In defense of the Internet - Network Neutrality
Yesterday I read the an article on Network Neutrality on CNN.com. The article was written by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and was VERY wrong.
Here’s part of what bothered me:
Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.
That is a VERY misleading analogy on many levels. Here is my counter-analogy.
Steve runs a Pizza delivery service. When his service started he used to charge per-pizza he delivered. The prices weren’t that high, and since I’m too lazy to go out and get my own pizzas I appreciated the service. I didn’t eat as much pizza as I would like to, because Steve’s surcharge was always in the back of my mind.
Once Steve got enough clients, he expanded his business and realized that he could offer a better service by charging a flat-fee. Using this new business model everyone paid a flat monthly fee, and the cost of people who ate a pizza every night (like me) were subsidized by the people who only ate 1 pizza a month.
Everyone had hot pizzas, everyone was happy.
A couple months ago Gpizza opened, they offer all the regular pizzas, but also offer the GSuper 4-course MegaPizza. This pizza comes in 4 parts which are served by midgets waiters. The midgets waiters need to be transported with the pizzas and then brought back to the Gpizza store.
For the first couple months Steve is happy to provide his loyal clients with Gpizzas, even though it did require substantially more resources for Steve to transport the Gpizzas and midgets. As Gpizzas become more and more famous, people start to complain that their Gpizzas are arriving cold, the midgets were tired from the slow ride and weren’t as enthusiastic with their serving the pizzas.
Ypizza, which has been using Steve for 10 years, sees how much money Gpizza is making and decides to make the Ysuper 4-course MegaPizza and one-ups Gpizza by providing a dancing leprechaun along side the 3 midget servers.
Steve sees that he will not be able to provide any service if more Pizza places start offering MegaPizzas. He has two options:
1.Revert to a Per-pizza business model and charge his clients for the delivery of MegaPizzas
2.Charge pizza places for the delivery of MegaPizzasGpizza catches wind of this and prepares the “Pizza Delivery Guy Neutrality” bill which mandates that Pizza delivery guys are unable to charge pizza shops extra for delivering MegaPizzas.
Now with silly analogies out of the way, a bit of mythbusting:
The Network is NOT Neutral
Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, but will restrict the ISPs in the service they can provide.
Bandwidth / Latency costs Money!
High Bandwidth/Latency applications cost money to transfer. The money has to come from somewhere. Creating laws that stop ISPs from charging the Googles, YouTubes and Skypes of the world mean that YOU and I will be paying for it instead.
YouTube/Google/Skype and Craigslist are making money
They can allocate a bit of money to provide good pipes.
When Google rules most of the Cable in the US
How neutral do you think that will be?
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I thought it was all about Quality of Service.
Meaning that like, Steve can use a specialized lane on all of the streets that allow him to bypass all other traffic, even Ypizza.
Damn, now I want pizza!
That’s a horribly convoluted and wrong analogy. Let’s try another:
GPizza and YPizza both make pizzas. However, they don’t deliver pizzas. They both hire trucking firm Veritruck to deliver their pizzas. Until now, Veritruck has told their drivers to drive whatever the speed limit is, regardless of who’s pizza they’re delivering, and they charge per-pound of pizza delivered.
Now Veritruck has gotten this great idea. They tell GPizza and YPizza that they will have their drivers only drive 20 mph, but if GPizza is willing to pay Veritruck $2 extra for every pizza they deliver for them, they’ll tell the drivers carrying GPizza pizzas to drive 30 mph. That means you, as someone ordering pizza, will always get your pizza faster if you order from GPizza because they’re paying the extra “don’t use the slow lane” fee.
That’s called extortion, and GPizza is naturally insulted by the idea, so they team up with you to make it illegal.
Drivers should drive the same speed limit, regardless of who’s pizza they’re carrying!
[...] Joel wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe Network is NOT Neutral Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, … [...]
Larry’s analogy is much better. However, let’s try a different ending.
