Talk about 'Network Neutrality' seems to occur in rushes. You can not hear about it for months, and then everyone wants to express their opinion on the matter. And I'm no different. I ranted about it already in 2008 with a post titled "Net Neutrality at a glance".
I hear a lot of different stories for pro's and cons on manipulating network traffic, and I'd like to share my view.
What it's about: Network Neutrality
The following YouTube video explains this very well.
It's about ISP's determining what you can or can not see or do on the internet. The ISP can block traffic to certain sites, or give priority on certain kinds of network traffic (such as HTTP in favor of torrents).
It's all good, no?
There are legitimate use cases for interfering with internet traffic. Take the example of e-mail and spamfilters. Your ISP will most likely filter every incoming e-mail sent to you, and determine if that message is spam or not. If it's spam, the ISP will decide to block it, in order to protect you.
That is, in fact, a violation of Net Neutrality, because someone is messing with your internet traffic.
Compare it to roads and drugdealers
Perhaps a far stretched example, but one that proves my point. Think of the internet as roads in a country. Everyone can drive on the roads, and everyone can go where they want. On those roads (= the internet) there are houses (= websites) that people want to visit.
What if the maintainers of the road would suddenly decide to block all traffic to a certain street, because it is occupied by drug dealers? While the idea sounds protective, it's not within their right to do so. Instead of blocking traffic to their street, the source should be removed: the houses with drug dealers need to go. The roads should remain open.
The very same goes to the internet. No one should mess with the network traffic, but actions should be taken upon the websites themselves.
Opt-in instead of globally defined
In the e-mail & spamfilter example, the interference is allowed because it is "opt-in". You can choose to take a spamfilter to protect you. It's not something that is forced upon you, where you have no means of controlling what happens.
The very same should happen to blocking dangerous websites or prioritizing network traffic. It should be end-user's decision to use such a feature. That same end-user should know what's happening, and what is being blocked.
The opt-in idea is not so ISPs could charge extra money for the service (which I'm sure a lot will do in the end), but it's a matter of choice and free will.
It's already too late?
The internet is already being censored heavily. Europe remains fairly free, but Asia and Russia are subject to massive internet control.
World map: censorship in different regions
There are worldwide blocks being performed on sites such as WikiLeaks, Facebook and even WikiPedia. Why? Because a government deemed it a possible threat to the country, and uses ISPs to control the information flow.
The real internet backbone
My fear is that in the end, all countries will enforce these kind of network traffic manipulation. Either on their own accord, because they think they're helping the end-user, or because a government is forcing them to take action.
In its beginnings, the internet was free and without limits. That is how the internet should remain. Information, regardless of who it came from or what it contains, should be able to flow freely over the internet. If it turns out to be illegal information (ie; child pornography), the persons responsible for it should be brough to justice. There should be no measures that impact every user, without their consent and approval.
The internet needs to remain open. No one should interfere with network traffic.
I don’t agree.
I’ll stick to your example. The roads have also rules about the traffic. People do need rules, do need to be organised, otherwise our sociaty doesn’t work.
Your dryg dealers for example: when they are using the road, the police will lock them in and prohibit them to do their activity on those roads, eg selling drugs.
Your opt-in: no, even in our sociaty we have rules. You cannot opt-in to be a child porno lover, you cannot opt-in to murder someone, … Not even on the “free” roads.
As a society we choose rules to protect ourselves. A society takes part in a giant “opt in”, which are called elections and democracy, where the majority chooses some opt-ins for us all.
Why should we make the internet a different kind of society, where we give free way for crimes? Why can we not block child porno in every way we see fit?
Your cry for net neutrality is nothing else then the everlasting cry in every democracy: it’s about your freedom. But never forget that your freedoms ends where my freedoms start. And since there is always overlap, we tend to have a government which sets the rules for those overlaps, including the roads. And we also have a sound appetite to criticise those governments when they torn on our freedom.
Which is good. Therefore it is good that you consider the pro’s and con’s of net neutrality, but as explained, I don’t agree that the internet should be a freehaven where everything is possibly.
@David; perhaps the example if child pornography is an obvious one, everyone would like to see it blocked.
But what about religion, or freedom of speech? What if journalists are being blocked online, because they write about slavery and corruption in a country, which is against the will of the government? What if WikiLeaks would suddenly publish a paper on Belgian corruption, and our ministers wish to block the site(s)? Where does the democracy begin, and dictactorship end?
Having “open roads” can be a burden as well as a blessing, but I feel it’s an important foundation on which we need to build our “future internet”.
Your examples are as clear as mine. No way these kind of features can be used to block freedom which we value highly in our society.
But once again, this comes to the fact that a society has the right AND the duty to make rules. A good functioning democracy has to guard the fundamental freedoms.
In fact, I have already been 15 years involved in legislation on internet (ab)use and I always had one golden rule: the internet is no different than the rest of the society.
To keep into the example: we do shape traffic. We have roads where we don’t allow heavy trucks. Why wouldn’t we have rules about which traffic is more important than other?
The problem with the current discussion about net neutrality is not about all these fundamentals, but just about money. Google is making a lot of money and other players want to see their part of it.
American providers are claiming they have the burden of the cost of the network, and Google has a lot of traffic on it (and yes, Google is using a lot of traffic, we see it on the routers of Nucleus what impact it would have if we would peer directly to Google and we are then even not an access provider).
But in fact the network is already being paid twice because access providers with a major download pay for the full synchronous bandwith they achieve, but content deliverants are also paying for their hosting.
So I believe that the current discussion is just about money: content which has a value; should it share a part of the value to the media on which they travel?
If I keep my golden rule, I get to the same example as your roads. Yes, we all have to pay taxes to use the road. And yes, we pay more when we drive more valued cars even if we do not stress the roads more but just because that is a choice in our sociaty.
But we don’t pay more wheter we transport scrap or jewels.
We pay more to the postal services if our package is heavier and we pay extra if we want insurance, but we don’t pay more for a high value love letter than for an invoice.
But we do pay more when we want an express delivery, rather then an economic rate for a standard letter.
Can we do the same to the internet? Why not let companies who want and can pay more, use more QoS than others?
Yes, we can and we should too. Business who are making money, tend more to be inventive than industries who are just doing OK.
And maybe we can have a democratic decision that part of those extra speed fees are taxed and these taxes can be used to do some R&D, to provide internet for everyone, etc…
@David; I see your point on prioritizing certain kinds of network traffic (defining different QoS’s for each service). And depending on how it would impact the lower-priority kind of network traffic, I can live with it. But that’s a matter of shifting priority, it’s not about blocking the traffic entirely.
My fear remains that our “freedom of speach” (which is already limited, as it’s forbidden to publicly support Hitler for example) will be hindered of ISPs decide to take matters into their own hand. Or if governments oblige ISPs to completely block websites or networks, because it “might be dangerous for our society”.
To continue the road example: while some roads are limited to heavy trucks, they will still be able to reach their destination via another route. If nation-wide DNS blocks would be enforced, or IPs null-routed, there is no way of reaching the destination. (unless via routing your traffic over other ISPs (for the IP block), or via other nameservers (for the DNS block)).
There are a lot of PRO’s in manipulating network traffic, but the drawbacks have the potential to completely control public media via the internet, and to limit sources in order to control the country’s population. Perhaps not something we’ll see in Belgium for the next few years, but the way China controls network traffic and access is downright scary.
I agree and disagree.
I see both sides clear enough.
I feel it comes down to extremes.
Arms dealers, drug dealers, money launderers, child or adult extreme porn, are things that need to be kept in line.
When it comes down to out of this area home users, they should not have such tracking enforcement upon them.
The unfortunate thing is since the ccomputer was invented, ALL information has been being stored in the Mainframe.
Everytime someone clicks online or to a site, it is registered.
So as Bill Murray siad in Scrooged; Be good for goodness sake.
Crime prevention is a totally apart thing from Big Brother, the Map above is scary alright, think i will pass on Australia this year.
One point about the net neutrality discussion and pertinent analogies. I’d say that any private corporations that want to prioritize user’s access to higher- value content already have a system (possibly more than one) where they can experiment with the concept. At least in the US, the media companies have the cable TV services, which they have far more control over. They can transform its operation to take advantage of TCP/IP style traffic management features, while shaping things to their liking. If people like how it works, then traffic will migrate to their “private web”. In the meantime, let them provide access to the Internet without prejudice.
In addition to the analogy of public roadways, we can think of how public access, traffic regulations and content restrictions have worked with postal and package delivery services, and landline and cellular phone networks. Most if not all countries have public postal services as well as private delivery industries — the privates keep public mail from getting too stodgy (hopefully), while the public mail hopefully guarantees universal access.
Another side we could look at to understand the money angle: if the companies pushing to overturn net neutrality really think they need more cash, can they show a financial case for this? How many of the ISPs or other service providers are, if not going broke, suffering from lack of investment capital to finance further expansion and upgrades? Has anyone seen economic data that would support this argument? In fact, what sorts of symptoms would you expect to see in a system that is suffering from either insufficient or badly distributed charges-to-traffic?