We also have Carl Ford asking “can the concept of ‘open’ be governed?” (see http://apps.calliflower.com/conf/show/58623)

Martin Geddes has long argued that Net Neutrality regulation is unenforceable and technologically naive – essentially that it will come back to bite you in the ass – and here it has.

You can’t expect a law to only apply to the bad guys.

This is what I’d call playing to the teleco’s strengths – if it’s one thing they know how to do, it’s lawyering up. They probably love all this “Net Neutrality” talk because they know how to manipulate the game in their favor.

As I’ve said in the past, Net Neutrality needs a dictionary and the root of the problem is lack of competition, lack of consumer choice for broadband provider. If there’s going to be new legislation, it should be focused on that problem, as was done in the UK and France, rather than trying to define and then enforce supposed rules about “Net Neutrality”.

Twitter embraces the end-to-end principle which is a central design principle of the Internet itself.  A “stupid network” is one  that merely passes packets independent of the what application uses the data in those packets. In other words, the network has little knowledge about the contents of the packets it handles and exerts little influence over them.

Twitter passes 140 character “packets” (tweets), acting as a “stupid network” for the most part. Twitter does not interpret the contents of a tweet – it passes whatever data the tweet contains. Some applications “overload” tweets with special content recognized by that application. This end-to-end model permits myriad uses of the underlying network and fosters incredible innovation.

Over time, Twitter has become slightly more “inteligent” interpreting “hashtags”, url-shortened links etc., but it still permits all kinds of application-specific data.

At first look, Twitter becoming more “intelligent” about the contents of tweets may appear to be a good thing.  But it is a slipery slope. Once they start adding meaning to the 140 characters, the network becomes more restrictive. The more Twitter remains a “stupid network” the better, IMHO. By deciding to be “stupid” and supporting the end-to-end prinicple, Twitter is inviting creative minds to use their “network” for new applications, which, it turns out, is a very smart thing to do.

A study based on the participation of 8,175 Internet users around the world found conclusive signs of blocked file-sharing connections only at three Internet service providers: Comcast and Cox in the U.S. and StarHub in Singapore.

If they will block file-sharing apps, one can assume they will block anything they deem to be decremental to their revenue, including VoIP, video, etc.

It’s interesting that, so far, none of these studies have concluded that telephone companies are blocking their DSL broadband customers. Does that mean they aren’t doing it? Or are they just better at it, so that it isn’t as easy to detect? Or, are the journalists just afraid to rock that boat for some reason ($$$)?

Obama said, if elected, he would appoint only pro-network neutrality Federal Communications Commission members. “I want to maintain that basic principle in how the Internet functions and as president I’m going to make sure that is the principle that my FCC commissioners are applying as we move forward,” he said.

I think one of the issues is whether any politician’s definition of “network neutrality” is the same as ours. It’s easy to say, just like “No child left behind”, but what does it really mean?

Don’t forget that the supposedly “net friendly” Michael Powell always claimed competition was not a “problem”, that there was plenty of competition and consumer choice in broadband, and therefore there is no need for FCC mandated “line sharing”.

Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton are co-sponsors of legislation introduced in the Senate by Byron Dorgan, D-S.D., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, a bill in the name of “network neutrality” but also would allow broadband providers to create tiered pricing as long as there is “equal access to each tier.”

Andy is pretty sanguine about it:

This is becomig the new way to provide discrimination by application, or Internet restraint of trade, if I were to give it a name. Many new Internet service packages now come with a specific provider-supplied router that is required for the service to work and is usually totally closed to the customer. We saw this a number of years ago where it appeared that BT was blocking VoIP and it turned out to be bugs in the BT Voyager 2000 router.

Recently we’ve started to see many similar reports with some of the triple play services. Even my old friends at EarthLink provide a special DSL box that doesn’t work with VoIP (not even EarthLink’s own trueVoice VoIP) unless customers disable the so-called UHP feature. At least Earthlink makes these settings available to customers, unlike many other providers.

Customers are not interested in the net neutrality aspects or long-term impact of this. All they say is “my computer and email work fine.” The third-party VoIP provider is left holding the blame.

