Month: January 2009

Cox Cable announced plans to test a new traffic management system intended to improve the Internet experience of most of their customers yesterday, and the reaction from the network neutrality lobby came fast and furious. The system will separate latency-sensitive traffic from bulk data transfers and adjust priorities appropriately, which is the sort of thing that Internet fans should cheer. In its essence, the Internet is a resource contention system that should, in most cases, resolve competing demands for bandwidth in favor of customer perception and experience. When I testified at the FCC’s first hearing on network management practices last February, I spent half my time on this point and all other witnesses agreed with me: applications have diverse needs, and the network should do its best to meet all of them. That’s what we expect from a “multi-purpose network”, after all.

So now that Cox wants to raise the priority of VoIP and gaming traffic over background file transfers, everybody should be happy. The neutralists have always said in public fora that they support boosting VoIP’s priority over P2P, and Kevin Martin’s press release about the Comcast order said he was OK with special treatment for VoIP. And in fact the failure of the new Comcast system to provide such special treatment is at the root of the FCC’s recent investigation of Comcast, which was praised by the neuts.

So how is it that the very people who complain about Comcast’s failure to boost VoIP priority are now complaining about Cox? Free Press’s general-purpose gadfly Ben Scott is practically jumping up and down pounding the table over it:

Consumer advocates certainly aren’t impressed. “The information provided by Cox gives little indication about how its new practices will impact Internet users, or if they comply with the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement,” says consumer advocacy firm Free Press in a statement. “As a general rule, we’re concerned about any cable or phone company picking winners and losers online.”

“Picking winners and losers” is bad, and failing to pick winners and losers is also bad. The only thread of consistency in the complaints against cable, DSL, and FTTH providers is a lack of consistency.

Make up your mind, Ben Scott, do you want an Internet in which Vuze can step all over Skype or don’t you?

UPDATE: For a little back-and-forth, see Cade Metz’ article on this The Register, the world’s finest tech site. Cade quotes EFF’s Peter Eckersley to the effect that Cox is “presuming to know what users want.” They are, but it’s not that hard to figure out that VoIP users want good-quality phone calls: a three-year-old knows that much.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality

Friends of Broadband should be pleased with President-elect Obama’s proposed broadband stimulus program, which proposes $6 billion in grants for wireless and other forms of broadband infrastructure. Granted, the package isn’t as large as many had wished; Educause had asked for $32 billion, ITIF wanted $10 billion, and Free Press wanted $40 billion, but this is a good start. Harold Feld puts the size of the grant package in perspective and praises it on his Tales of the Sausage Factory blog.

But there’s no pleasing some people. Free Press has mounted an Action Alert, asking its friends to oppose the stimulus package as it currently stands. The Freeps, who run the “Save the Internet” campaign, want strings attached to the money, insisting it only be given to projects that meet their requirements:

1. Universal: focused on connecting the nearly half of the country stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.
2. Open: committed to free speech and without corporate gatekeepers, filters or discrimination.
3. Affordable: providing faster speeds at lower prices.
4. Innovative: dedicated to new projects only and available to new competitors, including municipalities and nonprofits.
5. Accountable: open to public scrutiny so we can ensure that our money isn’t being spent to prop up stock prices and support market monopolies.

These goals are not even consistent with each other. Half of America uses broadband today, and half doesn’t. Most of the unconnected half have chosen not to subscribe to services that reach their homes already, opting to remain outside the broadband revolution for their own reasons. So we can’t very well pursue numbers 1 and 4 at the same time. Most of this money will be spent in rural areas that are currently served by Wireless ISPs like Lariat. Rural population isn’t as large as urban population, so going into unserved or underserved areas isn’t going to do much for the digital divide-by-choice that plagues America’s inner cities.

I suspect there’s some self-interest involved here, such that Free Press wants to keep the issue of America’s place in the global ranking of broadband penetration about where it is (between 7th and 15th, depending on whose numbers you like) in order to raise money, have a soapbox, and keep on complaining.

I don’t see any other way to explain this.

UPDATE: Freep has sent letters to the committee chairs with much less incendiary language, but arguing the same line: the Internet is a telecom network and has to be regulated the way that telecom networks have always been regulated. This angle is clearly good if you’re a career telecom regulator, but it’s blind to the technical realities of IP network management. Making an IP network fair and functional requires “discrimination”, and the Freep doesn’t get that. Not even a little bit.

This organization has established an amazing ability to confuse its self-interest with the public interest in the short time that it’s been around. Freep’s first issue, after all, was a series of regulations designed to prevent the rapacious newspaper industry from taking over the television industry. They still push for limits on TV and newspaper cross-ownership, and only got into the Internet-as-telephone fight to advance their initial cause. The number of people who think free societies need to be protected from “powerful newspapers” is vanishingly small, or course, around the same size as the flat-earther demographic.

UPDATE 2: It gets even stranger. Open access provisions are already in the bill, as Matthew Lasar points out on the Ars Technica blog:

As for the net neutrality and open access ideas; well, they’re already in the bill (PDF; see p. 53). NTIA, the executive branch agency tasked with disbursing the broadband money, is required to ensure that all grant recipients operate both wired and wireless services on an “open access basis,” though it’s left up to NTIA to define what this means and how it works.

In addition, anyone taking grant money must “adhere to the principles contained in the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband policy statement,” which lays out four basic neutrality provisions for Internet companies. In other words, although “network neutrality” isn’t mentioned, it’s already in the bill in a basic way. (Note that the FCC policy statement only protects “legal content,” however; it’s not a pure “end-to-end” packet delivery guarantee.)

Here’s a suggestion for the Freep: before issuing your next mouth-breathing Action Alert about a pending bill, read the damn thing. You won’t look like such a bunch of knee-jerk alarmists if you do.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality