FCC inches away from neutrality

The FCC’s latest proposal for network neutrality rules creates space for broadband carriers to offer “paid prioritization” services.[11] While the sale of such prioritization has been characterized as a stark and simple sorting into “fast” and “slow” traffic lanes,[12] the offering is somewhat more subtle: a paid prioritization service allows broadband carriers to charge content providers for priority when allocating the network’s shared resources, including the potentially scarce bandwidth over the last-mile connection between the Internet and an individual broadband subscriber. Such allocation has historically been determined by detached—or “neutral”—algorithms. The Commission’s newly proposed rules, however, would allow carriers to subject this allocation to a content provider’s ability and willingness to pay.

That's from a review on Standard Law Review a few months ago. I think this evolution in the FCC's approach will benefit the public.

It seems important to consider realistic developments of the Internet. Here's a thought experiment I've used for a long time, and that seems to be happening in practice. Try to imagine what goes wrong if a site like YouTube or Netflix pays--with its own money--to install some extra network infrastructure in your neighborhood, but only allows its own packets to go across that infrastructure. Doing so is a flagrant violation of network neutrality, because packets from one site will get to you faster than packets from another site. Yet, I can't see the harm. It seems like a helpful development, and just the sort of thing that might get squashed by an overly idealistic commitment to neutrality.

As a follow-on question, what changes if instead of Netflix building the infrastructure itself, it pays Comcast to do it? It's the same from a consumer's view as before, only now the companies in question are probably saving money. Thus, it's even better for the general public, yet it's an even more flagrant violation of network neutrality. In this scenario, Netflix is straight-up paying for better access.

It seems that the FCC now agrees with that general reasoning. They not only support content delivery networks in general, but now they are going to allow generic ISPs to provide their own prioritized access to sites that pay a higher price for it.

I believe "neutrality" is not the best precise goal to go for. Rather, it's better to think about a more general notion of anti-trust.

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.

Defining neutral web search

I like South Bend Seven's depiction of that process:

"Let's adjust the learning parameter to .00125 and the momentum factor to .022." "Sure thing, but we better run that by Legal first." There's a recipe for success

Perhaps in 40-50 years, there will be a stable version of the World Wide Web that it makes sense to clamp down with regulation, including search neutrality. However, right new, the web is changing way too fast.

Looking backward, imagine what kind of standards would have been written for a web search back when Alta Vista was the best. What are the odds that a government effort would have a reasonable approach to ranking pages according to linkage patterns? How about deciding what counts as a keyword? Is Zeitgeist one word or two? How about the "did you mean" results? If such an attempt had succeeded, then today we wouldn't even know about these innovations. They would have been squashed by the regulation before anyone could try.

Looking forward, imagine all the ways the web might change in the coming decade. What if more of the web moves into social spaces that have severe privacy needs, such as Facebook and Orkut? What if more of the content uses rich media, as do physical magazines, and is less possible to describe using plain text? What if things go the other way, and the web's information becomes a scattering of little sentences that are glued together on the fly for a particular user's settings?

The search neutrality project can only impoverish our Internet. I'm not clear on why the American government has jurisdiction over the "World" Wide Web, but to the extent they do, I hope they do the right thing and just go take a nap.

Fight with fire and get burned

I almost wrote earlier about Google's promotion of other Google sites like Maps as part of its search result, but I didn't. It seemed too silly. Now I read that the issue might be heating up after all. In a recent interview, Google spokespersons claim that there is strong activity in D.C. to turn the issue into a serious anti-trust case.

One of Google's defenses is that there's no such thing as a neutral web search algorithm:

Google has recently brought in executives to discuss how neutrality can’t be achieved in search because the company’s algorithm is based on subjective factors to ensure users get accurate results.

I completely agree. A neutral web search is bound to be a bad web search. A good web search is heavily biased toward what the user wants, and any search provider is going to have to use their judgment on what the user will want.

