Category: Net Neutrality

The title of this post is a slogan one of my fellow engineers at Texas Instruments had in his cubicle in the early 80s when we were developing the first network-based operating systems. Engineers understand that money doesn’t grow ion trees, the Tooth Fairy doesn’t leave it under your pillow, and that real stuff has to be paid for. It would be great if the laws of physics could be suspended and Our Internet could have all three virtues, but in the real world (the place where engineers are paid to make trade-offs) this isn’t going to happen. If you want your network to be fast and reliable, it’s going to be expensive; if you want it to be cheap, it has to be either slow or unreliable.

Two common networks make this trade in different ways: the telephone network is highly reliable and not very expensive, but it’s not fast. The packet network that we call the Internet is faster and more expensive than the telephone network, but it’s less reliable in the sense that it’s performance is more variable. Neither network is more virtuous than the other, they just make the trade-offs in ways that are appropriate to the ways the networks are used, to the kind of traffic they carry.

Our pals at Free Press, the organization that created Save the Internet and pays its employees, unveiled a new plan for the Internet at its annual conference this week. Free Press, by the way, is primarily concerned that deregulation of media ownership law a threat to our democracy, just as deregulation of Internet access networks is, you guessed it, a threat to our democracy.

Free Press’ plan for the Internet is couched as Declaration of Internet Freedoms and goes like this:

* Universal Affordable Access: Broadband Internet access should be universally available and affordable.

* An Open and Neutral Network: Access to broadband networks should be open to all producers and consumers of Internet content on fair and equal terms without discrimination.

* World Class Quality through Competition: America must build the world’s most advanced communications networks and maximize competition on those networks.

That sounds an awful lot like “Cheap, Good, and Fast: I want all three.”

I’m sorry, but that’s not how things work on the planet Earth. Upgrading the overall quality of our broadband networks is going to take a large infusion of cash, to the tune of several billion dollars. That money will be spent running fiber optic cables, buying routers to light the fiber, building network operations centers to spot and repair problems, upgrading routers inside homes and businesses, and purchasing long-haul fiber optic circuits. The Internet doesn’t generate enough carrier revenue to pay for this upgrade by itself, so the carriers will have to pay for it in no small part by selling the stuff that people are willing to pay for, television and phone service.

That’s the way we’ve always paid for infrastructure in the US, and it’s the way it’s paid for in other countries as well. You can get a raw connection rate of 100 megabits/second in Korea, but you can use any VoIP but the one provided by Korea Telecom. Similar rules pertain in the UK and in France. That’s a violation of network neutrality, but it takes place in the places Free Press touts as Model Nations.

The net result, pardon the pun, of the regulations proposed by Free Press on the American Internet access network can only be one thing: the network will never be substantially upgraded because there won’t be any money in it.

And that’s what happens when you go for Good, Fast AND Cheap: you got none of them.

Matt Sherman notices Stanford University law professor and copyright crusader Larry Lessig expressing doubts about some of the regulatory jihads he’s embraced recently. Lessig admits to being wrong about the Microsoft anti-trust case because it was rendered moot by the relative success of Linux. The professor is less certain he was wrong about net neutrality, but his mind seems to be opening just a bit.

Unfortunately, Lessig is still caught up in a false dichotomy between government-regulated networks vs. government-operated ones:

Those who oppose network-neutrality regulation should also oppose this regulation of last-mile broadband’s most important competitor. Municipal competition won’t kill commercial broadband any more than Linux has killed Windows. Yet it could change the business model of last-mile broadband, just as Linux has changed the business model of Microsoft. If there’s going to be a Linux-like miracle to counteract innovation-threatening broadband business models, then, at a minimum, miracles must not be a crime.

If the only competition AT&T and Verizon had was government-operated networks, their stock would outperform the markets to an extreme degree. In fact, their real competition can really come only from other for-profit companies smart enough to hire good people and develop sensible business plans. The one tip I’d give regulators is not to allow telcos to control too many different media. Licensed WiMax is a big threat to residential broadband over twisted-pair, so it’s best not to allow telcos to have a large piece of that action.

