Net Neutrality

One of the hot topics in the news lately has been Net Neutrality. One of my hot buttons lately has been how the general press has gotten it wrong.

How Does It Work?

So what is it? Think of it as express lanes on the information superhighway for people who can afford to pay more. (Read "big companies".) These are the High Occupancy Toll lanes -- extra speed for a price. It's not the raw bandwidth of your pipe -- you may have an OC-45, but if the QoS controls on traffic coming from YouTube limit the effective bandwidth to 50 kbps, you're not going to be able to see much in the way of video.

When you browse a web site or view an on-line video, there are two the packet streams involved -- the one from your browser to the server and the one coming back from the server to your browser. What the large network companies like Verizon and SBC would like to do is give higher priority to traffic coming back from the server to your browser for companies who are willing to pay for it. Essentially, they want to impose quality of service controls on your pipe *that you have no control over*, no matter what you (at the client end) pay for or ask for.

In some cases this kind of treatment just makes you impatient. If you have a choice between a page that comes up in two seconds or one that comes up in twenty seconds, which one would you choose? In other cases the difference in the quality of service can make the service unusable for you -- e.g. streaming video or VOIP.

Gatekeepers

The network service providers are effectively gatekeepers in this industry. They are the equivalent of the majordomo to the king, determining who gets to have an audience and who doesn't. The majordomo has just realized that he can demand bribes from petitioners to allow or deny access, except that he has to get approval from the king first. When a gatekeeper starts demanding payment for preferential treatment, I start to get very, very leery of the whole arrangement. The system encourages companies to look for ways to raise profits by walling out competitors rather than providing a superior product or service to the customer. Opportunities for corruption begin to increase and market transparency takes a nose dive. Insiders make sweetheart deals and everyone else pays the price. There has actually been a case where an ISP made Skype and Vonage almost unusable so that they could sell their own VOIP service instead. The majordomo is not only not letting some petitioners in to see the king, but also is steering petitioners to an alternative arbitration service run by the majordomo.

Innovation

This has a direct effect on innovation -- a bad one. A small company with a better technology right now has a good chance of competing with a large established company, since bandwidth is bandwidth. However, without net neutrality a large company can pay the majordomo to lock out a small company. This goes against everything that the Internet has stood for since its inception.

The network companies are trying to make the argument that they need to charge more so that they will have money to invest to grow our network infrastructure. I call bullsh*t on this. There's still a lot of dark fiber left over from the dot-com days and there have been innovations since then on multiplexing dozens of signals into the same fiber. If they need more revenue so that they can invest in more infrastructure, they can just raise their usual rates in a way that is fair to everyone, not in a way that blackmails Vonage for VOIP traffic and YouTube for video traffic. If the network companies can't raise their rates because of competition, well then the market is doing its job and the network companies should concentrate on cutting their costs or providing new value-added services. The network companies' argument just plain doesn't make sense.

Breaking a Contract

In a very real sense, net favoritism is the ISP breaking its contract with you, the end user. You paid for a certain amount of bandwidth -- e.g. 6.0 Mbps down/768 Kbps up DSL service. If you are not otherwise using that bandwidth, you expect that when you hit a website or a streaming video site you should receive the full 6 Mbps that you are paying for. However, because the ISP has decided to favor Yahoo over Google, you get only 1 Mbps from Google while you get the full 6 Mbps from Yahoo. This is not kosher, if you ask me.

Follow the Money

I was reading yet another article about this in the business section of the Washington Post, July 2, 2006. It made the point that the forces in favor of net neutrality (generally the users of the Internet) have spent about $2.1 million lobbying. The opponent of net neutrality (generally the telecom companies) have spent about $9.1 million lobbying. The side that spends the most money in these lobbying battles tends to be the side that stands to gain money at the expense of the vast majority of people.

What You Can Do

As an individual, you can:

1. Contact your U.S. Representative and U.S. Senators. You can find them at:

http://house.gov/
http://senate.gov/

Don't just send them an e-mail, write them a letter, call, send a fax, or visit their office in person, either in Washington, DC or in your home state. Especially do so if you live in Alaska and are a constituent of Senator Ted Stevens. His error-laden speech was an appalling demonstration of just how clueless (or corrupt!) some people are.

2. Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at

http://eff.org/

Symantec as Evil Chicken Little

Symantec just issued a warning about a trojan that attacks a hole in launchd that was patched by the 10.4.7 update.

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/osx.exploit.launchd.html

Except that it turns out there is no actual trojan, just proof of concept code. Their page contains *no* specific mention that this hole is patched by the 10.4.7 update. It just talks about updating your virus definitions. After repeatedly hearing them say, "the sky is falling, the sky is falling", I've started to disbelieve Symantec's security warnings. Their warnings seem to be more oriented towards selling copies of Norton AntiVirus than actually providing any real alerts. How bogus.


--Paul