Network neutrality

FCC head Tom Wheeler says the FCC may move to preempt state laws that make it difficult or impossible for local governments to create competitive broadband networks.

A couple of weeks ago, a U.S. Appeals Court told the FCC that their net neutrality rule was invalid. This has caused a huge debate among broadband industry folks about what comes next. The court ruling hinges on the way the FCC categorizes services like TV, phone, and Internet as either a "telecommunications service" or an "information service." To make things even more complicated, the FCC definition of "common carrier" also factors into the rules.

This CNet article is one of the best summaries of the foofaraw over the FCC net neutrality reversal.

It is unfortunate, but the issue of broadband in this country is becoming a political issue, when it should be focused more on economic prosperity, jobs, and business development. Witness this headline from the always excellent Stop the Cap! blog:

House Republicans Sell Out North Carolina’s Broadband Future to Big Telecom

Bob Frankston, who is smart enough to know why X.400 never worked the way the policy wonks thought it would, has an excellent and very readable short paper called Demystifying Networking that is one of the best overviews I have read on broadband, where we came from, and where we want to go. Take a few minutes and read it in its entirety.

There is plenty of sturm und drang elsewhere about yesterday's net neutrality decision by the FCC, so I am not even going to link to anything. I think that it is extremely likely that Congress or the courts, or both, will force the FCC to withdraw this new ruling, just as the FCC's ruling earlier this year was turned back. While opinions differ, it is not at all clear that the FCC has the statutory authority to do what it wants to do with net neutrality, and so nothing much is going to change until there is a ruling.

A D.C. court ruled against the FCC's attempt to regulate how Comcast manages its network. The ruling dates back to a 2008 order that FCC imposed on Comcast, which was slowing down high bandwidth file sharing for some of its customers.

Steven Levy has a Wired article that illustrates some of the problems that Google, and by extension, all cellphone users face. The new Google Nexus One can be purchased unlocked and without a cellular contract. You can then (in theory) go to any provider and get a service contract.

The next couple of years could be interesting. Google has been an advocate for network neutrality, which the FCC has indicated it intends to promote. But AT&T has just accused Google of blocking phone calls to rural areas for users of Google's Voice service.

Comcast has announced that it will start slowing down the traffic of its broadband users if they are using too much; "too much" generally means running P2P (peer to peer) filesharing applications like BitTorrent, which can run for hours or days while sending or receiving large files (like movies or music).

This news report suggests that some cable companies are actively blocking certain kinds of traffic on their networks. The target of such blocking is peer to peer file sharing, in which the subscribers are often sharing very large files like movies and TV shows. From a network operator perspective, what you see is a very small number of your customers using a disproportionately large chunk of your network bandwidth, which can degrade service for other customers and increase costs.

We know exactly what will happen if the big telecom companies succeed in convincing Congress to let them partition the Internet. We have a perfectly good example of the mess we will be in, and it is called the cellphone industry. Read this article [link no longer available] to see how innovation is choked off, small businesses are forced out of the market place, and how consumers end up paying more, much more, for mediocre services.

USA Today has a useful summary of net neutrality, with a two column, side by side comparison of the issues and the players. Congress continues to squabble over this issue, with what appears to be a notable lack of understanding of what is involved.

If it wasn't enough to be known as the Senator who wanted the bridge to nowhere, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska has probably secured a permanent place in history, right along with Al "I invented the Internet" Gore, as the Senator who said this:

Vonage may be the first big casualty of the "Web 2.0" craze. While Voice over IP is technically not a Web 2.0 application, we can use Web 2.0 as shorthand for the same kind of hysteria we saw in 1999 and 2000, when a lot of really bad ideas (from a business perspective) got way too much venture capital funding.

This article talks about Verizon's new claim that net neutrality "limits" the company, and the nothing but a scare tactic of claiming they won't be able to roll out any new services unless they get to erect toll gates.

One thing net neutrality does limit is the ability of one or two big companies from setting up walled gardens that keep consumers locked into a few choices (from, say, Verizon or Comcast). Net neutrality gives consumers and innovative startups a chance to play on a level playing field.

A distinguished group of technology leaders has begun a Save the Internet campaign, which is intended to provide information to legislators on the network neutrality issue.

Many of the incumbent broadband providers want to start charging differential fees for access to their broadband networks. The effect will be to squeeze much of the innovation and opportunity out of the Internet, leaving only deep pocket companies that can afford to pay the tolls--and that is all they really are.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article about the emerging two tier Internet. It is a good overview of the political and technical issues that are driving this problem. The big broadband access companies (e.g. the phone and cable firms) are determined to wrestle control of their customers away from the open Internet.

Doc Searls, one of the tech community's best commentators on technology and its impact on us, has done an outstanding job of explaining network neutrality--what it is, why it has made the Internet successful, and why it needs to be preserved.

The broadband access providers (aka the telephone and cable companies) are shocked, just shocked, that their customers are actually using broadband.

Their response?

According to this article in The Register, the big companies are already installing software that slows down much of what people want to do, to the point of making them give up and/or buying the service from the access provider.