Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome on the Internet
The New York Times posted this editorial on “Access and the Internet” and started the piece with the premise:
“On the Internet today, a Web site run by a solo blogger can load as quickly as any corporate home page. Internet service providers, including leading cable and phone companies, want to be able to change that so they can give priority to businesses that pay, or make deals with, them.”
The problem with this editorial is that it starts off with a fundamentally wrong premise. It repeats the myth that everyone operates at the same speed and capacity on the Internet, when that clearly isn’t the case. In fact, Digital Society pays $50 a month for server hosting where about half of that goes to pay for bandwidth and the other half pays for energy consumption and physical rack space. We’re not only limited to 100 Mbps which is only a tiny fraction of the speeds that larger websites like Google, Yahoo, or YouTube. Moreover, we can only use an average of 3 Mbps because we can’t exceed 1000 GB of data transfers or else we would incur additional charges that we can’t afford.
The reality is that there is equal opportunity to purchase access to the Internet, but that has never meant that everyone was entitled to equal capability regardless of what they pay to access the Internet. The current Internet is heavily reliant on private transmission capacity in the form of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) that offer exclusive premium distribution to those who pay for the services. In fact, this is the only way that large video sharing sites like YouTube can even work. The Internet has always had differentiated pricing for differentiated services, and that’s just common sense economics.
I think you missed the entire purpose of the article. This wasn’t about how much you pay for your web hosting. This is about what is offered to customers of ISPs. For instance, AT&T charging Hulu to have priority speed to AT&T customers on AT&T own network, or risk being prioritized really low so that the bare minimum of service is available to AT&T’s customers. The flip side of that is that SyFy’s services seem much slower that Hulu’s services on an AT&T network, creating a natural gravitation of services that both parties take profit in.
AT&T’s repsonse to people’s complaints about slow Hulu services would be that it is not our business, the nature of the internet, our network is working as intended, etc.
It is about what goes on in the network, not what level of services individuals or hosting or businesses buy.
Ron, I don’t think you understand how the Internet works today. AT&T has as much a right to offer edge caching services to Hulu as Akamai has the right to offer edge caching. Nobody is going to offer network prioritization as a mechanism for video deliver because all the priority in the world won’t scale and deliver your content across the Internet. CDN (edge caching) is the only type of service that can deliver video.
Google does the same thing and makes arrangements with CDNs like Akamai and directly with ISPs to host edge caching devices to deliver video content. That is the ultimate priority treatment where your data doesn’t even need to traverse the Internet, and it’s the only delivery model for unicast traffic that works.
ISPs have a right to offer this type of caching priority service, and they have the right to offer their broadband customers priority by giving them higher bandwidth for higher subscription charges. Markey’s Net Neutrality would ban this existing business model on the Internet, and it would prohibit ISPs from charging content providers at all. This effectively outlaws existing arrangements like the Amazon Kindle where Amazon pays for the shipping and passes the reduced shipping costs onto the consumer through the cost of the book. Instead, customers would have to buy their own wireless broadband service for a minimum of $40/month and that completely kills the Kindle model and we never would have had that kind of innovation.
But that still doesn’t change the fact about youor article that was entirely focused on the blogger not buying enough services from his host provider. That is always goign to be the case.
The core of net nurtrality is to make sure that all traffic, even competitors and non partners are treated the same. Every ISP does network management at some level. Caching services are different. I am not so sure that the above what you mentioned would outlaw that. I hacn’t read in in depth. If that is the case, then rather than dismiss net nuetality all together, you should concentrate on what you would like changed, and get that done.
A company should not have to pay TW, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, or anyone else individually and separatly to make sure that they are provided the level of service that other companies have on their individual networks.
“The core of net nurtrality is to make sure that all traffic, even competitors and non partners are treated the same.”
And I’m telling you as a fact that this has never been the case on the Internet. The Internet has been an equal opportunity network where you can buy different levels of bandwidth, duty cycle, distribution (CDN), and even priority.
Google does pay some ISPs today to get into their data centers at the edge of the network. That isn’t a “fast” lane; that’s a warp speed lane that instantly moves Google’s traffic in front of the line. That’s the ultimate form of prioritization, and the only type that actually works in the sense that it allows you to have good video distribution.
The fundamental flaw with your definition of Net Neutrality is that it is under the mistaken impression that prioritization has something to do with content delivery and distribution. You’re not alone, and this is a very common misconception. Prioritization has nothing to do with content delivery on the Internet and it has everything to do with smart and reasonable network management.
“to make sure that they are provided the level of service that other companies have on their individual networks.”
Again, you misunderstand how the Internet works. The Internet provides no such guarantees.
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