net neutrality, continued ...

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Yoo, Christopher" <christopher.yoo () Law Vanderbilt Edu>
Date: June 22, 2006 10:36:29 AM EDT
Subject: RE: net neutrality, continued ...

What is most interesting to me is the extent to which the network that
most people regard today as the Internet is already nonneutral.  Network
owners are caching popular content locally, which gives that content
speed and cost advantages.  Overlay networks, like Akamai (which
reportedly serves 15% of the world's web traffic, including Google), are
taking this to a wider scale by maintaining a distributed network of
servers and using it to deliver content more cheaply and more quickly.
Some backbones are advertising security features by conveying traffic
through purely private networks to a later point in the network than is
usually (raising difficult definitional questions of how far you can
carry traffic on a private network before it is no longer "the
Internet").  ISPs routinely block ports known to be sources of spam,
viruses, worms, bots, and phishers.  They also frequently deploy
filtering technologies and maintain portals that give privileged
placement to certain content.  And backbones enter into peering
arrangements with some ISPs and transit arrangements with others.  (If
you are interested, both Bob Cannon and Craig McTaggert submitted
abstracts to the upcoming TPRC of papers reviewing the extent to which
the network is already nonneutral, which will devote two paper sessions
and possibly a keynote address to network neutrality.)

All of this raises questions about the workability of the
labeling-oriented proposal, since a significant portion of what  
people regard as the Internet today
may well not meet the definition "the Internet" laid out in the statute.
And as we learned from the debates over UNE-P and the proper
classification of Internet-bound traffic and VoIP, definitional schemes
often simply invite creative ways to arbitrage into one's preferred
definitional category.



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