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The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation
Timothy Lee has posted a lengthy paper on
the network neutrality debate. One can guess its conclusions simply by
noting that it is hosted at the Cato Institute, but those conclusions are
backed up by substantial research and reasoning. "Yet many
deregulationists underestimate the importance of the Internet's end-to-end
architecture and are too cavalier about abandoning the neutral network
for a tiered, filtered, more centrally managed one. The decentralization
made possible by the Internet's open architecture is the key to
its astonishing growth, and there is little reason to think that it would
be improvement for the Internet's decentralized 'dumb' architecture to be
replaced by a more centralized 'smart' one." Worth a read for those
who are interested in this subject.
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The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 12, 2008 16:59 UTC (Wed) by sylware (subscriber, #35259) [Link]
My perception is that it will be very hard without regulation.
Net neutrality grossly means: - "QoS" when congestion occurs-->fair traffic bandwidth for all users on the congested wires. - "Reasonable" peering and transit availability from any IAPs.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 12, 2008 18:12 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I think that it's very unlikely that regulating the internet is possible while preserving it's openness and effectiveness. :)
Regulation has the effect of cementing the status quo. Any rules and regulations you decide to inflict on the companies that provide networking services will be based on today's technology, today's concepts, today's rules. They can't make laws taking into account future evolutions in technology, because it's impossible to determine those.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 12, 2008 19:15 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Too late; the Internet is already regulated in all kinds of ways. This is inevitable. Some rules are imposed by governments, others by ISPs, others are implicit in the architecture. Depending on how they are designed, rules can promote rigidity or flexibility. For example, it's a regulation that says that the 2.4GHz band is unlicensed, subject to a power limitation. Getting rid of the power limitation would promote freedom for about two to three days, before the spectrum becomes completely unusable.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 12, 2008 21:18 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Too late; the Internet is already regulated in all kinds of ways
More regulation is not the correct response, I expect.
> For example, it's a regulation that says that the 2.4GHz band is unlicensed, subject to a power limitation. Getting rid of the power limitation would promote freedom for about two to three days, before the spectrum becomes completely unusable.
Maybe.
But we also have a massive amount of bandwidth that is completely and totally worthless to anybody, except a tiny minority of companies, due to this regulation.
If you look at spectrum utilization there is a huge spike in this 'open' section.. were people are actually able to use it for something useful.. for anything and everything. All sorts of wonderful new ways of communicating.. broadcasting images and video and communicating with text and voice in ways that cost a fraction the amount compared to traditional ways.
The the rest lays completely unused.
We are dealing with regulations that were designed in the 1930's. Somewhat as a response to the Titanic disaster because radio stations on the coast drowned out the SOSs, costing many people their lives. Our regulation system is setup and designed to deal with ancient and mostly obsolete radio technology. No error correction technology, no CD/CMSA, no digital compression, no efficient protocols, no nothing. As a result most of it's completely wasted. Vastly more then what is 'made useful'.
And because of these regulations the FCC governs who has the right to speak, what those people can say, and how those people can say it. And those people, invariably, are exceedingly wealthy large corporations.
It's very easy to pass new laws and make regulations that make sense. It's nearly impossible to repeal them. One-way street mostly. Anything established today is going to be something your going to have to deal with the rest of your lifetime and your kid's lifetimes and pretty much as long as our government will exist.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 12, 2008 23:58 UTC (Wed) by wheelsIII (guest, #55155) [Link]
Not quite...
there is a reason why there is a relatively small piece of spectrum allocated to unregulated devices. the rest of it is in use, and not just by big corporations. By far the majority of the available VHF/UHF spectrum is used by other users who simply can not use the kind of devices you enjoy - military, aviation, television, and radar are the big ones, but there are a whole host of others. There is still a need for UHF voice channels for example - F/A-18's need something a little better than a wireless modem and a PC.
there simply weren't very many devices usable in this region until the last 10 - 15 years, thus there was no reason to allocate any more spectrum space. Now there is, and economic pressure will cause more space to become available. You must realize, however, that this will have to come from other users - in the case of the 700 MHz allocations from tv channels - although this will have to be shared with law enforcement which is looking longingly at all those channels.
