Bandwidth Fines Bad, But Not Net Neutrality Issue 159
On April 13th I received an e-mail from FreePress.net, one of the organizations that led the fight in favor of Net Neutrality:
Just as we're suffering economically, Time Warner Cable is trying to squeeze us even further, forcing millions of customers to pay steep fees for exceeding an absurdly low monthly limit on Internet use. [...] The company's scheme would cost customers $15 per month for one gigabyte — the equivalent of one 30-minute HD television show — with a penalty fee of $2 for every additional gigabyte over the limit.
Later, FreePress.net triumphantly announced that Time Warner had reversed their position. Now, I would appear to have painted myself into a corner on this issue, because I wrote in an editorial two years ago arguing in favor of Net Neutrality:
[Net Neutrality is] not about how much a service costs, but about the ethics of double-billing for it. [...] If vastly more people start trying to stream CNN over the Internet 24/7, and fully using the services that ISPs have "only been pretending to sell," as Brad Templeton put it, then ISPs may have to charge more for users who consume too much bandwidth, encouraging people to stay at today's average levels by rationing themselves and perhaps watching 24 on their $5,000 TV sets sometimes instead of downloading it off of BitTorrent to their laptop every week because it makes them feel like a haX0r. Much as we all love our unmetered connections, it wouldn't be a violation of Net Neutrality for ISPs to charge users for bandwidth hogging, to keep everyone from going too far above today's levels.
And yet, even after writing those words, I still think there is an argument against letting ISPs impose bandwidth fines, at least under some conditions. However, I think the argument is completely separate from the argument in favor of Net Neutrality, so it's important to derive both of them independently of each other.
I would try to make both arguments by deriving the conclusions from first principles. This might seem pedantic at times, but I think it's helpful to have a precise mathematical-style "proof" of why a conclusion follows from its premises, because then you can see how changing one premise would change the conclusion.
To me the simplest argument in favor of Net Neutrality follows from three assumptions. You don't have to agree with the assumptions, but I think that all three of them are obvious because the opposite would be untenable.
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An ISP that blocks (or slows access to) certain websites is defrauding its users UNLESS either (a) the ISP has made its users aware of the filtering, or (b) it's overwhelmingly clear that the filtering protects the users or improves their experience (so more experienced users would assume it is taking place anyway). If your ISP has told you that they're selling "Internet access" but they're silently blocking some Web sites, then this is straightforward. You're paying for one thing, and the ISP is selling you something else that is inferior. In the incident that I wrote about, ISPs like Rogers.com that used AboveNet as their upstream provider, were actually blocking their subscribers from reaching certain websites, even though their customers thought they were getting unfiltered Internet access. Now if the ISP advertises that its Internet connections are filtered, as some "family friendly" providers do — so that virtually all users knew about the filtering — then this would not be a violation of Net Neutrality. And if the ISP is blocking mail from actual spam sources, then this is something that protects users and improves their experience, and so is usually not considered a violation of Net Neutrality either. But if the ISP is silently blocking access to Web sites, or blocking mail from servers that are not sending spam but simply because the ISP owner has a political disagreement with those server owners, then that would violate this principle.
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"Make its customers aware" means just that — make its customers aware — and not bury something in the Terms of Service. Imagine if the opposite principle were accepted — that websites and software vendors could do anything they wanted as long as they put the right disclaimer in the 23rd paragraph of their site's or program's "Terms of Service" that nobody reads. Scam artists' eyes everywhere would light up with dollar signs thinking of the possibilities: Create a popular program and get people to install it, while putting a clause deep in the TOS that permits them to remotely take over your computer after you've installed their software! Or for a real-world example, Yahoo! once tried to amend the GeoCities Terms of Service to give Yahoo! the copyright on any content uploaded by their users. Yahoo! reversed itself after a public backlash, but even if they hadn't, it would have been good public policy for a court to say that Yahoo!'s copyright claim on their users' content was invalid. You can, of course, strengthen your legal rights by putting the right language in your Terms of Service, but it would mean total chaos if companies could bury "gotchas" in your TOS that are wildly contrary to what users are reasonably likely to assume.
