Telecommies

(crossposted from PC Mag)

Eighty percent of net subscribers use less than ten percent of the overall bandwidth. Do ISPs have a right, in light of this, to put limits on users? Dvorak and the cranks convene.

Rep. Markey’s Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 (HR 5353) ironically does just the opposite, opening a Pandora’s box of bureaucratic regulation and internet governance.

Currently the internet is open and free. There are many options for consumers to get online, some are faster while others are cheaper. In hindsight one of the distinctive differences between the old telephone industry and the internet lays in enormous innovation and competition, possible only in a non-regulatory environment. A critical congressional colleague complains:

Markey is trying to turn the Internet into a highly regulated industry like the waterways and railroads of the 19th century, according to Republican Reps. Cliff Stearns, ranking member of the subcommittee, and Fred Upton of Michigan.

In defense, Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, claims there’s an urgent need for internet regulation.

Free Press supports the right to network management, but draws the line at discrimination based on content or a particular application, like BitTorrent, Scott said. “That’s the kind of targeting and selectivity that should be left to the consumer.”

But should it? BitTorrent software is uniquely designed to gobble up bandwidth, and as a side-effect can harm the internet service of other customers nearby (see yesterday’s post). Comcast shouldn’t have initially lied about not managing internet traffic, but that doesn’t mean what they did is wrong. Comcast had a legitimate grievance.

If two of my neighbors decide to pirate the whole Star Wars movie collection simultaneously with BitTorrent, tying up the internet to such a degree that I can’t check my e-mail… where’s the justice in net neutrality there? Strict net neutrality could restrain an internet service provider (ISP) from protecting it’s own customers.

Preserving a free internet means thumbs down for HR 5353. Markey has a strange vision that the internet will fail to produce great new ideas without government protection. Government… bureaucracy is where good ideas come to die. This bill will empower bureaucrats to change the internet; and bureaucrats only go one direction, red tape.

Comcast’s new alliance with BitTorrent(a popular peer-to-peer file sharing software) shows private mediation is still the best solution for online conflicts. While impractical activists clamor for regulation, strictly enforcing neutral internet service, they fail to recognize some basic internet management is both desirable and necessary.
ISPs Need Freedom to Overcome Challenges

Back in 2004 internet service providers(ISPs) had a glut of extra bandwidth (a measurement of internets capacity for traffic). However four years later (an eternity in the world of technology), this is no longer the case. During peak hours internet use now reaches full capacity (you may notice the internet seems a little slower in the early afternoon).

What’s disappointing is, most internet bandwidth is consumed by a small minority. Comcast estimates, on congested links, two percent of the users occupy fifty percent of the bandwidth. This problem sparked the net neutrality controversy. Comcast found, during peak hours in particular, only five percent of the users consumed seventy percent of internet traffic. BitTorrent, useful for trafficking huge files, was a likely culprit. In hopes of restoring a greater degree of equal access among customers as a whole, Comcast reduced the speed of BitTorrent users. Objection to such management gave birth to the present “Net Neutrality” movement, a reactionary group opposed to any ISP management what-so-ever.

Should ISPs lose the right to manage service and protect their deeply invested internet infrastructure? In an online environment plagued by malicious spam, viruses, and spyware, do absolute net neutrality policies make sense? What good is a free internet if it doesn’t work? And should a free internet respect property rights, or conflicting utopian ideals?

Consider enacted net neutrality in Canada:

[A] Canadian court judge sentenced a London, Ontario man to nine months in prison for hate crimes. The defendant was brought to justice through the dogged efforts of Canadian civil rights lawyer Richard Warman. In response, operators of several hate websites targeted Warman, making explicit death threats against him.

Warman was justifiably was concerned that these threats could result in violence to him or his family. So he turned to Google in the U.S. and to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) (Canada’s FCC) and asked that the death threat web sites be blocked. Google, which was hosting one of the sites through its Blogger service, immediately complied, saying, “We want Blogger to enable free expression, including the hosting of views that are unpopular. However, advocating violence against a person is not acceptable.”

