[Chapter-delegates] Network neutrality and EU Telecoms Package

[Joly MacFie]

We are discussing this on the Open Infrastructure
Alliance<http://lists.bway.net/listinfo/oia>list. As usual Fred
Goldstein is adding informed input: I am sure he won't
mind me passing it along.


On 9/11/2013 4:52 PM, Dana Spiegel wrote:

·                     To meet end-users' demand for better service quality,
content providers may agree deals with internet providers to assure a
certain quality of service. Such offers will enable telecom operators to
generate additional revenue streams from OTT actors, content providers as
well as from consumers who are willing to pay for better or faster
services. These revenues in turn, will enable operators to
finance investments into network upgrades and expansion.
·                     Specialised services must not lead to a degradation
of quality in the "normal" internet. National regulators will monitor
quality of service and may impose minimum quality requirements under
Commission control.

These 2 paragraphs are the entirety of the problem. "normal" internet?
Whats that? "content provider deals"? Isn't that exactly what everyone's
fighting against for NN?


But there's nothing wrong with it.  First off, there's jack squat quality
on the "normal" internet.  It works best for very tolerant applications
(TCP data), and is not fit for purpose for others (streaming).  Second, why
not allow content providers to pay?  So long as the offering is
non-discriminatory (i.e., meets strict antitrust-type guidelines, not a
telecom issue), it merely allows more money to upgrade networks without
raising subscriber prices.


What's the difference between "enhanced" service for a few that can pay and
"degraded" service for some. They are two sides of the same coin?

Maybe, maybe not.  BUT remember that today's IP-only Internet is attempting
to provide multiple services with a monoservice mentality.  No can do
well.  The EU rule at least recognizes the possibility of multiservice
networks, offered on a nondiscriminatory basis.


And what's the problem anyway with a content provider paying for "enhanced"
services? Nothing, except that end users have (almost) zero choice of their
choice of providers.


It's like an 800 number -- the company you want to call may have one, or
may require you to pay for the call, but it's not the telco's problem --
they just offer everyone the options.


And of course, the vertical integration of ISPs completely tilts the field.
And end users have no clue about any of this, so all they see is that
"facebook" works better than the next competitor. Which it does, but only
because it spends 100s of millions of dollars building its infrastructure,
instead of just buying preferential treatment by ISPs.


Vertical integration is what's wrong.  Hence the call for a
nondiscrimination rule:  If you own the wire, it appears that you can not
offer polyservice capabilities to your own affiliate without offering them
to others.  That's as neutral as it gets without going all insane, which to
be sure Marvin-style NN would be.


And part of the whole problem here is that this type of payment for
"enhanced" service completely destroys any incentive for an ISP to build a
better, faster higher quality internet service, and just plow their money
into "enhanced" service. After all, if everyone gets really crappy "normal"
service, then that's perfectly ok by these regulations.


You are apparently, like many neuts (including Susan), under the totally
wrong impression that faster service solves the problems of traffic
management.  It isn't true -- faster networks cause bigger queues and
delays and losses to critical applications.  Games would work probably
better across 128k ISDN than across Google Fiber!

So from an antitrust perspective (Steely Neely's expertise), anything
*should* be okay so long as it's not used in an anticompetitive manner.
This is the opposite of hard-core NN, where all packets are created equal
and downloading pR0n thus has effective priority over everything else.


This is the problem with NN. While I used to be a big fan, once I
understood things more completely under the hood, and thought enough about
market and company motivations, it became clear that NN won't work by
operating at the level of the "internet", and was just a band-aid solution
trying to close gaping wound inflicted by the classification of internet
services as information providers without common carriage.

The only solution is CC.


Yes, but it MUST be done BELOW the Internet, not applies TO the Internet.
CC on the transmission permits competition for ISPs, and different ISPs can
compete on price and service quality.  And good quality for some users
could be bad for others.  Read the original descriptions of internetworking
from the 1970s -- the whole idea is that internetworking is routing packets
across multiple, dissimilar, sometimes common carrier networks. (I'll post
some if you want.) We are confusing internetworks with networks.  Treat an
internetwork as a network and the whole model is broken.

-- 
 Fred R. Goldstein      k1io     fred "at" interisle.net
 Interisle Consulting Group
 +1 617 795 2701




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