1. Equal treatment is a strong starting point, but of course it’s vulnerable to gaming: make sure that the “fast lane” for bits is sufficiently expensive, for example, that only Google / Disney can afford it. This effectively lets the telcos engage in price discrimination (rather bluntly), which seems to be what they seek anyway.

2. I’d be interested in whether a regulatory – the FCC? – would seek to codify existing practices (e.g., spam filtering) as exceptions to net neutrality. Not only is the devil in the details, it’s in the defaults.

3. Your first point — about the Duopoly Problem — really seems key. We’d be less interested in network neutrality if there were more competition in Internet access. Does either side contend that their position will, in fact, widen competition or diversify access paths?

thanks for reading!

But let me suggest a few ideas that I’ve picked up from some of the more level-headed advocates. First, the fear here is that major broadband network providers (i.e., The Duopoly in Your Town) will begin to arrange their business models around treating bits differently based on who is sending them. So many are asking not that all discrimination between bits be banned, but rather that any special treatment be made available to all comers on equal terms.

Of course, this just begs more questions. For examples, if a network provider’s infrastructure configuration happens to favor Vonage packets (perhaps because Vonage designed its protocol with that particular configuration in mind), do other VOIP providers get to force the provider to reengineer/reconfigure the network?

A second point to keep in mind: I don’t think anyone believes that network neutrality would be an absolute rule (any more than the First Amendment is an absolute rule). Presumably regulators would be asked to create a regime of exceptions that approves “non-neutral” treatment of certain kinds of traffic (like spam, port scanning, etc). Of course, that turf then will become its own battlefield, as regulators struggle to figure out whether an exception is legit or just a pretext for discrimination (or both), and then others try to sneak through the exceptions defined in the regulations. Whether you think this will be an improvement over the status quo depends on your view of regulatory decision-making.

Second, people may (psychologically) prefer less visible payments. We “pay” for free over-the-air television via ads. We pay for newspapers via classified advertising. Arguably, movie ticket costs are held down by the advent of pre-show “entertainment” (read: ads). FICA taxes are technically split between employers and employees; though most economists agree that employees wind up bearing the full cost of these taxes, this distribution somehow strikes us as more appealing. Hence, in terms of looking at the various ways that consumers might eventually pay for more bandwidth, some may be preferable to others for reasons that have little to do with their ultimate financial impact.

Finally, it’s an interesting question as to how much of the new demand / bandwidth use will simply soak up unlit fiber / slack capacity, and how much will necessitate new, and more expensive, infrastructure investment. In essence, this is a question about marginal costs versus average costs, but that may be too boring even for a geeky law blog.

And I’d love to read your article if you write it!

/D

I view net neutrality as a simple problem of economics and transaction costs. Somebody has to pay for the bandwidth. Right now, SBC charges a cheap rate for 1.5MB, on the theory that every user will not fill his or her 1.5MB pipe. Thus a 10MB pipe at the Central Office can serve 20 or more people. BUT, with video and voice, the likelihood of each user filling that 1.5MB goes up, and so the provider has to install 20MB at the CO or even 30MB (making the numbers up of course).

Who pays for this? In my view, it is the users one way or another – either they pay more for their 1.5MB pipe (because they now really are using the full 1.5MB more often) or they pay the video and voice providers, who wind up paying SBC. To me, none of this is shocking. It seems rational that it should be the service providers who pay, and then charge their customers. That way, those who really use the most bandwidth pay for it. The alternative is to charge users for what they actually use (which is what wireless companies often do).

The scary part for people (including me) is that charging for the type of usage means all the great free stuff out there (like YouTube) goes away because people won’t pay for it. That argues for charging the end users for the bandwidth directly. Of course, if they are paying more, then there will be less users willing to pay for fluff like YouTube, so it goes either way.

I’m not addressing blocking of “first amendment” type discrimination by service providers, but I have a belief that this is a minor part of what is going on in actuality, but it is a good rallying cry for net neutrality proponents. I think SBC, etc. do not care what the content is, so long as someone is paying for the bandwidth.

That’s my 2 cents. I guess I should write an article on this some time because I think my views are contrary to most.

MR

What interests me as well is that it seems from your analysis that net neutrality may be, at the moment, a construct of private agreements (peering, etc.) between network providers. That’s fascinating – to a degree, it means that legislated neutrality would be restoring the status quo.

Thanks for writing!

As I understand it, there are many, many mid-level connections between service providers, and in general there is little or no filtering between those connections based on application. It is all about bandwidth, not content.

Thus, as far as I can tell, spam blocking, Denial of Service (which is pings), etc. and other “end user” issues aren’t really relevant. What the ISP’s do with that will be governed by their agreements with their users.

Instead, the implementation would be simple – each “connection” must allow all packets through to the end destination, at which point the end destination will do whatever it does.

For example, when SBC hooks into some cable company’s network, there is no port blocking, etc. at that point. Either it lets the packets through or it doesn’t. I suppose it could throttle the bandwidth a bit – that would likely be outlawed as well.

Thus, when we talk about content filtering via NON-net neutrality, it means that packets are blocked based on sender, not based on the actual content of the packet.

I hope that helps clarify things a bit.