Thursday, December 20, 2007
Another confused anti-Neutrality Op-Ed
An anti-Net Neutrality Op-Ed in today's Seattle Times, Hysteria Makes for Bad Law, by information technology provider Avis Yates Rivers, is so riddled with omissions and sloppy logic, I do not know where to start taking it apart. Willful failure to explain what's happening makes bad law too, Ms. Rivers.
The article ridiculously recasts Comcast's recent interference with peer-to-peer traffic, in which an Associated Press reporter caught Comcast forging "reset" packets to disrupt transmissions from such applications as Bittorrent and Lotus Notes, as "a very good reporter's innocent mistake." There was no mistake. Comcast was blocking its customers traffic based on the kind of traffic it was. (Further, Comcast never admitted doing it despite the red-handed evidence, and never renounced it. As far as we know, they're still doing it.)
The supposed mistake was that the AP reporter did not wait long enough. The Op-Ed says, "Had the reporter simply waited, the file would have arrived unadulterated once the bandwidth became available." Aha! Arrival time does not matter. What do we need the Internet for? Why not send the file by pony express?
The sentence above has another red herring, "once the bandwidth became available." This is complete nonsense. The bandwidth was available -- indeed, Comcast was sending its forged bogus signals over said precious bandwidth.
The heart of Yates Rivers rhetoric is the conflation of connection and application. She writes, "There's nothing objectionable about [application] management as long as providers do so in a content-agnostic manner." But, "content-agnostic" means more than, e.g., don't favor Mitt over Rudy. Blocking certain applications while favoring others is itself a violation of content agnosticism. Bittorrent is currently the best way to deliver Internet video content. Was Comcast blocking Bittorrent to keep Internet video competition with cable TV at bay? The medium is the message.
It was much simpler back a few years ago when the Internet had to be stupid, that is, when computation was so scarce that you couldn't do deep packet inspection at wire speeds. That little hiatus was when the Internet matured and proved that a network that would just deliver the packets was a fertile innovation environment indeed.
Today, simple is still better. If our Internet connection were a simple Ethernet interface, it'd cost about $15 per household. But what we get from the telco (or cableco) is an interface that supports telephony, TV and Internet. It costs ten times more. And when you start snooping into the Internet packets themselves, network complexity (hence infrastructure cost) goes up even more.
Andrew Odlyzko, in work that is at least a decade old, showed that most Internet resources are way over-provisioned, and that congestion virtually always comes from a single overloaded node or facility. As far as we know, this is still true. Where there is a spot overload, it is cheaper to simply add capacity than it is to manage the packets and what's in them.
Another fact: It is approximately as cheap to implement a Gigabit link as a 56 kbit link. Despite the 18,000-fold increase in speed, most of the cost is in the right of way, the wire (or fiber), the power supply, the network-facing interface, the customer-facing interface and the modulation/demodulation logic. How fast the algorithms run is a trivial cost in the overall system. Indeed we have the **technology** to never be bandwidth limited ever again. And the technology is affordable. We could put Gigabit fiber Internet access into every household in the USA for about three Iraq-budget-months.
So mostly Yates Rivers is wrong when she says that bandwidth is finite. Where it is finite, the blame lies at the feet of the telcos . . . well, not really, they wouldn't be so stupid as to build such abundance that they have nothing to sell anymore. The blame lies with our limited vision -- we have affordable, mature technology that would make bandwidth scarcity as obsolete as horsepower from horses.
In those rare cases where a node or facility is a bottleneck and can't be up-sized, you still don't have to do what Comcast did. Instead, it is much simpler to count packets and have explicit tiers of service.
The article ridiculously recasts Comcast's recent interference with peer-to-peer traffic, in which an Associated Press reporter caught Comcast forging "reset" packets to disrupt transmissions from such applications as Bittorrent and Lotus Notes, as "a very good reporter's innocent mistake." There was no mistake. Comcast was blocking its customers traffic based on the kind of traffic it was. (Further, Comcast never admitted doing it despite the red-handed evidence, and never renounced it. As far as we know, they're still doing it.)
The supposed mistake was that the AP reporter did not wait long enough. The Op-Ed says, "Had the reporter simply waited, the file would have arrived unadulterated once the bandwidth became available." Aha! Arrival time does not matter. What do we need the Internet for? Why not send the file by pony express?
The sentence above has another red herring, "once the bandwidth became available." This is complete nonsense. The bandwidth was available -- indeed, Comcast was sending its forged bogus signals over said precious bandwidth.