- If company A sells something to company B which company B then re-sells to the public, but company B almost certainly cannot resell the good without committing fraud as outlined above, then company A is complicit in the fraud as well. Some of AboveNet's defenders argued that they mostly sold Internet connectivity to ISPs, not to the public, and the ISPs knew that the connections were filtered. Even assuming this were true, the ISPs still would not be able to re-sell the service to the public without representing it as "regular Internet access" — nobody would pay full price for a broken or degraded connection when a competitor could offer a regular connection for the same price.
So, an ISP that blocks or degrades access to certain Web sites, when users think they are getting full unfettered Internet access, is cheating customers (or, in the case of a backbone provider, complicit in the downstream ISPs cheating their customers) in violation of the principles of Net Neutrality. QED. I would tentatively call these assumptions airtight; at least, I cannot think of any corporate behavior that violates one or more of these principles and should be allowed under good public policy.
By contrast, the argument against Net Neutrality — that the free market will ensure that ISPs provide effective service without the need for government regulation — relies on assumptions that might sound reasonable, but have loopholes, and the loopholes are precisely where Net Neutrality violations can slip through. An anti-Net-Neutrality editorial by Sonia Arrison, for example, argued that "consumers would never stand for blocked Web sites." However, in the case of AboveNet's filtering, downstream users did of course "stand for it," because they didn't know about it, and the natural assumption, when the user sees a website not responding, is to think that the site is down, not that their provider blocked it.
But the argument against bandwidth fines is different. While "broken" Internet access could never be sold to the public without some sort of misrepresentation, it is conceivable that people would still pay for Internet access even if the price were $15 for the first 1 GB and $2 per GB after that. However, it would still be good public policy to prohibit two variants of this scheme: (a) ISPs silently racking up charges, scummy-cell-phone-company style, against users who may not realize what charges they're incurring, and then shocking them with overage bills at the end of the month; and (b) ISPs charging draconian bandwidth fines in cases where they have a monopoly, or near-monopoly, on users' Internet access options.
Prohibiting "shock" overage bills essentially follows from principles #1 and #2 above — users should know what they're getting, and sneaking something into the fine print doesn't count. If someone is approaching their bandwidth limit, and is on track to run over (and incur a lot of charges) before the end of the month, it wouldn't be too much trouble to send them an e-mail or an automated (or live) phone call to warn the user what's going on. If the ISP objects that this would cost them too much, I'd say I'll happily pay $1 for the trouble of them placing a call to my house if it saved me $20 in surprise overages.
Prohibiting bandwidth fines in the case of monopoly situations simply follows from the principle that without competition, the bandwidth overage fees are likely to be much higher than they would be in a competitive market. It may not be the motivation of the ISP simply to make as much money as possible; perhaps they want to discourage high-bandwidth usage for other reasons. As FreePress.net theorized about the proposed Time Warner bandwidth surcharges: "This trick is designed to make customers think twice before switching off their cable TV and finding the shows they want online." But whether it's to squeeze subscribers for extra money or to stop them from streaming content from the Internet, either way, the plan could not be sustainable if users can find higher bandwidth at a lower cost from other providers. For most of its subscribers, Time Warner doesn't have a pure monopoly — in some areas, you can get only one cable Internet provider and only one DSL provider, but the two still compete with each other to provide "Internet access," and other areas have a choice between cable providers. However, in a situation with only a small number of competitors, companies can still keep prices higher than they would in a purely competitive market, because there are fewer chances for an upstart competitor to find ways to provide a more efficient service at a lower cost.
What if neither of these conditions were true? If an ISP actually did make sure that its subscribers knew about the bandwidth limits, and users got warnings if they were approaching those limits, and there were enough competing providers to ensure real competition, then in that situation it would be harder to make an argument against the bandwidth surcharges. (Admittedly, it may be something of an academic point, because there are so few situations where there are "enough competing providers" to guarantee healthy competition.)
But it's important to keep the arguments for Net Neutrality separate from the arguments against bandwidth surcharges. Bandwidth fines are bad mainly when there are few competing providers, because it will be hard for users to get a better deal somewhere else, and providers like Time Warner may have a vested interest in keeping users' bandwidth limits low to keep them glued to their TV. Violations of Net Neutrality are bad regardless of whether there are few or many competing providers, because users cannot avoid the harm if they're unlikely to discover what's happening in the first place.
