Re: F.C.C. to Look at Complaints Comcast Interferes With Net - New York Times

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Bob Frankston [bob37-2 () bobf frankston com]
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2008 1:01 AM
To: David Farber; 'ip'
Subject: RE: [IP] Re:     F.C.C. to Look at Complaints Comcast Interferes With Net - New York Times

Moral court again ...

Does this mean I can't share files with my neighbor because of the cost of peering with a remote provider? Will someone 
judge that backing up over the net is not an appropriate use of the network? Am I not allowed to backup to peers?

Flat pricing reflects the actual costs when system management dominates any particular physical facility. ATT 
understood this in the early 1980’s when figuring out the cost of phone services. But the reason we have flat rate 
pricing on the Internet is that it is the only model that works when we can’t value bits out of context. This means 
that we can only avail ourselves of capabilities that do not command a special premium – this is a consequence of the 
end-to-end constraint. At first this means we can’t do much with the transport – but it was enough for applications 
like email.

Over time, however, our ability to take advantage of inexpensive junk capacity has given us abundance – any path works 
and we aren’t beholden to a provider’s attempt to charge us for the value of the bits. Efforts to sell premium bits run 
into trouble because they can’t make promises over the entire path and we’ve become adept at working around local 
scarcity.

I’ve been thinking about video over the network such as provisioning the network for 1080p. The problem is that such 
requirements are procrustean and have little to do with human perception. Human perception is doesn’t correspond to 
this measures. Bose succeeded in audio by working against perception not by preserving linear properties of sound.

At CES there were a number of demos scaling SD signals so you don’t see jaggies and get HD-like results. Some 
applications like watching sports details may demand higher resolution but if the goal of television is to entertain 
people after a hard day at work then why should we spend billions on a new infrastructure when we can provide 90% of 
the value by letting people choose the kind of scaling and processing that they choose. You can see this dramatically 
with sites like http://www.abc.com – if you have a high end processor and video board you get impressive video quality 
and who knows or cares what the resolution is. I can choose HD if I have the capacity and probably do but if not will 
soon as long as we allow the Internet Dynamic to work and don’t tie ourselves into arbitrary requirements. If nothing 
else such promises make the network “valuable” and thus there is something that carriers can (try to) charge for 
whether or not we want it!!

Unfortunately we are trying to build these kind of smarts into the network and thus locking ourselves into a very 
expensive refit that delivers little incremental value and leaves us too worn out for the next stage of 4kx2k video – 
if we so chose. But we can’t even choose 1080p today – we’ve barely deployed 1080i. An individual can’t choose their 
definition quality over the telecom networks so must wait till the next expensive iteration.

Carriers justify their intervention because they seem to believe they can define our experience and thus force us to 
wait for the trailing edge of technology. It’s another reason why 10 year old 1080p is still the future technology. And 
even worse I find my HD set top box is very very buggy because they aren’t up to even today’s offerings! And they can 
be upgraded incrementally which means a high capital cost in an uncertain market. Fortunately I do have an alternative 
in using a PC and the IP transport.

Ultimately Network Neutrality is about MYOB – letting me decide how to use the facilities. Fortunately the Internet 
dynamic has demonstrated that given a lot of choice we’ll find much value in what we can do with what we have now and 
then drive the process from the edge. We are not beholden to arbitrary and misguided choice of technology from an 
omniscient provider.

We already have abundance as the availability of prime time TV of the ‘net already shows – ironically now even a 1987 
DSL connection give us the perception of high quality TV – so why spend billions just for an arbitrary standard that 
doesn’t matter. If compression did matter a lot then why take some shows prepared using flash and send them as video – 
we’d send the original very compact flash format as is done on the network

There are so many choices that why do we choose those that give us the least at the highest cost?

Today Brett’s attempt to promise a lot with very little capacity is the exception and mustn’t be used to justify moral 
intervention. Fifteen years ago shared 10Mbps would have seemed abundant and the users would have found enough value to 
justify more investment. But that investment should be in network commons – not lots of little partitioned fiefdom 
networks. If you believe in any network affect above linear then partitioning networks into service-provider 
infrastructures greatly limits the value without providing much effective competition.

In order to realize this value we must get beyond treating telecom as a very expensive infrastructure tied to arbitrary 
and indefensible promises. Instead we need the opportunity discover value in what we have so we can drive the dynamic 
that has given us Moore’s law hypergrowth. DSL has been protected from this law (a criminal violation?) and has been 
moribund for 20 years. But the dynamic works anyway – as I noted a slow DSL line can now give us HD-like TV! Finally 
Verizon is starting to up the speed but that’s only one factor and not the only one. The bigger factor is our ability 
to innovate at the edge!

