The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote tomorrow to make broadband providers the equivalent of common-carrier telephone companies. Anybody providing broadband to consumers would be required to treat all packets roughly the same and barred from speeding up or slowing traffic down according to their own commercial priorities.
The problem is the Internet doesn’t work this way. Even one of the three Democratic-appointed commissioners who was expected to vote for the so-called net neutrality rules is balking at the sweep of
The brewing dispute within the Democratic ranks illustrates just how complicated a task it is to impose telephone-like regulation on a network of networks that functions more like a combination of the U.S. Postal Service and every other method of getting a package from one place to another.
Take mobile networks, which
Where does Instart Logic fit in, for example? This venture backed by Andreesen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and other Silicon Valley firms helps companies shove their applications through mobile networks by analyzing traffic patterns, putting servers at Internet choke points, and using fancy algorithms to figure out whether to cache a San Jose company’s home page images in, say, Silicon Valley or Chicago. It’s a lot like giant competitor Akamai, which has some 140,000 servers sprinkled around the world to speed content from the so-called “edge” to users’ screens, only Instart focuses on the mobile Web.
“If you don’t use a service like ours, then the provider of the e-commerce site can’t provide predictable performance to their users,” said David Hsieh, Instart’s chief marketing officer. “That’s because they don’t control the routing of the information and don’t have any information about what’s happening along the network.”
Hseih assumes Instart wouldn’t be targeted by the FCC’s net-neutrality regulations because it doesn’t actually own the connection to end users, the “last mile” that in mobile terms means the final flow of bits through FCC-controlled radio spectrum to the user’s wireless device.
That makes intuitive sense. But Christopher Yoo, a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor and critic of net-neut rules, isn’t so sure. Under the new rules, the FCC will have the authority to examine all kinds of commercial arrangements, including interconnection deals where companies like Instart install their servers at carrier choke points, to judge whether they are “just and reasonable.”
It’s assumed that deals under which a big company like Netflix pays
“We don’t know,” Yoo told me in an interview last week. “They’re going to do this as a case-by-case thing and ask, `is it reasonable?’”
As for Instart’s faith in remaining beyond the regulators’ reach, Yoo told me that is probably wishful thinking.
Hsieh, a former Cisco video marketing executive who is familiar with the ways of Washington – he once testified before the FCC for Cisco – said Instart would probably have more profitable opportunities if net neutrality was reversed or struck down by the courts.
“If a network would offer a prioritized path, we’d probably buy it,” he told me. “We’d probably be in a position to buy wholesale and sell retail.”
But Instart remains a staunch supporter of net neutrality, he said, because of what could happen to the network if the carriers had free rein to charge whoever and whatever they want.
“It’s not what happens on Day 1, it’s what happens on Day 1,001,” he said. “If you’re on a four-lane highway and one is a pay lane, that’s fine. But if it’s two pay lanes, or three pay lanes…”
Of course one well-established school of economic thought says three or four pay lanes would generate sufficient profits to encourage competitors to build some of their own, increasing capacity and driving down costs for everybody. Capitalists have a tendency to destroy their own profitable niches if they can’t count on the assistance of government to keep their competitors out.
Ashkay Sharma is a research director who studies carrier network infrastructure at Gartner. He said the most aggressive forms of data discrimination, such as deep-packet inspection to slow down competing services like voice over internet protocol, are probably too expensive for carriers to roll out in a big way. But he predicts there will be some level of discrimination in order to encourage carriers to keep pouring money into their networks.
“We’ll make sure the economy-class service is good enough, but maybe we can upsell a higher quality service too,” he told me. “The fact that now they’re saying unreasonable discrimination should be blocked, means reasonable discrimination should be allowed.”
While the New York Times last night trumpeted the net-neut rules as a “one that the little guys appear to have won” (that phrase had disappeared by this morning’s edition), the fact is this is a battle between the big guys of the industry. Google seems to be hedging its bets. In an ex parte letter to the FCC dated Feb. 20, the search and entertainment giant urged the FCC to regulate the consumer end of the pipeline but to keep its hands off of Google’s commercial arrangements with carriers before the last mile.
It doesn’t want the FCC poking into “peering” arrangements where the operators of different networks exchange traffic under terms they negotiate, often without money changing hands.
“Google has entered into peering arrangements with some of the largest U.S. broadband providers insofar as we are unable to use transit to reach users on those networks with reasonable quality,” the company said in its letter. It urged the agency to ignore a decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which it said contains the “totally factually unsupportable assertion” that broadband providers also are carriers when they move traffic for edge providers like Google.
“These arrangements are individually negotiated, however, so they could not support classification of a common carriage service provided to Google or any other edge provider,” Google said. The agency should avoid "the fiction that edge providers are customers of terminating ISPs when they deliver content to the Internet," Google said, and focus strictly on the relationship between Google's customers and their Internet carriers.
This makes business sense, Sharma said, since Google itself sprawls across several different Internet markets providing its own servers and entertainment via YouTube. "Their data center side, their YouTube side, they don't want that opened up for regulation," he said.
Of course not. This is about the little guy.
