A flaw in the Internet architecture?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Bill Stewart [bill.stewart () pobox com]
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 2:21 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] A flaw in the Internet architecture?

It's not surprising that Google's a big player
in the Net Neutrality game; much of the flamewar
was started by a couple of telecom executives
talking about how Google shouldn't be getting
such good treatment on consumer broadband without
paying for it.  They were a singularly inappropriate
target to pick on for technical as well as
business and political reasons.

I strongly disagree with Richard Bennett's objection
to CDNs taking advantage of geographical distribution
and his perception of Google's "unfair" advantages.
First of all, Google has four main activities
- Performing searches for clients
- Crawling the net to get the data for the searches
- Selling Advertising
- Distributing YouTube videos

Google's search engine became dominant for two reasons
- it produced really good results and displayed the
interesting pages first (which is another discussion.)
- it was blazingly fast, NOT because it was playing games
with TCP but because the computers were fast and the
results were displayed in a simple uncluttered format.
Compared to some of the competing search engines
like the one Wired did with lots of blinky icons,
Google was "unfairly" fast because it only needed to
transmit the data you cared about and your browser
didn't need to render animation or lots of graphics.
The only wasted transmission was the Google logo,
and your browser caches that one after the first use.

Similarly, Google's advertising is popular partly
because of the financial models but also because
it's unobtrusive, a few quiet lines of text,
as opposed to slow-rendering dancing monkey banners.

I don't know much about Google's current crawler algorithms,
but the "robots.txt" standard evolved when web servers
were having trouble keeping up with search engine crawlers
(both legitimate ones and spamware), and they've presumably
done lots of work to minimize their impact.

The Net Neutrality flamewar started before
Google acquired YouTube, so that doesn't really count.
But even there, YouTube's popularity doesn't depend
on playing tricks with TCP or geographical locations;
the performance is good enough on typical broadband,
and most people who are watching YouTube are only
watching that or perhaps also downloading music,
so if YouTube were doing performance tweaks to help the
movie download faster, it's only competing with the
other graphic elements on its own pages.

There are times that users would like to have
prioritization to make some downloads slower.
BitTorrent's the obvious example, but I've also found
that iTunes video podcast downloads can slow down
the rest of my browsing, and since they're both for
material I'm not going to be using in real time,
I'd rather have them get low priority on my downlink.
Some BitTorrent clients have controls to help with it,
but it really needs ISP support for a scavenger class,
just as VOIP really benefits from a high priority.

                Thanks; Bill Stewart

Disclaimer: I work in the industry, but this is strictly
my own personal opinions, not speaking for any current or
past employers.




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