General

Cringely Wises Up on Net Neutrality

I, Cringely:

Last year SBC (now AT&T), Comcast, and other big broadband ISPs began to make noise about how Google wasn’t paying them for priority access and should. Feeling threatened, the Internet community tried to push through net neutrality rules that said every packet should be treated equally. The net neutrality rules haven’t yet gone through but the ISPs also aren’t charging anyone yet for priority access.Too bad those of us on the side of net neutrality were so naïve. I looked in the RFCs and saw that the Internet was defined as a “best effort” network, which seemed to embody the principles of net neutrality. So, like most other people, I assumed that the de facto state of things was that all packets were being treated equally and what the ISPs were looking for was a change in the status quo.

Silly me.

What turns out to be the case is that some ISPs have all along given priorities to different packet types. What AT&T, Comcast and the others were trying to do was to find a way to be PAID for priority access — priority access that had long existed but hadn’t yet been converted into a revenue stream.

…

So lots of we “pundits” have been sitting around believing that the Internet is a “best effort” network, which in practical terms it isn’t and probably hasn’t been for a long time. We’ve believed that by being out of compliance with RFCs this combination of QoS and non-QoS services wouldn’t work, but they do. And the result is that I can sit here with 100 times enough bandwidth for fax service and still can’t send a damned fax.

…

So instead of a true “best effort” network upon which some ISPs want to impose tiered services, what most of us probably have are already tiered services, which means that net neutrality, if imposed, would make some Internet services slower than they presently are.

…What’s to be done, then? Well we won’t be going back to true net neutrality. Revealing that it had never existed was probably a weapon the ISPs were saving for their final defense of the status quo. In the long run, the ISPs will probably get their way, too, on being paid for access to higher service tiers. But since we’ve already paid for that bandwidth, I propose the ISPs be made to share their bounty with us.

I don’t mind tooting my own horn now and then, and this is exactly what I was talking about way back when I realized that net neutrality was not what everyone said it was.
What Cringely just now realized is that there is no net neutrality hasn’t been for a long time and this is about money, not freedom.  The point is again, that if a big ISP tried to shakedown Google for access to the fast lane, Google has all the options:

At the point of the shakedown they can

1.  negotiate access to the fast lane and pay a fee (what the ISP’s want)

2.  tell the ISP to go jump in a lake and wage a PR campaign against the ISP’s evil greedy ways.  This would probably work wonders.

3.  Buy the ISP, or setup a competitor.  This would not be an idle threat.

Point is the content provider and the consumer have lots of options.  let the free market work.

And remember what the pushers of net neutrality want:  more government regulation and a nice flow of campaign contributions from a whole new income stream.

Previously:

Lawrence Lessig
Cringely Chimes In
Dueling NN commentary on NPR
Shouldn’t we be wanting less regulation?
Eric Schmidt (google)
Logic
House committee passes HR5417
Showdown
Competition for the enduser
Exhibit A
Keep the Feds Out of the Internet

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