Notes on network neutrality

So, "network neutrality" has been getting lots of press lately. Briefly, network neutrality is the principle that Internet carriers should provide "dumb pipes" that carry all Internet traffic equally, rather than discriminating based on the type, content, or destination of the traffic that flows across their networks. A wide array of interests --- including MoveOn, Google, and a number of other groups and companies across the political spectrum --- have been lining up behind initiatives to codify this principle in law for US Internet carriers. The principal opposition to the coalition comes, unsurprisingly, from two quarters: the telecommunications companies, and libertarians.

My reaction to this is twofold. My first and predominant reaction is: I am troubled by the idea of getting the FCC involved in regulating how Internet service providers architect their networks. The Internet actually works pretty well these days, so it seems dangerous to get Congress monkeying around with its guts. And the question of what constitutes a "neutral" network is pretty subtle, as the term has no widely agreed-upon technical definition.

In the absence of a technical consensus, the output of the legislative process is likely to be either a mishmash of mistargeted micro-regulations, or a vague and overly broad mandate for the FCC. Who knows what will come out of that process, but in my opinion the most likely outcome is simple regulatory friction that slowly, invisibly eats away at network innovation. Network innovation won't go away, but certain kinds of innovation will become more difficult because of legal complications, and the Internet will suffer. Therefore, I suspect that any legislation written today will hurt the Internet more than it helps. It is with some surprise that I find myself agreeing with the telecom giants and the Cato Institute, and disagreeing with MoveOn, Google, etc. If network neutrality regulation passes now, I think progressive activists and technology companies alike will live to rue the day they begged for it.

My second reaction is that this whole debate strikes me as a kind of bizarre ritual theater in which people are making noises and gesticulating wildly, but nobody talks about the real issue.

Political outfits --- ranging from MoveOn to the Christian Coalition --- are worried that network providers will begin to discriminate based on the political content of messages. This is pretty unlikely. It's not easy for an algorithm to look at a bag of bytes and classify its political content; and network providers probably can't pay for the computational power required to apply such an algorithm to the many terabytes of data that flow across their networks daily.

And even if they could, why would they? There's no percentage there. In fact, I can think of two very strong reasons for them not to start filtering based on political content. First, there would be an enormous consumer backlash. Second, there would be enormous political fallout. The latter would include not only backlash against abuse of quasi-monopoly power, but possibly the imposition of responsibility for the content that flows across the pipes. Once you begin filtering based on political content, lawmakers may poke their heads in and wonder why you aren't filtering out all that kiddie porn and gambling and such too --- and if something gets through your filters, why can't we hold you liable? The network providers don't want to open that can of worms.

So, political censorship isn't the real issue here. Nor, pace Moby et al., is it interconnection with small media providers versus large ones. Verizon's not terribly likely to block access to your music blog. They might, someday, contract with certain service providers for improved performance. For example, they might strike a deal with iTunes to store songs in a local proxy cache, so that Verizon customers would observe slightly improved performance with iTunes, but not your music blog. That doesn't strike me as either disastrous or a betrayal of the Internet's principles. Networking researchers have been proposing schemes like this for years. In fact, Akamai's basically a third-party version of this scheme: people pay them to store content in caches close to where it's demanded, so Akamai-cached websites perform better than non-Akamai websites. Akamai's been operating since 1999, and so far the Internet hasn't been torn asunder.

So what's the real issue?

As Ars Technica noted back in January, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg was making noise about Google's (over-)"use" of Verizon's bandwidth. And last November, SBC CEO Edward Whitacre complained about Google and Microsoft using "my pipes" (meaning, of course, SBC's pipes; Whitacre suffers from your usual case of CEO megalomania):

"So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"

In a way, you have to give Seidenberg and Whitacre credit. In making these noises, they display a level of stupidity and chutzpah that rivals the dudes from Jackass.

First, the chutzpah: Google does pay its ISP for its Internet connectivity, just as Verizon customers pay Verizon for their Internet connectivity. Yet Seidenberg claims to believe that Google should pay Verizon for the Internet connectivity that Verizon's customers have already paid for. It's as if Ford were to ask Wal-Mart to pay fees to Ford, because Wal-Mart's customers were driving to Wal-Mart in Fords.

Second, the stupidity: five and a half months later, Verizon's lobbyists are working overtime to prevent network neutrality legislation from passing. And guess who's paying for the lobbyists on the other side? In many ways, Seidenberg, Whitacre, and their telecom industry cronies brought this circus on themselves through overreaching arrogance and greed.

So, here's the real story. The telecom giants currently sell you Internet access, which is okay, but dull. Dumb pipes are cheap. But hey --- what if they could sell you lots of bundled services? That really gets the dollar signs flashing in their eyes. These are the companies that want to sell ring tone subscriptions for your cell phone, and bundled cable packages with more channels than you'll ever watch. Their dream is to add a dozen extra bullshit services to your Internet service bill, so that you're paying them eighty dollars per month instead of fifty.

The big problem with that plan is that once you have dumb pipes and smart endpoints --- in other words, the Internet --- the endpoints can build essentially any service on top of the network. Of course, this is fantastic for Internet users. Once you pay for Internet access, you automatically get to use every Internet application that's ever been invented: email, the web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer, and (increasingly) the two V's, voice and video. These last two really drive the telecom giants nuts, because they used to sell you voice and video: they're phone and cable companies.

Therefore, the most likely form of telecommunications discrimination in the foreseeable future is discrimination by application, not by content. Verizon wants to give preference to its voice services, and Comcast wants to give preference to its video services. They're deeply freaked out by Skype, Google Video, and the like. If they can convince customers that competing services are slow and crappy compared to their own offerings, they think they'll have a better chance of getting you to pay for their bullshit services. Failing that, they'd like to convince Google and other Internet companies to pay fees for non-degraded service. Think of it as protection money: "Nice customer base you got there. Sure would be a shame if your packets were dropped 20% more often than your competitor's..."

If network providers got serious about this, the results would be pretty bad. Network providers should not be picking winners and losers in the Internet applications game. Applications should succeed or fail on their own merits. Now, I think network discrimination schemes would fail in the long run, but that's just a hunch and it's really an open empirical question. Meanwhile, in the short run, discrimination schemes could cause major distortions in the Internet applications market; and when you consider the possible network effects in domains like Internet telephony, it's possible that these distortions could cause lingering damage, locking in inferior applications for years to come.

So I'm really glad that people are paying attention to network neutrality. But I'm also alarmed that so few of those people seem to understand what's really going on here, and I'm skeptical that now is the time to make laws about it. So far, the Internet's still neutral. My bottom-line recommendation would be to watch and wait.

(And also to increase competition in local ISP markets, which would give customers a choice when confronted with discriminatory network policies. Note that this wouldn't be a panacea, because in practice most localities would still be served by a few providers, each of which might have an incentive to discriminate, albeit in differing ways. Oligopolies don't necessarily lead to efficient markets.)

computer-science, public-policy, network-neutrality

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p.s. Selected links on network neutrality:

• Ed Felten (here I discover, ruefully, that most of the substance of what I write above, as opposed to the half-assed guesses, has already been written by Felten):
  • How Would Two-Tier Internet Work?
  • Nuts and Bolts of Network Discrimination: Part One, Part Two, Encryption
  • Discrimination, Congestion, and Cooperation
  • The "Quality of Service argument"
  • Net Neutrality and Competition
• Lawrence Lessig Congressional testimony
• Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing
• Tim Wu's paper, Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination