Why 'net neutrality' is irrational nonsense

[Arthur]

Here's a piece worth reading on this important topic.

EU urged to ignore net neutrality delusions, choose science instead

Establish facts before making broadband regulations? Might be an idea

There are real issue of power, fairness, justice and market transparency in today’s internet. There are real uncertainties over which market structures maximise social and economic benefits. There are real questions about the practicality of different traffic management and charging mechanisms.

But Europe's misguided "Save The Internet" campaign isn't the way forward. As a responsible professional and native European, I would like to summarise why it is imperative for EU regulators to ignore calls to “strengthen” net neutrality if they want to retain their legitimacy.

‘Neutral’ networks do not exist

No packet networks have ever been ‘neutral’, and none ever will be. The idea of ‘neutrality’ is not an objective and measurable phenomenon, as shown by the recent work published by Ofcom.

It is an invention of the legal classes attempting to force novel distributed computing services into a familiar carriage metaphor.

‘Neutrality’ has an evil twin, called ‘discrimination’. Asserting that internet packets are being “discriminated” against is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the intentional and operational semantics of broadband.

Neither concept is a term of the art of performance engineering or computer science.

No scheduling algorithm is ‘(non-)discriminatory’. The assumed intentionality of random processes is false. The idea of ‘defending’ neutrality is thus a pure intellectual nonsense. Regulators who attempt to legislate ‘neutral’ networks into existence will find themselves in collision with mathematical reality.

Disconnected from actual constraints

Networks have resource constraints. One is capacity, and another is ‘schedulability’. The proposals to prevent ‘class-based discrimination’ fatally ignore the scheduling constraints of broadband. They require a cornucopia of resources (that don’t exist) to resolve all scheduling issues (which can’t happen) via an unbounded self-optimisation of networks (that is beyond magical).

Regulators who attempt to direct traffic management will find themselves sabotaging the customer experience and a sustainable cost structure.

...

This does our industry and society a disservice, and harms the credibility of the institutions whose names are attached to these works. Their authors' misguided attempts to control the definition and direction of ISP services must be resisted.

I strongly urge European regulators to ignore these campaigning ‘lawgeneers’. They have no ‘skin in the game’, so suffer no consequences for their pronouncements based on false technical assumptions.

This is a form of ‘moral hazard’. At least ISPs have a stake in the long-term viability of their services. The way forward is for regulators to establish a solid body of scientific knowledge within which the necessary debates can occur.

This needs to be done by stochastics experts and computer scientists, not lawyers. The one (and only) thing that should be ‘neutral’ is the resulting framework in which a debate over justice and fairness is held.

Moar

 

[SpiderMonkey]

Here's a piece worth reading on this important topic.

Moar

There is a big problem with this argument. It ignores the issue where the people who control the network use prioritization to unfairly advantage or disadvantage parties. For a place like the US where companies have virtual monopolies in areas they can easily introduce their own services and slow down competing products to the point where they are unusable. Alternatively they can force upstream companies to pay for using their network. This has already happened in the US with Comcast and Netflix. Take a look at Vodacom and Whatsapp. You only need 3 people to sit around the table in SA and they could literally force Showmax to pay them a fee to be usable.

 

[Arthur]

But legislated "neutrality" (which is a fiction) has much, much worse problems.

As Geddes says:

"This theory is flawed in five key ways:

•It assumes applications get the predictable performance they need. We can be sure that many applications don’t exist today because the performance of ‘best effort’ is unpredictable, so by definition they aren’t written and don’t get traction.

•It assumes that all users and developers are internalising their costs. They are not. Many applications are effectively pollution of a shared resource, and protocols are aggressively fighting for finite resources.

•It assumes there is no cost of association. A flat global address space where everything is reachable may sound attractive, but it comes with non-zero security and routing costs.

•It assumes that developers are entitled to write distributed applications with no engineering costs for performance (eg issuing profiles to DPI vendors, marking traffic). This is delusional.

•It assumed there is a mechanism for users to configure performance directly when needed. Today, that is absent. Regulators that attempt to sustain today’s mispricing of performance will find their rules incentivise a mis-allocation of resources, open up market arbitrages, and repel capital from the telecoms industry."

 

[SpiderMonkey]

But legislated "neutrality" (which is a fiction) has much, much worse problems.

As Geddes says:

"This theory is flawed in five key ways:

•It assumes applications get the predictable performance they need. We can be sure that many applications don’t exist today because the performance of ‘best effort’ is unpredictable, so by definition they aren’t written and don’t get traction.

•It assumes that all users and developers are internalising their costs. They are not. Many applications are effectively pollution of a shared resource, and protocols are aggressively fighting for finite resources.

•It assumes there is no cost of association. A flat global address space where everything is reachable may sound attractive, but it comes with non-zero security and routing costs.

•It assumes that developers are entitled to write distributed applications with no engineering costs for performance (eg issuing profiles to DPI vendors, marking traffic). This is delusional.

•It assumed there is a mechanism for users to configure performance directly when needed. Today, that is absent. Regulators that attempt to sustain today’s mispricing of performance will find their rules incentivise a mis-allocation of resources, open up market arbitrages, and repel capital from the telecoms industry."

Net neutrality can still be accomplished by restricting the users. If the user wants to use applications that have a big impact on the network then they will have to pay more. They can choose to use those applications or switch to alternatives that are usable. Of course resources are limited. In it's present form the system assumes that resources can be shared between a large number of users. That is likely to change. The pollution of shared resources is unimportant.

The cost of hosting is subsidized by the users. Take a look at mobile bandwidth. There are very few uncapped options. Users pay a premium and are careful to make use of resources that don't use up their bandwidth.

Without net neutrality there is a guarantee that here, in the US, the cable companies which are also the media companies will squeeze out all online competition or force that competition to pay a big premium to operate reasonably on their infrastructure. They will in turn mean much higher costs for users.