But in Canada – where there is the equivalent of net neutrality regulation – the bureaucratic red tape has resulted in inaction and the death threats remain online there(source).

Internet activities don’t deserve blanket protection, regardless of merit.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago Comcast and BitTorrent announced a cooperative effort for enhanced service. The ISP and software designers are adjusting their operations to better complement each other. Tony Werner, chief technology officer of Comcast Cable, explained,

This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure out network management technique that is more appropriate for today’s emerging Internet trends… We have been discussing this migration and its effects with leaders in the Internet community for the last several months, and we will refine, adjust and publish the technique based upon feedback and initial trial results(source).

You don’t have to understand the technical side to appreciate successful mediation between private parties. No regulations could produce such a constructive solution. An Internet run by the people, not the government, will always produce a better outcome for the consumer.

FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell commented,

The private sector is the best forum to resolve such disputes… It is precisely this kind of private sector solution that has been the bedrock of Internet governance since its inception. Government mandates cannot possibly contemplate the myriad of complexities and nuances of the Internet marketplace(source).

Considering the complex issues as a whole, the best way to preserve our treasured online resource, a free internet, is a continued U.S. commitment to non-regulatory polices.

While surfing the internet, I came across this great Net Neutrality site. It has a great blog, with plenty more video (click here for more).

America’s chief proponent of net neutrality doesn’t seem to practice what they preach.

crossposted:

Per Reuters, Google’s board is recommending that its investors vote against a shareholder proposal from the New York City Employee Retirement System that asks Google to commit to abiding by Net Neutrality… [more]

and

[also more here]

Net neutrality hearing merely a ’show trail’ by Derek Hunter

Edited Highlights Version:

On Feb. 25, the Federal Communications Commission went to Harvard Law School to hold a hearing on the Internet management practices of Comcast, the largest provider of broadband Internet access in the country. Why Harvard, when the FCC is located in Washington? Because Harvard is near the district represented by Rep. Ed Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, who has been a longtime advocate for regulation of the Internet.

The hearing was a typical show trial: two panels weighted heavily with experts opposing Comcast, Verizon (the only other company to participate) and all other Internet service providers on the grounds that they can’t be trusted to do what they have done since the inception of the Internet: keep it open and available for all legal traffic. The heart of the matter was whether Comcast’s rerouting of traffic using the file-sharing software BitTorrent to less crowded areas of the Internet at peak hours constituted “blocking” traffic or was simply a reasonable Internet management technique that harmed no one while ensuring improved browsing experiences for the majority of its customers.

Without managing traffic (think timed traffic lights), ISPs say there are certain times of day when Web traffic is so high (think rush hour) that there’s a risk of not having enough bandwidth to accommodate it. Abandoning network management could end up slowing the Internet for everyone. Since bandwidth is limited (as are lanes on the freeway) and BitTorrent is designed to consume as much bandwidth as possible (think a double-wide semi), Comcast has a program that bounces a tiny minority of heavy BitTorrent users to less crowded areas of the Internet during these peak times to ensure the vast majority of users simply reading e-mails, checking news or blogging don’t have their speeds slowed to a crawl. Seems like common sense — but it’s actually not common, because it rarely happens[…]

In a perfect world, there would be more than enough bandwidth to go around and management practices wouldn’t be needed, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Bandwidth costs money, and like any commodity, its use must be maximized to be efficiently distributed. The economics of this seemed to make sense to everyone except those who believe that access to the Internet is a right[…]

One point made by witnesses is that there isn’t enough competition when it comes to ISPs. Most broadband consumers have a choice between two providers, at most, so switching services if one does something you don’t like is a possibility only for some — and a limited one, at that. There’s truth to this, but increased regulation will hurt, not help, the problem of insufficient competition. What competitor in its right mind would ever enter a heavily regulated market?

(read more…)