Transparency and Net Neutrality
Net neutrality is a remarkably complicated issue, not easily divisible into Pro VS Con. At some granular levels, I can support some of the ideas; at others, I oppose it. Unfortunately, legislation and regulation tend to bundle those separate issues together.
Among the ideas I can support is the notion that ISP’s should be more transparent about important network practices. On that subject, the Washington Post makes an important point today.
Mr. Genachowski is right to insist that ISPs be candid with the agency and the public about network management practices. Such disclosures are necessary, Mr. Genachowski asserted correctly, to “give consumers the confidence of knowing that they’re getting the service they’ve paid for” and “enable innovators to make their offerings work effectively over the Internet.” Transparency should go a long way toward allaying the concerns of those who fear ISP manipulation of markets. It also puts in doubt the need for Mr. Genachowski’s second, dubious offering [e.g., a principle mandating dumb pipes].
Transparency really should allay concerns about harmful discrimination, but we don’t need to wait for data. Consider M-Lab.
In January of 2009, New America Foundation and Google unveiled M-Lab – or Measurement Lab. It was, we were told, “a new weapon in the fight for net neutrality” that would “give end users the tools to figure out whether internet service providers are interfering with their broadband connections…”
As far as I can tell, in the 9 months since M-Lab was launched, there have been no reports of net neutrality violations. Nothing.
Does that make M-Lab the SETI of the net neutrality movement?
Net neutrality is one necessary property in building a US data transport infrastructure which is capable of supporting multiple key services. We should not really need to ask for it, because long term, interconnect and end to end service delivery cannot work unless everyone is using the same rulebook.
Transparency is little more than a trade descriptions act issue, it is just we have not spent enough time with the engineers to get them to document exactly the rules of thumb are used to construct their networks.
There is a potential service which we have been both mis-sold and undersold. The potential service has planning rules which provide a picture of the average. You can discern some of the planning rules from the ‘fair use’ and then there is how this service behaves under congestion or peak load, which is the critical bit for anybody planning to deliver services.
The M-lab work is terrific and will no doubt evolve to tell us how our services behave during congested periods. The transparency needed is on what point our services become unstable – at what point do the loss and delay charcteristics become unbounded. The latter dictates how useful my service is.
As far as I can tell, in the 9 months since M-Lab was launched, there have been no reports of net neutrality violations. Nothing. Does that make M-Lab the SETI of the net neutrality movement?
Only if the aliens heard we were looking and shut up until we stopped. Really: ISP operators aren’t dumb. They know that net neutrality is on the agenda, and they’ve been mostly behaving themselves until the debate is over.
That’s why critics of net neutrality aren’t making much of a case by pointing to Comcast backing down over the RST packet debacle. ISPs outside of the US — and some inside — have continued to monkey with Bittorrent.
Admittedly, we have yet to enter the golden age of synergistic network agreements between network operators and application vendors. But M-Lab’s silence should not be interpreted as a sign that mixing business decisions with network decisions will always be unproblematic.
Odds are that ISPs aren’t open about their network management practices for one of two reasons. Either:
1) They’re making tons of money on their services and they don’t want anybody else to get into the business
or
2) Managing a network is part of service differentiation. It’s the secret sauce that can make one service perform better than another. There isn’t much of a marketing reason to talk about their management practices because the people most likely to understand this “sauce” are the competitive ISPs in the area.
As long as every ISP has to divulge their practices, then that will take away the need for any single ISP to keep their practices private. It may lead to only one sauce… Or it may lead to a wide variety (of network management practices) and consumers will need to become well versed on how different practices influence what they want.
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