Category: Net Neutrality

When Neuts Attack, Part n

Advocates of network neutrality are busily spreading a colorful story today. It begins with a piece in Forbes by Phil Kerpen of the Heartland Institute about the effects of threatened network neutrality legislation on investment in the Internet’s infrastructure. Kerpen discusses a study of telecom trends by Deloitte & Touche to the effect that the uncertain regulatory climate is bad for investment, and without new infrastructure the Internet will soon be in trouble.

For this, Kerpen is attacked by Paul Kapustka and Om Malik at GigaOm as a lying shill of the telcos:

Since Kerpen doesn’t actually link to the study, we are left to wonder what his conclusions are based on. It looks like DT doesn’t even believe there’s a problem, since another research paper there3 predicts that “unrelenting progress in processing power, network bandwidth and storage capacity” will let electronic games proliferate. What you’re seeing in Kerpen’s missive is another offering from the “telco chorus,” a group of bloviators who are paid either by conservative advocacy operations (like Kerpen’s Americans for Prosperity), or by groups indirectly supported by telco contributions.

Broadband Reports fires up this smokescreen:

Who’s to blame for this proclaimed bandwidth apocalypse? Network neutrality advocates, who are scaring off capacity investment, according to Phil Kerpen of Americans For Prosperity. Deloitte & Touche’s actual capacity prediction can be found here, but they make no mention of network neutrality law fears as the primary reason for the crunch — instead stating companies aren’t increasing capacity “because consumers will be unwilling to pay increased costs.”

Mike Maslick at Techdirt adds his own twist to Broadband Report’s fantasies:

It’s based on a Deloitte & Touche report, claiming that there hasn’t been enough backbone buildout to handle the growth in traffic — and the writer somehow connects this to network neutrality by saying it’s because of fear over network neutrality rules that the buildout isn’t happening. There’s just one problem, as Broadband Reports points out, the D&T report doesn’t mention network neutrality at all, and there’s no evidence to suggest that network neutrality has anything to do with backbone buildout.

The problem with these vicious and personal attacks (beside their evident rudeness) is that they’re completely off-base. The D & T Telecoms Predictions 2007 report has a whole section on network neutrality, ending with this remark:

Those who oppose creating [net neutrality] mandates argue that their business models are being undermined by Internet companies offering bandwidth-hungry services such as video and audio-streaming, heavily networked online games, video-based chat and peer-to-peer downloads. Many ISPs and telecommunications companies would like to start charging content companies, and others, a fee to provide access to their services. There are two primary reasons for this. The first is that ISPs and telecommunications carriers are seeing revenues stagnate. As penetration growth slows, competition drives down prices and rapidly rising Internet use among existing customers erodes margins. The second is that some of the largest Internet companies are enjoying bumper revenue growth and increasing profitability, and carriers would like to use their position in the value chain to participate in this growth.

Internet usage and traffic are both growing rapidly. There is an increasingly urgent need for new revenues that could fund expansion of the infrastructure on which the Internet runs. For example, on several key intercontinental routes, such as that between Asia and Europe, backbone capacity has grown slower than usage (see Figure 1), and may increasingly struggle to keep pace with demand. Similarly, ISPs and carriers may have to invest in higher capacity infrastructure to continue to be able to provide genuine broadband speeds to consumers and business users.

Balancing the two sides of [the network neutrality] debate is likely to remain challenging. Both sides have merit; both have their flaws. Clearly, something has to change in the economics of Internet access such that network operators and ISPs can continue to invest in new infrastructure and maintain service quality, and consumers can continue to enjoy the Internet as they know it today. (page 7, section titled The Network Neutrality Debate Needs Resolution.)

So whether you agree with Kerpen or not, it’s clear that his article is true to the Deloitte and Touche report’s summary of the issues, and the attacks by Kaputska, Malik, Broadband Reports, and Maslick are as wildly off base as they are vicious and personal.

UPDATE: Doc Searls jumps on the bandwagon right behind Broadband Report’s pseudonymous Karl:

As Karl notes at Broadband Reports, Deloitte & Touche’s actual capacity prediction can be found here, but they make no mention of network neutrality law fears as the primary reason for the crunch — instead stating companies aren’t increasing capacity “because consumers will be unwilling to pay increased costs.”

