Telepocalypse

Pooper scooper

I’m just having some fun taking a Waitrose Colombian coffee flavoured milk drink break, reading David Reed’s submission to the recent FCC hearing. It’s all about Comcast’s approach to squishing BitTorrent traffic on its broadband network. (Sorry, no link, I’ve only got a copy via email.)

I’m not in favour of network neutrality regulations, and feel that Comcast did a Bad Thing™ that should be punishable under existing consumer protection, contract and tort law.

In his submission, David puts forward several ideas. The first says:

All it takes to be part of the Internet as an Autonomous System is to agree to participate according to the very simple ground rules of the Internet.

Bzzt. There is no social or legal contract to adhere to the IETF’s recommendations. To me this feels like communitarian nonsense (in the nicest possible way, separating the argument from the arguer). I think this confuses what should be (maximising total utility through co-operation) with what is (a prisoner’s dilemma-style game where cheating can be rewarded). This is entirely a private matter between Comcast and those other networks it interconnects with.

Somehow, the dignified manner in which IETF standards are arrived at is supposed to re-inforce this point of view.

These congestion control techniques can only work well if they are standardized across the entire Internet. New techniques are introduced carefully, typically orchestrated in the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is a collection of engineers and researchers who resolve these issues Internet-wide, independent of the vendors and operators, but taking their needs seriously.

No, I’m more than happy for ISPs to experiment with techniques that the IETF thoroughly disapproves of. Central planning, even that of benevolent technocrats, is fraught with danger.

A more convincing argument comes later:

Comcast used these non-standard mechanisms in an unexpected way, potentially disrupting systems and applications that are designed assuming the expected behavior of the Internet.

It’s not what you’d write in a public submission, but Comcast’s actions is a bit like a dog poo in the public park. Not only does it offend those who tread in it, but now everyone else has to expend time and energy looking for poo and telling their kids to keep away from the grass near the entrance. There’s an externality which is imposing costs on application and device designers everywhere. I’m happy for us to have regulations that manage pollution, but that carefully balance the true costs of the pollution against the immediate benefits of production. If in doubt, regulate less. Indeed, in this case, probably not at all, since if a legit P2P application was being messed up, Comcast customers would either churn or be willing to pay less.

And the real reason to be furious at Comcast comes at the end:

When Comcast or any Internet Access Provider claims to offer Internet Access, they implicitly agree to participate according to the standard practices of the Internet as a whole. Otherwise, all they may claim to offer their customers is “selective access to part of the Internet’s capabilities”.

Now, we might disagree what those “standard practices” are, but to me it’s limited to:

• social measures to manage traffic (pick up the phone and tell the customer they’re over their fair use limits), or
• applying traffic shaping to users with clearly defined and transparent policies and a system of individual notification of any special throttling,
• dropping packets until the pain to that user modifies their behavior.

Event if RST injection (i.e. automated lying) is superficially the most efficient way of damping the traffic, users will respond to less technically efficient (but more socially acceptable) incentives. Yes, DOCSIS cable networks have a whacky uplink architecture that makes them very sensitive to lots of TCP/IP sessions being started at once, such as BitTorrent attempts. Just start chucking away 99% of their packets, irrespective of protocol, to reflect the social cost to the other users of uplink congestion. They’ll soon get the message and change when their Web browsing slows to a crawl. At the very least send them an email saying you’re throttling them, and why.

Picking on specific protocols, without telling the user, and then denying it, just isn’t part of the game. Particularly protocols that compete with your own video distribution network. Time for the referee to call a foul, and Comcast to scrape the sh*t off everyone’s shoes.

UPDATE: Before anyone gets too excited that Martin’s gone all neutralist, the offence is one that’s of the poop in the park magnitude, not that of premeditated murder that some more hysterical accounts would have you believe. Antisocial, irresponsible, stupid — but not criminal.