However, I also feel the same about network neutrality. The Internet is not a star topology, where we route packets into a central router and then it spits them back out to other people connected to it. It's a complex network that no one in the world has a full map of. The routing decisions at each node can be quite complex, and good routers are almost never going to treat all packets the same. A neutral router is a bad router.

Additionally, I always felt the same way about browser neutrality. The best operating system shells have thorough integration with a web browser instead of just forking off a web browser application. It makes for a better user interface, and software engineers seem to agree if you look at what they build rather than their opinion on this case. There have been a number of good OSes with built-in browsers, including two by Google: Android and ChromeOS. A browser-neutral OS is a bad OS.

I hope Google does not get stuck with search neutrality provisions. I must say, though, that they invited the wolf into the hen house.

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.

That's not how it works

James Robertson shares this depressing quote from the FCC:

"A commercial arrangement between a broadband provider and a third party to directly or indirectly favor some traffic over other traffic in the connection to a subscriber of the broadband provider (i.e., 'pay for priority') would raise significant cause for concern," the Commission then elaborates. This is because "pay for priority would represent a significant departure from historical and current practice."

Follow the link for analysis.

Let me focus just on this part. The FCC, here, joins the ranks of those who think the Internet is a star topology. The apparent model is that there's an Internet, and then everyone plugs their computer into the Internet. When one user routes a packet to another user, it takes two hops: one to the center node, and one to the other user. Everything that happens within this mythical center node is abstracted away.

As an aside, the FCC also presents a view of the Internet where a handful of providers are sending broadcasts to the masses. Individuals don't contract for Internet services. They are "consumers", and they "subscribe" to the feeds. Leave that aside for now.

The Internet is not a star topology, but a general network. When you send a packet to someone else, it usually takes a dozen or two hops to get to them. How fast it gets to them depends enormously on the intermediate nodes that are taken along the way. I used to play around with traceroute and watch just what routes the packets take under various circumstances. I saw some particularly striking examples when I worked on a Department of Defense bulletin board and watched how packets route between a university network and a DoD machine. Let's just say the routes favored security over latency. They'd go a LONG way in order to go through carefully controlled choke points.

Because the Internet works this way, people who provide Internet services work hard to make sure their servers are well connected with respect to their users. For example, if you want to provide service to British folks, then you really want to get a server up on the island. It wasn't so long ago that all major ftp sites had clones in the UK. Sending data across the English Channel, much less the Atlantic Ocean, was just horrendously slow. When you install an extra server in the UK, you must pay for it.

Relocating a server is just one option. It's also possible to lease network connections between where your server is and where you want the IP traffic to route to. When you do that, you will have to pay whomever you are leasing the bandwidth from.

In short, if you want better connectivity, you have to pay for it. The more you pay, the better the connectivity you get. What the FCC calls a disturbing development is a hair split away from how things already work. They seem to be riding on the notion of whether you pay a broadband provider or some other entity. I fail to see what a big difference it makes.

Let's try a few thought experiments and compare them to the star-topology model. Suppose Netflix pays Comcast to let them install some servers in the same building as a major Comcast hub. Is anything wrong with that? I don't see why. They'll get better bandwidth, but they're paying for all the expenses. Similarly, suppose Netflix, on their own dime, installs new network fiber from their data center to a major Comcast hub. Is there anything wrong with that? Again, I don't see it. After Netflix lays that network, would there be anything wrong with Comcast plugging into it and routing traffic to and from it? Again, I can't see how it would help users for them to decline.

Where the FCC seems to draw the line is when you go past barter and use more fungible resources. What if, instead of Netflix installing new network fiber itself, it pays Comcast to do it. And what if, instead of Comcast laying new fiber for each customer, they split the cost over different customers, giving more access to those who pay more. From the FCC's view, this goes from totally normal to something they've never seen in the past. From my view, this is how things work already. You pay more to get more bandwidth.