Please, please, please (Score:5, Insightful)
Please summarize (Score:4, Insightful)
"I bought an 'unlimited' plan that turns out to actually have limits. Now I don't want to pay because I didn't understand the contract I was signing. I think I shouldn't have to pay because I'm not a lawyer."
ToS that nobody reads (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine if the opposite principle were accepted -- that websites and software vendors could do anything they wanted as long as they put the right disclaimer in the 23rd paragraph of their site's or program's "Terms of Service" that nobody reads.
Your whole argument for Net Neutrality hinges on this. Clearly there is a huge incentive for a company to read through these lengthy documents and bring this stuff to people's attention, so that people who don't have the time to read long contracts or ToS can know about it. If people choose not to read something before signing it, they are not being "defrauded" if and when the unexpected comes to pass. There is a free market solution to this. As VeriSign does for online security, and Underwriters Laboratories for product safety, and Consumer Reports for product quality, so goes for contracts. Companies would build up their name by providing the public with useful and accurate information at the lowest possible cost.
as long as all bytes are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
If company A sells something to company B which company B then re-sells to the public, but company B almost certainly cannot resell the good without committing fraud as outlined above, then company A is complicit in the fraud as well. Some of AboveNet's defenders argued that they mostly sold Internet connectivity to ISPs, not to the public, and the ISPs knew that the connections were filtered. Even assuming this were true, the ISPs still would not be able to re-sell the service to the public without representing it as "regular Internet access" â" nobody would pay full price for a broken or degraded connection when a competitor could offer a regular connection for the same price.
Surely thats simply a case of 'if people aren't going to buy your product, why aren't you sourcing a replacement supplier?'
If you are willingly buying the degraded product from your supplier, and the supplier is not hiding the fact that it is degraded in some way, then I don't see why the supplier should be complicit in the fraud that you willingly went on to conduct.
The argument as presented in the summary just seems absurd in that regard.
Why we need net neut (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole point of Net Neutrality is that an ISP can not treat packets differently based on their type or destination. Here are some examples of why Neutrality is a good idea:
What is to stop TW from blocking or slowing packets related to Vonage's service in order to push their own? What would stop TW from creating their own search engine and blocking Google, Yahoo, and MSN?
The whole point is that TW can create its own version of any service currently provided by the web and choke off their competition or charge extra for access to their competition. When there is only one game in town, that's monopoly abuse. That would be like your power company selling toasters with a special plug and charging extra or blocking users from buying a competing toaster.
As for usage caps. I really hate it, but I can't really find a good argument against this one. Unfortunately, Internet service is like a utility, or should be, and every utility is based on usage. This is why competition is good. Once a utility has competition, they are forced to compete and lose their monopoly status.
Re:Please summarize (Score:3, Insightful)
Summary: "I'm illiterate and don't think I should be held responsible for actions that I undertook myself."
I suppose you read every piece of paper you signed your whole life.
The market ain't perfect (Score:2, Insightful)
I doubt there is much "demand" for having access to the entirety of the Internet. So most people won't care if 95% of it isn't blocked, so long as they can still get to foxnews.com or npr.org.
So suddenly that 95% of the Internet is useless as a vessel for meaningful communication. The number of outlets for people to get their information becomes minute and controlled by large corporations.
Given the demonstrably strong connections between governments and these large corporate entities, I would like to retain the ability to access the other 95%. And I want to preserve that right for the people that don't yet know they need it.
Think about it: the Constitution is a big ol' Nanny State document. After all, nothing says, "We don't trust you not to screw with this" like "We made it really hard for you to change this."
Re:False Neutrality (Score:1, Insightful)
There's a world of difference between QoS and network neutrality.
No, there isn't. QoS should never be applied by the ISP, other than by limiting your total bandwidth usage (in whatever form it may be) during high traffic times if they can't handle it, in order to make sure others still have their bandwidth. Prioritizing services is something they certainly should not be allowed to do, and that type of QoS should happen at YOUR router so you can prioritize what YOU think is important.
After all, once you let Time Warner decide they can prioritize voip traffic over other traffic, what's to stop them from prioritizing their voip service over something like vonage? On their end, all packets should be equal.
Censorship by any other name (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:as long as all bytes are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's exactly the problem.
Time Warner already offer streaming ESPN. You can bet they won't be including those GB in your 5GB a month. So effectively, punitive per-GB data transfer fees are a way to violate net neutrality for video services.
Re:Please, please, please (Score:5, Insightful)
Even better would be dropping the whole "Net Neutrality" meme and returning to the time-honored concept of "common carriage." The FCC created this problem when it bowed to the wishes of the telcos and created an entirely new regime ("enhanced services") not governed by common carriage. Internet services fall into this category along with directory assistance and dial-a-porn. The consequences of not enforcing a clear divide between content and carriage are now apparent, particularly in the case of cable operators who have an obvious conflict-of-interest when it comes to the distribution of video programming over the Internet.
Re:Please, please, please (Score:4, Insightful)
Net Neutrality to mean one thing and one thing only, agnosticism to packets content
Not just content, but source and destination too.
Re:What about when they treat their offerings diff (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that Time Warner already offers streaming ESPN. I'm betting that won't be counting against your 5GB.
So I still think it's effectively a net neutrality issue. The caps and overage charges are just the framework being put in place to allow them to violate net neutrality later.
And crippling my Internet connection so Time Warner's digital movies on demand are cheaper than Netflix streaming isn't a net neutrality problem? I guess if you view "net" as just TCP/IP that's true, but if you view "net" as the cable and the signals down it, then it's nonsense.
Re:Please, please, please (Score:4, Insightful)
No, no, a thousand times no! Disclosure is not neutrality. ISPs have monopolies. You can't choose a better deal. So disclosure makes no difference.
Furthermore, bandwidth caps, particularly when they are asymmetric, mean you are a consumer of content, not a producer. How neutral is that?
It's true that bandwidth sharing isn't *solely* a net neutrality issue--there are real problems with hogs. But when a desire to retain a cable franchise motivates an ISP to deliver a slow, capped connection, that _is_ very clearly a net neutrality issue.
Re:TW's play at being anti-competitive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:False Neutrality (Score:3, Insightful)
If they were degrading Hulu streams, you'd have more of a point. Bittorent is just any old high-bandwidth file transfer as far as they're concerned though, and therefore low priority.
I mean no offense but I think you yourself may be missing the point. I can't speak for everyone but I'll explain to you what I want and I hope that will elucidate the viewpoint. I want a completely neutral, disinterested carrier. This carrier merely delivers my IP packets on a best-effort basis with absolutely no regard for the content of those packets. They don't decide that one type of transmission needs higher priority and they don't decide that another type of transmission needs lower priority. They don't analyze my data for the purpose of serving advertisements, nor do they do this for any other reason. In short, they are merely the pipe. If I need VoIP traffic to have priority over BitTorrent traffic, then I will perform my own prioritization and traffic shaping. If that's not quite as effective as what an ISP can do, I will accept that as a fair trade-off.
It bothers me that so many things are heading down the path of "we know what's good for you." That's not specific to ISPs at all. The idea of "we (the centralized entity of some sort) know what's good for you" has been put to the test throughout history, in many different forms, again and again. It has failed each time it has tried, unless your definition of success includes conditioned helplessness and a rejection of free will. Each new form of this idea is presented as though it were truly new and it isn't. How many iterations do we need to experience before we realize that there are only a few important principles that govern many thousands of things, and that this path is the wrong way to go?
The other other side of net neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
These discussions always seem to ignore one part of the equation. Specifically net neutrality stops GOOD QoS too. I worked at a small ISP. Over-selling capacity is strictly necessary in most cases where staying in business is a priority*. Most of the time no one notices. During certain peak hours however, everyone noticed. We received many complaints about voip and game quality.
Our solution was to implement packet inspection and QoS. What we did was identify VOIP packets, and give them a very high priority. Same with game packets. A few others too, like syns and acks are very cheap, so we gave them high priority too (because it does matter and will enhance the end user experience)**. We also identified video from youtube, cnn, etc (all places where there are BUFFERING players). With those video sites we lowered priority after the first .5MB since buffering is intended to make jitter irrelevant. We did NOT slow video down, we just made introduced latency sometimes so gamers and voipers got a better experience.
