A Reminder of What "Net Neutrality" Is Really About

More than a year ago, I put up a post expressing my pleasure about how the “net neutrality” discussion had evolved over time. Specifically, I focused on the comments of Vint Cerf between 2006 and 2008, when he seemed to move from arguing that the Internet must be “open and neutral,” to saying that “the real question… is not whether [broadband networks] need to be managed, but rather how.”

My thoughts on the argument were confirmed for me by a panel at CES this past January, entitled “The Internet – How Do We Keep The Road Open.” If you read this account, you’ll note agreement among the panelists that managing networks is important, but so is transparency.

I understand that, as the FCC examines the issue of “net neutrality” (or the “Open Internet”), it isn’t just about network management, but I welcome having a more sophisticated, complex discussion.

So, imagine my dismay when two of my favorite cable shows – The Rachel Maddow Show and The Daily Show – recently took on the net neutrality issue and described it the way it was described back in 2006.

All About Blocking?

On October 23rd, Maddow said, “Telecom companies want to be able to slow down access to some parts of the Internet and to block some others. Essentially, they want the right to privilege the content that they want to privilege for their own telecom corporate purposes.” Maddow’s guest, Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, said that net neutrality is about everyone having equal access to all Internet content: “No cable companies, no telcom, should be able to slow that down because what you want access to is against their competitive interest.” [Watch the whole Maddow/Jardin segment here.]

The following Monday, October 26, Jon Stewart devoted a whole segment on The Daily Show to the same topic. He said, “The Internet Service Providers – your Comcast, your AT&Ts – would like net neutrality not to happen so they would have the ability to decide which content and websites get the preferential treatment.”

Let’s start right there. The charge is leveled that cable companies will slow down content that competes with their interests. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in his September 21 speech at the Brookings Institute, listed reasons that he thought net neutrality regulation might be necessary. Blocking competitive content was not one of those reasons. Nor am I aware of any instance of a cable company ever doing such blocking. NCTA’s President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow has said on a number of occasions that our member companies don’t block and won’t block lawful content.

All Bits Are Not Treated Equally.

In addition, Xeni Jardin is being disingenuous and Jon Stewart (I presume) doesn’t know any better. Jardin says, “All packets are created equal.” Stewart says, “Currently everything moves through those tubes at pretty much the same rate. Like, if you’ve got a packet of information from a major corporation like Google that information gets exactly the same treatment as, say, a packet from a little startup company…”

But, in fact, all packets aren’t the same. You wouldn’t want a voice packet, a video packet, an e-mail packet or an image packet to be treated the same. TCP/IP isn’t neutral and never was. There are times when you need to prioritize different packets.  George Ou at Digital Society has done some great work explaining the difference between low-bandwidth and high-bandwidth applications. If you want a dumb pipe, with every bit treated the same, that will significantly affect telemedicine and other advanced services which may require priority treatment. If creating some method of optimized delivery was such a terrible thing, what does this say about services like Akamai, that help make content distribution more efficient, benefiting both consumers and content producers?

Stewart posed the question, “Why are all these people so opposed to this innocuous, populist legislation?” If all that was being discussed was the right of consumers to visit any website they want, or use any legal Internet service they desire, there would be no problem. NCTA has gone on the record many times that our member companies are in favor of this. When Chairman Genachowski proposed the two new principles in his Brookings speech, we applauded efforts to preserve an Open Internet. The trick is that the conversation is more about how and when networks can be managed.

Jardin proposes, “Whenever there’s a fight on the Internet, it’s always good to side with the geeks who actually built the Internet, rather than, sort of, fat-cat telcom lobbyists. You have guys like Vint Cerf… he’s coming out, saying this is a dangerous thing.”

• Point One is that Mr. Cerf has worked for Google since 2005; that company is hardly a little garage start-up, nor are they a disinterested party in telecommunications.
• Point Two is that Professor David J. Farber (the “Grandfather of the Internet”) thinks that net neutrality is not such a good thing.
• Point Three is that we agree that network management is an issue best addressed by engineers rather than policymakers. The cable industry has a lot of engineers of its own. For the past 15 years, cable companies have been able to offer high-speed Internet access thanks to the hard work of these engineers, who still have to manage these networks on a daily basis. Let’s cast our minds back to 1994 and remember that it’s those cable engineers that helped drive all the broadband we currently enjoy.  It was cable that developed the DOCSIS standard and first laid significant amounts of fiber out in the field, ahead of the phone companies.

(It’s ironic that Maddow, who is so publicly a fan of infrastructure, seems to miss this last point.)

The Challenges of Creating Neutrality Rules

As long-time telcom reporter and industry analyst Gary Kim pointed out, the need for management is exactly why net neutrality poses some difficulties:

It is very hard to define and covers a range of business discrimination issues, network management and performance practices as well as potential future services that consumers might very well want to buy, that provide value precisely because they allow users to specify which of their applications take priority when the network is congested.

Kim notes that it’s a good thing for ISPs not to discriminate against the competition, but he is concerned “whether ‘affirmative’ packet handling, as opposed to ‘negative’ packet handling, will be lawful in the future.”

Swing too far in one direction and you create broad draconian rules that stifle innovation. Swing too far the other way and you end up with vague principles that don’t let anyone know for certain what’s allowed and what isn’t.

Finally, let me observe that there is a lot of hubbub about what might happen without net neutrality. I am reminded about a recent tweet from Blogads.com Founder & CEO Henry Copeland.

RT @nickbilton What life w/out Net Neutrality will look like: http://j.mp/2UYL2H ++Umm, wait, there’s no NN law right now.

As he says, when you imagine what life might be like without net neutrality, you might want to remind yourself that we have no such regulation right now.