Register article on the FCC hearing

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Richard Bennett <richard () bennett com>
Date: February 28, 2008 5:35:20 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Register article on the FCC hearing

Dave -

Here's a snippet of my article for The Register on Monday's field  
hearing at Harvard Law. For IP, if you please.

RB

BitTorrent certainly uses Internet Standard TCP as a delivery vehicle,  
but it does so in an unconventional way that essentially exploits a  
loophole to increase performance. At the end of the day, BitTorrent is  
just another file transfer program. It has thousands of predecessors,  
and they differ from each other in only three fundamental ways:  
scalability, resilience, and performance. It gets its performance  
boost from the ability of BitTorrent to access a deeper pool of  
bandwidth than a centralized program can; there's no way to transfer a  
(compressed) file faster than to take more bandwidth.

BitTorrent does this as a direct consequence of its scalability, by  
running dozens (or even hundreds) of TCP streams concurrently. The  
proliferation of streams gives BitTorrent immunity, at least  
partially, from the Internet's packet-drop-triggered congestion  
management system.

By contrast, most Internet traffic moving upstream on residential  
broadband networks comes from applications with no more than one  
stream active at a time. The loss of a single packet slows this  
application down, and hence the entire PC that runs it. The loss of a  
single packet by an application with dozens of active connections  
hardly registers on the host PC's bandwidth consumption scale. That's  
the loophole in conventional bandwidth management issues, and why  
Comcast has been hauled before the Star Chamber: when congestion kicks  
in, the neighbors slow down before BitTorrent does.

So an innovative bandwidth allocator at the client demands an  
innovative bandwidth allocator on the network, and that's what the  
Comcast's Sandvine system is. And logic suggests that if we appreciate  
a break from tradition on the application side we at least have to  
accept it on the management side, if it's being deployed to benefit  
the public. No one has suggested that Comcast's management of  
BitTorrent caused any harm: as a Comcast subscriber and BitTorrent  
user, the practice kept the application running well, without  
degrading the rest of the neighborhood.

QED, innovation all around. But how do we define good practice?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/28/bennett_fcc_neutrality_hearing/print.html

--
Richard Bennett



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