Net Switzerland in Danger

Switzerland is famous for cheese, chocolate, numbered bank accounts, and for being a neutral country, which probably enabled those numbered accounts in the first place. High worth individuals felt comfortable stashing their well- or ill-gotten gains because they knew Switzerland wasn't likely to kowtow to law enforcers or snooping governments from other countries – they were neutral.

Up until the present moment, the Internet has been a neutral country; if you have enough money for an Internet connection, your traffic is accepted and delivered to its destination just like anyone else's. The product of a democratic nation, the Internet has been the ultimate democracy. People coming to the StratVantage site enjoy the same speed and priority as people going to Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, or the other mega-sites. And that's the way we like it.

Burgeoning businesses such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and YouTube have been able to catch on and grow with only the relatively minor growing pains of having to pay more to their Internet Service Providers due to an increase in traffic.

But there are folks, not coincidentally folks in the Internet backbone business, who would like higher volume sites to pay more for the privilege of receiving users' traffic.

One of the first indications of the change in attitude from the semi-altruistic policy of "We'll carry anyone's traffic, and anyone will carry ours" came last fall when Level 3 Communications refused to carry the traffic of another Internet infrastructure provider, Cogent Communications. Level 3 shut down the connection between itself and Cogent, affecting many of Cogent's 9,500 customers, including Time Warner Cable, Harvard, Boston College, and MIT, isolating them from key areas of the Internet.

According to a Network World article at the time:

Peering is mutually advantageous when both partners exchange similar traffic volumes, but Level 3 says it was carrying the bulk of the traffic in its deal with Cogent. "The larger company ends up disadvantaged because it ends up providing essentially free capacity," said Level 3 spokeswoman Jennifer Daumler. "In Cogent's case, we determined that the arrangement was not reasonable or commercially viable."

Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer disputes Level 3's characterization and says the dropped peering arrangement is really Level 3's attempt at playing hardball with a rival that has been undercutting it on pricing.

"The root cause of this is Level 3's strong desire to pressure Cogent into raising our prices," Schaeffer said. "They have been very vocal and very upset at our gain in market share and our pricing policy."

Because the Internet is highly redundant, even when a peering relationship ends, traffic may still go through, using roundabout, slower routes, but some traffic won't be delivered. Thus peering ensures quicker delivery of traffic and a more-responsive Internet. (Incidentally, if you're interested in an up-to-the-minute snapshot of how well the Internet is working, check out the Internet Health Report.)

Cogent has had similar fights with other peers, notably AOL and France Telecom, both of which ended peering agreements with Cogent. And this was not the first dispute over peering that we've seen. In 2001, a similar contract dispute led Cable & Wireless to cut off its connection to PSINet, one of the oldest Net backbone companies.

The Internet was built on this very important idea: Big infrastructure providers, whose long, high-speed communications lines crisscross the country and the world, would enter into peering agreements with other providers, thus enabling both peers to hand off traffic in order to get it delivered to its ultimate destination.

Lumeta's Graphic Map of the Internet

There would be no Internet today if these providers had not developed this system of traffic routing. If there were no mutual peering agreements, each network would have to negotiate with all other networks and charge them for handling, for example, East Coast traffic on one network destined for Google's servers in San Francisco, on another network.

While providers might be able to argue that they would have made more money by charging for peering connections, adding a huge bureaucratic system of charge backs and trades would make the Internet less free (and more expensive) and less efficient.

It turns out many of these Internet backbone providers aren't making money – both Level 3 and Cogent are bleeding cash, and Cogent is undercutting everyone's prices. So it's only natural that they are trying to increase their revenue. And their latest idea is a really bad one for neutrality, democracy, and the little guy.

Backbone providers plan to start shaking down huge Websites for protection money (Youse know, Mr. Google, it would be a real shame if sumptin' was to happen to your traffic from my network, know whad I mean?) has raised a stink among the digerati (Web originator Tim Berners-Lee) and, alas, our elected representatives, who never met a hyperbolic name for a bill they didn't like (Internet Freedom Preservation Act, Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, Net Neutrality bill, Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006, Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006).

