When a wee website gets pointed to by a big website, like Digg, it often falls over. That’s because it’s not in the host’s interest to pay a huge hosting bill just because everyone and his Internet dog would like a peek.
Now, who would disagree that a great improvement in the system would be for someone to be able to host their web site on, say, Amazon Web Services EC2/S3 platform, and set a limit on how much they were willing to pay out of their own pocket to host the site per month. Then, once they’ve hit that limit, the requesting ISP has to pay instead.
So now I can choose to subscribe to a ‘premium-enabled’ ISP, and get to see all that content that’s been Slashdotted, and get a monthly top-up bill for the pleasure.
Can someone who wants a network neutrality law please explain to me how they’re going to word it to avoid preventing such improvements to the Internet. Anyone?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 05:23 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/915.
Martin, I laugh at your strawman argument. Who's been buttering your bread lately?
What you are describing can easily be solved through agreements between /endpoints/ in the network, without in any way involving the ISP(s) or invoking network (non)neutrality.
Furthermore you might pick a problem that hasn't already been solved. (Tip: Google coral cache)
Now go away or I will taunt you a second time. :)
Posted by: at April 19, 2008 07:14 PMMartin,
Interesting idea. Not sure I have any answers; I'm not a pro-regulation guy generally. How would this be different than having my ISP be the bill collector for my porn site membership (for example)? And why must it be the ISP instead of Amazon collecting the "premium" in your example?
Granted the premium would be for popularity, not pretty pictures, but it still seems like more of an accounting issue than a transport or access issue. The ISP wouldn't be restricting access per se, the publisher would.
Frankly I think the NN crowd would be better served lobbying for true competition in the access pipe, then this silliness would all go away by itself.
Posted by: at April 20, 2008 10:45 AMOh come on Martin, this example has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. There is no preferential treatment, just reverse payment. Google does something similar with Blogspot. You don't pay them, but they hope you start using adwords or something else.
Have a look at Andrew Odlyzko's paper on net neutrality and preferential treatment on other networks. http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/net.neutrality.pdf It goes into why there were networks in the past (canals and railroads that had differentiation for types of goods, but disallowed discrimination between individual producers of the same good.
You're right regulating this will be hard. But are you really happy with Virgin or BT just saying that itunes will have to pay treble the costs of Amazon MP3 because that is how they see the world?
Fact is that currently there is no shortage of bandwidth. Nowhere in the network there is a shortage of bandwidth except at the end-points. In the UK and the US there may be some problems with regards to backhaul, but those are mostly regulatory. There is absolutely no reason to expect a bandwidth shortage any time soon. If there would be a shortage than telegeography wouldn't report dropping prices in long haul prices.
If there is abundance,if there is no shortage, why would we need differentiation.
Good luck,
Rudolf
Posted by: at April 20, 2008 09:07 PM
Martin I'll concede that there is no obvious way to word a law enshrining strict network neutrality that does not run at least some risk of preventing an ISP from innovating. At least in North America however this is a purely hypothetical risk as the ISP market is an effective duopoly of cable and incumbent telcos neither of whom have ever been known to innovate. If there were robust competition one could perhaps count on market forces to ensure that both neutral and "improved" bandwidth were available assuming enough consumer demand but as no such competition exists regulation is required to prevent the destruction of existing real innovations; regulation that yes could interfere with potential telco/cableco innovations. For example in Canada both Rogers (the largest cableco) and Bell (the largest telco) have begun throttling P2P traffic ostensibly to resolve network "congestion" and improve performance for the average user. If congestion were truely the issue would not by the bit pricing be the solution? One wonders whether their respective television subscriber bases are also part of the calculus. In Bell's case they've even throttled wholesalers who otherwise might offer their customers the "inferior" congested service.
Posted by: at April 21, 2008 04:59 AMMartin,
I agree with Rolf that this is not a particularly good example of Net Neutrality issues.
However, the differentiation is pricing and service levels is an interesting idea. The proposition could include any combination of payment (reverse, ad-funded, subscriber pays, pre-pay, etc).
But different from what Rudolf seems to suggest, this pricing/proposition innovation has nothing to do with either a shortage or abundance of bandwidth capacity. And different pricing between 'procuders of the same good' is an economic fact, typically based on demand, agreements, service levels etc. Martin, suggests that by introducing different tiers of service levels differentiation in pricing/proposition may occur.
BR
Colin
Posted by: at April 21, 2008 12:14 PMcolin,
I don't disagree with the possibility to introduce this new way of paying for access to content that is not available anymore because of slashdotting.
I do however oppose the idea of Network Schmootrality. As I do think that there is serious reason to belief that not keeping the net neutral will seriously degrade the possibilities for countries and companies to compete in the services and content market.
The main argument for Non-network neutrality is about price differentiation being necessary to pay for the network, which in my opinion is a load of you know what :-)
People aren't paying for youtube videos and slashdotted content.
GameRail just went bust
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/GameRail-Closes-Up-Shop-93738
You know who would pay to have their content privileged? Advertisers. The argument you've made here isn't that strong, but your other one, about the advertising-funded Yahoo! broadband for poor people would.
Who would fund it? Perhaps Merck, to tell you their drugs are safe? http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=merck+advertisements
Posted by: at April 21, 2008 07:36 PMMartin,
Net Neutrality aside, how realistic are these complex reverse payment models in terms of implementation. The idea sounds great, and I could see potentially paying such a premium to get through to overburdened content, but, what is the administrative cost do to the OPEX of the system. Micropayments were supposed to be a savior, but few have them effectively deployed. As a corollary, I look at US healthcare where there are thousands of individual settlement contracts putting a miserable 25% overhead tax on the system. Compare this to Singapore with one payment method and 2% OH.
This may not be the most compelling comparison, however, "technology will wring out the efficiencies" does not pass my sniff test on the complex models.
-Todd
Posted by: at April 21, 2008 09:03 PM