I cited a DoJ statement in a previous article that was destined to stagnate or kill all innovation on the web, by permitting ISPs to end the end-to-end nature of the internet.
I’ve been trying to draw the attention of some other technical people by talking about NN on mailing lists. Sadly some people have got the wrong end of the stick – they think that the rule simply states that ISPs will be allowed to carry customer Quality of Service preferences to the edge of their ISP networks. This is not the case – the Net Neutrality debate is about whether an ISP should be permitted to be un-neutral irrespective of, or even against their customers’ wishes.
One company that stands to loose most from an un-neutral net is Google who have been quick to earn column inches supporting the neutral net.
Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research speaks from the front cover of this weeks’ Computing arguing that the only reason “the net has grown far beyond the original perception bounds” was in fact ” because it is open, and because services can be launched without being fettered by higher level control. At Google, we think it is good for competition to try to keep services this way, and that is what we are going to push for.”
I don’t want an internet dominated only by companies with deep pockets. Google, the archetypal company with the deepest pockets don’t even want an internet dominated only by companies with deep pockets. The only parties that stand to gain from the NN war as the ISPs that have been the most aggressive at driving down consumer internet charges, to un-sustainable points. Don’t give them a life line. Let’s have a fair internet.
For months, ISPs in Europe have been campaigning to preserve their ‘mere conduit’ status, or in English they have been fighting to prove that they should be able to treat all packets, between customers and the resources that they want to access equally. This means, no content blocking, monitoring, and fundamentally no commercial favouritism – or as it is referred to Network Neutralism.
At the same time, some ISPs in America have been petitioning to abolish the concept of Net-neutrality on their networks. These campaigns have not fallen on deaf ears, the US Department of Justice now consider that without legislation permitting ISPs to charge companies who host content for access to the ISP’s customers shifts the “entire burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto consumers“.
This shows a wanton lack of understanding of the model with which internet connectivity is sold. I, as a consumer, buy connectivity from a company who will try hard to ensure my packets will flow towards their intended recipient. Someone who wants to host content pays another ISP some money to ensure that their packets flow back towards me when I visit their website, online shop, or use their service. That’s the model, and its the only one that works.
If I want to set up a shop online, I should only have to pay the companies that I have a direct connectivity relationship with. It should not be permitted for a company that I do not connect through, to hold their eyeball customers to ransom, demanding money from me, the shopkeeper, to allow me to reach our mutual customers. Particularly if this customer is selling internet connectivity – there is a strong ‘end to end’ implication with that phrase.
The DoJ are wrong – what they think is a burden to consumers is just the fair market price that internet connectivity is sold for today. An ISP should charge their customers enough to make sure that they can pay to support their network. As a consumer, if I want to use MSN, Skype, Hotmail, Google, the BBC, iTunes, or any other online service, I should be able to, because I have paid for my ISP to try their best (without getting in the way) to get data between me and the services I use.
Net-neutrality has been the driving force behind innovation online, and we would not have the wide variety of services online today, if starting to trade online meant you had to pay lots of ransom notes to every ISP in America first.
I have twice now had to defend an unpopular premise – that local governments should not provide free wifi to residents and visitors. A recent thread on the Open Rights Group discussion list almost got pretty out of hand between a few people who thought it was dangerous for the government to be providing IP services, and the majority who wanted it.
To provide “free” wifi to residents, a council must spend our money on many more items than simply wifi access points located in strategic points around the city. They need to provide onward connectivity (expensive), operational support, technical support, security systems, subscriptions to professional groups such as the IWF, monitoring and maintenance and much more. The council can’t afford to fix the pot-holes on my road, despite billing me each April on the promise of doing just that, so where will the money come from in order to pay or this infrastructure?
I also do not want the council competing with my local ISP. Government is not designed to compete with private enterprises. Turfing council tax paying employees out of work by competing with their employers is surely counter-productive.
I also don’t want the general public to be led to believe that internet access is free to provide. Its bad enough that Carphone Warehouse, Orange, and other companies are trying to their best to leave customers of ‘free’ broadband services with that theory without my local government joining in.
Some people believe that free municipal wifi could be a positive externality achieved when a city is ‘wifi’d’ for public sector employees to use when doing their job. I would love to see any cost/benefit analysis that demonstrated that the applications that drive our public sector are cheaper to run over ubiquitous wifi rather than store-and-forward messaging systems that take advantage of wifi at strategic points or 3G data connectivity. I then want to see the figures that suggest opening up a private local government network for public use wont cost any more money.
Then followed the argument that if local government can provide street-lights, then why shouldn’t they provide wifi using the same rationale. The problem with this logic is that streetlights and IP connectivity are not similar enough to compare. Street lighting is a public good; in economic terms, that means that we all are required to pay for it and we all get it, irrespective of our purchase preferences as free economic agents. People wouldn’t ‘buy’ street lighting in normal circumstances, even though there is a compelling reason to deploy it. Internet connectivity is not like this, where IP is useful, it is already widely deployed.
Firms need to fight in order to be the best at providing services, so that they can feed innovation and value. Consumers need to choose which service meets their needs the best. I would wager that you demand very different things from your domestic internet connection than I do. If I had to buy SheffieldCityBroadband (which I do have to buy, if I get taxed for its provision – tax is of course demanding money with menaces), it probably wont do what I need.
Free wifi isn’t free. Someone has to pay. And if that someone is the taxpayer, then why can’t we just pay “the best” private company in our area to provide the service. Perhaps I will be lucky and get two providers to fight it out to be the best!
Lastly, the concept of buying internet access from the Government is extremely frightening to me. Check out the content blocking section of the LINX Public Affairs site if you want some evidence that the government are desperate to filter our internet connections. If everyone buys their state-IP the government have a simple place to block our content!