A little while ago, I noted that Ofcom was seeking input on the subject of Net neutrality. I also promised to post my own submission, which I've included below.
Ofcom has put together a very useful discussion paper [.pdf], and invites comments via an online form. Alternatively, you can send comments directly to traffic.management@ofcom.org.uk. In either case, responses need to be in by 9 September.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Net neutrality is turning from a boring, irrelevant issue that few people thought about much into one of the key issues for today's Internet. Sadly, that's because a few powerful industry groups in the US have started spending lots of money to bolster their weakening positions in a shifting world, and that means obscure technicalities like Net neutrality become collateral damage in the collective stampede to get to the feeding troughs.
On Open Enterprise blog.
I'll admit it: watching the debates about net neutrality in the US, I've always felt rather smug. Not for us sensible UK chappies, I thought, the destruction of what is one of the key properties of the Internet. No daft suggestions that big sites like Google should pay ISPs *again* for the traffic that they send out – that is, in addition to the money they and we fork over for the Internet connections we use. And now we have this:
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the great knock-on benefits of Elinor Ostrom sharing the Nobel prize for Economics is that the concept of the commons is getting the best airing that it's ever had. Here's another useful meditation on the subject from someone who knows what he's talking about, since he's written a book on the subject:Old fables die hard. That's surely been the history of the so-called "tragedy of the commons," one of the most durable myths of the past generation. In a famous 1968 essay, biologist Garrett Hardin alleged that it is nearly impossible for people to manage shared resources as a commons. Invariably someone will let his sheep over-graze a shared pasture, and the commons will collapse. Or so goes the fable.
In fact, as Professor Elinor Ostrom's pioneering scholarship over the past three decades has demonstrated, self-organized communities of "commoners" are quite capable of managing forests, fisheries and other finite resources without destroying them. On Monday, Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in Economics for explaining how real-life commons work, especially in managing natural resources.
As he notes:Although Ostrom has not written extensively about the Internet and online commons, her work clearly speaks to the ways that people can self-organize themselves to take care of resources that they care about. The power of digital commons can be seen in the runaway success of Linux and other open-source software. It is evident, too, in the explosive growth of Wikipedia, Craigslist (classified ads), Flickr (photo-sharing), the Internet Archive (historical Web artifacts) and Public.Resource.org (government information). Each commons acts as a conscientious steward of its collective wealth.
And this is an acute observation:
A key reason that all these Internet commons flourish is because the commoners do not have to get permission from, or make payments to, a corporate middleman. They can build what they want directly, and manage their work as they wish. The cable and telephone companies that provide access to the Internet are not allowed to favor large corporate users with superior service while leaving the rest of us--including upstart competitors and non-market players--with slower, poorer-quality service.
In an earlier time, this principle was known as "common carriage"--the idea that everyone shall have roughly equivalent access and service, without discrimination. Today, in the Internet context, it is known as "net neutrality."
Neat: another reason we need to preserve Net neutrality is to preserve all the commons - past, present and future - it enables.
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The Competitive Enterprise Institute is always good for a laugh thanks to its transparent agenda (the use of the weasel word "competitive" gives it away), and it doesn't disappoint in the following, which is about the evils of net neutrality and openness:Consider the Apple iPhone. The remarkably successful smartphone has arguably been a game-changer in the wireless world, having sold tens of millions of handsets since its 2007 launch and spurring dozens of would-be “iPhone killers” in the process. If you listen to net neutrality advocates’ mantra, you would assume the iPhone must be a wide open device with next to no restrictions. You would be mistaken. In fact, the iPhone is a prototypical “walled garden.” Apple vets every single iPhone app, and Apple reserves the right to reject iPhone apps if they “duplicate [iPhone] functionality” or “create significant network congestion.”
Why, then, has the iPhone enjoyed such popularity? It’s because consumer preferences are diverse and constantly evolving. Most users, it seems, do not place openness on the same pedestal that net neutrality advocates do. Proprietary platforms like the iPhone have advantages of their own– a cohesive, centrally-managed user experience, for one– but have disadvantages as well.