Again, I argue that we need to create some formal definitions for what exactly constitutes “Internet” service. Does it mean I get an unfiltered public IP address that I can connect anything to, or does it mean I can run a web browser and email client? And what’s the spectrum in between those extremes and how do we classify and label it so consumers appreciate the difference?

This ability to block VoIP (or any application) with intentional or unintentional “technical incompatibilities” is a dangerous form of “accidental net neutrality” that isn’t making it to the radar of those supposedly speaking on our behalf like savetheinternet.com.

When you sign up for one of these services, you get a phone company supplied combination TV/phone/router box. It looks like the end user gets no control over or access to this box. And it further looks like it is performing various ‘service management’ on behalf of the user.

The bottom line is it looks like the services one can use with these Triple-play Internet services are limited to web browsing and email and maybe a few others. It appears to be a ‘browsing and email’ service, not an Internet service. It looks like users don’t even see their public IP address and cannot connect their own router or any device besides a PC.

Should they be allowed to call such a service ‘Internet’?

By even making the debate be about “net neutrality” the very nature of the war has changed, for the worse (worse for us, better for the telcos).

Let’s look again at the history of the net here. Nobody forced the telcos at gunpoint to offer Internet service. In fact, the telcos were late to the party. But now that they have squeezed out all the competition that actually DID want to offer DSL service (such as CLECS), the incumbents now cry foul, that it’s “not fair”, that they can’t make enough money on Internet service. Boo hoo.

Those with knowledge of the history of local telephone service have seen this before. They first squeeze the competition out and then declare that they need to raise rates to make money. Except this time, it’s not quite so easy, because they have not squeezed out their only remaining rival for Internet access services: the cable companies. So the poor telcos actually have to offer competitive pricing. Yipes. That hurts. That’s not a Telco’s core competency and they aren’t accustomed to having to.

So of course they turn to what they do know – the legal and political systems. And for the most part, the net luminti have fallen right in their trap, pawns in the telco’s game.

What the telcos and their political allies managed to achieve by shifting this debate to one framed around “net neutrality” is let everyone forget that nobody forced the telcos to go into the Internet service business and nobody is forcing them to stay in it. If it’s bad business, get out. If it’s really that bad, nobody else will want to offer it either. Oh but wait, maybe they know somebody else might actually WANT the business (such as all those companies they squeezed out before to create this monopoly mess we’re in now).

So which is it? Is Internet service a bad business or a money maker? If it’s bad, then why are they fighting so hard to be in the business? If it’s good, why are they fighting so hard to tell everyone how bad it is?

Other folks comments’ follow along the “government regulation will hurt the internet” theme.

It’s an interesting point, one I generally agree with. However, this situation is complicated by the fact that the LEC is a monopoly on the first mile, and therefore, a monopoly (gatekeeper) for me getting access to the Internet beyond the telco. There are a few minor little problems with the argument above. First, how are we going know when there are “real problems”? If the telco or cableco subtly messes with my access to certain sites or services, who’s going to know? It’s not like I could use an alternative service to compare against.

Second, Govt. regulations do often create overhead and restrict development. In this case however, it’s the telco (or cableco) that has the ability to severely restrict, or totally bring to a stand-still, innovation. The key to internet-based innovation is IP standards and ubiquitous access based on those standards. It means an inventor from Albania to Zimbabwe can imagine and construct services which anyone can access from anywhere. There is no Internet Company deciding which services shall see the light of day. No central entity decides whether a given application is too threatening, too trivial, or too unworthy to be offered to customers. The marketplace decides that. If you can write code, afford to pay for a connection to the internet so potential customers can get to it, your idea may be “the next big thing”. And that’s exactly where things like Google came from. It’s also exactly what the telcos want to end. In the traditional telco space, third-party innovations are non-existant. Innovations are possible only in the unlikely event the phone company agrees. And of course the chance of that is absolutely zero — it doesn’t happen. And now they want to do the same thing to the Internet, where they can play a gatekeeper role, deciding what applications are good and bad, which should see the light of day and which should not.