Like Karl, Doc didn’t bother reading the D & T report, he read a summary in a news article and drew wildly wrong conclusions from it. The bottom line here is simple: before calling somebody a liar, check your facts. Karl, Doc Searls, Mike Maslick, Paul Kapustka, and Om Malik couldn’t be bothered with that in this case, and they’re all supposed to be journalists.

UPDATE 2: See this post on the fallout from my criticism of Karl, et. al. Doc Searls posted an impressive retraction.

3000 Percent Growth in Wireless Broadband in a Year

The latest FCC report on broadband penetration is out and the growth in wireless broadband is amazing:

One interesting detail of the new statistics is the rise of new platforms for delivering broadband. Cable and DSL still dominate the market, with 28.5 and 22.6 million lines, respectively. Mobile wireless, however, went from only about 379,000 subscribers in June 2005 to more than 11 million in June 2006.

Empirical research finds, without question to my knowledge, that cross-platform and other facilities-based competition is a key driver pushing investment and innovation. The arrival of wireless broadband is a very good sign regarding market competitiveness.

The next person who says “broadband duopoly” gets slugged. It’s at least a triopoly and maybe a quadropoly. This is clearly bad news for Google’s “grassroots” campaign to save the Internet.

Lovable scamp Colbert nails Wikipedia again

Stephen Colbert takes on Wikipedia again with this great clip on Wiki-lobbying. He exhorts fans to edit the Wikipedia entry on “Reality” to say “Reality has become a commodity” and sure enough they comply. Ironically, they’re fought off by Wikipedia Admin Raul654, one of the Google fan-boys who mangled the Network Neutrality entry to reflect a completely warped point of view.

Linklove to ValleyWag.

A tale of two visionaries

For today’s “compare and contrast” exercise look at the concise and clear Peter Huber explaining why net neutrality is a boon to lawyers:

The new Congress is determined to enact a “net neutrality” bill. Nobody yet knows what those two words mean. The new law won’t provide any intelligible answer, either. It will, however, put a real drag on new capital investment in faster digital pipes by making it illegal for many big companies to help pay for them, while leaving everyone guessing about the details for years. That last bit is great news for all the telecom lawyers (like me) who get paid far too much to make sense out of idiotic new laws like this one.

…with Visicalc Frankston’s vision of citizen net admins:

The Internet connection just carries raw bits. We get to decide what the bits mean. The carriers’ attempt to provide us with services over-defined and thus limited the solution. The results may seem counter-intuitive – by narrowly defining the allowable solutions the carriers’ effort failed. Instead those Internet packets gave us the opportunity to choose among any solutions including our own.

Today the gas and electric utilities deliver information via their web sites without having to make any special deals with the carriers. I use the term “carrier” but these companies are really in the business of providing services and deploy CFR only as a means of providing the services. The failure of the residential gateway highlights the sharp difference between the service culture and the Internet culture. Yet we still confuse the two.

Do you stop BitTorrent before picking up the VoIP phone? Then shame on you for discriminating, you control freak!

Google’s plans for world domination

Check out Cringely on Google’s plans for world domination:

Google controls more network fiber than any other organization. This is not to say that Google OWNS all that fiber, just that they control it through agreements with network operators. I find two very interesting aspects to this story: 1) that Google has acquired — or even needs to acquire — so much bandwidth, and; 2) that they don’t own it, since probably the cheapest way to pick up that volume of fiber would be to simply buy out any number of backbone providers like Level 3 Communications.

The “do no evil” guys are a lot scarier than the telcos or Microsoft, as they have absolutely no conscience. You’ve been warned.

Of course, it’s likely that a company so full of itself and stocked with overly-narrow employees will blow up in a fairly spectacular way someplace between here and world domination. On the other hand, it may soon be too late to stop global warming or global Googling.

The worst academic paper ever written

Public Knowledge intern Bill Herman has written a marvelous piece of propaganda for net neutrality regulations and managed to have it published in a law journal.

Herman argues, in essence, that the traditional Internet represents the last word on network architecture, and any attempt to improve it will necessarily result in the Lord smiting the American Economy with boils, plagues of locusts, and hordes of hungry millionaires unable to take their rightful place among the billionaires. It’s actually a fine example of the errors that will be made when questions of technical network architecture are decided by legal academics, regulators, interns, and other wannabes.