Ultimately, the free market will keep AT&T’s rapacious instincts in check better than any half-baked regulatory scheme, but only if it’s allowed to develop. For that reason, the provision of the AT&T/Bell South merger agreement about WiMax divestiture was good; the rest of it is garbage.

A week has passed since AT&T submitted to the will of Democrat FCC commissioners Copps and Adelstein by volunteering to “network neutrality” regulations and we’ve seen the entire range of possible reactions. Not from the pro-neutrality vs. the anti-neutrality forces, mind you, but from within the ranks of the regulationists themselves. Free Press’ chief telecom wonk Ben Scott touts the agreement and his own press blurbs on the Astroturf Save The Internet blog and Columbia law professor Tim Wu gushes about the “historic” nature of the agreement in the same venue.

But all is not happy in Neutland. Another law professor and neutrality hard-liner, Susan Crawford, says the agreement is the end of the Internet (copy paste http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/12/29/2604993.html into your browser, she won’t allow direct linking from here), and late-breaking neutarian Tom Evslin says the agreement is a sham. Others on the pro-regulation side say the agreement is hollow as the FCC’s majority doesn’t intend to enforce it.

So depending on which virtuous, regulation-happy soul you want to believe, the AT&T merger agreement is either the best thing that’s ever happened to the Internet, the worst thing, or nothing at all. That’s a lot to choose from, but don’t worry, I can explain everything in a very few words.

If you read Ben Scott’s quotes, it’s clear that he’s happy about two things:

1) The merger agreement contains a definition of “network neutrality”; and
2) It imposes telecom network regulations on at least part of the AT&T DSL network.

The first is really nothing, because the definition used in the agreement was simply lifted out of the Snowe-Dorgan Internet Freedom Preservation Act and has no special significance beyond the fact that the Democrat commissioners were familiar with it. Scott claims it puts the lie to the claim that “nobody can define network neutrality”, but that never was the issue, really. The intellectual problem with neutrality is that everyone can define it, generally in many different ways. Some say it’s about routing, some say it’s about delivery times, some say it’s about unbundling and some say it’s simply about pricing. As the agreement contains many of these elements, we’re still no closer to a universal understanding of network neutrality than we were when Professor Wu coined the term a few months ago.

And that, I believe, explains why Wu is so giddy over the agreement: it ensures that the term he coined will be part of the discourse on Internet regulation for years to come, extending his fifteen minutes of fame. That’s good for book sales, speaking gigs, and tenure. And more power to him for that, it’s no small feat to manufacture a regulatory principle out of thin air and have it stick to a major merger agreement.

The reason Ben Scott is so happy is because the agreement applies telecom regulations to the Internet. He’s a telecom regulator, you see, not an Internet guy, so he was facing unemployment if the trend toward de-regulated networks embodied by the historical Internet continued. But now he believes he’s made the case that the Internet is no different from an old-fashioned telephone network (in a regulatory sense) so he’s still relevant.

And this is the reason Evslin and Crawford are unhappy. They’re Internet people, not telecom people, and they understand enough about the Internet to see that it’s not at all like a phone network and can’t be treated that way. They’re all for regulating it in principle, but skeptical about the applicability of Scott’s wisdom to a fundamentally different medium. So they naturally point out that the telecom wonks who forged the agreement have missed the point so badly that they’ve actually made things worse for the Internet.

So this is the bottom line: the AT&T merger agreement applies traditional telecom law to the Internet, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether you think the Internet is phone network.

Just so we’re clear, networks of the past were designed for a single service: the telegraph network only carried telegrams, not phone calls; the telecom network wasn’t designed for television, and the CATV network, in its original form, didn’t carry data or voice. The Internet is a packet data network that fundamentally is capable of serving a variety of needs without much effort: e-mail, porn, video, and voice are all happy on it, more or less.

If we’re going to get regulatory with the Internet, we’re not going very far until we recognize this unique character. It’s not enough to be strict about how users of a single service are treated relative to each other, we have to understand how different services relate to each other. The telecom wonks’ approach is simply to ban “different services” in order to force-fit the Internet into the Procrustean Bed of the traditional regulatory model. The disgruntled neuts are sounder in their reaction to the agreement than the happy-faced ones, more in tune with the Internet’s character and less reactionary.

