Feb
26
Open letter to Lessig on net neutrality
Posted by Dirk Avery at 10:28 am under Internet, Technology.
Dear Lawrence,
I’m sorry to hear that you will not be running for congress. We can always use smart people in DC that are champions of human progress.
Good luck in your new endeavor to change congress. I hope you’ll consider net neutrality a part of that effort. Lack of neutrality has the potential to threaten our future in significant ways as human progress falls prey to margins and profits. From a business perspective, Comcast and other Internet providers are justified in using systems they own to create business advantages. From a progress perspective, however, when ISPs begin throttling high-bandwidth applications except those deemed worthy, we are well on our way down a slippery slope away from free culture. The next generation of innovation is at risk of being snuffed out before it even starts. The problem of traffic discrimination is compounded when those choices are made based on the short-sighted, profit-centric vision required of public companies by Wall Street. While peer-to-peer traffic has been the target of the most significant discrimination, we really have no idea whether lots of other traffic which poses legitimate competition to ISPs has been subjected to less severe discrimination.
Regards,
Dirk Avery
I really don’t think there’s a whole lot of long-term support for Net Neutrality, but it sure does make for some interesting dialog. As the Internet forms and transforms, so many people have so many views on what should be and what will be. These often conflicting and usually opposing views seem to miss the reality of what the Internet and Neutrality is all about.
The premise of neutrality is objectivity, or freedom from bias.
The premise of Net Neutrality is the absence of restrictions by those providing access on those for whom the access is provided.
If this sounds like the western expansion in the United States (and other countries before it), or if someone has burdened you with the metaphor of Internet expansion as space exploration, that’s because we, as humans, have the need to relate new things to old paradigms. If we are looking for something to really relate this to, it’s pretty simple . . . the Internet is like Utopia!
http://carterfsmith.blogspot.com/2008/02/utopic-neutrality.html
Carter,
I disagree. The market is great at fixing lots of things but not everything. If water companies started providing cleaner water to those also used electricity from the same company, because it increased its profits, we would all agree there’s a problem. When the Internet was originally provided, it was a non-essential utility. However, it has become essential to the economic, educational, and social welfare of those connected. That companies use their leverage over people based on an essential to make a profit is a market failure. The same market failure has led to heavy regulation of utilities whether they are state run or not.
Re: If water companies started providing cleaner water to those also using electricity from the same company, yes, there’s a problem. But there’s a bigger problem with them providing more water to my neighbors and charging us the same, no?
If my neighbor washed his four SUVs, watered his lawn, and refilled his swimming pool every day and we both got the same bill, I would be concerned. If when I took my half-full, city-provided trash can to the curb next Tuesday and my neighbor had three overflowing cans and regularly had boxes full of trash from his office and old lawn mowers from his son’s repair business and yet we both paid the same for trash pickup, I would be upset — even if he was a city councilman.
How is that any different than the attitude I would get if I had cable Internet (I do not) and it bogged down to a crawl every afternoon starting 3 minutes after school lets out because my neighbor’s kids were up-and-downloading songs, pics, and pirated software until way past their bedtime? (hypothetically speaking
Pay-per-amount-used and discriminatory filtering of traffic are two different things. If the water company started turning off your high-use neighbor’s water, that’s different than charging him more for using more. (I’ve written about pricing tiers here.)
The analogy of a water company does illustrate certain aspects of the Internet situation but falls short in others. For example, water is not exactly a high innovation area right now with unknown, untapped (hehe…) potential. We use water for 3-4 basic things that haven’t changed much in a long time. However, the Internet is changing all the time. What if ISPs started filtering out high-use applications prior to YouTube or iTunes being launched? It is likely neither of these two innovative but high-bandwidth using companies would have ever emerged. P2P has illegal uses which I do not support but pricing-by-amount-used and traffic filtering both put the kibosh on future innovation based on this technology.
the greater issue lies in determining measurements for intangibles. by instituting net neutrality ad hoc, the market, whether for aesthetic or functional applications (high-definition video or faster printing, say), cannot be rationally determined. how many minutes or how much data, is simply obsolete in an age when certain bandwidth commands higher demand under certain conditions. measuring packet flow and enabling a transparent measurement of bandwidth is no different than enforcing fairness in any number of securities markets. the government and advocates of net neutrality should first, do no harm. at present the limitation is one of who has the ear of the regulators, not who is interested in leveraging the value of the bandwidth or the networks it represents for any or all manner of the folks (that would include all americans) who access the ‘net.
Again, I would agree that pay-per-amount-used is a preferable model to the current degradation/filtering approach. While pay-per-minute pricing is commonplace now with cellular phones, flat-rate pricing is not uncommon. Two examples: Local phone service is unlimited and library patrons are not charged based on usage. Imagine if researchers working on a big breakthrough started having to pay extra at the library for the time spent there or the extra books checked out. If technology existed to only degrade illegal packets and I trusted the current ISP players to use it for the greater good rather than economic advantage, I’d probably support it. Those, however, are two very large ifs.