My short rebuttal: the traditional Internet doesn’t represent the last word in network architecture, it’s actually the first of a series of experiments that will need to be conducted to find the best way to design networks for multiple services. For essentially its entire life, the Internet has only been concerned with providing service to one type of application, the “careful file transfer”, hence it’s not needed to deal with the problems it faces today.

The Internet of the future will absorb the functions that have traditionally been provided by the telephone and cable TV networks, as well as functions that aren’t performed at all today (such as rapid service for massively multi-player on-line games.) In the course of this future development, network engineers need the same freedom to experiment that the original researchers had in the ARPANet and early Internet days.

It’s way too early in the game for government to begin mandating solutions to technical problems that are just now beginning to be researched.

If this paper gets any traction, I’ll do a more detailed critique of the mistaken assertions, shoddy reasoning, and unfortunate smears it contains.

Jeff Chester changes the subject

One of the lamest forms of discourse is sliming your opponent as a stooge of capitalistic or other assumed-to-be-evil interests. Professors Farber, Katz, Yoo, and Faulhaber have been attacked as shills by Jeff Chester on account of their publishing a well-reasoned Op-Ed in the Washington Post opposing new Internet regulations:

Super cable monopoly Comcast hired UC Berkeley’s Katz in 2003 to produce research which placed the industry in favorable light. Comcast, of course, opposes network neutrality [I cover the role of Katz and other communications -academics-for -industry hire in my new book, btw]. Professor Yoo worked for the cable lobby NCTA last year to write a net neutrality study as well. Even Davd Farber should have disclosed he has spoken under the banner of the Verizon Foundation at Carnegie Mellon.

Note that Chester’s smear of Farber consists solely of the professor’s giving one of a series of lectures at his university sponsored by Verizon (UPDATE: Farber was not compensated for this lecture in any way. He frequently gives talks for no honorarium, even to Microsoft after testifying against them. Chester’s smear is asinine.)

Chester’s trick often works in a capitalist society because we’re awash in money and somebody’s always paying somebody else. Chester himself makes his living writing books and giving talks on the evils of capitalism, and apparently does pretty well at it. Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky are both multi-millionaires from that very same pursuit.

In the network neutrality debate, one could point out that Google employees give thousands of dollars to Moveon.org, a primary supporter of Save the Internet, or that the other primary supporter, Free Press, is financially supported by the Schuman Foundation headed by Bill Moyers, who’s paid $200,000 a year for this virtuous task. Moyers aired a program on PBS that was a naked advertisement for Free Press, and spoke at Free Press’ National Conference on Media Reform funded by multi-billionaire currency trader George Soros’ Open Society Institute. One might argue that Soros wants to weaken investigative journalism so he can engage in legally questionable currency raiding without restrictions, so he supports a cause that would erode the financial basis of real investigative journalism.

According to Jeff Chester’s analysis, that’s the only way to understand net neutrality: I’m following the money (and Speaking Truth to Power, dude!)

I don’t buy that, so I’ll have to follow the arguments and judge them on their merits.

The anguish of regulation

Note: This post isn’t clear. I’m trying to say that the notion of “layering” in network protocol design doesn’t mean there’s some kind of firewall of ignorance between layers. In layered architectures, protocol layers advertise services to their higher-layer consumers, and notions of regulation built on the notion of layering have to take that fact into account. Crawford misunderstands protocol layering and attempts to build a regulatory framework on the back of her mistaken idea.

Some of the fans of network neutrality regulations are sincere but misguided, such as law professor Susan Crawford. She’s in a lot of anguish about how to sell the regulators’ agenda*:

If the only economic and cultural justifications you have for the need for a layered approach to internet regulation (an approach that treats transport differently from applications) are (1) the explosive innovation that competition among applications would produce and (2) the appropriate mapping between the “actual” architecture of the internet and the regulatory approach to be taken to it, you’ll lose.

But she never questions whether the “layered approach to regulation” is a good thing or even a well-understood thing. I see this a lot among the legal academics, who seem to base most of their regulatory model on a defective model of protocol layering. Lessig is the prototype for this misunderstanding, as he wants to extract architectural features from the Internet of the Past and use them to constrain the development of the Internet of the Future.

