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March 07, 2006
Net neutrality and how cell networks are eating the Net
A post on network neutrality has been in the hopper for a while.… Now that Ron Wyden has dropped a bill (S. 2360) on the subject (Thanks Traceroutes), a few words: [ 1 ]
Maybe I don’t get around enough, but I don’t know a single person who is unabashedly enthusiastic about the Net-enabled services they get from their cell phones. For better or worse, these networks are developing as discrete “silos,” and who your carrier is determines who you can get content from. Remember all those ads during the Super Bowl about getting sports clips from ESPN on your mobile? Did you notice that the ESPN service is only going to be available on Sprint’s network? What if you use Verizon, or T-Mobile, or Cingular? Well, you might be able to get sports content from someone else, but at least for the time being, you can’t get it from ESPN.
That’s because the cell networks aren’t traffic-agnostic. They’re designed to carry traffic—and only traffic—that’s been preapproved by the network operator. In this case, ESPN (Disney) and Sprint came to a deal, some money changed hands, some access codes were exchanged, and voilà!—ESPN content appears on the Sprint network. Without the deal, though, the content doesn’t flow.
Compare that to the Internet. When a user develops some kind of compelling content, s/he contracts with a host, uploads some files, and is open for business. His/her content is available on an equal playing field with all other content. Of course, the traffic might get too high (Ed: Not yet a problem for U.Id), but there are services like Akamai that offer caching and other traffic spreading services to ease the burden.
What’s happening now is that the ISPs are trying to push us from the “historic Internet” model to the “cell network” model. Executives at firms such as AT&T—I mean at&t (née SBC)—are starting to make high-pitched chittering noises about requiring rent payments from Internet resources that utilize the ISPs’ bandwidth. [ 2 ] The logic is that, if ESPN is paying Sprint for access to its network, then Google (for example) should pay every ISP for the same thing.
Moving to that kind of an architecture would make the ISPs the most important policymakers for the Internet. They could decide what traffic to emphasize, what traffic to deprioritize, who gets what, when, and how. Under the current system, such questions are answered by and large by the global community of users through a decentralized dialectic of links, commentary, negotiation, argument and, above all, mouseclicks. The ISPs argue that that’s an inherently inefficient system. But it seems to me to be the worst form of governance except for all the others. Putting the ISPs in charge serves nothing but to entrench large firms’ already-startling influence over media and culture.
In this correspondent’s opinion, Senator Wyden is on the right track. Network neutrality is a linchpin of the modern Internet, and the attempts of the ISPs to move back on that should be resisted.
[ 1 ] I don’t have the room here to properly go into the technical details of neutrality, and I could never do so with the thoroughness and clarity of Ed Felten’s two recent posts on the subject: Nuts and Bolts of Network Discrimination, parts 1 and 2. Check it out.
[ 2 ] Of course, users are paying for access to that bandwidth. So the ISPs’ characterization that they “own” it is not quite apt.
Posted by Rob Courtney at March 7, 2006 11:19 AM