Re: Net Neutrality...

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman () meetinghouse net>]

Steve, the key piece you're missing here is that the major broadband 
providers are both
- near-monopolies in their access areas
- content providers

Not a situation where market forces can work all that well.

Miles Fidelman

Naslund, Steve wrote:
> Net Neutrality is really something that has me worried.  I know there have to be some ground rules, but I believe that government 
> regulation of internet interconnection and peering is a sure way to stagnate things.  I have been in the business a long time and 
> remember how peering kind of evolved based on mutual benefit or some concept of "doing the right thing".  For example, 
> at InterAccess Chicago, our peer policy in the late 90s was pretty much the following.
>
> 1.  Non-profits or educational institutions could private peer with us as long as they bore the cost of the circuit.  
> (this kind of connection was more beneficial to them than us).
> 2.  Comparable sized carriers got to peer with us, with each of us picking up our portions of equipment and circuit 
> cost since it was mutually beneficial.
> 3.  We would peer with anyone at any NAP we had a mutual appearance in.
> 4.  Larger network usual would not peer with smaller networks without some sort of compensation.
>
> Seemed to work pretty fair at the time and we managed the backbone by watching customer traffic.  If things got congested, 
> you paid for or peered with whoever you needed to in order to get acceptable performance for our customers.  The big guys 
> did get to call the shots and made you pay but then again they provided the largest fastest connections so I guess it was 
> fair enough.  It may have been the wild west in some ways but at that time everyone needed to get along because if your 
> peering policies were unfair you would get universally shunned and then you would have real problems.  I hate that the 
> network operators now feel the need to ask the government to step in.  When you ask for that don't be surprised that 
> the government creates a cumbersome mess and disadvantages you in another way.  The problem is that the gov does not react 
> at internet speed.
>
> I remember the first unbundling agreements and trust me when I say that ourselves and the ILEC both found the gov't rules to be 
> nearly unworkable.  We eventually started with the telecom act framework that forced them to the table where they finally sat down 
> with us and said "Ok, Ok, what do you really need here" and we banged out a pretty good interconnection agreement that was 
> workable for both of us.  Well, about as workable as it gets with an ILEC.
>
> I think what will really drive everything is the market forces.  You either provide what your end user wants or you go 
> out of business.  The customer could care less who pays for what pieces or what is fair because in the end, their 
> service provider is the only one they will punish.  If Netflix becomes universally hard to connect to, then they will 
> lose the customers.  The customer does not really care why your connectivity sucks, they just know that it does and 
> that if someone better comes along, they are gone.
>
> Maybe something better would be some sort of industry group that you could become a member of and that group could 
> resolve peering disputes through some kind of arbitration process.   The benefit of being a member could be something 
> like the opportunity to peer with any other member on demand with some sort of cost splitting arrangement.  They would 
> need something like a group wide interconnection agreement.  The responsibility would then be the industry and not some 
> appointed FCC working group that spends all of their time writing convoluted gibberish.  If the group was big enough 
> and powerful enough, the incentive to get on board would be huge.
>
> Steven Naslund
> Chicago IL


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra