How Network Non-Neutrality Affects Real Businesses

Xconomy.com posted an opinion piece today that I wrote about how some ISPs can unwittingly trash legitimate web services in their effort to stem the flow of peer-to-peer file sharing traffic like BitTorrent.

I detail the run-in we had a few years ago when Canada’s two largest IPSs secretly deployed traffic management policies, apparently targeting BitTorrent.  Their instrument was quite blunt, trashing nearly any high speed TCP/IP stream that their customers uploaded, which caused Glance customer sessions to slow to a crawl.  Fortunately, we were able to determine the cause and luckily had a method that allowed our customers to avoid the block.

But my point is that the ISPs were of no help.  They denied that anything had changed, which was not true.  This left our customers wondering who was telling the truth.  From their perspective, only the Glance service had slowed.

That’s the crux of the problem.  ISPs cannot be allowed to institute secret traffic management policies that target unnamed web services.  Such practices can harm real businesses.  It’s like letting the phone company block an arbitrary class of phone calls that traverse their network and then deny its happening.  No one would tolerate it.  Why should other telecommunication monopolies, the ISPs, have that right?

ISPs suffering chronic congestion must be prevented from arbitrarily limiting some forms of traffic.  If they have congestion, they need to address the real problem, which I feel is a pricing problem.  They simply sold more bandwidth than their network can carry.  To fix it, they need to build more infrastructure, charge more to limit traffic, or be driven out of the market by better, more bandwidth abundant competitors.

We cannot allow ISPs to decide whose traffic they like, and whose they can trash.  Its not good for businesses and its not good for customers.

Comments

[Kevin Holtsbery]

I really enjoyed reading your opinion piece about net neutrality and how it's affected you personally. I greatly appreciate how middle of the road your opinion is even after those affects. The problem I have with your conclusion that the internet should be a per byte subscription based service is that 1) people won't swallow that pill easily. 2) how can people possibly keep track of how many bytes they have used, and furthermore, 3) how can a consumer confirm that the telecom mougles aren't abusing that figure. It's not like how it was in the beginning when you paid per minute. Too many sites have way too much data on them already that I personally don't even pay attention to. With this proposed method I would now need to pay for all that extra nonsense! And it hasn't been a huge issue lately but all those pop-up ads certainly add up. Currently you pay for throughput not total usage and you have tiers to that degree. Per byte usage will hurt not only the little guy, it will prevent people from expanding their exposure to new sites for fear of going over their limit. It's the same reason I don't txt message, because it hurts my pocket way more than it's worth.