more on Google and 'neutrality' hypocrisy

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat org>
Date: June 28, 2006 2:00:47 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Google and 'neutrality' hypocrisy

All:

The biggest problem with the issue of "net neutrality" is that most  
measures that purport to prevent it have very bad unintended  
consequences.

It's perfectly reasonable to prioritize traffic by type (for example,  
Web traffic -- where people want to see results immediately -- over e- 
mail, which can wait a few minutes and is mostly spam anyway). In  
fact, it makes for happier users, since it takes their desires into  
account. A "net neutrality" provision which prohibited this  
prioritization would hurt our ISP's quality of service.

We also use "DNS blacklists" to reject 90% or more of all attempts to  
send e-mail to our servers -- and thank Heaven we do, because those  
servers and our users would otherwise be inundated with spam. This is  
especially true with the advent of spamming "botnets." (We have  
blocked spam from more than 20,000 unique IP addresses just this  
week, and I'm sure that the spammers don't have that many legitimate  
IP addresses, so they must be using "zombies.") If we don't recognize  
a source of e-mail, we may throttle its transmissions to limit the  
amount of spam it can send before we or our blacklist maintainers  
recognize it as a spammer. Any provision which kept us from  
throttling or blocking e-mail traffic from such sources would be folly.

It's also legitimate to de-prioritize bandwidth hogs. For example,  
our system limits the total amount of our bandwidth which can be  
consumed by ESPN, because users who leave their browsers on ESPN's  
home page are (unknowingly) constantly downloading video and/or large  
still images. What's more, they repeatedly download the same files  
over and over again while prohibiting the browser from caching them  
-- a huge waste. We throttle this not because it's ESPN in  
particular, but because they are irresponsibly turning users'  
browsers into bandwidth hogs. This slows the users' other work down,  
too, by monopolizing their allocated bandwidth. (Yes, we have had  
some of them complain that their connections were slow until they  
shut down a browser that was pointed at ESPN.)

This is an example of a situation in which it's reasonable to  
throttle some information sources for policy reasons. But note that  
the policy is applied evenhandedly. Any site which exhibited the same  
behavior is subject to the same restrictions. What's more, the user  
experience -- even on that site -- isn't affected by the throttling.

What's NOT reasonable to throttle as an anti-competitive measure.  
This would include situations where the ISP itself is a content  
provider or where it receives payment by an information source's  
competitor to de-prioritize that source. And the idea of "ransom"  
should be altogether out.

--Brett Glass



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