I work with layered protocols, and have for more years than I can remember, so please allow me to explain what layering means in real network systems. We divide network functions between abstract layers (physical, link, network, session, application) so we can mix and match combinations for real systems. So the IP network layer can run on the Ethernet link layer or the WiFi link layer, and work pretty much the same. And we can run Ethernet over a fiber-optic physical layer or a copper pair physical layer, and have it work pretty much the same. ]

The key here is understanding what “pretty much the same” means. Each protocol at each layer has its own constraints, and higher layers have to be able to accommodate them. For example, Ethernet packets can’t be more than 1500 bytes long, but WiFi packets are bigger and ATM packets (cells) are smaller. So IP needs to know what the size constraints of the link layer are so it can adjust to them and operate efficiently.

The way this is done is through a service interface between the network layer and the link layer that allows the higher layer protocol to discover the capabilities of the lower layer protocol and behave accordingly. So while these two layers are defined and built separately, they’re intimately connected through a shared interface that allows them to operate together smoothly.

At the link layer, many protocols have the ability to offer different services, each appropriate to a different set of applications. WiFi, for example, has a voice service that handles short packets that need to be transmitted and received at regular intervals differently than long packets that are less sensitive to delay but more sensitive to corruption and loss. The network lingo for this selection of services is Quality of Service or QoS. Note that it’s not really correct to say that Voice QoS is “better” than the bulk data QoS called “Best Effort,” it’s simply different. It would not be in your interest to use Voice grade QoS for downloading files from Netflix, even if those files contained movies, because it actually constrains total bandwidth. You essentially trade off moving a lot of data for moving a little very quickly.

The tragedy of the Internet is that the IP layer doesn’t have good facilities for selecting QoS options from the layers below it, and his makes it difficult for applications to get the service they need from the network top-to-bottom and end-to-end. So we bypass IP in real systems through something called a “Control Plane” and tell the Link Layer how to fit QoS around the data that need it.

But the main point is that the segregation of functions into protocol layers doesn’t mean that each layer doesn’t know what the other layers are doing. In fact, the layers must know what their options are and how to use them, even though they don’t need to know how the other layers make these options available. So the layered approach to protocol design doesn’t preclude diversity of services, it in fact facilitates it by sharing the important information and hiding the unimportant details.

In the real world, a layered approach to regulation would begin by identifying service options and the means for requesting them. The neuts don’t get this and begin by banning service level communication between layers. That’s what “just move the bits, stupid” means. It’s bad network design and it’s bad regulation.

*Crawford blocks referrals from this blog. She’s at: http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog.

Gang of Four on Net Neutrality

Dave Farber, Michael Katz, Chris Yoo, and Gerald Faulhaber have a very concise and well-constructed Op-Ed in today’s WaPo on the downsides of net neutrality regulations:

The legislative proposals debated in the 109th Congress take a very different approach. They would impose far-reaching prohibitions affecting all broadband providers, regardless of whether they wielded monopoly power and without any analysis of whether the challenged practice actually harmed competition. If enacted, these proposals would threaten to restrict a wide range of innovative services without providing any compensating customer benefits.

Most of the people who’ve made substantial contributions to the Internet in the past are converging on this point of view: it’s harmful to make too many restrictions on the services the network provides to users and applications. Contrast this view, which is empirically provable, with the assertion on the other side that there are mystical and unprovable reasons to favor a dearth of network services. The evidence is all on the side of deregulation.

H/T to Verizon’s Policy Blog

Chewed it up and spat it out

Andrew Orlowski has some fun with the AT&T-Bell South merger:

In a decade, American consumers have seen the number of Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or Baby Bells, coalesce from six down to just three: the odd man out, Qwest, the RBOC which covers the sparsely populated Mountain states, is surely next on AT&T’s menu.

The extraordinary thing is that all this took place at a time in the wake of the fall out from the telecoms bubble. The Bells enjoyed little affection from the public in any case, long before Global Crossing and MCI. and with an unpopular Republican President, Democrats can have been expected to push a few populist buttons, and hear some bells.

What actually happened is that Whitacre got everything he wanted, but only thanks to the aid of The Democratic Party, most of whom aren’t aware how thoroughly they’ve been outwitted.

Now that’s style.

It’s certainly an interesting perspective. I’ve observed that AT&T played a game of misdirection last year in a more concrete way. While activists focused on video franchising and net neutrality in Washington, the phone company quietly got statewide franchising from the big state legislatures in California, New Jersey, and Michigan without much fanfare. That’s playing the system.

The fact that states can’t impose net neutrality obligations even if they want to is not small thing, either.