Which is fair enough. But it then goes on to say:
But under the FCC’s proposed neutrality rules, the iPhone and similar devices that place limits on the content and applications that users can access would likely be against the law.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with the edges - which is where the iPhone resides - and everything about the wiring that connects the edges. It is about preventing those who control the networks from blocking innovative services - like the iPhone - being offered across them. It would only apply if Apple owned the network and refused to allow third parties to offer rival services to its iPhone - clearly not the case. It does not forbid Apple from choosing which apps to run on the iPhone, any more than it forces Microsoft to go open source.
Painting the freedom of net neutrality as a kind of slavery in this way is really a tour-de-force of topsy-turvism, even by the high standards of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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Viviane seems confused:
From the governance point of view "Net Neutrality" is essential. New network management techniques allow traffic prioritisation. These tools may be used to guarantee good quality of service but may also be used for anti-competitive practices. The Commission has taken steps to empower national regulators to prevent such unfair abuse to the detriment of consumers. These measures are at the heart of the new telecoms regulatory package
Well, no, not as such. The provisions in the Telecoms Package actually *gut* net neutrality. So either you don't understand what the current proposals say (not difficult, since they are meant to be misleading) or you don't really care about *real* net neutrality.
So which is it?
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It seems that one of the main architects of the disgrace that is the Telecoms Package is the UK MEP Malcolm Harbour. Here's an indication that he doesn't know what he is talking about:According to rumours in cyberpsace the proposed new rules will impose conditional access to internet, providers will be able to limit the number of site you're visiting and Skype could be blocked. Is Internet freedom really at risk?
That's pure fantasy. The Telecoms package has never been about anything to do with restrictions on the internet. I am astonished to see this remarkable text from Black-out Europe. There is absolutely nothing in this proposal that says anything about that.
The questioner is wrong to frame this in terms of blocking *sites*: it's about blocking *services*, particularly ones based on new protocols piggy-backing on TCP/IP. The Telecoms Package gives telecoms companies the possibility of blocking anything it doesn't like at this level - killing net neutrality - provided they tell people what they are doing.
So Mr Harbour is absolutely incorrect to say "The Telecoms package has never been about anything to do with restrictions on the internet." He obviously doesn't understand what Blackout Europe is saying, as the latter's own post on the topic points out.
You know things are bad when a coalition includes Google and Microsoft agreeing on something...
On Open Enterprise blog.
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There's a fascinating history of the RFCs in the New York Times, written by a person who was there at the beginning:Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or asserting authority. In my mind, I was inciting the wrath of some prestigious professor at some phantom East Coast establishment. I was actually losing sleep over the whole thing, and when I finally tackled my first memo, which dealt with basic communication between two computers, it was in the wee hours of the morning. I had to work in a bathroom so as not to disturb the friends I was staying with, who were all asleep.
Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.” R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questions unanswered, and soon became obsolete. But the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards, and today there are more than 5,000, all readily available online.
For me, most interesting comments are the following:The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.
After all, everyone understood there was a practical value in choosing to do the same task in the same way. For example, if we wanted to move a file from one machine to another, and if you were to design the process one way, and I was to design it another, then anyone who wanted to talk to both of us would have to employ two distinct ways of doing the same thing. So there was plenty of natural pressure to avoid such hassles. It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement.
This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have the Web without it. When CERN physicists wanted to publish a lot of information in a way that people could easily get to it and add to it, they simply built and tested their ideas. Because of the groundwork we’d laid in the R.F.C.’s, they did not have to ask permission, or make any changes to the core operations of the Internet. Others soon copied them — hundreds of thousands of computer users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing content and technology. That’s the Web.
I think this is right: the RFCs are predicated on complete openness, where anyone can make suggestions and comments. The Web built on that basis, extending the possibility of openness to everyone on the Internet. In the face of attempts to kill net neutrality in Europe, it's something we should be fighting for.
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The UK government is fast turning into the digital villain of Europe as far as the Internet is concerned. Not content with monitoring everything we look at online, it now wants to break Net Neutrality so that it can block out chunks of the Internet is disapproves of - killing Net Neutrality in the process.
