Consider this.
I’m a cheapskate, and I’m with Tesco Mobile’s prepaid plan. I hardly use my mobile except as a camera and for brief voice notes. Under $10/month expenditure.
Tesco’s MVNO only offer Web (ports 80/443 HTTP/HTTPS) access on their GPRS gateway. This is a means of the host operator (in this case, O2) to segment the market and avoid competition from the MVNO for its premium customers.
Now, if you have neutrality rules, you get two unwanted effects:
- Tesco may have to close down their GPRS service, because it discriminates against service providers who happen not to use HTTP as their only protocol. The customer loses if the only type of Internet access allowed is 100% unfiltered.
- Tesco can never expand the service to, for example, allow POP email access whilst disallowing VoIP by inducing jitter and using deep packet inspection. The customer loses again — in this case the marginal one who may even be willing to pay a little more.
You might object that this kind of protocol discrimination will be allowed in the rules, whereas extortion attempts against individual destinations will be outlawed. I think attempts to differentiate discrimination between classes of application and classes of destination (or individual end points) is doomed to failure from the outset — it’s all too easy to game by creating new protocols and tunneling old ones. If you allow SIP but block Skype’s protocol, or vice-versa, you’ve just secured the Christmas bonus for a lot of lawyers.
I’ve said it many times before, but Network Neutrality is a treatment for the symptoms, not the causes — and it’s an ineffective anti-consumer folk remedy at that. Good intentions aren’t enough.
UPDATE: And there’s more… ISPs and telcos do more than just shuffle IP packets. What if your ISP starts re-directing failed DNS look-ups to ads? What if they bundle a device that only works with their service and you can’t get the connectivity without paying for the device? What if they give themselves preferential treatment in the retail channel? Picking at one tiny part of the anti-competitive edifice isn’t the way forward. Better to have power over suppliers through your wallet than via politicians.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 02:55 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Holy mackerel. You're one of the biggest names in Telco 2.0 and you use your mobile mainly for pictures and notes to self.
Basically, same here. If mobile minutes were ten times cheaper, I might spontaneously use more than I do. But given I stay well away from my monthly allotment of 600 minutes, I probably pay something like 12-16c/minute, taxes and surcharges accounted for. And I don't have the time or inclination to consciously march right up to 600 minutes every month to minimize my average per minute cost. For this service, I'm not inclined to save money by spending time.
I make my living off the network, as I believe you do, too. But watching how I spend my time on a metered network has the advantage that I get back minutes that I can use thinking about something else. Sort of like quitting smoking: you get that time and occupation back for productive reuse somewhere else. That, and I pay for minutes out of my pocket, not my employer or my parents. 12-16c/min leaves me feeling like I'm getting totally soaked. Mobility is a nice to have, not a need to have, despite what the mobile industry requires me to believe.
Was a 3000 minute-a-month user as a Sprint employee when the company was spread all over Kansas City before the campus. Now I doubt I cross 30 minutes a month.
Never listen to radio -- why bother when I've got 30Gb of music and podcasts of my own choice?
Have bought about 5 CDs in 5 years, but have downloaded tons of music. I even pay for it.
Went cold turkey on video games in 1992. Like a reformed heroin junkie, my only lifestyle option is zero participation.
Went cold turkey on TV in 1989. Don't own a TV. Can't stand watching linear newscasts with no "skip". (TiVo is just washing down your smack with tequila.)
Hardly use my home landline.
So perfectly positioned to pontificate on telecom and media, I think you'd agree!
I do Skype a lot. A use the web. And play DVDs on our PCs. Blog. Take photos. And meet people in the real world as often as I can. Just audiovisual narcotics just don't work for me any more.
Posted by: at August 31, 2006 05:18 PMSo, what is your opinion on the DNS redirects? There are some cool plugin options for that technology like re-directing requests for known phishing sites to an information site about phishing before allowing the user to continue on to the suspect site.
The issue is similar to QoS in my opinion. DNS redirects can be used for good or for evil. Is it, in and of itself, evil?
On one hand, if you don't like your ISP's DNS resolver you can just use a different one. OTOH, it's not easy for most people to use a different DNS resolver at this point, or even detect whether their ISP's resolver is doing weird stuff (the unfiltered Internet is weird enough already).
Posted by: at September 8, 2006 12:09 AM