[opendtv] IEEE Spectrum: Net Neutrality Is Like a Delivery Truck Flowing Through a Pipe With Tollbooths

From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2015 21:12:26 +0000

Analogies always fall short, one way or another. To me, the telephone analogy
is still the most relevant.

It might be true that the PSTN was originally designed to optimize just voice
communications, and still is for voice service, but it's also true that the
telephone network was used extensively for Internet communications initially,
was also used for any manner of other communications, such as teletype and
remote monitoring services, and its success right from early last century was
only possible because it is a strictly neutral network. And this neutrality
also contributed in a very significant way to the evolving nature of the
Internet itself, which few people, aside from special interests of course,
would want to change now.

The trunk lines used in the Internet are still provided by interexchange
carriers, so the relationship between telephone industry and the Internet is
still quite strong.

Bert

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Net Neutrality Is Like a Delivery Truck Flowing Through a Pipe With Tollbooths
The many metaphors used to explain Net neutrality-and why they all stink
By Joshua J. Romero
Posted 19 Mar 2015 | 19:30 GMT

In late February, in a big victory for Net neutrality advocates, the U.S.
Federal Communications Commission voted to reclassify broadband Internet as a
telecommunications service subject to regulations like those used in the
telephone industry. AT&T, Verizon, and other opponents of reclassification
argued, unsuccessfully, that phone networks are a poor analogy for
understanding the Internet. But what is the right analogy? Internet access is a
complex tangle of technical, political, and commercial issues, and people have
long tried to make it comprehensible through comparisons to other, more
familiar systems. As a result, Net neutrality analogies have also become a
powerful and effective rhetorical tool for rallying political action.

It goes without saying that the development of the Internet and the economy it
supports has had an unprecedented global impact. But "unprecedented" means that
nothing in history adequately prepared us to determine who should be paying
whom and for what, exactly, in a world ruled by packets. Here's a quick
reminder that some of the very things that make the Internet unique are
precisely those that make it resistant to comparisons.

The Analogies:

* The FCC justified its latest decision by noting that when customers pay an
Internet provider, they're primarily purchasing the ability to transmit (and
receive) packets of data, just as customers pay phone companies to transmit and
receive phone calls.

* That's a reversal from 2002, when the FCC said that wired Internet access is
an information service, more like websites and cable TV. AT&T has argued that
Internet service providers (ISPs) obviously do more than just transmit data; if
they didn't provide a "computing functionality," paid prioritization, blocking,
or throttling bandwidth wouldn't even be possible.

* It's also common for people to compare Internet data to water flowing through
pipes or electricity flowing through the power grid. Internet law expert
Lawrence Lessig, for one, has compared a nonneutral Internet to an electrical
outlet that provides electricity with different prices, quality, and
reliability depending on the brand of appliance you plug in.

* Ever since U.S. vice president Al Gore popularized the term "information
superhighway" in the 1990s, the analogy of traffic on a multilane road has been
ubiquitous. Over the past few years, the Net neutrality debate has largely
focused on paid prioritization, the idea that ISPs could charge content
providers for a higher level of service. Some opponents said this was like
adding tollbooths to previously free roads. The ISPs argued that paid
prioritization was the equivalent of adding new, fast lanes alongside the
existing lanes; other opponents shot back that ISPs were more likely to add
speed bumps to some of the old lanes and relabel the remaining lanes "fast."

Why the Analogies Fall Short

* It's privately owned infrastructure: Unlike U.S. highways, which are built
and maintained by the government, fiber connections are usually laid and
managed by private companies. Initial deployment is usually expensive, so the
companies expect to profit by collecting recurring fees over time. When private
companies do build private roads, tollbooths are common.

* It's not a single-purpose network: In a phone system, a call is a call, and
the network is optimized for call quality. Similarly, cable TV infrastructure
was purpose-built for delivering television channels. The beauty of the
Internet Protocol, on the other hand, is in its ability to support a multitude
of services. But one limitation is that the protocol itself doesn't guarantee
timely delivery, and not all data streams are equally tolerant of delays. For
e-mail or Web browsing, tiny delays in packet delivery have little impact, but
when you're making a two-way voice call or playing an online game, even small
amounts of latency can ruin the experience.

* There's no such thing as generic data: When you turn on your tap or plug in
an appliance, all you really want is water or power. Where that water or power
originated is irrelevant; once it's in the pipes or wires, it's all the same
stuff. The Internet doesn't work that way. When consumers pay an ISP, they're
purchasing the ability to access any specific content that they choose, not
just the data that's convenient for the ISP to provide.

* There are bottlenecks at interconnects: When Columbia Law School professor
Tim Wu first defined Net neutrality, he was arguing that network providers
should not be allowed to discriminate against any of the bits flowing through
their network. But what if the slowdown occurs outside of an ISP's network?
When Netflix was battling with Comcast and Verizon over streaming-video speeds,
the real issue revolved around who should foot the bill for upgrading the
interconnects at the boundaries between those last-mile ISPs and the
intermediate ISPs that Netflix paid to deliver its traffic. A better highway
analogy might involve the financing of new on-ramps, rather than the arbitrary
construction of tollbooths.

* Traffic is two-way: Many metaphors focus on content delivery. But on the
Internet, of course, you're not just consuming packets, you're also sending
them. Except for minimal interactivity (for example, on-demand movies)
television is a one-way medium. Water and electricity are similarly services
that are consumed (unless you're feeding solar power back onto the grid).

* There's a history of peering arrangements: In fact, the general business
structure of the Internet was based on the idea that when customers on one
network need to send data to customers on another network of similar size, it
makes sense for those networks to exchange packets without charging each other,
a practice known as "peering." Smaller networks paid to get access to larger
networks, and at the top of the food chain were backbone providers, which found
that it was mutually beneficial to exchange and deliver each other's packets
without cost. With the rise of online video in particular, traffic has become
much more asymmetric, undermining the historic definition of peers. It is
difficult to work the concept of paid or nonpaid peering into a highway or
utility metaphor.

* Routing packets isn't like routing money: Water and power companies charge
based on consumption (in addition to connection fees), so that the more you
use, the more you pay. And with a cable subscription, you're paying a flat rate
for both the content itself and the transmission infrastructure that delivers
it to your TV. Neither billing structure is suitable for the Internet, where
nothing is actually consumed. Customers pay content providers for content and
ISPs for access to that content. Companies in each business want to capture as
much total revenue as possible while keeping their costs to a minimum. As
Internet pioneer David D. Clark noted a couple of decades ago, "you cannot
derive money flow from packet flow," so we can expect this battle of competing
economic interests to continue for years to come.

This article originally appeared in print as "Why Net Neutrality Analogies Will
Always Fail."

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[opendtv] IEEE Spectrum: Net Neutrality Is Like a Delivery Truck Flowing Through a Pipe With Tollbooths

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