By way of Boing Boing’s report on indie rockers jumping on the Net Neutrality bandwagon, I find this analogy from Craig “Craigslist” Newmark on the coming dark days of non-neutral nets:
Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.
Yes, what a topsy-turvy, dystopian sci-fi world this is, where large companies pay for what we might call “additional phone lines” while customers of a small business might attempt to call in, only to encounter some kind of “busy signal.” Clearly an existential threat to democracy.
Update: Various commenters (including no less than Cory Doctorow—I’m flattered) point out that the mechanism by which non-neutral net filtering works is different from having a busy signal, since a company might get its packets slowed even if it had a whole welter of T3 lines. And of course that’s right: The only point I was making was that there’s nothing especially novel or crazy about companies being more or less easily or rapidly accessible depending upon what they’re prepared to pay. And it’s hard to see why it’s fine for this differential to arise because some companies can afford bigger pipes on their end, or multiple geographically dispersed servers, but it’s suddenly a “bribe” or “protection money” if the differential arises from what amounts to a company’s cross-subsidy for a user’s faster access. This, too, is pretty familiar from the telephonic context: Normally the person placing a call ponies up the dime, but some companies get 800 numbers, subsidizing customer calls to them but not their competitors.
19 responses so far ↓
1 tde // Mar 29, 2007 at 1:58 pm
You really do miss the point. Under your analogy, you would never know about all of the additional phone lines unless you called the “large company”.
Craig’s analogy is much more appropriate and that is perhaps not surprising given that Craig undoubtedly has a greater knowledge of the net since he has played a pivotal role in creating the net that people actually use.
2 Cory Doctorow // Mar 29, 2007 at 2:39 pm
You have indeed missed the point.
In the Newmark analogy, the phone company routes you to the “please hold message” *before it tries to ring Joe’s Pizza*. IOW: before you are allowed to connect to the URL you’ve pasted into your browser, the ISP consults a lookup table. If the server isn’t on the list of “people who’ve paid us bribes,” it just holds those packets for a little while.
Google can have a billion OC3 lines terminating in its data center with the capacity to connect to the whole world at arbitrarily high speeds, but YOUR ISP (whom you’re paying for your DSL line) deliberately slows down the packets Google routes to it for you, at your request, unless Google pays it a bribe over and above its network fees. In a discriminatory network, every network service (including juliansanchez.com) has to be prepared to give money to every ISP in the world for the privilege of having expeiditous routing to its customers.
3 Kriston Capps // Mar 29, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I don’t know here from there as to how packets work vis-a-vis Net Neutrality, but I do know that Craig Newmark and your metaphors do not operate in the same way.
4 Brian // Mar 29, 2007 at 3:20 pm
We already have a system on the Internet incorporating the busy-signal/more phone lines aspect: JoesPizza.biz will run faster and redirect to a DATARATE EXCEEDED page less frequently when Joe ponies up for the same bandwidth from his hosting company as PizzaHut.com does for theirs. Sites that want to pack a lot of pipe already pay for the pleasure.
Neumark’s buried point: Joe has more than enough phone lines to handle the incoming calls, and despite that, the telecom intermediary sends you to a busy signal anyway. Joe hasn’t paid his protection money. Paying to make that additional, artificial toll seems unfair. I thiiiiiink you’ve acknowledged the injustice of this, but assume folks on other side of the middle man will be able to switch to different providers, making the behavior exceedingly rare in the first place.
5 Cory Doctorow // Mar 29, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I think Craig speaks for himself, Kriston. I’ve spoken to him more than once since I first blogged his characterisation of Net Neutrality, about this subject, and I’m confident that I’m representing his position.
Since your objection doesn’t contain any substance (“I know Craig” isn’t a rebuttal. Lots of people know Craig), I think it would be worth revisiting it with something substantive. In what way does this metaphor diverge?
