A few neutrality quick hits

Wayne Brough points out that neutrality legislation is unlikely to help consumers, as it aims to freeze current technology in place.

Google and other high-tech giants are pressing Congress for greater federal control over the Internet in the name of “net neutrality,” a vague concept purportedly required to keep the Internet open for consumers, content and applications.

Yet looking at what net neutrality means in practice, this renowned leader in innovation is, in essence, calling for a “freeze” in technology. While protecting its own freedom, Google would forbid broadband providers from developing new technologies and services to bring consumers more valued and interesting content.

Their arguments rely on risible claims that broadband providers are monopolists who will limit access to the Net in pursuit of profits.

Yet in today’s market, the pipes are competitive and can only make money providing consumers what they want: unbridled access to content.

Neutrality proponents claims of monopoly-duopoly-infinitopoly aside, it is clear that no company dominates US telecoms. When they are not lobbying together, companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are knives-out competitors, and consumers are seeing the benefits.

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George Ou notices that ESPN realizes that content is king, and are squeezing ISPs to “carry” their Internet service. Huh? Is this reverse non-neutrality? Should ESPN be required to make their content available to any ISP that wants it?

The content providers (Google et al) have the upper hand, even if they don’t realize it yet. Neutrality would foreclose many business models that would be advantageous to them, not the telcos. Ray Gifford hints at this — I will have a full post on the topic soon.

Update: As always, Jim Lippard has an eminently logical take, and asserts that content providers do not have the upper hand.

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New wireless “mesh” networks have passed some important tests and may be ready for prime-time. What does this mean? New avenues for Internet competition. When neutrality proponents argue that we are in a monopoly situation in Internet access, they should be reminded that we have (or will soon have):

• Cable
• DSL
• Fiber to the home
• Fiber to the neighborhood
• 3G wireless
• WiMax
• Broadband over power lines
• Municipal WiFi (ugh)

I understand the arguments that competition could be better. No doubt. Neutrality legislation is a restrictive salve which does nothing to remedy this root issue. Free markets do.

If we look at the consumer communications market as a whole, we realize that no company owns more than 25% of it (or even 10% depending on how we define it). In certain local areas, competition is lacking. This combination of new technologies and the fact that all of the players are going national means that now is not a good time to get in the way.

Comments

[jv]

Imagine you get in your car, head out on I80 and then I580 east. As you approach Modesto you head south to merge onto I5 south.

But there's a backup and eventually some guy comes up to your car. You roll down the window and he asks "Where are you going?" You say "Fresno", and he says "Hmm. Well, LA bid way more than Fresno for QoS (quality of service) on I5, and most of these cars are headed for LA. So I'm afraid you'll need to pull off onto the shoulder and wait until the congestion clears up a bit."

That's highway non-neutrality. I assume you can see how that would translate into net non-neutrality?

If there were sufficient backbone bandwidth and router capacity to move all data through at maximum capacity then the telecoms would have nothing to sell -- there would be no point in buying higher QoS, as everything would move quickly anyway.

The only way that buying QoS bonuses would help is when things get congested, and consequently, that means that some lower bidding site has packets sitting and waiting for the higher priority traffic to get through (ie. higher bidding sites).

If I5 were empty, it wouldn't matter. If it were busy, then Fresno bound traffic gets screwed by the richer LA traffic.

Do you understand now?

[Matt S]

Hey there jv, I understood it from the beginning. Do you understand the difference between neutrality and QoS? Do you know why we use QoS even in uncongested situations?

Here's help: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=244.

What you are describing is speculative. That's problem 1 -- passing laws that foreclose technical choices.

Secondly, throwing bandwidth at the problem can help, but it's inefficient. 50Mb/s with QoS can provide as much consumer benefit as 100Mb/s without. There will always be a demand for more bandwidth. QoS: quality of service. Get it?

Third, there is no practical way to have multiple, competitive roads. There is plenty of room for competition with networks. Physical roads are a very poor analogy: http://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2006/06/previews_of_the.html

Do you think that FedEx somehow slows down the postal service? Do airlines clog the highways?

Let us know if you have some more boilerplate.