Update 9/9/2010: Digital Society calls on Free Press to stop misrepresenting the IETF

Russ Housley (pictured right to the left) is the Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which is the technical standards body for the Internet.  Housley has called out AT&T for what he considers misleading comments to the FCC.

Hank Hultquist of AT&T (pictured right standing to the right) posted this blog entry touting this letter to the FCC that the IETF had long envisioned fee based network prioritization.  Russ Housley in some email statements to CNET reporter Declan McCullagh directly refuted this saying that it isn’t his view that the IETF envisioned this.

This is a very serious charge and assertion that Mr. Housley is making against AT&T and it is something that is very easy to verify.  Being the fine reporter he is, Declan McCullagh has already saved me the trouble of looking up the pertinent text and cited the IETF’s specifications in his story.  McCullagh wrote (emphasis and hyperlinks to RFC documents added by me):

A July 1999 IETF specification (RFC 2638) discusses paid prioritization by saying: “It is expected that premium traffic would be allocated a small percentage of the total network capacity, but that it would be priced much higher.” Another specification (RFC 2475) published half a year earlier says that setting different priorities for packets will “accommodate heterogeneous application requirements and user expectations” and “permit differentiated pricing of Internet service.” (An RFC is a policy document, often accepted as standards, published by the IETF.)

Well I think that pretty much settles it in black and white text.  The IETF documents clearly supports AT&T’s assertion that the IETF has long contemplated fee based priority services which do get “priced much higher”.  Mr. Housley’s assertion that AT&T is making misleading statements about the IETF DiffServ standard permitting higher priced priority networking services is easily proven false.  It is surprising that Mr. Housley would confuse documents from the very organization he chairs.

It’s one thing if Mr. Housley stated that the IETF hasn’t taken a position on a contentious political issue like Net Neutrality and neither endorse or opposes AT&T’s views.  The IETF like many standards bodies has to accommodate a wide variety of views, competitors, and nations and they try to stick to engineering matters rather than getting into legal or economic debates.  But to come out and make a statement that blatantly contradicts his own organization’s published documents while claiming that AT&T is misleading the FCC is very disturbing.

Anyone who has ever purchased business class network services knows how important pricing is.  If everything was merely a matter of user choice and pricing played no role, then while in the world anyone voluntarily label their packets with a lower priority class?  The obvious answer is that priority packets cost more just like no one expects the United States Postal service to offer priority shipping at the same rate as ground shipping.

User-driven prioritization does not preclude fees or supersede agreements

We keep hearing from pro Net Neutrality groups that only the user should be able to label their own packets with the priority level of their choosing and that ISP shouldn’t have a say in that.  The fact is that while the ISP doesn’t care what you label “priority” but they do care if you stay within your contracted priority budget.  Those contracts, or what we in the business world call Service Level Agreements (SLAs), are priced on service level and it’s strange that so many Net Neutrality advocates are portraying this as immoral and illegal.

There are even legitimate examples where user-driven prioritization are rightfully ignored by the ISP.  For example, if a user labels 100% of their packets at maximum priority when they only paid for a 10% high priority budget, then the ISP is within its right to relabel any traffic above 10% as best effort.  If the user only paid for cheaper best effort service, then the ISP is within its right to relabel all of that traffic as best effort.  If the traffic is leaving the ISP’s network to a network peer that has no contractual obligation to the ISP or the end user, then the ISP is within the right to relabel everything as best effort.

Confusing the regulatory battle

If confusing his own IETF documents wasn’t bad enough, Russ Housley also has a strange view of the regulatory debate over Net Neutrality.  Housley told reporters:

“The disagreement arises from what happens if Video Site No. 1 and Video Site No. 2 both mark their streams as high priority. “If two sources of video are marking their stuff the same, then that’s where the ugliness of this debate begins,” Housley says. “The RFC doesn’t talk about that…If they put the same tags, they’d expect the same service from the same provider.”

This doesn’t have anything to do with the regulatory debate.  Net Neutrality proponents want to outlaw higher prices for “enhanced or prioritized” service.  This particular NYU economist even claims that it’s wrong for ISPs to offer Paid Peering services even if they are cheaper and faster simply because he cannot accept the idea that there might be winners and losers in a free market and that some websites do in fact run faster than others.  The term “differentiation” used in the IETF DiffServ standard not only pertains to differentiated performance characteristics, they explicitly points out that differentiated pricing is part of the equation.

What happens in the above scenario with two video sites is a red herring because the answer is obvious.  If both site 1 and 2 are paying for the same priority tier, they both get same priority.  If packets from site 1 and 2 have to vie for the same transmit queue somewhere in some router owned by that ISP, then they’re put into the same DiffServ queue as long as they’re within their contracted priority budget.  If they’re in the same queue, they operate on a FIFO basis within that class of service.  However, both those video sites better get all their packets through at the contracted rates in a timely manner considering what they’re paying for that priority service.

Free Press’ crusade against better managed networks

Free Press’ idea that the entire Internet should operate on a FIFO basis without regard to payment or class of service is ludicrous and it’s based on the myth of the dumb Internet.

Declan McCullagh went on to cite some of Free Press’ comments and wrote:

“Which is, by the way, more or less what liberal advocacy groups like Free Press have told the FCC. “DiffServ was not designed to be a tool to allow the network provider to drive application-level discrimination,” Free Press Research Director Derek Turner said earlier this week.”

But application level prioritization is precisely what is required to create a truly fair and neutral network.  If Free Press truly believes in user-driven prioritization, then the user should ultimately decide for their own broadband connection how they want it managed.  If that means explicitly authorizing the ISP to do fair queuing between applications and fair or disproportionate bandwidth allocation, then that is within the definition of user-driven QoS.

The meaning of the word “user”

I also find it strange why groups like Free Press have such an arbitrarily narrow definition of user driven prioritization when the term “user” could refer to a business or a consumer.  When it comes to intra-subscriber traffic management, it should always be the customer dictating what gets prioritized or what doesn’t  But the subscriber must be within their contractual agreements which are determined by how much the subscriber pays.

But the technical act of setting the DiffServ tags is something that generally doesn’t get implemented on the application level much less exposed to business or residential end users (with exceptions like the Vuze BitTorrent client).  This is generally handled by the engineers and the routers and it should make no difference if they are employed and owned by the customer or by the ISP.

We don’t need laws and regulations micromanaging who pays

It should also make no difference from a policy point of view whether it is the consumer or the website that pays for the bandwidth or the prioritization on either or both ends of the pipe.  Amazon pays for both ends of the pipe with the Kindle but they get to dictate a walled garden on the Kindle and the user gets free 3G wireless access.  We also have the opposite example where the end user pays for the broadband end of the pipe and pays for the server end of the pipe if they want faster service.  The various news group services (NNTP) or websites like megaupload.com will charge their users for the server bandwidth on top of what the end user pays for their own broadband connection.

The real dispute here is that the current FCC majority has decided that they want a regulation that will only permit end user payment for “enhanced or prioritized” service, but they won’t permit Business to Consumer (B2C) websites (which are also “users” of the network) to pay the ISP to reach the consumer quicker.  Having the website pay is a more efficient economic model because of lower bulk transaction costs and it ultimately saves the consumer money.