Legislating that all drivers should drive at the same speed proved impossible to police. It was soon discovered that drivers with good lawyers were able to get away with blatantly abusing the law. The bottom line was the extortionate pricing continued unabated.
So the people got together and setup their own community based delivery service. It was done with volunteers and the goal was nothing more than quick, efficient delivery of pizzas, no matter they were from.
Problem solved. Similar solution to net neutrality is at http://www.copowi.com (community powered internet). Check out the latest survey results and see where you stand on the issue.
Sorry Aaron, I don’t think any analogy can map positively to ISP’s charging providers of online services to be able to serve data efficiently to the ISP’s customers — who are already paying the ISP for that very thing.
Customers pay ISP’s for bandwidth. Customers should be able to use the bandwidth that they pay for. No matter what kinds of streaming video or MMORPGs customers play, they are merely making use of the bandwidth and QoS that they paid for.
It makes no impact on the ISP if I am streaming video from Google or from my remote desktop at work. So, while Google may have deep pockets, I don’t. And I can’t outbid Google for the privilage of connecting to my work desktop.
Should I have to? I pay my ISP for my connection. My work is paying for the other end of the connection. Do we have to also pay a “not consuming big media” tax on top of it?
Let’s go back to the telephone analogy. Of course a large business must invest in building a customer service center. Of course they must invest in telephony and lines to service all the simultaneous calls coming in. They pay *their* telephone provider for *their* connection to the telephone network: which is certainly substantial.
Now, on top of that, must they pay *your* telephone provider in a bid-war against everyone else you could be calling, as a ransom for the privilege of being connected to you? That is absurd. It gets even more absurd if it means everyone who you speak with on the phone has to play in this bid war to get you on the line. Can your Grandmother outbid the telemarketers?
The problem in your Gpizza/Ypizza analogy is you have a pizza stand charging a flat fee and then offering increasingly costly and extravagant delivery methods to customers. Your analogy says the flat fee allows the light users to subsidize the heavy users. So be it, when costs go up The pizza shop should either increase the flat fee or go back to per-pizza. Or merely charge a different fee for extravagant deliveries. Keep in mind the customer is still the one ordering these pizzas and benefiting from the circus.
The analog in the internet world is that people who want 24/7 access to the internet saturated at 10mbit/s pay more than a 128k dsl customer does. The dsl customer would get an extravagant pizza delivery cold. boo hoo.
We all know that the real motive behind this legislation is that Verizon broadband wants to redirect all web requests for Tmobile Wireless’ website to an advertisement for Verizon Wireless instead.
Anyone who doesn’t believe me, simply point an MS IE7 web browser to Firefox’s website. Notice how the huge “download now” button is simply missing? That is the direction this is headed.
I have no IE7, so is this true?
“Anyone who doesn’t believe me, simply point an MS IE7 web browser to Firefox’s website. Notice how the huge “download now” button is simply missing? That is the direction this is headed.” (Jesse Thompson — 5/4/2007 @ 8:27 am)
Hakre, my IE7 does not do that. Microsoft knows much better to stay away from that type of sillyness.
Nice read!. Your topic about In defense of the Internet - Network Neutrality needs more comments. I\’d like to spend me Monday nights reading about how to start a trucking business
While we sit and debate about this online has anyone thought about the fact that if we have to pay extra for this, will we be here after its all said and done to continue using funny analogies and expressing ourselves to anyone who has access to a computer? Or will this topic as well as this site become a fading memory of the past and we will tell our kids and their kids how the web used to be free and information was as easy as a click of the button to anyone. Those were the good old days when big business didnt tell you what you needed to know and blogs ran rampant keeping everyone informed on everything. This will create a social and educational gap between those of us with money and those of us without. As well as enableing those who have the money to censor what they fell should be or not be sent out to the world at large. Since when did we give up our rights to make the decison for ourselves? Have we become so lazy that we wont stand up an figth for what we know is right or have we become truly complacent and believe everything the news and big money tell us is best for everyone. Its blogs like these that have keot news reporters in line and politicians a little more honest are we really going to let them take it away?