Net Neutrality vs Traffic Throttling

[Here's a post from Ed Hardebeck, Glance's VP of Engineering...]

The issues of Net Neutrality (Neutrality on the Internet) and Traffic Shaping or Throttling as a network management practice by ISPs (particularly cable companies) are closely related, but often confused.

They have different motivations, and somewhat different negative consequences:

1. Traffic Throttling/Shaping

ISPs will use this if they oversold their bandwidth.  The problem is that they built networks better suited to typical web-surfing and email.  They don't want all that bitTorrent stuff or other file sharing to use up bandwidth.

The negative effects are:

• It sucks for people who like file sharing and think they've paid for the bandwidth to use as they wish.  You can't say these customers are "hogging" bandwidth.  They want it, they want to use it, they think they've paid for it.



• The ISP can't easily distinguish file sharing traffic from other services, like web conferencing.  So they can end up throttling us and and possibly other interesting or new services. (It's NOT easy to tell and it will likely get worse.  The file sharing developers will actively TRY to make their protocols look like something else.  I've seen these discussions among themselves.) 
  
  This has the potential to kill new or different services of the future.  Remember that the Internet was around for over TEN YEARS before the web appeared.  What if we were all stuck now using only the services AOL wanted to provide in 1998?  Short term, it hurts innovative new companies; long term, it throttles innovation on the 'net in general at the expense of the status quo applications.

2. Net Neutrality

This battle is over money.  The ISPs don't just want to be carriers, they want to make money from content providers.  Some want to strike deals with big providers, like iTunes or CNN or Amazon or eBay, to carry their traffic preferentially.  Or for the cable providers, THEY want to be providing video content, not having you get it from youTube.  If you're surfing to smaller websites, other providers that have no deal, that traffic is slower.  They don't care what you the customer wants to do, they're used to telling you what you're going to get.

The negative effects:

• Small business gets screwed, big business rules.  It's like all the good, wide, well paved roads went only to WalMart and McDonalds.  If you wanted to go to a local shop, or a Thai restaurant you had to take the windy unplowed dirt road.  Small business actually generates more jobs and is a larger part of our economy.  Without this public infrastructure, small business can't compete and small businesses never grow to large businesses.  Web conferencing might exist, big established providers like BrandX may pay them, but we likely can't.
• Generic big-company blandness.  The Internet becomes like TV.  A one-way medium where only big companies provide the content and Internet users become passive consumers of it, they don't create content or communicate.

In the long run...

I don't really don't think it's economically or technically or ethically feasible to legislate protection of various kinds of traffic and not others.  And I think it's stupidly shortsighted to choke off small companies and innovation.

So, long term, I only see two ways this could possibly play out:

1. Nobody gets much upload bandwidth at all.  The Internet essentially becomes a one-way medium, like TV.  Everyone becomes passive consumers of content rather than creating or communicating.  Worse, only certain large producers get any download bandwidth carried at reasonable speeds.  Small business and new services (particularly those that rely on upload bandwidth) get screwed.  The end of the Internet boom as we know it.
2. Charge by level of traffic.  Per megabit up/down bandwidth usage charge, just like we all pay in the colos, with tiered pricing.  You want to fileshare or do web conferencing all day?  Go ahead.  You just need to buy the x MB plan.  Pretty much just like cellphone pricing.  And it will keep coming down as the technology improves, and you'll probably get free nights and weekends.

And I don't think free market competition can save this.  There's just not enough space on the poles or spectrum in the ether.  (You should see the great loops of cable on the poles outside my house).   This is something of a natural monopoly, like roads, like telephone service, like electricity.  And like them it is an infrastructure that is important to the entire economy.  It's got to be regulated somehow.  And I know how this grates on people who instinctively can't stand the idea of "the government" interfering with anything.  But this is exactly why we have government at all.  This is the sort of thing it's supposed to do.

There have been proposals to create competition like was done with telephone service, by "unbundling" services and requiring the wires to be shared with competitors.  But that's not really free-market, it's a lot more regulation.  Maybe it would work to increase some competition, but it doesn't solve the technical problems.  (For example, we can buy T1 service from any number of companies, but it's always Verizon that has to show up and connect the wire...)

-- Ed Hardebeck