Template Tools
| Common Sense: NN Rules Will Make Little Difference For Years |
| Wednesday, 05 May 2010 23:09 |
|
DC's Net Neutrality battles are about precedents and will affect almost nothing in the next year or three. None of the carriers are doing anything abusive that really matters. None of the rules likely adopted will seriously affect anything the carriers need to do. There will be infinite noise in D.C., then everyone outside D.C. will go back to what they were doing previously, and that's fine.
In practice, the uproar over net neutrality has persuaded the carriers not to infringe basic Internet freedoms because it isn't worth the political backlash. So they won't need to change. The FCC has taken a very broad view of what's "reasonable network management" and almost anything legit will be just fine. In particular, Bill Smith of AT&T and Jason Livingood of Comcast in D.C. have recently cited "possible" interpretations of NN that could be unreasonable and both therefore think NN is a mistake. But there's essentially no chance the FCC would actually impose ridiculous rules like they fear.
Nothing will change. A good result.
That said, I'm a strong supporter of net neutrality and glad the FCC is moving on it. I care in the long run, because some of the most powerful people in the industry have told me of plans that most of us would be horrified about. A top exec of CenturyTel was asked what they would do about Vonage competition for voice calls, for example, and told a private group on Wall Street. "Don't worry. We're ready to turn them off if they actuall become a problem." The top technical executive of a Bell years ago, deeply off the record, said to me "Dave, you don't get it. They are allowing the cable companies to protect their walled garden and won't stop us when we do the same." I also heard AT&T's current CEO, Randall Stephenson, tell Wall Street of plans that required slowing down selected traffic.
The CTO of Deutsche Telekom essentially said they would deliberately cripple video over the net in order to force the TV people to pay them. We were in front of hundreds of people at the Broadband World Forum in Berlin.
He had just described a network that would reliably carry 16 megabits or more to every home, which meant a 2 to 5 megabit video stream would get through perfectly without any "special QOS". In the same speech he had claimed the video folks would pay billions for that QOS. I asked him whether his regular network would reliably handle 2 and 5 megabit streams, and he spoke up proudly. "I designed this network myself and I assure you there will be no problem." I next asked "That means that unless the video people want more than 5 megabits (a good HD speed), no one needs to pay for QOS. So won't paying those billions be totally unnecessary?" He turned apoplectic and I believe wish he could have called the security police and have had me arrested. We both knew I was right: today's networks, whether at Deutsche Telekom or AT&T U-Verse, are designed so that "best efforts" is all you need for just about anything and there's no market for "managed services."
On the other side, Marvin Ammori from Free Press also went too far. This week he told us to worry that if the FCC didn't step in Comcast or AT&T could "(1) Block your tweets, if you criticize Comcast's service or its merger, especially if you use the #ComcastSucks hashtag. (2) Block your vote to the consumerist.com, when you vote Comcast the worst company in the nation. No need for such traffic to get through. ... (6) If you create a small online business and hit it big, threaten to block your business unless you share 1/3 or more of all your revenues with them." This isn't going to happen: real NN issues will almost exclusively come up at high speed, mostly video. Marvin's a respected friend, but while he's right about what's theoretically possible under the law Comcast isn't planning anything like that. (But look out for TV Everywhere, which is clearly violating all the principles of antitrust law.)
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, but it's time to tone down the rhetoric.
(For the record, I just made a modest contribution to Free Press. Readers need to know my bias.) http://bit.ly/bcpv9F
|