Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality (Wired)

Networks are very, very complex beasts on their own. Throw in millions of people's individually unique usage patterns, and the behavior of that complex system becomes an impossible thing to precisely describe.

As a consequence, network operators deal in abstractions where such are useful. Again, though, the more you try to take those abstractions and make them more precise, the more you try to reach an impossible degree of complexity, and the more customers spend as they confuse "wants" for "needs".

If I wanted to get a 10GbE network connection to my home, I could. It'd cost me a pretty penny in installation costs, but it's doable; I'd have to pay someone to either bury or hang single-mode fiber between me and an L3 center about three miles away on the other side of downtown. And then I'd have to pay to have (and keep) it lit. And then I'd have to pay for IP addresses. And transit. And support. Every single one of those things you mention.

There's a reason it's expensive, and there's a reason you don't see those kind of connections land on every home.

Instead, you have organizations like Comcast, RoadRunner and AT&T who move to the other extreme and abstract things as broadly as possible. As a consequence, they can provide oodles of bandwith *cheap*. There are a ton of guarantees you don't get, and services you're not promised, but you get a service that's "good enough" for the vast majority of people (much as we might prefer people to move out of centralized services...), and you get the option to pay for a higher tier that gets you preferred status on the network (no complaints about bandwidth consumption, and you even get OB port 25 unblocked), red carpet treatment in support (call drop? they call me back.), and they're *happy* to send out a tech to swap out a modem, tune attenuation or replace a line if you're not getting 24/7 connectivity.

Now, let's say the traditional last-mile providers started offering these things a la cart. Most people would *hate* it; people want to have choice in principle, but when faced with it they either buy it all, cheap out and don't buy what they need, or agonize under information overload. (Your average user isn't going to know what $some_feature is, and will blame the ISP when they face problems owing to their own ignorance. I expect this is why Comcast _only_ provides on-link (not routed) IPv4 subnets.)

And if last-mile providers did offer a la cart services, there would be general complaints about how the evil ISPs are "nickle-and-diming" their customers.

As for bandwidth caps and other things that are "ripe" for abuse. That's theory. Practice varies. Comcast isn't abusing it...at least not in a way that's visible around here. Yes, they were seriously nasty back in the bad old days of DPI and anti-torrenting behavior, but every Comcast tech I've interacted with, from netops on down to the contractor testing my home connection, is chiefly interested in building the best network they can.

Individuals, communities and corporations _always_ work around the limitations set forth by current networks, if they're allowed to. Users got bittorrent to deal with asynchronous network connections. Companies like Akami and Limelight seek to place their own distribution-point equipment within the boundaries of major networks, to reduce network-boundary congestion. And the owners of those networks rightly charge them for the privilege, infra and support costs that go with those arrangements.

"Net Neutrality" is an attempt at implementing a ham-handed, political solution to what is ultimately a technical and market problem. To put in place a net neutrality mandate would be to lock the shape of the network into the current status quo...unless you put in enough caveats and flexibility that it's meaningless and just another "we have to run this by a political committee before we can implement it." And that's not a good place to be.

The Internet is not mature, and I should hope it never ceases to be the hotbed of innovation and creativity it's been over the last thirty years. But a Net Neutrality mandate would be the biggest stifler of creativity it's ever seen.