Of course this fixation on TV is misguided – as I keep pointing out lives can be saved with just a few bits of 
information but our fixation on TV leaves us disconnected everywhere unless we can justify meeting  carrier’s arbitrary 
price for their private networks which, as noted, are partitioned and thus the value is minimized against the whole. 
And then the value to society is further reduced by purposefully limiting capacity to create value to the carrier.

Historically we’ve avoided taking externalities into account in setting policy because they are hard to determine and 
the value of the network itself was sufficient. Today almost all the value is external but we still limit ourselves to 
the value of the copper, glass and radios. And so we die.

As we see from Minitel – even when the carrier is forward looking and does something wonderful eventually the world 
moves beyond their “vision”. A network operator cannot provide opportunity and, as we know, we no longer need to rely 
on them. It’s far too easy to interconnect digital packet networks. As those who tried to prevent IM interconnect – the 
hard part is keeping the networks isolated!

As to violating the ToS – this message violates Verizon’s ToS by saying bad things about the company. Their own router 
violates the ToS by embedded a server. The ToS is about as meaningful as a parking lot stub that says that the operator 
has no liability after using your car in crash tests. Network abuse is having a foreign company take my local ability 
to communicate and forcing me to pay forever for a small capital investment – today $1k/house for gigabit fiber but 
that will go down rapidly.

http://www.frankston.com/?Name=InternetDynamic
http://www.frankston.com/?name=VideoTippingPointNear
http://www.frankston.com/?name=VONRailroads
http://www.frankston.com/?Name=SATNFSM
http://www.frankston.com/?name=SATNVZCustomers






-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 20:35
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Re: F.C.C. to Look at Complaints Comcast Interferes With Net - New York Times





________________________________________

From: Brett Glass [brett () lariat net]

Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 2:38 PM

To: David Farber; ip

Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   F.C.C. to Look at Complaints Comcast Interferes With Net - New York Times



At 07:59 AM 1/9/2008, Joly wrote:



> Apparently it is a growing mood at the IETF that the the bandwidth

> based principle of 'flow rate fairness'- implicitly governed in

> TCP by dropped packets - is being abused by clients that make huge

> numbers of connections.



Indeed, the current problem of P2P abuse is largely due to the same

root cause as the plague of spam that daily threatens to consume

our mailboxes: the fact that the Internet was developed in a

"friendly" environment where users could be expected to play fair,

not hog resources, and not abuse the network.



As Richard Bennett points out in the article cited in the original

posting, claims that Comcast is engaging in "spoofing" or "forgery"

are inflammatory and misleading. The truth is that routers have

long sent "RST", or "reset," packets to terminate connections --

for example, when a PPP dialup session is dropped. P2P mitigation

is merely another use for the same technique, which conforms 100%

to industry standards.



What's more, the FCC -- and others -- must understand that "P2P"

software, including BitTorrent, violates ISPs' terms of service by

taking ISPs' bandwidth for the benefit

of third parties. You see, besides monopolizing network resources,

P2P also engages in another form of network abuse: it takes users'

machines -- sometimes with their knowledge but often without it --

and make them into servers, which generally is in violation of the

ISP's terms of service. These servers wring all they can out of the

user's "flat rate" connection, doing so either for the benefit of a

business which should be buying its own bandwidth (such as Vuze or

Blizzard Entertainment) or for the benefit of the authors of the

P2P software (which, in many cases, make money by infecting users'

machines with spyware and/or turning them into "zombies" or "bots").



Because virtually all Internet service is "flat rate," and relies

on oversale and a limited duty cycle to allow the rate model to

work, a P2P user is analogous to a customer sneaking food out of an

"all you can eat" buffet for the benefit of a third party (or, in

this case, thousands of them). The parties which are currently

asking the FCC to mandate that Comcast abandon P2P throttling have

no more legal basis for their demand than a buffet customer would

have for demanding to carry food out to third parties who have not paid for it.



If the FCC were to mandate that ISPs could not mitigate P2P, the

ISPs -- backed into a corner -- would be forced to drop back to a

model in which users paid by the bit and by the packet. (A user

transmitting or receiving many small packets would pay more than

those who exchanged fewer large packets, and users would also pay

more involuntarily if they happened to receive a large amount of

spam or too many photos of friends' kids, etc.) This could

dramatically raise the cost of Internet access, worsening the

United States' already lagging position in the rankings of

broadband deployment and cost.



--Brett Glass







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