It’s a truck . . . it’s a tube . . . it’s the internet!
What self-respecting geek could possibly resist the urge to make fun of Sen. Ted Stevens from Alaska, who will now go down in history (at least internet history) as the guy who told the Senate Commerce Committee that the internet was “a series of tubes.”
Yes, it’s hilarious when people don’t understand the internet, but in this case Stevens’ incomprehension is also sad. Because the Senator doesn’t understand how the internet works, he voted to keep net neutrality out of the Senate’s version of the new telecommunications bill that’s working its way through Congress. If lawmakers don’t write network neutrality into law, we’re facing an internet whose “tubes” will be pay-to-play. Internet providers like Comcast can cut deals with companies like Google to make the search engine’s services run faster than those of Yahoo!. Or Verizon can choose to run only its own internet telephone service over its network, and if you want to use Skype then you’re going to have to switch providers.
I talked about what the end of network neutrality will mean for you in my column last week.
July 18th, 2006 at 4:32 am
His terminology and metaphors may be funny, but his argument is correct. Net Neutrality laws are foolish and would inevitably lead to a tragedy of the commons. (oh, and I have a CS degree, but that doesn’t mean I feel that I have to sneer at people who try to talk about technology in layman’s terms.)
July 18th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
The thing is, if you take his argument seriously (which I do in my column), he never mentions the tragedy of the commons. Instead, he talks about how his e-mail is slow. Then he suggests that a lack of network neutrality will mean that everybody gets their own private internet, which simply isn’t true. In fact, it means large corporations will get to set the terms on which we each as individuals receive information over the internet. So we will have less control, and less choice as consumers.
July 20th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
The details of his argument aren’t right — I’m sure his “internet” was delayed by a transient problem with some server, and not because of the volume of other traffic, for example — but the idea that neutrality causes this kind of qos crosstalk problem is valid. And when he suggests the possibility of a commercial net (rather than everyone getting their own “private internet”) that is reasonable too. The implementation might not be a parallel set of wires (sorry, I mean tubes) but the idea of differentiating between high bandwidth, low jitter, etc. traffic which is carried for a premium, and standard uses of the network like email or http is completely sane. (*)
Why should this lead to worse performance? Differentiated products are usually good for the consumer. If there’s a market for plain old web access, then the network providers will provide it, and probably more cheaply, too, since they won’t have to amortize the cost of the few heavy streaming video and bittorrent users across everyone else. If the market isn’t working (and it might not, given the lack of choice among broadband providers) then use antitrust law.
I’m afraid it’s solid FUD to suggest that because your next router will be able to be reflashed across the network, the network provider has more control over the policies it applies to your connection. They’re your network provider; they already control all the traffic you send or receive through a point-to-point connection to their machines anyway. As Scott McNealy would say, get over it. But also, you do have a contract with them. We’re not just victims.
(* It could just involve virtualizing the network link, say a home DSL connection, with a different cost and performance guarantee on each virtual link. I think this is a useful way of thinking about it: one of the leading virtualization software projects, Xen, originally grew out of attempts to provide quality-of-service guarantees for different applications.
Ironically, the expression “leaky bucket” is used technically to describe a common policy for qos traffic shaping… god forbid that anyone should use such an ignorant metaphor in describing the internet)