It's easy to criticize the FCC, but they must regulate a spectrum from VLF on up, and must satisfy users which do include lifesaving (i.e. Titanic-like) issues. It's easy to have tunnel vision - not too many people really see the broad picture beyond their own need for spectrrum space.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 13, 2008 1:11 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> there is a reason why there is a relatively small piece of spectrum allocated to unregulated devices.
Well obviously there is a reason for it. Otherwise it wouldn't of happened in the first place. Also I understand that different spectrum has different properties and uses, and there remains some need for simple radios for rescue or other practical issues.
What is less obvious is how the needs for aviation, rescue, and defense translates to maintaining spectrum to preserve the commercial interests of radio broadcasters, television broadcasters, and cellular phone operators. Also it's not obvious how the need to preserve the ability to send SOS's translates to censorship and control of what can and can't be said or discussed over the airwaves. Every talk show host or news broadcast is handed a big book of what they can and cannot talk about.
Also it's odd how preserving the effectiveness of ship to ship radar translate to difficulties in getting Free software drivers written for consumer-grade radio devices when those radio devices can be trivially modified to break and exceed FCC rules by even the most ham-fisted hacker through physical modifications to the devices and their antennas with zero knowledge of the hardware-to-software interfaces.
> there simply weren't very many devices usable in this region until the last 10 - 15 years
Ya. But they are here now. And there are going to many many more that simply do not exist because it's not commercially viable to do to research and development for concepts that are unsellable due to government regulation.
Which is my point here. If you pass network regulation it's going to affect and restrict how software and hardware is going to be designed. It's going to affect and restrict on what sort of new network technology internet peers can implement and how they can communicate with each other. Not because those rules make sense to future, and as yet unseen, forms of technology. They may or may not make sense 30 or 40 years from now, but the rules and laws will have to be followed irregardless.
Imagine if digital networking laws were designed with the knowledge, prejudices, and technology of the 1960's and 1970's? Before the success of the internet, before www, before personal computers. What sense would they make today?
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Also it's a democracy. A representative government that is affected in a strong manner by levels of campaign contributions and the private holdings of individuals in Congress. It's a mistake to think that Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast (or whoever else has a vested interest in internet networking) are going to have their voices silenced. The laws and regulations are not going to be designed solely by the input of networking gurus and Free speech activists... Politics is the art of compromise and it's unlikely anybody will get what they want (or expect) in the "QoS vs Net neutrality" congressional debates.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 13, 2008 1:49 UTC (Thu) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]
"It's very easy to pass new laws and make regulations that make sense. It's nearly impossible to repeal them."
Just build in an expiry date to all laws. Five years from date of passage.
To put them back, they have to be debated again. Not just re passed by default.
all the best,
drew
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 13, 2008 2:28 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
The point is that the rule that says that some bands are unlicensed and power-limited is just as much a regulation as the rule that dedicates other bands to licenses. So the issue is not about "more regulation" vs. "less regulation", but getting the regulations right.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 13, 2008 8:50 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
all the digital/cdma/error correcting/etc technology doesn't change the physics that all this digital stuff must get translated to old fashioned analog radio signals, and those still suffer the same interference issues that they always have. under some conditions you can tolorate more interference, but not always, and expecially not when you are trying to hear a weak signal in the presence of a much stronger one.
digital communication over radios works well for short distances, but it doesn't work nearly as well over longer distances (take a look at the fact that HDTV stations have a smaller footprint when broadcasting in digital mode than in analog mode) and the dignal doesn't degrade gracefully (instead of fading out you just loose it entirely). as a result not all services that currently run on analog radio can realisticly be converted to digital
also radio signals don't stop at the borders (much as some people would like to think that they do), so it's not a single government regulating things, it's a long series of international treaties that lay down the rules that the FCC then writes it's own rules to work within.
in the early days of radio and TV there was not this sort of regulation, and the problems were pretty significant.
the reason that the FCC regulates what can be done on broadcast TV is that they are giving a chunk of a public resource (spectrum) to one particular company (when several other companies would like that same chunk), in exchange the company getting the spectrum agrees to follow a set of rules (I'll ignore for the moment the stupidity of the recent FCC "we won't tell you if it's acceptable until after you air it, even if you explicitly ask")
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 13, 2008 11:13 UTC (Thu) by jonth (subscriber, #4008) [Link]
"digital communication over radios works well for short distances, but it doesn't work nearly as well over longer distances"
Rubbish. Try telling NASA that.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 13, 2008 17:16 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
take a look at the extremely low data rates that they need to do to make that work.
