywhere. Where it isn't seen that way, they try to limit flow or charge, often with bad consequences for the organization that thinks it has the upper hand as its own end-users raise hue and cry. Let's recall all the Level 3, Sprint, and Cogent flaps. The issue is that their own users are a mix of consumers and providers: Providers who can be bandwidth capped or charged more for bandwidth if they use it, and users who want access or they will go elsewhere if they can. In short, any backbone provider making its coin from a balance of end user and data provider customers will find the issue to ultimately be not worth pursuing for simple business reasons someone in their optimization dept. failed to notice.
ISPs may see it differently, but then, if (say) Bob's DSL Provider decides that people are killing its speeds by pulling tons of video, it can - and does today - traffic shape by traffic TYPE, but only at the point where its own total bandwidth is tapped out. In the areas easiest to provide access and where profitability is good for reasons of low overhead, customers have many choices. Let's all recall how poorly cable providers did despite monopoly until they started to allow (and advertise themselves as) FASTER speeds. Why bother trying to limit by provider? If they do limit customers' speeds to a popular data provider, they risk losing their customers, who are quite fickle these days in any place they can be (let's not get into places where monopolies are held, since that has its own area of regulation that could be used with no new laws necessary).
Or such abuses see the public make a flap over it, which is perhaps far worse than customers leaving. Indeed, the whole net-neutrality issue seems to have risen, based on huge flaps that have themselves corrected the bad behavior. Public sentiment is so strong against content filtering and source-based shaping, that creating laws around this may actually shelter the organizations doing what we now consider unsavory. Let's recall the CAN-SPAM Act, which more or less legitimized spamming in the effort to stop it.
That all reminds me of the roads question. And the telephone company question. We broke up the telcos from a public-private monopoly partnership into a bunch of competitive units (which, like the Blob, are slowly coming back together...). Now we want to, in a way, force the competing Internet providers to act like one happy family (and whether they are presently mostly doing that is eclipsed by the flaps over where they are not).
In short, after taking all that in, the question is not whether we need to enforce neutrality on private players. It is whether we are at a point where turning privately held turnpikes into public utilities will benefit the general commercial good, or hinder progress. Given our recent history with taking public flaps and regulating the underlying issue, I think we're likely to make things worse right now. The non-neutrality issues remain mostly theoretical as market reactions and public sentiment whip the violators of the neutrality principle back into line. Where that doesn't happen, the provider is often in the right - a "partner" is really a life-sucking abuser of the provider's open access, getting for close to free (as a "peer") what their own competition has to pay for. I don't think Congress, with or without the help of our tapped tech committees (made of people with significant financial stakes in some of the players) is in a position to get anything so fluid right.
They screwed up spam - something practically on fire at the time, which much of the big money opposed, and which >95% of people despised. How can they possibly get "net neutrality" right when it is only just smoldering, when we've only just begun to see how the players will work it out on their own, where the "helpful techies" almost all have massive financial stakes in seeing a warped version of "neutrality," and when most people barely understand the issues?
I hate comparing the Internet to roads (or tubes or what have you), but the neutrality argument occurs at a 50,000 foot level, at which it is probably worth thinking of them all as systems of transit, commerce, and communication. Therefore, while I am about to go into some tech policy, I'd like to keep the history of roads in the US in mind, particularly the period of booming long-haul road growth, driven by private firms and public-private trust organizations and then bought up by the public with the actual consent of the turnpikes' various owners. Let's note the for-profit turnpikes had similar profit margins as today's Internet providers, which is to say, not so much despite decades of thinking it would all pay of some day. And then, conversely, let's note the current trend to semi-re-privatize the operation of our public toll roads (e.g., the Chicago Skyway).
Ok, so back to neutrality, the struggle for control also raises the question of whether issues of non-neutrality are actually going to affect the public interest at a level of significance that new laws will resolve. The argument is that sites that are bandwidth pigs will be bandwidth limited by end users' ISPs, or by their own ISPs, or that the backbone providers will limit and control bandwidth among peers and partners. For pay of course. I.e., providers will limit popular sites or popular high-speed access services seen as bandwidth pigs that need to be controlled lest a few harm the experience of the rest and the providers go under. The neutrality argument is they will do that in anti-competitive ways, not just to keep their own customers on equal footing and the data flowing smoothly.
That premise breaks down some on examination. Oh, it happens a little. But it has had negative results for the limiter when the power has been abused anti-competitively.
Backbone providers already do some non-neutral things - not by content but by peer quality and/or contract. They peer openly where it is mutually valuable, which is almost everywhere. Where it isn't seen that way, they try to limit flow or charge, often with bad consequences for the organization that thinks it has the upper hand as its own end-users raise hue and cry. Let's recall all the Level 3, Sprint, and Cogent flaps. The issue is that their own users are a mix of consumers and providers: Providers who can be bandwidth capped or charged more for bandwidth if they use it, and users who want access or they will go elsewhere if they can. In short, any backbone provider making its coin from a balance of end user and data provider customers will find the issue to ultimately be not worth pursuing for simple business reasons someone in their optimization dept. failed to notice.
ISPs may see it differently, but then, if (say) Bob's DSL Provider decides that people are killing its speeds by pulling tons of video, it can - and does today - traffic shape by traffic TYPE, but only at the point where its own total bandwidth is tapped out. In the areas easiest to provide access and where profitability is good for reasons of low overhead, customers have many choices. Let's all recall how poorly cable providers did despite monopoly until they started to allow (and advertise themselves as) FASTER speeds. Why bother trying to limit by provider? If they do limit customers' speeds to a popular data provider, they risk losing their customers, who are quite fickle these days in any place they can be (let's not get into places where monopolies are held, since that has its own area of regulation that could be used with no new laws necessary).
Or such abuses see the public make a flap over it, which is perhaps far worse than customers leaving. Indeed, the whole net-neutrality issue seems to have risen, based on huge flaps that have themselves corrected the bad behavior. Public sentiment is so strong against content filtering and source-based shaping, that creating laws around this may actually shelter the organizations doing what we now consider unsavory. Let's recall the CAN-SPAM Act, which more or less legitimized spamming in the effort to stop it.
That all reminds me of the roads question. And the telephone company question. We broke up the telcos from a public-private monopoly partnership into a bunch of competitive units (which, like the Blob, are slowly coming back together...). Now we want to, in a way, force the competing Internet providers to act like one happy family (and whether they are presently mostly doing that is eclipsed by the flaps over where they are not).
In short, after taking all that in, the question is not whether we need to enforce neutrality on private players. It is whether we are at a point where turning privately held turnpikes into public utilities will benefit the general commercial good, or hinder progress. Given our recent history with taking public flaps and regulating the underlying issue, I think we're likely to make things worse right now. The non-neutrality issues remain mostly theoretical as market reactions and public sentiment whip the violators of the neutrality principle back into line. Where that doesn't happen, the provider is often in the right - a "partner" is really a life-sucking abuser of the provider's open access, getting for close to free (as a "peer") what their own competition has to pay for. I don't think Congress, with or without the help of our tapped tech committees (made of people with significant financial stakes in some of the players) is in a position to get anything so fluid right.
They screwed up spam - something practically on fire at the time, which much of the big money opposed, and which >95% of people despised. How can they possibly get "net neutrality" right when it is only just smoldering, when we've only just begun to see how the players will work it out on their own, where the "helpful techies" almost all have massive financial stakes in seeing a warped version of "neutrality," and when most people barely understand the issues?