To be perfectly frank, Ben Scott and Tim Wu are rank opportunists who obviously care much less about Your Internet than about Their Own Careers. That’s not a bad thing, but it is something you should bear in mind lest you find their jubilation infectious.

UPDATE: Matt Sherman surveys yet another reaction.

This just in from the Wall St. Journal: AT&T Offers New Concessions In BellSouth Deal

WASHINGTON — AT&T Inc. has offered a new set of concessions that are expected to satisfy the two Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission and lead to approval of the company’s $85 billion buyout of BellSouth Corp.

Approval by the full commission could happen as soon as Friday.

AT&T filed a letter of commitment with the agency Thursday night that adds a number of new conditions to the deal, including a promise to observe “network neutrality” principles, an offer of affordable stand-alone digital subscriber line service and divestment of some wireless spectrum.

The net neutrality concessions are:

1 . Effective on the Merger Closing Date, and continuing for 30 months thereafter, AT&T/BellSouth will conduct business in a manner that comports with the principles set forth in the Commission’s Policy Statement, issued September 23, 2005 (FCC 05-151).

2. AT&T/BellSouth also commits that it will maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service. 15 This’ commitment shall be satisfied by AT&T/BellSouth’s agreement not to provide or to sell to Internet content, application, or service providers, including those affiliated with AT&T/BellSouth, any service that privileges, degrades or prioritizes any packet transmitted over AT&T/BellSouth’s wireline broadband Internet access service based on its source, ownership or destination.

This commitment shall apply to AT&T/BellSouth’s wireline broadband Internet access service from the network side of the customer premise equipment up to and including the Internet Exchange Point closest to the customer’s premise, defined as the point of interconnection that is logically, temporally or physically closest to the customer’s premise where public or private Internet backbone networks freely exchange Internet packets.

This commitment does not apply to AT&T/BellSouth’s enterprise managed IP services, defined as services available only to enterprise customers 16 that are separate services from, and can be purchased without, AT&T/BellSouth’s wireline broadband Internet access service, including, but not limited to, virtual private network (VPN) services provided to enterprise customers. This commitment also does not apply to AT&T/BellSouth’s Internet Protocol television (IPTV) service. These exclusions shall not result in the privileging, degradation, or prioritization of packets transmitted or received by AT&T/BellSouth’s non-enterprise customers’ wireline broadband Internet access service from the network side of the customer premise equipment up to and including the Internet Exchange Point closest to the customer’s premise, as defined above.

This commitment shall sunset on the earlier of (1) two years from the Merger Closing Date, or (2) the effective date of any legislation enacted by Congress subsequent to the Merger Closing Date that substantially addresses “network neutrality” obligations of broadband Internet access providers, including, but not limited to, any legislation that substantially addresses the privileging, degradation, or prioritization of broadband Internet access traffic.

Thus, the neuts have extracted most of what they wanted from the FCC after Congress told them to go take a hike, which is not exactly a victory for the Democratic Process. It simply means that two ignorant commissioners – Copps and Adelstein – were able to subvert the will of the people.

But the larger question is whether this is a victory for the Internet or even a victory for Google and the other moneybags who funded the net neutrality movement and stood to make the greatest gains from it. On one hand, Google loses from this agreement because AT&T retains the right to prioritize its IPTV service, the main juicy plum that Google wanted to cannibalize. But Google wins because it’s still able to out-perform other web sites by caching content in its various massive server farms, a permanent advantage that the carriers can’t counteract with higher-quality transport services.

And there’s nothing in this about censorship of political speech, but we all knew that was bullshit form the get-go.

In the meantime, Internet service in Asia remains severely degraded by the loss of a fiber-optic tube from Taiwan to an earthquake, and Google isn’t volunteering to help restore it or to invest in the two new tubes the carriers are going to lay for a billion dollars.

Isn’t democracy wonderful?

UPDATE: The deal is done.

UPDATE 2: Predictably, neuts are whining. See Techdirt, Isenberg, Evslin, Crawford for the ongoing litany about the dearth of free candy in the world. My heart bleeds.

