Peter Huber has an interesting piece over at Forbes in which he lays out an example of how content providers today engage in network management that he describes as being “inegaitarian” and violating the very sense of network neutrality for which many of these content providers appear to lobby. I don’t agree.
The network that’s lighting your screen today isn’t neutral at all. Google, Amazon, Citicorp–all pay a privately negotiated price for better connections from their huge banks of servers to the Internet. What they get are fast connections from their premises–and for just their content–to one of the several dozen “network access points” that channel data into the Internet’s sprawling, ultrahigh-speed backbone.
Then they buy still more speed–for their content and no one else’s–from companies like Akamai. Akamai provides neutrality-busting service. The company has deployed a global array of servers that cache content supplied by its customers so that it’s sitting out there when it’s needed, much closer to the people who need it. Akamai can push its strategy a long way by cuddling up close to, say, Comcast or Verizon. The net neutralizers may regulate some of that, but nobody yet knows how much. In other analogous contexts, the FCC has had to develop a large, arcane set of rules to define “affiliated” enterprises.
Many if not most large web hosting centers are connected to multiple Internet backbones to ensure their traffic traverses as few choke points as possible on the way to the end consumer. Web hosts can choose not to purchase multiple backbone links, and their traffic will take longer to get to the end user and cost their Internet backbone provider more to deliver. Multiple connections is not network un-neutral, it’s just smart network design.
Ditto for using a service such as that offered by Akamai. I’m less clear on how this magic is performed, but Akamai moves content closer to the end users, once again eliminating lags in network transit. In this way Apple does not need to serve up each bit of the latest episode of “Desperate Housewives” downloaded from the iTunes store to each individual who purchases the show and deliver the bits to each individual over the long-haul Internet. Rather the file gets distributed out to each Akamai content delivery node, and end users download the 1′s and 0′s that make up that episode from a local Akamai node. So all the people who purchase from iTunes in Herndon, Virginia are served up bits from an Akamai node somewhere in our national capital area and someone in Chicago is served up with bits from an Akamai location in or near the Windy City. This is not a violation of the concept of network neutrality, it’s just smart content delivery. Content providers can choose whether or not to pay Akamai for this service, and Akamai does not command a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination and competes with Kontiki and others.
Those of us who advocate for “network neutrality” are in no small part to blame for the fact that it is so easy for opponents to paint neutrality with a broad, ugly brush. We’ve done a very bad job of describing what “network neutrality” is. Even though I’m not a strong advocate for government action, I certainly would welcome some clarifying language on the issue from Congress to the FCC if only we could keep it away from over-regulating broadband networks. Mr. Huber was at least correct in his article when he stated that any regulation capable of surviving the Congress, FCC and courts will be an unholy mess by the time it comes out the other side.
For my own part, my main concern is for the creation of exclusive arrangements between the owners of physical network connections (at worst a natural monopoly or at best limited oligopoly). For a perfect example look to wireless services:
Do you want to download the latest “mobisodes” of “24?” Well, I hope you have Verizon Wireless, because those clips are only available exclusively on Verizon Wireless.
This is precisely what I don’t want. I don’t want to find out that I can’t get to Yahoo, SciFi.com or WSJ.com because my broadband provider is Comcast and they have exclusive arrangements with competitors. I also don’t want to find out I’m getting that content significantly slower than Verizon DSL customers simply because of some commercial arrangement that exists between Verizon and those content providers. I also do not want to find that Comcast is actively degrading a service because it competes with something they or an exclusive partner offer.
Whether or not I lease a smaller “tube” is a completely separate issue. A smaller pipe will equal lower content speeds, plain and simple. When opponents to network neutrality throw out this little canard and claim it’s proof of “tiered” Internet service they are being completely dishonest. Likewise, the Internet in its most neutral form is best effort so sometimes content will be served up faster for one customer than another. That is something with which I can live. It’s this idea of the provider of my “tube” actively taking steps to degrade content delivery and thereby effectively steal (yes, steal) money from me that I definitely don’t want.
Technorati Tag: Net Neutrality