That, at least, is the effect of a proposed amendment EU's Telecoms Package, currently being circulated according to Monica Horten's IPtegrity site:
The UK government wants to cut out users rights to access Internet content, applications and services. Some of the information used to justify the change has been cut and pasted from the Wikipedia.
Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users' rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a ‘principle' that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services.
As Horten explains:The proposed amendments cut out completely any users' rights to do with content - whether accessing or distributing - which would appear to be in breach of the European Charter of Fundamental rights, Article 10. The Charter states that everyone has the right "to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers." In the digital age, the Internet, and the associated applications and services provided by the World Wide Web, is the means by which people exercise that right.
...
The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.
The proposal is not just against the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, but will also bring the European Council in conflict with the European Commission and the European Parliament. Unfortunately much of the real power in Europe still lies with the Council, so if this proposal is accepted there, it might still be imposed against the wishes of everyone else.
If you thought all that anti-net neutrality stuff was just for Yanks, think again: they're trying to sneak it over here, too:Telcos are lobbying hard for discriminatory practices in network management to be permited, which threaten the neutrality of the Internet. They are opposed by citizens groups who are calling on MEPs to close the loopholes in the Telecoms Package Second Reading.
Liberty Global is the latest telco to throw its hat in the anti-net neutrality ring, with a statement in support of its colleagues at AT&T and Verizon. In a statement to run with its European Parliament seminar today, Liberty Global calls for limitations on regulatory intervention in respect of ‘network management practices'. The AT&T amendments are about trying to stop European regulators taking the kind of action that the FCC was able to take in the Comcast case, where a netwwork operator was restricting lawful services on the Internet and the FCC told it to stop.
Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty (Global)...
Neat:
the argument over net neutrality is essentially a rehash of the argument between whether a network is more efficient if it uses circuit switching or packet switching. To recap, circuit switching is where a network holds open a dedicated network channel between two endpoints, whereas packet switching is when the data transferred between the endpoints is split up into packets, which may traverse the network by different routes, and even arrive out of order (and are re-sequenced at the receiving end).
POTS telephony traditionally ran on circuit switching, but tcp/ip networking introduced the packet switching paradigm, which happens to be much more efficient. It appears that opponents of network neutrality want, in effect, to scrap packet switching and make parts of the net run on a less efficient paradigm.
Thus fighting net neutrality emerges as a nostalgia for the days when men were men, and a circuit was a circuit.
Here's a very stupid idea in the making:Representatives of the US government have demanded that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) come up with a solution for prioritizing certain data within government networks and at the interfaces to other networks. Representatives of the US Department of Defense and of the National Communications System (NCS), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, are seeking to ensure that certain items of information can even in an emergency be guaranteed to arrive. This presupposes appropriate identification mechanisms in the servers. At the IETF meeting in Prague Antonio Desimone of the US Department of Defense said that the switch to a "global grid" raised a number of issues, such as how delivery of a specific e-mail could be ensured within a defined period of time. What was needed was a prioritizing of data, one that also took in emergency and catastrophe scenarios.
"Some calls are more important than other calls, some chats more important than others or a certain content within a chat session may have priority," Mr. Desimone explained.
Why's it stupid? Well, it essentially kills net neutrality, and at the behest of the soldiers. If they want their own super-duper networks, let them build it, rather than attempt to steal the toys everyone else is sharing. And another reason this is asking for trouble is the following:He said he was especially worried that prioritization might in reality not be confined to authorized persons. Should confinement fail script kids and hackers might find ways to use "priority bits" for their purposes, he observed.
"Might find ways"? Might???
Sir Tim has been talking to a bunch of boring politicians. Here's my favourite bit - a neat distillation of why Net neutrality matters:When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone's permission. The Web, as a new application, rolled out over the existing Internet without any changes to the Internet itself. This is the genius of the design of the Internet, for which I take no credit. Applying the age old wisdom of design with interchangeable parts and separation of concerns, each component of the Internet and the applications that run on top of it are able develop and improve independently. This separation of layers allows simultaneous but autonomous innovation to occur at many levels all at once. One team of engineers can concentrate on developing the best possible wireless data service, while another can learn how to squeeze more and more bits through fiber optic cable. At the same time, application developers such as myself can develop new protocols and services such as voice over IP, instant messaging, and peer-to-peer networks. Because of the open nature of the Internet's design, all of these continue to work well together even as each one is improving itself.
