Sleepycatz

Neutral Monopolies

I have been asked by some journalists and others to comment on the recent actions taken against Comcast and their policy of interfering with peer-to-peer application traffic. Of course, the problem with journalists and policy makers is that they don’t want to understand the real issues involved; they simply want to setup a black and white polemic and decide which side is right. In this case, everyone is wrong.

The whole thing began about a month ago when the AP reported that Comcast was blocking traffic associated with BitTorrent, GNUtella, and other file-sharing applications. In a semantic parsing that would please even the most jaded pentagon technocrat, Comcast denied that they were blocking any traffic. In actuality, Comcast wasn’t really blocking traffic; they were simply imitating traffic in order to get the sharing computers to ignore the data sent between them. This approach is quite a bit sleazier then actually blocking the traffic, as it forces the hosts to keep establishing their connections to one another. Nonetheless, the die was cast, and consumer groups filed a complaint with the FCC and called for congress to impose Net Neutrality regulations. Meanwhile, hordes of libertarian network operators began complaining about how the government shouldn’t interfere with how they run their networks. Three days ago the story got bigger when a California resident filed suite against Comcast for breach of contract, arguing that Comcast does not deliver the promised Internet speeds it advertises, and actively interferes with the performance of certain applications.

The issues and problems surrounding this debacle are an outgrowth of the severely flawed telecommunications policies of the FCC and the federal government’s failure to deal with those bad policy choices. Comcast should to have the right to regulate traffic allocation on their own network. The nature of the HFC architecture employed by cable Internet providers means that limited bandwidth is shared within local distribution areas. This means that if your neighbor is using huge amounts of bandwidth to download an episode of Lost, there is less overall available bandwidth for you. Cable operators want to ensure that burst bandwidth is available to users, so they set the cable modem’s overall limiting quite high (usually between 4 Mb/s & 8 Mb/s); however, this leads to the problem of active users consuming large amounts of bandwidth for extended periods. In the case of peer-to-peer applications, Comcast was trying to ensure that there was excess burst bandwidth available to more casual users of common Internet applications. However, Comcast should have informed their customers that they were limiting specific traffic and applications. By not doing so, they operated in duplicitous and deceitful manner. This is a clear case of Comcast wanting to have it all: they want to pick up subscribers by touting high bandwidth numbers and then limit the users who actually use the bandwidth they’re paying for.

To allow the federal government, however, to dictate what is valid network traffic could lead to disastrous consequences. To be adaptable to the ever changing applications and protocols on the Internet any legislation would need to be written broadly. This could easily lead to situations in which it becomes technically illegal for service providers to mitigate spam, intervene in a virus outbreak, or prioritize voice or video traffic. For many years the Internet community of operators and developers have done an exceptional job of regulating and expanding the applications and data on the Internet. This was primarily due to the need of numerous network operators being forced to work together to exchange data and adhere to standards. Recently this has started to change; however, as the number of autonomous carriers has begun to shrink. This has placed business pressures on the remaining networks to try to keep more traffic and services on their networks and worry less about exchanging data with others.

The overall problem is that there is a lack of competition in the marketplace. If subscribers had multiple choices of broadband providers they could choose a provider based upon their application needs. Network Neutrality only becomes an issue because last mile monopolies have been encouraged by the FCC. With the loss of data line sharing requirements for copper, coax, and fiber, consumers are left with very few choices between Internet providers. Additionally, the deregulation of last mile data facilities means that no company can enter into the market to satisfy customer demands. For instance, a service provider who wishes to target peer-to-peer users cannot, economically, gain access to the copper or coax wire entering your home. This means that consumers will always be tied to one or two service providers and their policies. If competition was encouraged in this market, questions of Network Neutrality would not even arise. Consumers would simply change providers from those who do not satisfy their needs to those which do. The FCC, with their unique brand of logic, keeps insisting that fewer providers means more competition and better products for consumers. In any other market this logic would be dismissed as laughable: do we really believe we would have better automobiles if there were only two or three manufacturers? But in the world of telecommunications this ass-backwards logic seems to be accepted as gospel –proselytized with massive political contributions.

Without re-regulation of last mile facilities the only hope consumers have is Network Neutrality legislation. Network operators and admins should work with lawmakers to try to ensure that any regulations are adaptable enough to address their concerns. If operators, and the companies they work for, simply continue to oppose Neutrality regulation they will soon find themselves having to interpret poorly written regulation and hope that no one complains when they get it wrong. This is simply a case where consumers are not going to stand for biased monopolies, and the monopolies will have to get used to operating in a more neutral fashion.

This entry was posted by steve on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.