Although they evidently have gotten the buzzword for the controversy – Net Neutrality – Congress still doesn't seem to get that the Internet, being a worldwide phenomenon, is not totally under their control. While US legislation can affect US backbone providers, it obviously cannot coerce providers throughout the world. The relevant section of the most popular bill, the Snowe-Dorgan-Inouye Internet Freedom Preservation Act, goes thusly:

(4) [Providers must] enable any content, application, or service made available via the Internet to be offered, provided, or posted on a basis that-

(A) is reasonable and nondiscriminatory, including with respect to quality of service, access, speed, and bandwidth;

(B) is at least equivalent to the access, speed, quality of service, and bandwidth that such broadband service provider offers to affiliated content, applications, or services made available via the public Internet into the network of such broadband service provider; and

(C) does not impose a charge on the basis of the type of content, applications, or services made available via the Internet into the network of such broadband service provider;

(5) [Providers must] only prioritize content, applications, or services accessed by a user that is made available via the Internet within the network of such broadband service provider based on the type of content, applications, or services and the level of service purchased by the user, without charge for such prioritization;

and

(6) [Providers must] not install or utilize network features, functions, or capabilities that impede or hinder compliance with this section.

What this section says is, Internet providers can't discriminate against its best customers. This hardly seems to be the type of thing that should be legislated. It seems more like a rule of good business. Next Congress will declare that airlines can't charge more for tickets bought close to the departure date, which also effectively discriminates against their best customers – business travelers. Wait a minute. That actually might not be a bad idea!

Alert SNS Reader Larry Kuhn sums up his attitude toward Net Neutrality enforced through US laws like this:

Personally, although I know I'm living in fantasy world, I'd prefer if we could maintain net neutrality without laws to mandate it. These types of legislated technology mandate, although they begin with the noblest of intents, always have a way of inspiring odd and unexpected corporate profiteering and bureaucratic inefficiency that will look very foolish many years down the road when the technology changes enough to disrupt the assumptions that the laws are based on.

I would liken the whole net neutrality situation to the way wireless spectrum is handled today.  The entire structure is predicated on the technology of the earliest days of analog radio technology, and it completely stifles the use of spread spectrum and other technologies that could deliver more capability more cheaply than what we are now legally allowed.

I agree with Larry. We can't rely on Congress solving a problem now without creating another problem later.

Legislating Net Neutrality is bad enough, but the act also proposes another, possibly more deeply flawed, technical solution. It prevents providers from establishing different classes of network traffic (like enabling better Quality of Service (QoS) for voice and video.) QoS guarantees are actually one of the biggest deficiencies in the current Internet. Packets are packets, and all are routed with the same priority. Those who want to provide voice or video services on the Internet struggle with this fact.

So why should you care? If the bittorrent packets of last night's episode of Desperate Housewives are delayed a few milliseconds on their way to you, it might not matter too much to you. But if the packets that make up live video or a phone call are delayed, the quality dramatically suffers and you will definitely not be happy.

Inserting QoS concepts into the way Internet traffic is routed may be required for it to take the next leap, and become a reliable, efficient delivery pipe for all kinds of on-demand, real-time content.

Congress would be wise to stay out of technical and business decisions like these and let the market take care of it. That's what happened with the Level 3 case: Users got up in arms about the disruption in service and Level 3 had to back down. Setting a precedent of regulating the Internet could be the mythical slippery slope that gives legislators the idea that they can control not only how the Internet is put together, but ultimately – like China – control the kind of content that moves over it.

If a single Internet provider started to charge large Websites more for bandwidth or to guarantee preferred delivery, they'd be cutting their own throats. If the whole industry colluded, with a nod and a wink, and all started to do it, the government could prosecute under existing anti-trust laws. Even if that was ineffective, smaller players would inevitably take the initiative to fill the void, perhaps using the tens of thousands of miles of dark fiber already in the ground. (At one point, Level 3 had 16,000 miles of intercity dark fiber capacity available for sale.)

There's an old saying about the Internet coined by John Gilmore, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." In this case, the Internet would interpret the obstruction posed by higher rates for popular sites as damage, and route around that.

There's also little likelihood, in my view, that the huge companies who depend on the Internet for their livelihood, including Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (try downloading Microsoft's patch-of-the-month over a dial-up connection), would sit idly by while they were gouged. Chances are good they'd band together and get into the telecommunications business. (Google's already doing that as a partner in the citywide San Francisco wireless project and has expressed interest in hiring a dark fiber employee who would be responsible for "Identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network.")

So I don't think legislation is the answer, but Internet users should be worried nonetheless. Think of how your business would be affected if your Website (and email) were relegated to a low-bandwidth, backwater ghetto of the Internet. Let your elected representatives know what you think on the subject of Internet neutrality, and hope they get a clue.