The Internet Neutrality Debate Explained

Okay, it looks like this is going to be one of those controversies, like the Social Security privatization debate, where the bad guys intend to push hard for a "solution" to a problem, which they're secretly manufacturing themselves, in order to bulldoze Congress and the voters into breaking a perfectly good network that the bad guys hate because it empowers democracy.

Here is what the bad guys are doing in a nutshell: they're pretending that network neutrality regulations prevent them from offering differentiated services. It doesn't, and they want you to believe it does.

Look at the arguments against network neutrality coming from the telcos, their lobbyists, their astroturfed supporters and the brainless mob of conservative clones who are snowed by them. Every last argument they have goes to the perceived need to build a "multi-tiered" Internet, with variations in pricing for variations is service quality, i.e. so-called differentiated services. What they don't tell you is that the law already gives them the power to offer differentiated services. What it doesn't do is free them from the requirement to be a common carrier.

The network geek inside me can't resist telling you that differentiated services are only necessary to optimize resource utilization in networks with scarcity. If you're building out your network backbone, you can decide to completely dispense with the extra expense of supporting a differentiated services (DIFFSERV) architecture simply by overprovisioning the network by about 30%. For various technical reasons, it really is unfair to expect American telecom companies to do that, so they really do have to implement DIFFSERV in their networks. They need to run DIFFSERV if they want to offer all those cool features they talk about, e.g. video on demand, medical remote monitoring, etc. Otherwise their networks cannot provide the reliability, latency and/or jitter guarantees those features require, and there's no way they're going to overprovision their networks to make up for that.

So why don't they just turn on the DIFFSERV mibs in their routers?

All their backbone routers have supported the standard for years. All their edge gear could support it with a software upgrade if they don't already, and most of it does. So what's the hold-up?

The hold-up is that DIFFSERV was designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to permit differentiated network services while preserving network neutrality. It's the network neutrality they want to destroy, not for the reason they give you, i.e. that it prevents them from offering differentiated services— because it doesn't— but for the simple reason that they've never liked being common carriers, they've been struggling to free themselves from that regulation ever since AT&T was brought low by anti-trust law, and they think they've got a chance to get what they've been after for the last fifty years, i.e. the end of common carrier regulation.

Don't let them snow you. This debate isn't about letting the telecom companies offer innovative new services. It's about preventing their customers from offering innovative new services to other customers unless they get a controlling piece of the action.