After doing that, our customers complained much less frequently, and many thanked us for getting more bandwidth.
Essentially, bandwidth should be measured on 2 axis, Throughput and Latency. Some apps dont need much bandwidth when they have low latency (voip), others don't suffer from latency as long as throughput is good (torrents). Most cries I see for net-neutrality ignore this. I find it sad because I would not mind my isp guaranteeing low latency for voip and games and high throughput for downloads (if i would be a pal and let them add a 100ms delay here and there).
I know that a lot of the issue hinges around the above being used to double charge, and other evil tactics, however legislating away the good because of potential for evil seems plain silly. Perhaps some sort of middle ground could one day be reached, in which destination filtering/prioritizing is strictly off limits, but content type filtering can be allowed as long as overall throughput remains at the rate sold. (not necessarily a good solution, just a talking point).
*This refers to places where the infrastructure is not well built up, and metro-e is not available.
** DNS at highest priority is surprisingly important. The day we did this speed related call dropped a large percent, and stayed dropped.
Re:Please summarize (Score:2, Insightful)
My Time Warner contract does say "unlimited internet". Granted, my plan is not the $15 month plan outlined in TFA, but it still has a catchall (paraphrasing) 'Time Warner has the right to change the terms of this contract in any way they see fit for any reason' clause in there somewhere. Basically, it's no contract at all.
I wouldn't expect an "unlimited mileage" warranty would cover my car if I used it in a demolition derby, nor would I expect an "unlimited internet" contract to cover my computer if I launched it in a catapult. However, I would expect an "unlimited mileage" warranty to cover my car if I drove it over 1,000 miles, just as I would expect an "unlimited internet" contract to cover bandwidth over 1 GB/month.
Re:False Neutrality (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you totally missed it. If you have packet queueing based on customer, and you deliver the packets round robin, then as long as you have 128kbps or so for every active customer, VoIP will still work fine. If you don't, then you're pretty well fucked anyway.
Re:TW's play at being anti-competitive (Score:4, Insightful)
So what do you call it when TW imposes caps which make say Netflix/Hulu/Youtube content more expensive to watch than TW provided content?
Er, sound business practice? It's much cheaper for TW to provide regular cable service because it is a multicast service. What that means is, when 1000 people want to watch HD show X, which requires 2gb total to send to their users, TW only has to send that 2gb once. Total bandwidth used over the course of a 1 hour show: 2gb.
VOD falls somewhere in the middle, but is closer to regular cable in cost. Why? Because even though for 1,000 users they have to send 2gb each (2,000gb if you've been paying attention), TW knows exactly what it offers on VOD, and can cache all of those movies/shows locally. This means they they are sending that 2,000gb only on the legendary "last mile", which costs them almost nill.
Now, when 1000 users want to download from Netflix/Hulu/Etc., they have to receive that 2gb 1,000 separate times, and send that 2gb out 1,000 separate times, that's 2,000gb of bandwidth burned end-to-end, compared to 2gb. Sending the data over their own lines is cheap. Receiving it via another major ISP's lines is expensive, relatively speaking. Granted, caching can aleviate some of that, but it is not even close to possible for them to cache the entire range of options, like they can with their own VOD service.
You cannot expect a cable company to do the same for a service like Netflix/Hulu/Etc as they do VOD. Why the hell should they, they offer their own service! A service that almost certainly has less of a selection, I might add. It would be obscenely expensive to try and cache everything Netflix et. all have, and only serves to help the video companies, not the cable companies. You (the customer) would have to pay extra for that anyway, so why would they go through the trouble and expense for nothing?
So, to sum up, here is why Netflix/Hulu/Etc cost more to use:
Regular cable: 2gb burned per 1000 users (multicast)
VOD: 2,000gb burned, but only last-mile (serving content locally)
Netflix/Hulu/Etc.: 2,000gb burned that must travel accross several ISPs, bringing sharing agreements into play
The disparity between services is a bandwidth issue. The pricing is a monopoly/lack of competition issue. Now, if TW were slowing or blocking or otherwise restricting access movie streaming services specifically, THAT would be a net-neutrality issue.
Honestly, bitching about pricing for a service you use (that's all you're doing, really) and then calling it net-neutrality is disingenuous at best, and completely dishonest at worst.