I wish the FCC would just abandon trying to regulate Internet service. I want a neutral network, but I don't see how the FCC is going to anything but hurt. I want the Internet we have, not something like broadcast TV, cable, wired telephony, or cellular telephony. I don't think it is a coincidence that the Internet is both less regulated and far more neutral than these other networks.

Can the FCC touch cable?

Brian Stelter says no:

There is little the Federal Communications Commission can say about Fox News or MSNBC since the channels are on cable, not delivered over the broadcast airwaves.

True, but don't rest too easy. The FCC has whatever authority that U.S. Congress gives it. It's been lobbying for explicit authority over cable and the Internet, and they'll get it if the public wants them to have it.

We have a chance to leave behind the bad old days where U.S. citizens are "protected" from seeing anything that D.C. folks would consider objectionable. Getting there requires that the FCC not regulate the new networks, and they really want to.

Against an Internet Blacklist

There is a bill in the U.S. Senate to set up a blacklist for American citizens:

The main mechanism of the bill is to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates names like "www.eff.org" or "www.nytimes.com" into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate. The bill creates a blacklist of censored domains; the Attorney General can ask a court to place any website on the blacklist if infringement is "central" to the purpose of the site.

To draw an analogy, this is like ordering someone's phone line to be disconnected based on a simple court order. It's not a good plan even if it were limited to sites that were clearly infringing copyright. Shouldn't the site owner get a day in court before their access is cut off?

Needless to say, I don't think we should have a DNS blacklist in America. We shouldn't adopt totalitarian information control just to prop up the current crop of companies that are in industry. Indeed, why should we work so hard to prop up yesterday's business models, anyway? We may as well try to bring back the horse and buggy.

Some sanity on network neutrality

PC World writes that the courts have ruled against the FCC for throttling BitTorrent connections:

The FCC lacked "any statutorily mandated responsibility" to enforce network neutrality rules, wrote Judge David Tatel.

As I wrote before, I didn't understand how the FCC had this authority:

Part of my curiosity is exactly how the FCC has the jurisdiction to do this. The last I heard, network neutrality was voted down in Congress. Did it come up again with no one noticing, or is the FCC just reaching again?

I want a neutral network, but I don't see much our governments can do to help. I'm glad to hear that at the very least, the FCC must await enabling legislation to do any of this nonsense. It means that U.S. agencies are still to some degree bound by law.

It's a good thing in this case, too. The FCC wanted to prevent Comcast from throttling traffic. How is this really going to work out profitably in the long run?

The problem is that plenty of throttling is not just acceptable, but a good idea. Eliminate the bad throttling, and lots of good will be thrown out, too. The clearest example is that the diagnostic packets used by ping and traceroute should surely be prioritized higher than packets carrying regular data. Another is that streaming video should likely get down prioritized so that it doesn't hog the whole pipe. Another is that any individual node that is spamming would be good to get throttled down. Another is that a large network might have some parts of its network better connected than others; to prevent the low-bandwidth areas from being clogged, they might want to throttle incoming data into the well-connected parts. There are really quite a lot of legitimate uses for throttling.

Those examples are all compelling and ordinary, but it gets worse when we consider possible future business models. For example, suppose an ISP of the future openly advertises that it prefers some traffic over others, e.g. that it allocates sufficient bandwidth for VOIP that there are never any glitches in a conversation held over their network. Such a company could provide a great service to the general public, but good luck getting it past an FCC that categorically disallows any form of throttling. Regulatory agencies tend to clamp down an industry to work the way it currently works; new ways of doing things can't get off the ground.

Again, though, I'm all for trying to make a more neutral network. It's just that the U.S. government is so terrible with everything computer that its solutions are worse than the problems. If I desperately had to think of something for our governments to do, I'd suggest looking into last-mile issues: decouple Internet service from the service of physically hooking up at the last mile.

IP-level neutrality is not the biggest issue, though. It's already pretty good. A far bigger concern is the constant race between walled gardens and open systems. It doesn't matter if you can send data to any IP, but the only IP that matters is Apple's. The best cure for that is for customers to pay attention to lock-in.