it takes significantly more bandwidth to digitize a voice and send the digital version then it does to send the raw analog signal (even with digital compression), there are some areas where the ability to share a high-bandwidth channel make it worthwhile to do this, but there's a significant amount of overhead in doing so.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 12, 2008 19:19 UTC (Wed) by ralphdegennaro (subscriber, #35718) [Link]
Its a tough balance to maintain fairness (because there are those that don't want to be fair) in "the now", without limiting or inappropriately applying "the now rules" to new things where they don't fit. I think the good laws are written conceptually to allow for the dynamics/growth/evolution of society.
But nothing is perfect. Look at the changes in Patent law that are happening right now. They were good at one conceptual understanding of the world. Though when knew things come, its human nature to see if old rules apply. Its a shame that its so difficult to see that they don't.
Anyways, I should read the article. And I hope those we've put in place to make laws & regulations read all sides/agendas/spins and try to keep things fair, open; for both "the now" and "the future".
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 13, 2008 1:39 UTC (Thu) by wmf (guest, #33791) [Link]
> Regulation has the effect of cementing the status quo.
Given the ossification of the Internet (where future technology won't be deployed anyway), many of
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 15, 2008 0:17 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Net neutrality grossly means: This is a vacuous statement because the whole issue is what is fair. To some, fair means traffic that doesn't need low latency, such as email, doesn't hog the wire, so traffic such as telephony can use it. But that's the opposite of net neutrality. Net neutrality means fairness can't take into account the content or purpose of the packets, so in this case the email packet and the voice packet would enjoy the same latency. But there's nothing in the concept that says the parties at either end can't work out their own idea of fairness and instruct the carriers to treat particular identified packets differently from others. So a sender of a voice packet might affix more postage to it than the sender of an email packet. The carrier, based on the postage and not the carrier's judgement of the content, would adjust the service level. This free-market kind of fairness works without much regulation in other areas; it should be possible on the Internet.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 17, 2008 16:02 UTC (Mon) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]
"This is a vacuous statement because the whole issue is what is fair. To some, fair means traffic that doesn't need low latency, such as email, doesn't hog the wire, so traffic such as telephony can use it. But that's the opposite of net neutrality.
Net neutrality means fairness can't take into account the content or purpose of the packets, so in this case the email packet and the voice packet would enjoy the same latency."
I have never seen Net neutrality described this way except by its opponents.
QOS for packets that need low latency is fine. QOS that prefers packets coming from site A over those from site B because site A pays you and site B doesn't, when A nor B connect through you is another matter.
Your customer, C, pays you to connect him up. Preferring one site over another at your customer's expense because you want to double dip is a problem.
all the best,
drew
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation Posted Nov 18, 2008 3:51 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Net neutrality means fairness can't take into account the content or purpose of the packets, so in this case the email packet and the voice packet would enjoy the same latency."I have never seen Net neutrality described this way except by its opponents. There are many varied understandings of net neutrality -- so much so that it's probably wise not to use the term. The paper this article is about makes a point of using the term "end to end" instead, which it introduces as the "principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents." That's the kind of net neutrality I'm commenting on. This is also the kind that was involved in recent controversy when Comcast was determining that it was most fair to give priority to traffic other than file sharing. That was not net neutral, whereas its new scheme of simply charging more for high volume regardless of its content is.
QOS for packets that need low latency is fine. Well, I wasn't talking about what is fine; I was only talking about what it net neutrality. But if a network operator decides which packets need low latency, I can't see how the operator is being in any way neutral. However, if the operator leaves it up to the folks at either end of the connection to make that judgement, then it's being neutral.
QOS that prefers packets coming from site A over those from site B because site A pays you and site B doesn't, when A nor B connect through you is another matter.Sure, but A and B always connect through you. The only connections anyone cares about are the end-to-end connections. I wouldn't pay a dime just to connect to AT&T's router; I pay to be connected to Amazon's web servers, etc. The accounting is rough today, but Amazon and I do share the cost of that whole connection. If together we decide to pay for a fatter pipe through AT&T for Amazon traffic, it would be net neutral of AT&T to give us that pipe without passing judgement on whether we need it.
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