The first new idea I’ve seen in a long time on the stale network neutrality debate came from following a comment to this post (whose conclusion doesn’t match the quotation — if big enterprises want to waste shareholder capital on me, please bring it on!). Anyhow, here’s the deal:
The false dichotomy of net neutrality, and the Tariff Rebate Passthrough solution
…and the nutshell version from the previous comment:
The idea is Tariff Rebate Passthrough — i.e., the ISP can charge by byte for QOS (but only by byte) and the information service provider (Google) can rebate the costs directly to the consumer (but only to the consumer). This works because it meets the need to pay for differentiated QOS, without letting the telecom companies’ control over that payment become actual control over content. I.e., all the good parts of net neutrality are preserved, but there’s no need to give something costly away for free.
Now, I’m not sure how practical it is (any large change to a large system causes large pain), but it sure stimulates the grey cells. What it does acknowledge is that you need to look at the interests of the various actors and see how they align under different models. The one that lines them up best, wins — just as capitalism harnesses greed to do good.
I have a bone with the original academic papers on the end-to-end principle of the Internet. (This basically says “a dumb pipe is good because it preserves option value and only the edges have the context to know how and when to add value to the bits”.) The argument was presented against a technical framing. Really, it a question of economics. If fat, dumb pipes can be deployed and scaled at a lower cost than an equivalent hybrid or centralised architecture, then that ecosystem will grow faster. The honest truth is that we don’t know if the Stupid Network is a local anomaly in history (although a damned big and important one) or a permanent fixture of the landscape. It could be a by-product of the relative technical and cost constraints of CPU power, storage, transmission and battery power. Not to say the limits of the speed of light, quantum physics and human-imposed legal and social constraints. (No nuclear-powered mobile handsets, please.)
The timing whole P2P/broadband/filesharing phenomenon can in some ways be traced back to an upswing in the rate of progress of hard drive capacity. Without that we’d have had the technolgy to build the pipes, but not to create the demand.
It is possible to conceive of radically different distributed computing architectures. They’ll come about not because of some religious war between technologists, but because of cost and demand curves changing position.
The study of choices in the allocation of scarce resources resources has a name — “economics”. By publishing in the proceedings of the ACM, they picked the wrong type of journal. It’s good to see the economics coming back into the neutrality debate and the political ranting take a back seat for once.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 06:06 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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