Cory Doctorow, who I have a lot of respect for in so many ways, has
written an article in the Grauniad arguing that ISPs, not heavy bandwidth users, need to be curtailed. I had to comment on it, as I think it encapsulates a lot of the muddy thinking around Net Neutrality. While there is a lot of good stuff around Net Neutrality (all bits are free to travel), the argument around paying for it is muddied by vested interests (all bits must travel free), and I will try and unpick it here. Firstly, Cory notes:
....politicians around the world seem willing to sacrifice their national interest to keep a few powerful phone and telcoms companies happy.
Take the Telcoms Package now before the EU: among other things, the package paves the way for ISPs and Quangos to block or slow access to websites and services on an arbitrary basis. At the same time, ISPs are instituting and enforcing strict bandwidth limits on their customers, citing shocking statistics about the bandwidth hogs who consume vastly more resources than the average punter.
He argues that if they are left to be able to throttle and filter bandwidth, it will limit the ability of the "Next Googles" to grow:
But the real action in network fiddling isn't the battle between giants such as Yahoo and Google. Both well-established, have armies of otherwise unoccupied "business development" people lying around, and are handily capable of fanning out across the globe and buying lunch for their opposite numbers at every telcoms operator on the planet. The real victims of network discrimination are the nimble little startups, the firms that are in the same position today that Google was in 10 years ago when it consisted of a few marginally funded hackers and some taped-together hardware under a desk.
Except that an ISP has little need to filter or block a small startup, as they are unlikely to be the ones who are the "bandwidth hogs" using up all the ISP's capacity. No, the "bandwidth hogs" are the big companies throwing vast amounts of Video down the pipes - like Google. If anything, ISPs filtering YouTube will give new players more, not less, chance of success as that way they will be attacking the "free ride" the large players are currently enjoying at the expense of the small ones (and its these big guys who are most opposed to network management - and spending PR money like water - as they are currently enjoying the bandwidth commons the most).
I'm afraid this sort of error occurs because a lot of the Net Neutrality crowd are great writers and lawyers, but less capable mathematicians - when Cory talks about the maths of bandwidth hogs for example:
The reality is that network usage follows a standard statistical distribution, the "Pareto Distribution," a power-law curve in which the most active users are exponentially more active than the next-most-active group, who are exponentially more active than the next group, and so on. This means that even if you kick off the 2% at the far right-hand side of the curve, the new top 2% will continue to be exponentially more active than the remainder. Think of it this way: there will always be a group of users in the "top 2%" of bandwidth consumption. If you kick those users off, the next-most-active group will then be at the top. You can't have a population that doesn't have a ninety-eighth percentile.
While true about always having a 98 percentile in any distribution, this is not the point. The point is that by culling the top 2% of users, the ISPs have reduced the stress on the network as, in a Pareto system, they drive a massively disproportionate amount of traffic. Another term for Pareto's Law is the 80/20 law, ie 20% of the users suck up 80% of the bandwidth. Cull the heaviset users of that 20%, and you cut a huge amount of traffic while nearly all the rest of the users see massively better service. In other words, culling the network hogs will help, not hinder, the new startups.
This is because, being a power law, of the 20% of bandwidth hogs, only 20% of those will use 80% of the 80% etc - you get the picture. (For what its worth, in a pure 80/20 power law, the top 2% of users will use over 50% of the bandwidth. Thats right, 50%. So culling them reduces the stress on the network by half. Yes, there is now a "new" top 2%, but the usage of the network has halved. Real network traffic laws are not as steep as this. but it illustrates the issue well)
And the reason ISPs are doing this is because as their networks start to hit capacilty limits, the cost of upgrade is huge and its not clear who will pay them to do it.
The real thorny issue is how best to extract revenue from those who are the heaviest users. Cory is right to point to the problems here:
Metering usage discourages experimentation. If you don't know whether your next click will cost you 10p or £2, you will become very conservative about your clicks. Just look at the old AOL, which charged by the minute for access, and saw that very few punters were willing to poke around the many offerings its partners had assembled on its platform. Rather, these people logged in for as short a period as possible and logged off when they were done, always hearing the clock ticking away in the background as they worked.
But untrammelled, un-metered usage leads to bandwidth hogging.....so an ISP is damned if you meter, damned if you don't. But if you meter you at least get money from the really heavy users, which also nudges them towards managing themselves.
And if you look at any other utility in history - gas, electricity, water, telephony - they all wind up metered to some extent (in fact fixed price + meter seems the endgame for nearly all types of utility) in their evolution because of this need to extract revenue for the infrastructure maintenance from its heaviest users. In fact, what the upstream bandwidth hogs - the big guys like the BBC, Google et al - really fear is that the ISPs will get better at executing 2-sided business models and charge those loading stuff onto the networks more, not those taking stuff off. The most rational outcome is heavy uploaders pay metered plus discounts, small downstream consumers pay flat rate to a limit then add-on charges.
This all has nothing to do with Net Neutrality (the Free Net) but is more a scrap for economic advantage along the value chain by those currently getting a Free Ride
But as Cory points out, and this is where Net Neutrality does have a strong argument, you cannot discriminate on one bit vs another:
In the classic "traffic shaping" scenario, a company like Virgin Media strikes a deal with Yahoo to serve its videos on a preferential basis, and then slows its customers' connections to Google, Hulu, and other videohosting sites to ensure that Virgin's videos are the quickest to load.
So long as they have paid the entry price, they must get equal - neutral - access to the net.
This is the core of the valid Net Neutrality argument and we support it unreservedly.
(There is also a discussion in the piece about public subsidy of Telcos that should be returned to people - its a good idea to stop subsidy, but it still doesn't mean ISPs shouldn't charge the heaviest users more. In fact, if one stops subsidies there will be even more pressure on the heaviest users to pay their share. Beware of unintended consequences.....)
As an aside - I do get fairly tired of having to constantly be the one saying "No, thats not right" to the New Kids on the block, and potentially be seen as defending powers that be - but some of the muddy thinking around the new world will hurt in the medium term if it isn't challenged now.
