Month: May 2006

When it comes to the principle of net neutrality — the idea, essentially, that a packet is a packet is a packet — I’m largely neutral. Along with the political issues involved there are some technological issues that I rarely see discussed enough (and don’t know enough about to render a judgment) so I really don’t have an opinion one way or another.

Unfortunately, what I have noticed is that some advocates of net neutrality are intentionally distorting the issues at stake. Craig Newmark does just that in a Wall Street Journal debate with Mike McCurry. The claim goes something like this — what the industry wants to do is slow down connections from certain companies unless they pay a fee to large bandwidth providers. In Newmark’s version,

Do you believe Yahoo should be allowed to outbid Google to slow down Google on people’s computers? That’s the kind of thing that the big guys are proposing.

But Newmark debunks this idiocy just a bit later. The source for this is a Bellsouth exec,

FYI, Bellsouth guys have admitted that they don’t intend to play fair [according to a December 2005 Washington Post article]: “William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.”

But paying for my site to load faster is not the same thing as slowing down the speed of everyone else’s site. Rather, what telcos are proposing to do is essentially leave the existing Internet as it is and build a parallel system with higher bandwidth and lower latency and charge companies for traffic to be carried on this network.

Such a system already exists to some extent for those of us with access to Internet 2 connections, with the main difference being that I2 doesn’t charge, say, Youtube, for any of its traffic that finds its way over I2.

Is building such a separate network a good idea? Should companies be allowed to charge additional fees for data that traverses that separate network? I don’t know. But that is not the same thing as believing that “Yahoo should be allowed to outbid Google to slow down Google on people’s computers”.