December 18th, 2006

Filed under:
Technology, The Long View
7 Comments »

What the Hell is Net Neutrality?

That’s a good question. It’s poorly named (a better term would be ‘network discrimination’) and a little opaque to the average citizen. Save the Internet is a campaign ‘fighting for internet freedom’, and they’ve put together a nifty 4-minute video explaining net neutrality in terms that everybody can understand:

When people say ‘net neutrality’ today, they’re talking about an American issue.

I’m Canadian. And so, possibly, are you. What does net neutrality mean to Canadians? I’m not sure, but these guys sound like they know what they’re talking about:

Recently, network neutrality has come under attack by a number of Canadian corporations, many of whom you will find listed on this site. Demonstrably, net neutrality is not a hypothetical problem; it is one that is occurring today, on the ground, in Canada.

Many critics of network neutrality claim that all government regulation should be avoided and instead a laissez-faire attitude should be adopted. This ignores the fact the incumbents in the telecommunications industry obtained their positions through decades of government granted monopoly.

Speaking personally, I’ve decided that digital rights issues like this aren’t high on my list of get-involved priorities. Happily, there are lots of people who do care a great deal. You might be one of them.

There’s a petition to sign at the very bottom of (the incredibly long) Neutrality.ca. For you Americans, there are plenty of calls to action on SavetheInternet.com.

Comments: 7 Responses so far

Chris
December 19th, 2006
7:03 am

I’m not sure I understand what the big deal with. When we went from dialup to broadband, most of us happily paid the extra cost. So now that some companies have figured out to provide even more bandwidth, people are claiming that it’s their right not to have to pay extra for this?

Australian service providers have been offering such faster service for over a year now. It involves something like installing a bunch of new specialized hardware at the telco’s switching stations. They claim that they can get up to 25 times the throughput with this technique.

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Todd Sieling
December 19th, 2006
8:46 am

Net neutrality breaks down to the ability of the internet to send data at the same rates regardless of who is sending it. That means that someone who starts up a site gets the same treatment as a huge company that launches a huge site.

Should net neutrality end, and with the US in charge of this stuff it almost certainly will, companies will have to pay a premium to get good bandwidth speeds. That means that the Googles and media distribution companies will see their stuff come to you at a good speed, while anyone who doesn’t pay the premium access fee will have dial-up or sub-dial-up speeds.

Chris, this doens’t have anything to do with providing more bandwidth - it’s about choking back the amount of bandwidth available to specific customers from what it is now. You won’t get more from paying more - and if you’re just an individual customer you won’t be able to afford it in most cases - you’ll get less from paying the same, and only those sites with enough money for decent access will be the ones you end up using.

That’s a lot less of an Internet than I’ve come to know.

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Chris
December 19th, 2006
10:45 am

Hmm, ok, I think I was a little misled in my previous comment. I mistakenly thought it had to do with the pipeline to the home but instead, this is about the pipeline to the webserver.

But even so Todd, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t find a mention anywhere of anyone suggesting that bandwidth for non-paying sites will be choked off or slowed down from their current speeds.

Even still, this sounds to me like a lot of hype and paranoia by those who tend to fear the powers behind monoplies. Most latency that you see even today is not caused by bandwidth as much as it is with capacity (the power of your webservers/databases, having a clustered web farm, etc.) and the bigger, richer companies can afford a lot more hardware than, say, darrenbarefoot.com’s hosting provider. Is that fair? Should the government provide every website with enough hardware so that they can all run their sites as fast as google’s?

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Todd Sieling
December 20th, 2006
1:47 am

There’s a big difference between serving more people and having a level playing field in accessing the utility that is the Internet. I don’t know where you’re looking Chris but the video Darren posted makes just that point.

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Todd Sieling
December 20th, 2006
11:36 am

Here’s how the telco’s are shilling this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPIYxtjLFeI&eurl=

Chris, the problem this creates is that it makes it very hard for new services to start up and get noticed without paying higher tolls to get decent responsiveness. Under a non-neutral net, Darren won’t be able to pay for his traffic to be delivered to you at a decent speed, and you’re not likely to remain a reader.

It’s true that much latency is caused by application responsiveness, but network latency is still a real thing, and having it actually imposed on the network simply isn’t healthy for it.

It has nothing to do with paranoia, though the telcos don’t have a great track record for customer support, competetive behaviour or respect for their common carrier status or customer privacy, so if I were wary of them I’d have good reason. Doing away with net neutrality will simply lock out smaller startups from gaining an audience. It’s not about paying more to get more, it’s about paying more to avoid getting less, and no matter what political stripe you try to paint on it that’s not right.

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Dan
December 21st, 2006
1:22 am

As part of the Federal Green Party in Vancouver Center and other ridings, we’re looking to draw up a policy regarding this issue as we think this could open a can of worms. If anyone is interested in helping put together something on this (regardless of political or apolitical affiliation) they could e-mail me at mail@dangrice.com.

Some of the issues we have seen so far are:

1) Networks attempting to limit VOIP by other networks, to intentionally provide disruptive services so as to stifle competition, or to offer their services at a higher quality. This is anticompetitive.

2) Unjustified port blocking on known service ports.

3) Website blocking. This was a hot issue when Telus blocked out a union site lambasting it. Additionally, the ISPS have recently began blocking access to child porn sites. While this may be a justifiably necessity, having ISP unilaterally decide which content is appropriate could be dangerous if they decide to engage in other content filtering.

There are likely other issues, but the idea is that ISPs can provide differential levels of service but should not provide discriminatory access to informations or services.

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Todd Sieling
December 22nd, 2006
4:14 pm

To add to point 3 above, Telus also blocked over 700 sites on the same host when they decided to filter content on the basis of their inability to resolve a labour dispute. To my knowledge, they have never apologized or admitted that this was wrong.

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