Net Neutrality?

Net neutrality is back in the news.  But what you don’t hear about is that the problem already extends far beyond BitTorrent. 

Many “legitimate” businesses are on the verge of becoming collateral damage. These companies see vast regions of the Net –- nearly all of Canada and pockets of communities here in Massachusetts and other states can countries -– as far from “neutral.” ISPs in those regions already employ "traffic management" policies that can unknowingly render many services useless.  These include web conferencing companies (like Glance), photo sharing sites, disk backup services, and more.

The crux of the problem is that many ISPs sold far more bandwidth than their networks can deliver.  They wrongly anticipated consumers would mostly download data from the Internet, not upload data into it.  While the “core” of the Internet – the Net’s massive superhighway – still enjoys plenty of surplus bandwidth, the “last few hundred yards” of some networks can be easily maxed out, particularly by users uploading lots of data.

BitTorrent causes a large fraction of the upload traffic, so a number of ISPs have developed methods to squeeze BitTorrent traffic on their networks to a trickle, freeing up space for other traffic.   

But their methods, called “traffic shaping”, can be like fishing with dynamite.  They may get the bass they’re hunting, but not without killing the trout, pickerel and everything else swimming nearby.

Consider Canada, where the two ISPs dominate – Rogers Cable and Shaw Cable.  They have been traffic shaping for several years to limit BitTorrent traffic.  But their method is astonishingly crude.  It crushes nearly any high speed data stream sent by a customer that uses one of the Internet’s most popular protocols. 

If a typical Rogers or Shaw customer tries today to host a web conference using that protocol to show some slides to colleagues, he may find it can take minutes to send a single slide. 

Often he’ll assume the web conferencing provider is at fault.  After all, everything else will seem to run fast.  Even if he calls his ISP, the ISP will probably deny culpability.  The public position for most ISPs has been to deny they employ traffic shaping.

The customer suffers, because a critical web service fails.  The web service provider suffers, because customers incorrectly assume its service is at fault.

In the short term, many web service companies have been investing R&D dollars implementing methods to avoid traffic shaping.  But this is just a finger in the dike.  The BitTorrents of the world are doing the same.  At some point, seemingly overnight, legitimate web services could fail to work at all. 

Applying a blunt instrument to the problem that punishes all bandwidth users indiscriminately is not in the spirit of true net neutrality.

Sure,  ISPs should have the right to “fire” a customer or put them on a plan that reflects their true cost.  But they should not be permitted to impose broad policies that discriminate against Web applications unrelated to the problem.

Follow this issue at:
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-280373A1.pdf

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200802241813DOWJONESDJONLINE000310_FORTUNE5.htm