Net neutrality and strawmen

Reading The Precursor Blog by Scott Cleland (a blog labelled 'policy, markets and change'), it has some interesting commentary on Comcast & the FCC. On a factual level, I can't agree with him. On the other hand, I can't disagree either. It should be said, first and foremost that the guy is biased - linking to an industry issued Q&A on Net Neutrality from every page on the site is a bit of a giveaway.

Starters, I think it's not very nice to say "Net neutrality is thisandthat. As such, anyone in favour thinks this - and thus, by extension, are wrong. By the way, the FCC pooped on you. Neeners, neeners.", no matter if you wrap it in long words with many syllables and three levels(!) of bullet points. It's a pretty ugly strawman and I hope you're proud of yourself, Cleland.

Why a strawman? Simple. "Net neutrality" means different things to different people or interest groups. Is this an ideal situation? No. Does it make it easier to even discuss the issue? Definitely not. Does it allow for pretty cheap rhetoric? Yes. And in my opinion you better stay off that particular bottle if you actually want to commit anything but canned line noise.

That said, the guy does have some valid points - the main one being that there's some semblance of approval for reasonable network management from the generation direction of FCC.

"The system works and that there is no need for legislation or regulation;"

In a word, no. I think it's fair to say that the threat or uncertainty of eventual legislation has affected the planning or policies of major ISP's in the US. In a way, the threat of legislation is what makes the system work.

Don't get me wrong - I see business cases for extremely restricted and cheap Internet service, I see business cases for wide-area Wireless ISP's and both cases would probably need to stray pretty far from network neutrality (by any definition of the term) in order to even work out.

The difference is that 'reasonable' would be applicable in those cases. It's reasonable to prioritise interactive traffic slightly to ensure that the shared media is feeling somewhat responsive. Killing BitTorrent in one of the messiest ways conceivable - I'm looking at you, Sandvine - is another ballgame. The FCC seem to be in agreement. As for the rest of the world, no other Sandvine customer tried anything just as messy and most other traffic management/Deep Packet Inspection kits out there offer way better facilities for managing congestion (Disclaimer: I work for Procera Networks, Sandvine is their competitor. Opinions here are my own.)


"Given that: over half of Internet traffic is P2p and ~90% of P2p traffic is illegal piracy per the US PTO; given that 40% of email is spam per the Spam Filter Review; and given that 28% of pay per clicks of the large search engines are fraudulent per Click Forensics; the majority of Internet traffic is not protected by the FCC's principles and can be legally blocked."

Great - so let's block all P2P, e-mail and web browsing. Problem solved.

Statistics are good and all, but I don't think they're very valid in this case: Let's look at Instant Messaging - that's also (predominantly) P2P. In terms of transferred bytes, I'd say that a decent chunk of the traffic is copyrighted material. Same goes for FTP.

Light throttling is one thing - it makes sense for file transfer apps in some cases (P2P file transfer protocols are usually very good at hogging a decent sized chunk of the shared media. This can be at the expense of other applications) - but blocking is another deal altogether.


"Unable to sustain radical hardline non-discrimination absolutism in the face of facts and a real governmental process, the debate has shifted to what is reasonable -- and on that point obviously reasonable people can disagree."

The debate really hasn't 'shifted' in any direction at all, I'd say. Again, net neutrality proponents have a wide array of opinions - yes, some people really do whip the "all bits are created equal" drum, but you can't categorically say that's what network neutrality is.

Or, if you so prefer, "My unequivocal findings in the line of researching and opining on this issue is that the claim that there exists either a collectively ratified or de-facto definition of the aforementioned terminology is moot. As such, a sweeping characterization of its proponents is premature at best."

If you excuse me, I'll go wash my keyboard out with soap now.