It's amazing how dim clever people can be. Here's a piece in the Washington Post from some apparently clever chaps about net neutrality. But listen to this:Blocking premium pricing in the name of neutrality might have the unintended effect of blocking the premium services from which customers would benefit. No one would propose that the U.S. Postal Service be prohibited from offering Express Mail because a "fast lane" mail service is "undemocratic." Yet some current proposals would do exactly this for Internet services.
Metaphors are so seductive because they can be grasped more easily than the matter to hand. But they are dangerous because of the potential imperfection of the comparison. In this case, there is a fatal flaw in the metaphor: net neutrality is not about blocking "fast lane" postal services. Proponents of net neutrality have pointed out time and again that anyone is welcome to buy faster Net connections if they need them.
The real comparison is if a postal service were offered that guaranteed faster delivery for letters that contained a particular kind of content. This would act as a barrier to someone "inventing" new kinds of content for letters. Net neutrality is about ensuring that the playing-field is level for everyone - that anyone can invent new kinds of content, so that users can then decide which to use without other biases coming into play. It is not about blocking generic "fast lane" services.
The point is that even if there are cases that could be pointed to where priority might seem be beneficial, the overall impact is negative: once you start giving network providers the power to discriminate, they will - and not in the ways that will be good for the network. If priority is needed, it should be provided - and paid for - on a generic basis.
As if it isn't enough having to fight for Net neutrality, now it looks like in Europe we've got to do the same for Mobile neutrality:This study undertaken by Booz Allen Hamilton, on behalf of the UMTS Forum, considers the impact on mobile consumers and the overall industry ecosystem of two alternative spectrum management scenarios for wide area communications. Firstly, continuation of the current harmonised approach, which is based on internationally agreed band plans using a designated group of technology standards. Secondly, the liberalised scenario, which advocates flexibility through generalised technology neutrality.
The report concludes, through qualitative and quantitative analysis, that consumers and the overall industry ecosystem are best served through continuation of the current harmonised approach. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that in a harmonised environment consumers benefit from the increased penetration of end-user services due to the speed of innovation and network effects (i.e. Metcalfe’s Law); while the industry ecosystem benefits from the improved cost structure provided by the large market size, and scale effects resulting from a harmonised environment. Finally, the quantitative analysis suggests that spectrum harmonisation will benefit end-users through greater usage of end-user services, at lower ARPU, with a larger consumer surplus.
So, a report commissioned by opponents of mobile neutrality - the "liberalised scenario" - comes out against it: what a coincidence.
But all the arguments in favour of Net neutrality - level playing field, the ability to introduce new services without asking permission from network operators etc. etc. - apply here too. Don't be fooled by this arrant nonsense: long live the wireless commons. (Via openspectrum.info.)
Here's a thoughtful analysis of another harmful knock-on effect of the loss of network neutrality:
What will be murdered with no fallback or replacement is the nascent market of interactive entertainment – particularly online gaming. Companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment, and countless others, have built a business on the fundamental assumption of relatively low latency bandwidth being available to large numbers of consumers. Furthermore, a large — even overwhelming — portion of the value of these offerings comes from their “network effects” — the tendency for the game to become more enjoyable and valuable as larger number of players joins the gaming network.
And that means things like Second Life and all the other virtual worlds that are currently under developmentwill also be hit. So, net neutrality is concretely about the future of the Internet, not just abstractly about the importance of preserving an online commons. (Via Terra Nova.)
I was pleased to see that Steven Levy, author of the definitive Hackers book on where it all started, has declared himself on the side of the angels when it comes to the Net neutrality discussions (I won't dignify the misinformation put about by those with vested interests with the name of "argument"). It's short but definitely sweet. (Via SmartMobs.)
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