[Editor: Just to set things up: Network Neutrality is the idea that a communications carrier should play fair by not picking favorites among applications or services running over its network. Sounds good, neh? Count on Martin to go all counterintuitive on us...]
I’m
sure this is something that’s been raked over before, but I don’t see a
common understanding of what ‘Net Neutrality’ actually is. Despite many
of the Internetorati demanding it by law. Whatever.
There appear to be several different camps, which you could paint as “bottom of IP”, “middle” and “top”.
The bottomistas would see enforced Internet Protocol itself as a
premature optimisation and violation of the end-to-end principle.
Unhappy that you only get IPv4 or IPv6? Still grumpy that you only
have IPv4 and not even IPv6? Really miserable that your VoIP packets
are staggering under the poisonous load of IPv6 headers? You’re a
bottomista.
I suspect there are some fundamentalist bottomistas who would object
to your service providers not giving you a choice of Ethernet, ATM or roll-you-own-L2-protocol. We’ll pretend to be out and not answer the door when they knock.
The middlemen draw a distinction between “raw IP” (before the ISP gets ahold of it), and “retail IP”, which is what you and I get to experience. This kind of suggests that the OSI 7-layer model
got it horribly wrong, because there’s a fundamental cleave right in
the middle of layer 3, where IP sits. Fair comment, but sounds pretty
radical to me. Although I’ve never really got layer 6, so maybe they’re
onto something.
Then you might be a “top of IP” kind of girl. You can cope with the
discrimination creeping higher up the stack to the next layer, where
particular TCP and UDP ports
and flags are screened off. But you only get queasy if particular
commercial service providers or applications are targeted. Blocking off
port 25 is OK to you, since it doesn’t discriminate against any particular email service provider.
Sadly, these are all hogwash and bunkum.
Net Neutrality is a dead end, because
as Searls and Weinberger correctly noted, the Net isn’t a thing, it’s an interconnected set of agreements. These are bilateral and freely entered into. And since those agreements weren’t modelled off a viral template such as the GNU General Public License,
they are all unique. There’s no contagious clause that insists the
Internet becomes a “thing” by virtue of everyone having to agree to
freely and neutrally pass packets in an ever growing pool of
Neutraldom. So to impose neutrality you’re going to have to interpose
yourself into a lot of contracts. (Another reason why “Internet
Governance” is an oxymoron when referring to anything beyond IP address
allocation and routing, which do require some central agreement and
co-ordination.)
There’s no grand “first principle” from which you can derive network
neutrality as an economic argument. No public choice, competition, game
theory or otherwise construct that leads us there. Indeed, saying that
the public would benefit if there was a transfer of wealth from
providers to users isn’t good enough. You’re playing with matches in
the oil refinery when you start messing with property rights. Yes,
those networks are mostly funded by risk capital. The local loop copper
of a fixed operator may still be hangovers from monopoly days, but
generally those assets were brought into the private sector on clear
rules, the stockholders took a punt, and some of the better informed
ones who saw the long-term potential of DSL etc.
got to reap a windfall. Of course in parallel the telcos have done a
superlative job of lobbying for rules that keep competition out, but
that’s a different issue.
But wait a moment, it gets worse.
What if I wanted to allow people in the street to access my WiFi? But I only want to offer web and email, so as to make P2P filesharing
tricky. As a good public-spirited citizen I put up a splash page so
they know exactly what’s going on. Am I allowed to? Or is Net
Neutrality only for the mythical mystical “them”?
When in deploying my network do I need to “design-in” neutrality?
Concept, build or operation? Should we be outlawing the deployment of PSTN-specific GSM networks
because they’re “unfair” to non-PSTN voice applications like Skype? Am
I allowed to deploy non-technological measures for neutrality, such as
contract terms? Am I allowed to read the packets, but not block them,
in order to enforce my contract (repeat - freely entered into by both
partners)?
What level of jitter and congestion is perceived as “neutral”? What
if I deploy technology like Qualcomm’s 1xRTT, which separately supports
voice and data, with PSTN-only voice, but
the data is a bit lousy for VoIP? Is that being unfair, or merely a
realistic response to the limitations of technology?
Is neutrality a wholesale or a retail problem? What if the access
infrastructure owner offers “neutral” IP connectivity, but no retail
provider chooses to pass that on directly to the public without
layering on some filtering and price discrimination?
Oh, and what’s so special about the Internet? Do other IP-based
networks need neutrality principles? Do any networks? Should more
network industries be forced to forego “winner takes all” rewards?
Google looks awfully dominant at adverts, doesn’t it… I wonder if that
ad network needs a bit of “neutrality”?
Incidentally, although I’m against blanket rules enforcing neutrality, I would reserve it as a tool for post hoc competition and antitrust law enforcement. And I think you can
make a stand on Network Neutrality on political and free speech
grounds, but that requires a very different policy approach (i.e. not
one that confiscates the proceeds of private capital investment).
And if the users value a neutral connection so much, perhaps it’s
time for them to self-organise a bit, build their own networks, or
tender for connectivity together — rather than rolling over and
accepting whatever the local telco can cableco provide by default. But
that would burst the illusion that government is here to save us from
ourselves and we’ve no need to take personal responsibility for our
connectivity freedom.
The moment you try to define Network Neutrality, you have to choose
a layer, a time, a market, the participants. You have to make
non-neutral choices in order to define the boundary of your
Neutrasphere. There is no ‘neutral’ space devoid of favouring the
interests of particular market players. The contradiction is inherent.
There is no way to finesse it away.
Everything’s bass-ackwards. Neutrality is a sign of healthy supply
competition and sophisticated ways of demand expression. It’s an
output, not an input. Beware demanding net neutrality as a blanket
principle, rather than a scalpel to excise particular local
anti-competitive acts. Khrushchev declared the corn harvest was great,
too — but it didn’t create the incentives for more corn to be sown and
for the system to succeed on future iterations. And net neutrality
rules are also likely to have the exact opposite effect of that
intended.
Net neutrality messes up freedom of contract, freedom of association, and property rights.
I don’t buy it.
via Telepocalypse.net
I wonder when I will be able to get it in South-East-Asia. Emerging markets, yet, but no place to get it here.