The potential lost opportunity is what scares me. I started using the net in the eighties. We had a net back then. We used it. We thought it was cool. But you know what? HTTP and the web hadn’t been invented yet. We see arguments now that say things like “hey, as long as I can get email and and surf the web, what else do I need?” What if we said the same thing about the internet as it was in 1987 (or 1993, or 1998, or 2001, etc)? We would never have seen the web. We would be using today the same net we had back then. You can’t assume the world will stay the same. It’s what we won’t have in the future by accepting the status quo today that scares the heck out of me. What consumer (voter) is going to complain to their congressman about not having an application/feature/service that doesn’t even exist yet?

Does that mean I support Net Neutrality regulation? Frankly, I don’t think so, at least not as I’ve seen it proposed. However, we need to begin some dialog on this matter. It would be a crying shame to let the telcos kill innovation on the net without a fight.

I want to look at this from another perspective. Let’s step back to 1996, when we used dial-up to reach the Internet. It wasn’t the telco that gave us Internet service or access to the Internet. We purchased a normal phone line from the telco and then used a modem to let us establish a connection to an Internet service (ISP). The telco really had nothing to do with our interaction with our favorite website of the day, as shown below.

Some creative people, outside the telco (inventors of modems and ISPs) came up with a way for us to use this thing called the Internet in spite of the telco. The telco didn’t invent the Internet nor the means for us to access it.

Later, telcos got involved in the ISP business, but in 1996 we probably got our Internet access from someone other than our telco. The telco didn’t seem to mind then. I guess it might have something to do with the fact that they were basking in the cash from all those second-line phone lines people were buying so they could use this cool thing the telcos didn’t invent (or offer, and didn’t really know anything about) called the Internet. So the Internet, invented by others, made the telcos billions of dollars, even though they had no idea what it was until after lots of people were already using it.

There are millions of people, still doing just this today, using dial-up modems to access the Internet using a non-telco ISP (perhaps more than half the Internet users in the U.S.). So how does Net neutrality effect these people? Why is someone using dial-up provided by a third-party okay, but someone using DSL provided by the telco not okay?

So what they’re telling me is I can literally use the same copper pair to place a dial-up modem call to a third-party ISP and use whatever website I want, but if I use that exact same copper pair using my DSL account, I can’t access that same website?

In some sense, they are all right (correct), but fail to get to the root of the problem. The problem isn’t a question of Net Neutrality or Tiered Services. The problem is the end result of several core drivers. The bottom line is that there is no competition at the lowest (first mile) of our Internet pipe. We have the duopoly of Cable vs. Telco and in many cases people don’t even have that choice (broadband is provided by only one or the other).

It starts there. You take the combination of no competitive marketplace, combined with the fact that the duopoly players want to play higher up the stack, above “access” and into “content and applications” and you have a recipe for disaster. If we had competition at the access layer, nothing else would matter. Each of us could then choose the service package that matched our specific goals. No two of us are alike. We each value different things in different ways. There would be no need to speak of Net Neutrality and regulation, because the marketplace would provide a broad range of products and offers, including tiered services, or whatever.

So now back to reality. We don’t have a competitive marketplace at the access level. We have one choice, perhaps two, for access, for the pipes we use to reach the Internet. So now what? We can fight the battle for Net Neutrality, and try to force these vendors to play by some set of rules. The problem there is these are huge companies with decades of experience in working the system — they thrive in that world. Who is going enforce those rules? Like the phone companies are going to care about breaking those laws (assuming anything as concrete as “laws” ever happened). Look at their history. Even if they do lose a legal battle here or there, they will gladly just pay the fines, rather than actually change their ways. And who is going to stop them?

Or we can fight for competition at the access layer. This is working in the UK and in France, countries that started with a far more monopolistic environment than we have here.

Either way it’s a long slog. I just think putting the focus on Net Neutrality takes the focus off the real problem, which is competition at the access layer, giving us choices in “Internet pipe” providers. That is a 20 year battle, but without it, nothing gets fixed, regardless of whether or not there are supposed rules about “Net Neutrality”.