Continuing with that point: as long as servers, bandwidth, hosting,
rack space in the co-lo sites, etc, etc. cost money, its never going
to be "neutral" between the established companies and the start-ups.
However, losing net neutrality would make this qualitatively worse:
instead of your quantity of money determining what kind of service you
receive (between you and an end user,) the decisions of a few ISPs
would be the main determining factor. Its somewhat analogous to
moving from a competitive market to a monopoly, although in this case
the Tier-1 ISPs already have a monopoly among themselves, they just
can't demand their monopoly-rent as effectively as they would like.
One other thing that concerns me is that this issue is so often
confused with QoS issues. There is a pretty strong technical case for
prioritizing real-time traffic, and making things like email and FTP
wait (on the order of 100s of ms or so) until the network is less
congested. (Or making this traffic take longer routes, etc.) The
problem is how do you trust the ISPs to make these decisions on a
'fair' basis? What does that even mean, as a system like this would
inherently be unfair to those running email and FTP servers?
The best response I can come up with to the QoS issue is that in the
short term, the ISPs need to just invest in more capacity and give all
traffic a decent QoS, like they've been doing up to this point. Its
not as if all this real-time applications have caught them off guard,
people have been talking about this for decades, and if the ISPs
didn't plan for it that's their (financial) problem.
In the long term, however, there really is no reason the entire
internet should rely on a dozen or so for-profit Tier-1 ISPs to handle
all the traffic (and then the numerous local ISPs to actually connect
all the users to them.) As long as its more profitable for the ISPs
to deliver unfair service (and it will likely remain much more
profitable) they're always going to be attempting to do that as long
as they're run for profit. If they were owned and run collectively,
then society as a whole could decide what priority to give to what
traffic, when and how to build more capacity, etc. At this point the
ISPs are as central economically as the power utilities, roads, etc.,
and leaving necessities like these privately run is just begging to be
extorted.
Mike
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 2:02 PM, ravi <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Dec 16, 2008, at 1:17 PM, Bill Lear wrote:
>>
>> On Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at 12:38:20 (-0500) Shane Mage writes:
>>>
>>> ...
>>> But that's not what Google says it's doing. Whitt explained that
>>> Google is simply talking with ISPs about a technique called edge
>>> caching that is commonly practiced by other Web companies, including
>>> Net neutrality proponent Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN).
>>
>> A cache has a limited size, and correct me if I'm wrong, but if Google
>> is a very large portion the traffic, it will more frequently displace
>> other entries in the cache, making Google appear more "responsive".
>
>
>
> I think you may be thinking of the cache in your browser. The "edge" cache
> is something run by providers like Akamai (and Google has their own
> deployments, IIRC) that puts servers with large disks at the "edge" of ISP
> networks. Hundreds of these systems are co-located at ISP POPs which are one
> or a few network hops away from the end user. Google and other content
> providers then replicate their content from their central servers into these
> caching servers (this is becoming true even for somewhat dynamically
> generated content, but I won't get into that). With such a setup, a user's
> browser is redirected to the cache nearest to him/her rather than to the
> central server, affording, in theory, a faster response.
>
> Your second comment about neutrality are quite appropriate. Techniques
> ranging from caching, server-side bandwidth aggregation, multi-homing, etc,
> help corporations with deep pockets beat out other purveyors of content
> w.r.t response time. For the ordinary Joe independent content producer, "net
> neutrality" effectively is nothing more than a last and feeble nod. For the
> ordinary Joe consumer, I am not sure the argument proffered by the
> pro-net-neutrality crowd makes more than a marginal difference. However, a
> small gain is a gain nevertheless, and net neutrality is a good thing to
> have.
>
> --ravi
>
> --
> Geekery: http://ahren.org/code/
> Inanities: http://ravi.tumblr.com/
> Opinion: http://0sum.org/
>
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