One of the fantasies I hear these days says there’s tons of dark fiber all over the place so bandwidth is essentially free. Never mind all the routers it takes to light it up, the fiber is there so anybody can use it for next to nothing. You’ve probably heard this too.

It turns out that “next to nothing” is really about a billion bucks (WSJ subscription required):

Verizon Communications Inc. signed an agreement today with five major Asian telecom carriers to build the first high-speed trans-Pacific undersea cable system directly linking the U.S. and China.

According to the company, the planned $500 million project will offer an alternative to the single low-capacity cable that now provides the only direct link between mainland China and the U.S. Currently most Web traffic between the two countries has to go through Hong Kong or Japan, at times causing transmission delays.

Meanwhile, AT&T Inc. is in talks with Telekom Malaysia Bhd. and Singaporean carrier Starhub Ltd. to build a cable line linking Southeast Asia and the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter. The consortium could invest $400 million to $500 million if the deal is completed, says a person familiar with the matter.

Oops. I guess all that dark fiber isn’t in the right places, is it?

Charles H. Giancarlo, senior vice president and chief development officer of Cisco Systems, has the neuts in an uproar thanks to the omission of a word from this Op-Ed:

Continued governmental support to promote an open and highly competitive telecommunications market combined with accelerated corporate and private initiatives to ensure that all Americans have equal, high-speed broadband access are crucial to the country’s economic and social well-being. We also cannot tie the hands of the Internet through additional regulation, such as “net neutrality,” which eliminates the ability of the Internet to support new applications. We should be breaking down barriers rather than building them.

Doc Searls is pretty exercised about it:

Net Neutrality is a red herring here. Lots of arguments can be made against it. Lack of clear definitions and possibility of unintended consequences are the main two. But to argue that Net neutrality “eliminates the ability of the Internet to support new applications” is so far beyond wrong that it calls Giancarlo’s motives into question. Has he joined the carriers’ lobbying teams? Sounds like it.

And Isenberg is in full foaming-at-the-mouth-mode:

Hey, Cisco needs the carriers as customers. Further, Cisco sees the complexification of Net Discrimination as a selling point that keeps the commoditization monster at bay. Charlie G saw the hot water John Chambers got into by repeating that voice would be free until Verizon’s execs lost patience, and he’s not going to make the same mistake. OK. But . . .

The battle is between those who would change the carriers so the Internet survives and those who would change the Internet so the carriers survive. Wouldn’t it be better for Cisco to have dogs on both sides?

Giancarlo should have said: net neutrality eliminates the ability of the Internet to support new types of applications. We know that the Traditional Internet is capable of supporting many kinds of web-based applications: catalog sales, hookups, auctions, blogs, and all of that tedium. But the architecture devised when the Internet was an academic plaything walled off from the world isn’t capable of supporting large-scale deployment of telephony, video-conferencing, live TV, and massively multi-user real-time gaming: whole new kinds of applications.

These new applications, when widely deployed, will put demands on the infrastructure that can’t be met economically by any carrier, privately-owned or publicly funded, if they can’t distinguish services. So even if policy goes as the neuts want it to go and the Internet becomes a public utility the performance potential of the Original Architecture isn’t sufficient to meet the needs and desires of the public for very long. Treating every Internet stream as if it were on-line gaming that needs to move massive amounts of data with a latency of less than 50 milliseconds isn’t practical. The pipes aren’t free, and there’s no reason for people who don’t need super-duper high performance connections to pay for them. Consequently, carriers need the flexibility to offer service plans that fit customer needs, and the ability to pay for infrastructure sufficiently flexible to do all the things people want it to do. One-size-fits-all is a poor policy for the Internet.

Giancarlo understands this, and the carriers understand it. Cisco and the carriers built the Internet, and they know how it works. It’s the height of arrogance for people unschooled in packet network engineering to denounce engineers for telling the truth, but that arrogance is the essence of net neutrality advocacy.

When will this madness end?

