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We never had Net Neutrality and we never will

I've been knocking around the internet since the days of Compuserve, BITnet, and UUCP. And in all that time I've never had a net connection which didn't carry some form of usage restriction. So the current dustup over "Net Neutrality" leaves me more than a little bemused. People are up in arms because a court recently ruled that the FCC couldn't prevent Comcast from prioritizing other web activities over bittorrent downloads.

Well why not? Bittorrent sucks up the bandwidth. Back in my UUCP days when connections were via 9600 bps (or gack! 2400 bps) dialup modems the quickest way to getting yourself banned was to constantly download huge files posted to the alt.binaries groups.

If you were a resource hog, the net admins let you know it. If you kept up being a resource hog, the net admins imposed the UDP (Usenet Death Penalty).

Oh, but back then the net admins were "the good guys", fighting to keep access open for all. They had to balance scarce and expensive resources (modem banks and phone lines, not to mention disk space) against the needs of the user community. And by and large they did a good job. But their actions were far from "neutral".

Fast forward to today. Net connections are significantly faster. Disk space is orders of magnitude cheaper. But still the infrastructure is not free. It has limits, those limits have just been pushed out beyond what most normal people would ever consider using.

Unfortunately the population of "not normal" people has grown. Comcast reacted to a very real problem faced by their users. Bandwidth hogs were degrading the experience for everyone else. Think of Comcast as you would think of the police catching speeders on a residential street. Sure it's possible to drive 80 mph past your house, but is it wise?

Proponents of Net Neutrality don't want private companies like Comcast determining the rules under which they operate their networks. Networks they bought, paid for and maintain. Net Neutrality means the government, most likely the FCC via authority granted to it by Congress, would decide how those networks are used.

Suddenly the net admins are "the bad guys".

In an effort to stave off government regulation of their businesses Google and Verizon teamed up to develop a set of principles which will guide their internet service offerings. These principles embody much of what the Net Neutrality activists want. Much, but not all. For instance the proposal recognizes that wired internet services like cable and FiOS are different from wireless data services, and thus the rules governing the two offerings might not necessarily be the same.

Sounds good to me. Wireless data is a rapidly evolving technology. Putting regulatory restrictions on how the carriers deliver data is likely to stifle innovation.

But the Gospel According to Net Neutrality says all data must be treated equally. No exceptions.

Well, except for spam. That's evil. When it comes to fighting spam, all bets are off. Internet traffic can be diverted, cut off, rerouted, and deep-sixed. All with no recourse. Get your site or server or net address on an anti-spam blacklist and you're effectively dead in the water. And since the anti-spam zealots operate in the shadows with zero accountability there is nowhere for you to appeal.

Net Neutrality? I'll settle for getting a bunch of my mail server addresses off of the SORBS list. They have a "one mistake and your dead" blacklist policy. To get off the list you have to pay these blackmailers a fee. And lots of networks use them to cut down on spam. So if you get on SORBS you can't exchange email with a significant portion of the internet.

Complain about that and the response is "my network, my rules". Paul Vixie who created one of the first email blacklists justifies it this way:

My thinking when I created the first RBL (now called a DNSBL; mine was the MAPS RBL though and so that's how I still think of it) back in the mid/late 1990's, was that universal access between e-mail servers was a greater boon to the bad guys than to the good guys, and so I worked to create a way that cooperating good guys could make their mailers less accessible. While I didn't reach my objective of stopping spam, I did help establish the "my network, my rules" theory of limited cooperation for Internet resources. Simply put, it's up to every network owner to decide who they will or won't cooperate with, and the way to get your traffic accepted by others is to be polite and to spend some effort trying to avoid annoying folks or letting your customers annoy folks.

Which of course is what the guys from Google and Verizon and Comcast have been saying all along. Their network, their rules.

Net Neutrality is a myth. We never had it. We don't have it now. And we'll never have it. There will always be bad actors which in turn will require network owners to decide who they will or won't cooperate with. Putting their decision into the hands of the FCC (or God-forbid Congress) won't alter that fundamental fact.

Posted at 14:34 by Chris Wysocki   [/tech]   Comments | Archived | Perm Link |
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