The Very Expensive Myth of Long Distance
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
First, internet transit is incredibly competitive. The protocols are designed from the ground up to support changes and redundancy in network routes, so there is not a lot preventing any company from switching ISP service aside from their contracts and the constraints of what wires reach their data center. Because of this competition, prices are always getting lower and vendors are constantly working to reduce costs. Geography is a very significant variable, of course: getting a lot of bandwidth in rural Idaho is going to be much much more expensive than getting it in New York, London, or Seoul because you won't have many options. The most expensive, of course, is in markets that are regulated monopolies; many African countries have absolutely ludicrous bandwidth costs for the same reason they are expensive to fly to.
On the bright side, though, ISPs are constantly working to make the network more efficient. One mechanism for this is peering, where two ISPs agree to exchange traffic that is bound for destinations on each other's network directly, rather than each individually paying their provider to do so. It used to be that only large ISPs would bother to work our peering agreements among each other, but over the past 10 years peer-to-peer traffic has dramatically increased traffic between different ISPs in local and regional markets, so those smaller guys have learned to do peering as well.
What does all this mean? I'm no libertarian, but it's hard not to be awed by the efficiency and power of the unregulated global internet. For whatever reason, tens of thousands of companies are working together around the world in an amazingly cooperative and efficient way, even though many of them are fierce competitors. We could certainly stand some of that in the domestic telephone market, and we'll probably get it eventually, if only because the cost of VOIP transit will probably round to zero within our lifetime.
There's also a tricky distinction going on here. If you have a Comcast cable line going to your house, your network connection is already non-neutral. That cable carries video signals over IP on a certain share of the wire's bandwidth; this share is always dedicated solely to Comcast IPTV and no matter how many blip.tv videos you have going on your laptop your digital TV will always have the same dedicated bandwidth. Is that unfair? Comcast did a lot of work putting up wires to your house, navigating a bunch of annoying state and/or municipal laws, and investing in a lot of network infrastructure, for which they clearly deserve some reward. Is it OK to dedicate bandwidth on the wire but not over IP? Seems like a distinction that will get meaningless pretty quickly.
On the other hand, there are many good reasons to be suspicious of telecom conglomerates, and it might be a reasonable policy position to say that comcast-the-internet-provider and comcast-the-cable-service should be separate companies. All I've heard from the Net Neutrality heroes, though, is vague and inactionable invective. It worries me not because I think it might work, but because it's (1) likely to generate incompetent legislation and (2) crying wolf now when we might well need coherent opposition to specific industry actions or proposed mergers in the future.
And as with a principle such as free speech, the best way to explore its topology and applications is to look at examples. Your example of preventing an ISP from slowing down another company's VOIP traffic is a great one. Paradigmatic, even. NN, in my view, can be seen as a generalization from that example. I'd also want to exclude ISPs from deciding that, say, VOIP traffic gets priority over WoW traffic, because I don't want ISPs deciding what the Net is for. Rather than having to detect similar such slowdowns and then petitioning the FCC for redress in each specific case, I'd like to see the FCC adopt (through legislative mandate) a _general_ principle that ISPs are not allowed to prioritize packets (with some set of hard-to-work-out and ever-arguable exceptions). That would leave room for ISPs to offer plans whereby users can specify which types of traffic and/or which sites _they_ want to receive priority (for the last mile, at least), and would certainly leave room for ISPs to offer tiered service.
My interest in NN is not theoretical, if only because I don't know enough -- and I greatly appreciate shimon's link and post. My motivation is exactly what shimon expresses in his third paragraph: The economic reality is that the large ISPs have a structural and just about unavoidable interest in treating the Internet as a way to give preferential treatment to their own content and services. For that reason, I'd rather have exactly the sort of structural separation that shimon mentions, in which case we wouldn't need NN regulation. This is a position shared by Yochai Benkler, Susan Crawford, and David Isenberg, to name three highly competent, reasonable, informed proponents.
As for shimon's claim that NN is all "vague and inactionable invective," well, there are lots of highly technical, reasonable, and smart people who are talking exactly about actionable specifics, along with more than occasional invective. Tim Wu, Harold Feld, and David Reed spring to mind.
Clearly the answer is to have Congress hold some hearings and add new layers of regulation. Since that always works so well.
The original rationale for this was to help spread telephone service to those parts of the country where it was more expensive to build out. This actually made sense since phones are much less useful if significant portions of the population don't have access to them. That this policy outlived it's usefulness to the extent it did is somewhat surprising.
Shame about the woeful customer service.