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July 11th, 2006

Ed Felten on Net Neutrality

Ed Felten has posted a really great technical overview on the Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. The paper isn’t long, so hopefully lots of non-technical people will read it. The connection between technical router policy and larger network neutrality policy is very valuable.

I’m unclear on one point, though. Prof. Felten argues that the importance of quality of service guarantees, often a retort to proposals for network neutrality mandates, can be overemphasized. He suggests that QoS is inapplicable when the speed needed by the application is either greater than, or significantly less than, the speed of the network. Speed, in this context, seems to be both latency and bandwidth. Prof. Felten suggests that voice applications don’t really need QoS, because the speed of the network is great enough in comparison that the “valleys” of speed are never too severe.

The reality, though, is that we’ve never had an Internet with end-to-end QoS guarantees. While voice might not need QoS, other high-bandwidth interactive services might benefit highly from regularized speed. This kind intelligence just seems to make sense to further additional innovation.

Prof. Felten concludes that we need more time to determine what regulation would be appropriate. I think that’s right. The bills we’ve seen ignore the subtle technical points that he covers in today’s paper.

Posted by M in Net Neutrality, Interesting Link

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Net Neutrality, Interesting Link. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Ed Felten on Net Neutrality”

  1. Tim Schneider says:

    The problem, of course, is that they’re investing in the hardware necessary to discriminate now, not to mention business models that rely on the ability to discriminate. These investments will be a compelling argument against regulation later . . .

    July 11th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
  2. M says:

    Tim, that’s definitely been a strong view of the pro-network neutrality regulation camp.

    I don’t think that there’s much question that routers and network equipment are going to get smarter, with network neutrality rules or not. Moore’s law ought to apply to the processors and equipment that sits in the middle of the Internet just as much as it applies to your desktop computer. If the processors and memory capacity of these routers increase faster than the growth of network traffic, which I believe is true, there are more things that you can do to network traffic. I’m not sure of the history of this, but limited and expensive networking equipment probably contributed to the end-to-end model.

    So I’d suggest that the capacity to do deep packet inspection, and to break net neutrality, will continue to grow as infrastructure is updated.

    That’s not to say that there isn’t an entrenchment concern that’s valid. What you might be concerned with are business models that start to use these new capabilities in harmful ways.

    I simply have no confidence that we can draft a law (or get is passed) that will adequately prohibit socially negative conduct without blocking important innovation.

    It’s possible that discretion could be given to an agency, to help sort out the case-by-case problems that Felten suggests. Given the power of the broadband players, though, and the track record of such agencies, I don’t think we’d like that outcome either.

    July 11th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
  3. Tim Schneider says:

    That’s an interesting argument. I don’t know much about the rationale for the end to end argument at all, but I’d be interested if you know where such information might be available.

    Hmm. First, I actually share a reflexive antipathy to government regulation, but there’s actually a fairly long history of just this sort of regulation, though admittedly with different technology. The alternative, leaving this in the hands of monopolists, is equally bad.

    July 11th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
  4. Tim Schneider says:

    Ugh, that was a little incoherent. Obviously time to go home. More later

    July 11th, 2006 at 5:55 pm

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