David Isenberg tried to explain his dramatic turn-around on net neutrality recently:

In June of 1997, when I wrote the essay, it seemed reasonable (to a Bell Labs guy steeped in telco tradition) that a stupid network might incorporate low level behaviors analogous to taxis or tropism to automatically adapt to the needs of the data. But research results from Internet2 [.pdf] now show that network upgrades to accommodate even extremely demanding applications, such as Hi-Def video conferences, can be achieved more effectively, cheaply and reliably by simply adding more capacity.

The research results he cites were delivered to Congress by this eminent researcher:

Gary Bachula is the Vice President for External Relations for Internet2. Gary has substantial government and not-for-profit experience, with an extensive history of leadership in technology development. Most recently, Gary served as Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology at the US Department of Commerce where he led the formation of government-industry partnerships around programs such as GPS and the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. As Vice President for the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) from 1991 to 1993, Gary managed strategic planning and program development for the organization designated to build a distributed information network as part of NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth. From 1986 to 1990, he chaired the Michigan Governor’s Cabinet Council, and from 1974 to 1986 Gary served as Chief of Staff to U.S. Representative Bob Traxler of Michigan where he advised on appropriations for NASA, EPA, the National Science Foundation and other federal R&D agencies. Gary holds undergraduate and law (J.D.) degrees from Harvard University. A native of Saginaw, Michigan, Bachula served at the Pentagon in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam war.

So now we have a new definition for net neutrality: in the past, networks were designed by engineers, but under net neutrality they’ll be designed by lawyers and lobbyists. Great.

But to be fair, there was an actual study performed by two guys using the Internet2 Abilene network from 1998-2001 which determined that QoS wasn’t practical to implement with routers of that era, primarily because they had to use software to figure out how to distinguish high-priority and low-priority packets. As these routers performed most packet forwarding operations in hardware, this was a big slow-down:

Some router vendors have elected to include complex QoS functionality in microcode running on their interface cards, rather than in custom ASICs that add to the power consumption and cost of a card. This is a non-starter. Our experience has been that this approach can result in a drop of maximum packet-per-second forwarding rates by 50% or more. Such a CPU cycle shortage hurts all traffic, including Premium, making deployment very hard to justify.

The trend among newer, higher-speed routers seems to be towards less QoS functionality, not more. As circuit costs are responsible for an ever decreasing portion of network capital expenditures, and interface costs are responsible for an ever increasing share of network capital expenditures, the market pressure for dumb, fast, and cheap router interfaces is ever greater.

Are we prepared to pay the price difference for extra QoS features? If so, is there enough of a customer base for feature-rich routers to make their development worthwhile for router vendors?

Contrary to the Internet2 predictions, modern routers do in fact have more QoS functionality in hardware. So if Internet2 were a serious research organization they’d repeat the study with up-to-date systems and abandon the rank speculation. But they won’t, of course.

To those of us who’ve been around a while, the idea that you can learn ultimate lessons about the Internet from academic experiments is laughable. Early experiments with the Internet in academic settings taught us, for example, that there was no need for spam protection, virus removal, and the control of bandwidth hogging. In the academy, social systems control this behavior, but in the real world it’s up to the network. We haven’t always known that, but we do now.

My question for Isenberg is this: what kind of engineer abandons well-known findings on the say-so of a lobbyist touting one ancient experiment conducted without control or follow-up? We know that an over-built network doesn’t need much in the way of QoS to support moderately demanding applications like VoIP.

The problem with over-provisioning the entire Internet is that applications will emerge to consume the excess bandwidth, putting the user back on square one.

Oops.

UPDATE: To clarify the Internet2 “research” just a bit, bear this in mind: the fears that NN advocates have about web site slowdowns and censorship presume that routers are capable of discriminating for and against all the traffic they pass without slowing down Premium customers. The Internet2 “research” says this is impossible.

So who are you going to believe, Internet2 or Internet2?

David Isenberg is jumping on the cluetrain to defend Dr. David Weinberger from charges of fuzziness. According to the Davids, there’s no uncertainty about Network Neutrality:

As a proponent of Network Neutrality, I cringe when I hear, “We do not even know what Network Neutrality means.” We DO know. Such statements are true ONLY in the sense that we don’t know the precise dividing line between a shelf and a table, or that we can’t say precisely how a tree grows, or that there’s sometimes fuzziness in whether a death is a murder.

