Re: Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer vs Hal Singer

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Bob Frankston [bob37-2 () bobf frankston com]
Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2008 4:59 PM
To: David Farber; 'ip'
Subject: RE: [IP] Re:  Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer vs Hal Singer

One postscript -- I’m watching and HD show on Comcast at the moment and there are many dropouts. On some of my STBs I 
simply can't get the HD signal to work. I could, of course, call Comcast and maybe have them tweak something but...

But the claim is that you need QoS to solve these problems -- the reality is just the reverse. It's this kind of 
dependency that makes it difficult to deal with the problems. Over IP you many options from buffering to adapting 
dynamically and more. And you don't have an upper bound of preallocated capacity (except where you are locked into the 
limits of a broadband offering -- be careful what you ask for).




-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2008 14:37
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Re: Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer vs Hal Singer





________________________________________

From: Bob Frankston [bob37-2 () bobf frankston com]

Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2008 11:24 AM

To: David Farber; 'ip'

Subject: RE: [IP] Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer vs Hal Singer



I was curious to read the entire paper (or article) because, judging from the abstract, the claim doesn’t make any 
sense. This is akin to arguing that monopolies are far more efficient because they can provide guarantees that you 
can’t make if you had to compete. What is the definition of QoS and what kind of control do you need over the entire 
network path in order to make such promises? This claim would seem to deny the orders of magnitude price and 
performance improvements we’ve gotten by constraining solutions to those which didn’t depend to billable promises by 
carriers.



I found a full article at http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv30n2/v30n2-4.pdf. It makes arbitrary statements like 
“Real-time video, Voice over Internet Protocol, and online video game traffic cannot be experienced properly by the 
end-user if it is subjected to jitter (unevenness in the rate of data packet delivery)” which are simply untrue as 
those of us who’ve watched HD video over our IP connections can attest or, for that matter, the many millions who’ve 
watched YouTube.



It also says “Net neutrality proponents speak of “access tiering” — that is, offering tiered levels of qos at different 
prices” which may be true in the sense that some say but selecting such statements to quote doesn’t mean they are 
representative or even makes sense. It also says “Content providers are voluntarily entering into contracts with 
broadband service providers presumably because content providers (and their customers) value the service enhancements 
more than the prices for the enhancements.” And perhaps some are paying based on the same misunderstandings or because 
the term “voluntarily” is used in the sense that paying ransom is voluntary. But from what I know they are more 
interested in bypassing the gatekeepers than paying them off.



I could go on with a detailed analysis or rebuttal but it seems pointless when the premises are so obviously false. 
It’s disingenuous to misstate the other side and then “win” the debate by defeating a straw man.



The key fallacy is that the carriers have something valuable that they can withhold if they aren’t paid – in other 
words they can act as gatekeepers or monopolists. That’s the very constriction that the Internet’s end-to-end approach 
defeats. I often refer to the end-to-end constraint as opposed to the “argument”. The argument says we can create 
solutions at the end points. But when we are forced to do so it’s akin to evolving our immune system. We don’t need to 
theorize or come up with fanciful models. We have years of experience demonstrating the counter-intuitive results that 
with such a constraint we can do far better in a few years than the QoS-constrained telecommunications service business 
was able to do over more than a century.





From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]

Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2008 09:07

To: ip

Subject: [IP] Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer





http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1001480



"Net neutrality represents the prohibition of any contracting for enhanced service or guaranteed quality of service 
(QoS) between a broadband service provider and an Internet content provider. Such a prohibition would unwind existing 
contracts for QoS between broadband service providers and content providers. The anticompetitive harms that would be 
allegedly spared from such a prohibition pale in comparison to the efficiencies made possible by such contracting."

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