Is Net Neutrality a Good Thing?

Posted by JohnP 10/02/2009 at 09:27

ISPs, Internet Service Providers, are in a tough position. They oversubscribe their networks like the phone company has been doing for 100 years. As customers use more and more of what was promised, unlimited downloads at X speed, the ISPs are getting into trouble because they don’t have enough bandwidth for everyone all the time. It is only a very few users that cause problems for the company – that’s where the new-ish abuse clauses added to your ISP agreement come in and why download limits happen. 0.5% of users fall into this abuse clause. Now, imagine your city is full of college students all using p2p and VoIP. You don’t use VoIP, but you do use p2p. Do you mind if p2p is given a lower priority so VoIP traffic can work better? Should these VoIP phone calls be given higher priority over your traffic? That’s the question of Net Neutrality.

The real issue is that prioritization often isn’t enough. When the ISP receives more traffic than they can handle, it becomes a denial of service for everyone and almost all traffic is impacted. They have 2 choices, be aggressive about closing low priority traffic (p2p) by sending RST TCP packets or let that part of their network crash. Obviously, some of you will say they need bigger pipes, but that takes months to design, then months to build and they’ve been doing that for years – it isn’t getting any better. So, do they let their network crash or be nasty to p2p traffic?

With Net Neutrality, all traffic has to be treated the same; all packets are treated with equal priority. That means that when P2P traffic ramps up, web surfing, email, VoIP, VPN traffic all need to be RST just like P2P to keep the network working. It isn’t just P2P traffic, video traffic from Hulu, Youtube, Netflix and other sources also add to the traffic. Think of all the customer phone calls to the ISP that will happen. Think of all the VoIP traffic dropped? That will create lots of calls and complaints to the FCC for action since the ISP is obviously in an agreement with the phone company to prevent VoIP providers from working. It doesn’t matter that all traffic is impacted or that the ISP is trying to reduce the impact for most of their customers. The least evil thing the ISP can do is selectively RST p2p traffic since much of that is downloading copyright material anyway. I don’t have the traffic stats, but let’s say that only 50% of p2p traffic is for copyrighted material. That’s still a bunch. BTW, I think it is much higher, perhaps 90%. There are only so many Linux users getting the latest distro legally via p2p out there. The rest is music, TV, and movies being pirated, IMHO.

This Net Neutrality thing will force ISPs to create tiers of service and lower the price for customers who accept lower tiered packages. Similarly, those users with higher traffic needs will be charged greater amounts for the privilege. I wouldn’t be surprised should all VPN access be blocked without the highest priced plan – since VPN is used for business use. I’m surprised that the big ISPs haven’t already created Full Access and Protected Access internet plans.

  1. Full Access is obvious – all the internet has to offer, minus the things they already dropped like USENET.
  2. Protected Access would block all inbound traffic, setup a proxy to block porn and websites that aren’t child friendly, and control which client machines can access the internet. No P2P would work, neither would VoIP or VPN. You wouldn’t be able to run any servers (which are probably illegal in your ISP contract anyway) and no game servers.
  3. A further capability could be to place you behind a corporate NAT router and have corporate-like PC management. Imagine your home network as part of a huge company network with patches pushed when IT decides. It can be done today. I’ve seen companies manage over 100K users in this way. I’ve seen what happens when a virus gets in too. They shut off the network for an entire campus, perhaps 5k users, while they got control of the virus.

Some parents would pay extra for this Protected Access, even without 100% assurances that you are protected.

Full disclosure – I DO NOT work for an ISP. I have designed networks and equipment monitoring systems for an ISP.

So, is Net Neutrality a good thing when you understand these other impacts?