It is in the telcos’ and cablecos’ interest to keep Network Neutrality amorphous and undefinable. If we don’t even know what it is, we can’t pass a law against it, right?

We DO know what Net Neutrality is. There are several excellent definitions of Network Neutrality, e.g., by the Annenberg Center, by savetheinternet [.pdf] [disclosure: I work as an unpaid volunteer with the savetheinternet folks], and, perhaps the clearest statement of all, since it is stated as proposed legislation, by Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) [actual 2006 Bill here .pdf].

The unifying element is the prohibition of deliberate discrimination.

Isenberg should read his own writing.

Net neutrality proponents are sharply divided about what constitutes “discrimination”, and one can find this rift in Isenberg’s book “The Rise of the Stupid Network,” where he describes something called “idiot savant behaviors” which allow the network to tailor transport services to the needs of applications:

[In] the Stupid Network, because the data is the boss, it can tell the network, in real time, what kind of service it needs. And the Stupid Network would have a small repertoire of idiot-savant behaviors to treat different data types appropriately. If the data identified itself as financial data, the Stupid Network would deliver it accurately, no matter how many milliseconds of delay the error checking would take. If the data were two-way voice or video, the Stupid Network would provide low delay, even at the price of an occasional flipped bit. If the data were entertainment audio or video, the Stupid Network would provide wider bandwidth, but would not necessarily give low delay or absolute accuracy. And if there were a need for unique transmission characteristics, the data would tell the Stupid Network in more detail how to treat it, and the Stupid Network would do what it was told.

This is a sort of “discrimination” and a violation of Strict Stupidity. But not to do this, which would be to simply treat all packets the same, is also a form of discrimination because it favors applications that care more about bulk data transfer over those that need timely service.

So either way, we can wave our hands about “discrimination” or we can address application realities, and we all have to choose. It’s not that clear at all, and Isenberg knows it.

In the US we practice a form of social discrimination called “Affirmative Action” which many advocates claim is not discrimination at all because it’s for a good reason. In the UK, they’re a lot more honest, calling it “Positive Discrimination.” Network neutrality either bans or endorses positive discrimination depending on whose definition you use.

That’s reality. On the Internet, we have a number of different behaviors that require “discrimination” on the part of the carrier: fraud, theft, and bandwidth hogging among them. To require strict passivity on the part of the carrier when we know these things go on is simply to hide ones head in the sand.

A gaffe is when a politician accidentally says what he really thinks. Net neutrality advocate David Weinberger committed one recently when he wrote:

…I recently spent a day�sponsored by an activist think tank�with a dozen people who understand Net tech deeply, going through exactly which of the 496 permutations would constitute a violation of Net neutrality. Caching packets within a particular application area but not according to source? Caching application-based non-cached application-based packets? Saying “Hi” to all passing packets, but adding, “Howya doin’?” to only the ones you like? Patting all packets on the back but refusing to buy some lunch? The whole thing makes my brain hurt

I put that quote into Wikipedia’s Net Neutrality entry, and now Weinberger’s crying foul:

FWIW, I agree that the paragraph that cites me should be edited out. It is unencyclopedic. It also is used to make a point that it in fact does not support. The fact that it’s challenging to work out the precise application of NN in some instances doesn’t mean that the meaning of the principle itself is unclear. It’s tough to figure out exactly how to apply, say, affirmative action, gay rights, or the end-to-end principle, but it’d be highly misleading to start an article on them by saying the principles are unclear. It’s the nature of principles to require thought, argument and politics in their application. So, I hope someone removes that paragraph.

The fact of the matter is that nobody knows what net neutrality is, how to detect it, and how to regulate it, so the whole matter of laws protecting it is premature. Weinberger accidentally told the truth, and now he doesn’t want it to get out. There are plenty of people who think net neutrality is a great thing, but that we don’t know enough about it to regulate it; Doc Searls and Tom Evslin, for example. But the Wikipedia crowd isn’t real keen on sharing that point of view with the public.

That’s the way it goes.