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

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu [Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]
Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2008 11:23 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer

On Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:06:43 EDT, David Farber said:

> 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."

"efficiencies". Yeah, right.

There's exactly *3* cases to deal with:

1) There's enough bandwidth available end-to-end. QoS is totally meaningless
in this case, and does nothing.

2) There's a bottleneck, and some traffic has been flagged as "this data
gets preferential treatment".  If QoS takes effect, then some *other* traffic
will by necessity be pushed to the rear of the queue or totally dropped.
This is what most providers call QoS.  The problem is that very rarely
does the dropped traffic belong to the same customer that asked for the QoS.
In other words, if *I* flag a data stream as "preferred" because it's VoIP
or something, and the provider drops some other of *my* traffic, that's not
a big problem.  The "network neutrality" problem is when Content Provider X
flags something with QoS, and in the process of providing that traffic to
some other customer of my provider, *my* traffic gets dropped.

3) There's a bottleneck, and some traffic has been flagged as "bandwidth
scavenger/can be dropped".  When QoS kicks in, it of course is the first
data to get heaved over the side. This would be nice if it happened, but as far
as I can tell, it's basically a mythical beast that's rarely if ever actually
sighted in the wild.

The problem is that "efficiencies" (mostly not needing as much of an upstream
pipe because you know what data has requested dropping) happen in the third
case, but most providers try very hard to conflate that case with the second
case, which can provide a revenue stream for them...





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