Is Internet access a utility?

I forwarded a link about Network Neutrality to Google Plus, and it got a lot of comments about how Internet access should be treated like a utility. I think that's a reasonable perspective to start with. What we all want, I think, is to have Internet access itself be a baseline service, and that Internet services on top of it have fierce competition.

In addition to considering the commonalities with Internet access and utilities, we should also note the differences.

One difference is that a utility is for a monopoly, but Internet access is not monopolized. You can only put one road in any physical location, and I will presume for the sake of argument that you don't want to have multiple power grids in the same locale. Internet access is not a monopoly, though! At least in Atlanta, we have cable, DSL, WiMax, and several cellular providers. We have more high-speed Internet providers than supermarket chains.

Another difference is that utilities lock down technology change to a snail's pace. With roads and power grids, the technology already provides near-maximum service for what is possible, so this doesn't matter. With telephony, progress has been locked down for decades, and I think we all lost out because of that; the telephone network could have been providing Skype-like services a long time ago, but as a utility they kept doing things the same way as always. Meanwhile, the Internet is changing rapidly. It would be really bad to stop progress on Internet access right now, the way we did with telephony several decades ago.

I believe a better model than utilities would be supermarkets. Like Internet providers, supermarkets carry a number of products that are mostly produced by some other company. I think it has gone well for everyone that supermarkets to have tremendous freedom in their content selection, pricing, promotional activities, hours, floor layout, buggies, and checkout technology.

In contrast to what some commenters ask, I do not have any strong expectation about what Comcast will or won't try. I would, however, like them to be free to experiment. I've already switched from Comcast and don't even use them right now. If Comcast is locked into their current behavior, then that does nothing for me good or bad. If they can experiment, maybe they will come up with something better.

In principle, I know that smart people disagree on this, but I currently don't see anything fundamentally wrong with traffic shaping. If my neighbor is downloading erotica 24/7, then I think it is reasonable that Comcast give my Game of Thrones episode higher priority. The fact that Comcast has implemented this badly in the past is troubling, but that doesn't mean the next attempt won't work better. I'd like them to be free to try.

Peek IPv4 ?

In its announcement about "IPv6 Day", the Internet Society (ISOC) casually remarked that IPv4 addresses are about to run out:

With IPv4 addresses running out this year, the industry must act quickly to accelerate full IPv6 adoption or risk increased costs and limited functionality online for Internet users everywhere.

This is highly misleading, and the recommended solution is not a good idea. I am sure if pressed the ISOC would respond that by "running out", they mean in the technical sense that some registrar or another has now given away all its addresses. However, the actual verbiage implies something far different. It implies that if you or I try to get an IPv4 address on January 1, 2012, we won't be able to do so. That implication is highly unlikely.

A better way to think about the issue is via price theory. From the price theory point of view, the number of IPv4 addresses at any time is finite, and each address has a specific owner. At the current time, every valid address is owned by some entity or another. (Thus, in some sense they "ran out" a long time ago.)

When a new person wants to get an IPv4 address for their own use, they must obtain the rights from some entity that already has one. While some large organizations can use political mechanisms to gain an IPv4 address, most people must purchase or rent the address from some entity that already owns one. Typically those IP addresses are bundled with a service contract that provides Internet bandwidth, though in some cases addresses can be purchased by themselves.

The price one pays gives us a way to think about the scarcity of addresses. Diamonds are relatively scarce, and their price is correspondingly high. Being 747s are even more scarce, and their price is even higher. For IP addresses, the price is surely rising over time as more and more people hook things up to the Internet. Already the price is high enough that, for example, most home users do not assign a separate publicly routable address to every IP device in their home. They make do with a single IP address from their Internet provider.

What is that price right now? The question is crudely phrased, because some addresses are more valuable than others, and all addresses come with some sort of strings attached. However, we can get a ballpark idea by considering a few data points:

• Linode offers its subscribers an extra IP address for $1/month.
  
• Linode offers an IP address along with an Internet hosting service for under $20/month.
  
• Broadband providers such as Comcast and AT&T offer an IP address along with Internet connectivity for on the order of $50/month.
  

From these observations we can infer that the cost of an IP address is at most a few dollars per month. With the cost this low, I can't see any major site going to IPv6-only any time soon. A few dollars per month is a very low price to pay for a great deal of extra accessibility. With the protocols designed as they are right now, the reason to consider IPv6 is that it's a newer, better protocol, not because it has more available addresses.

I wish public communication about IPv6 would make this more clear. The Internet is important, and as such, it is important that the techies get it right. This isn't a minor technical detail.

That scary Internet

National governments are coming to fear the Internet as a potentially disruptive mechanism for their publics. China and Australia have installed national firewalls to attempt to filter information crossing their borders to and from the greater Internet. Most recently, Egypt has recently shut down portions of its Internet infrastructure.

Many reports speak of the Egyptian shut down as a done deal. However, this is a misleading viewpoint. In point of fact, many Egyptians are still connected to the Internet through various means. The Internet is architected so that packets can take any route available from their source IP to their destination IP. As the old saying goes, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". Like with so many other things, an official shut down just shuts down official business. Criminals don't care, nor do most of the general public.

Regarding the American kill switch, I must wonder how the discussion has gotten as far as it did given American politics. Aside from being technically hopeless, and for making times of peace more dangerous, it just doesn't seem American to let the president shut down a major category of speech. Has there ever been a U.S. president that tried to get a media kill switch, i.e. the ability to shut down every newspaper, pamphlet, printer, and copying machine at the press of a button?

Overall, I expect this gradual creeping oversight to know no bounds. The U.S. government is ham-handed, its members would universally prefer not to be discussed, and units such as the FCC are seeking a new reason to exist. Instead of gradually fighting each individual effort as they attempt to chip away at the open Internet, I would prefer a categorical principle that the U.S. government just does not have authority over the Internet. There's no reason they should, and they're not even competent.