The heart of Yates Rivers rhetoric is the conflation of connection and application. She writes, "There's nothing objectionable about [application] management as long as providers do so in a content-agnostic manner." But, "content-agnostic" means more than, e.g., don't favor Mitt over Rudy. Blocking certain applications while favoring others is itself a violation of content agnosticism. Bittorrent is currently the best way to deliver Internet video content. Was Comcast blocking Bittorrent to keep Internet video competition with cable TV at bay? The medium is the message.
It was much simpler back a few years ago when the Internet had to be stupid, that is, when computation was so scarce that you couldn't do deep packet inspection at wire speeds. That little hiatus was when the Internet matured and proved that a network that would just deliver the packets was a fertile innovation environment indeed.
Today, simple is still better. If our Internet connection were a simple Ethernet interface, it'd cost about $15 per household. But what we get from the telco (or cableco) is an interface that supports telephony, TV and Internet. It costs ten times more. And when you start snooping into the Internet packets themselves, network complexity (hence infrastructure cost) goes up even more.
Andrew Odlyzko, in work that is at least a decade old, showed that most Internet resources are way over-provisioned, and that congestion virtually always comes from a single overloaded node or facility. As far as we know, this is still true. Where there is a spot overload, it is cheaper to simply add capacity than it is to manage the packets and what's in them.
Another fact: It is approximately as cheap to implement a Gigabit link as a 56 kbit link. Despite the 18,000-fold increase in speed, most of the cost is in the right of way, the wire (or fiber), the power supply, the network-facing interface, the customer-facing interface and the modulation/demodulation logic. How fast the algorithms run is a trivial cost in the overall system. Indeed we have the **technology** to never be bandwidth limited ever again. And the technology is affordable. We could put Gigabit fiber Internet access into every household in the USA for about three Iraq-budget-months.
So mostly Yates Rivers is wrong when she says that bandwidth is finite. Where it is finite, the blame lies at the feet of the telcos . . . well, not really, they wouldn't be so stupid as to build such abundance that they have nothing to sell anymore. The blame lies with our limited vision -- we have affordable, mature technology that would make bandwidth scarcity as obsolete as horsepower from horses.
In those rare cases where a node or facility is a bottleneck and can't be up-sized, you still don't have to do what Comcast did. Instead, it is much simpler to count packets and have explicit tiers of service.
Technorati Tags: AndrewOdlyzko, Comcast, NetworkNeutrality, Press, savetheinternet
Comments:
It's interesting that you can see that bandwidth is finite, but you don't see that (the use humans can make of) resources are infinite. I refer of course to your peak oil bugaboo. We will *never* run out of oil. If anybody is worried about it, I will be happy to sell them a guarantee that they can still purchase oil 10, 20, or 100 years from now.
Russell, you may not think I can, but I can indeed see that the uses humans can make of resources, especially mostly-non-rival ones like bandwidth, is infinite.
Sigh. *Running out* of oil isn't the point. The point, which you'd think an economist, even an angry economist, would understand, is that demand will exceed production. One will grow, the other will not, and is likely to shrink.
Hell, we'll be able to purchase oil 100 years from now, nobody debates that. What we won't be able to do is treat like it is cheap.
Sigh. *Running out* of oil isn't the point. The point, which you'd think an economist, even an angry economist, would understand, is that demand will exceed production. One will grow, the other will not, and is likely to shrink.
Hell, we'll be able to purchase oil 100 years from now, nobody debates that. What we won't be able to do is treat like it is cheap.
Right, so, there is no such thing as demand exceeding supply -- not unless you bring the price into the picture. Then, the demand may exceed the supply at a given price. You don't HAVE to use prices as a rationing mechanism, but any other method requires you to have knowledge that you can't get. The best thing is for the price to rise.
If you understand, then, that the price will rise to the point where alternatives become cheaper, then why the worry? The alternative have never been put under price pressure, simply because they have never been a mass market item. Over time, the alternative will become cheaper.
Remember that oil used to be a waste product. Remember that Standard Oil didn't become a monopoly using government force -- it became a monopoly by standardizing the production of oil, and driving the cost through the floor.
I have full confidence that the same process will repeat itself. We're still a mostly free people and the best and the brightest still want to come here. Now, if only we would let them, but that's a different matter entirely.
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If you understand, then, that the price will rise to the point where alternatives become cheaper, then why the worry? The alternative have never been put under price pressure, simply because they have never been a mass market item. Over time, the alternative will become cheaper.
Remember that oil used to be a waste product. Remember that Standard Oil didn't become a monopoly using government force -- it became a monopoly by standardizing the production of oil, and driving the cost through the floor.
I have full confidence that the same process will repeat itself. We're still a mostly free people and the best and the brightest still want to come here. Now, if only we would let them, but that's a different matter entirely.