6 Kriston Capps // Mar 29, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Sorry, Cory, but I confused you with a lazy “your” referent—I was speaking to Julian. I’m saying that Julian’s analogy doesn’t properly analogize Newmark’s analogy, since the busy signal is a precondition for using the phone (as you (Cory) point out).
7 micahd // Mar 29, 2007 at 7:17 pm
I guess I always surprised when independent bloggers opposing net neutrality when they have no resources to compete were the system to be changed in the way that the corporate lobbyists are demanding.
I am just genuinely surprised, not critical here. I understand that this is a principled stance …
But who is getting screwed by the system right now? What’s wrong with this equilibrium from a justice perspective or even from a market innovation perspective?
The anti-net neutrality lobbyists are not, by the way, advocating on behalf of no regulation of the internet but on behalf of regulations and a legal structure that benefits their companies.
This is one of my main beefs with libertarianism. They are the attack dogs of those who desire to tear down a state that is proactive in favor of the disadvantaged and then they get surprised when what we replace it with is a state that is proactive in favor of the advantaged.
Corporate welfare? Where did that come from?
8 Sam // Mar 30, 2007 at 6:28 am
I don’t think Julian has “missed the point,” exactly. He’s pointing out that the Craig’s pizza scenario resembles the current state of affairs in an important way: it’s already the case that some businesses already have unequal access to communications and customers, and that these discrepancies are not themselves unfair. On Super Bowl Sunday, Mom & Pop’s Pizza Shop may well be harder to reach than Pizza Hut. Moreover, this is the result of a “money-making regime” on the part of the telecommunications company, namely that devious practice of selling more lines to those who pay.
Julian’s critique points out an important weakness in Craig’s analogy. Whether it goes to the heart of the overall Net Neutrality debate is another matter.
9 Eric the .5b // Mar 30, 2007 at 7:24 pm
If you really think state support of the advantaged only happens when someone tears down support of the disadvantaged, or that the US government has ever supported the disadvantaged and not the advantaged, I’m not sure you can reasonably criticize libertarians on their crazy ideas.
10 Eric the .5b // Mar 30, 2007 at 7:36 pm
So, every ISP, network backbone company, etc. in the world is going to set up a management and billing infrastructure so they can milk every web site in the world for expeditious routing privileges. Consumers will not care if they have any trouble getting to sites they like. And naturally, because every ISP in the world has set up this sort of billing and every web site is paying for good routing, consumers won’t see any difference in routing quality between ISPs. Not seeing any sort of difference, consumers won’t change providers to avoid slowness or outright difficulty reaching sites while surfing. And with consumers not changing providers in response to bad experiences caused by deliberately poor routing, every ISP in the world will continue milking every web site in the world for “bribes”, which every web site in the world will pay.
Also, I hear that if you eat Pop Rocks and drink Coke, you will explode.
11 micahd // Mar 30, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Eric the .5b wrote:
If you really think state support of the advantaged only happens when someone tears down support of the disadvantaged, or that the US government has ever supported the disadvantaged and not the advantaged, I’m not sure you can reasonably criticize libertarians on their crazy ideas.
As to your first point: um, no. And as to your second point, um, okay.
Let me get this straight: there is no time when the government has supported the disadvantaged. Never?
I don’t think that libertarians are crazy. Just that they may not totally think all the way through the impact of their principled arguments.
12 Eric the .5b // Mar 30, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Excellent, though now I’m wondering what that song-and-dance about pulling down the state in favor of the disadvantaged causing a state in favor of the advantaged was all about, aside from making a false dichotomy.
Ah, but I didn’t say that – you’re strangely overlooking the words “and not the advantaged”. (Or, if I were to say, “Odd, I’ve never gone to a grocery store and had to go through a metal detector,” would you really ask if I’d never been to a grocery store?) Maybe you’ve missed this detail about the world in your smirking at principled arguments, but government always gives and has always given a helping hand to the rich and influential.
13 James // Mar 31, 2007 at 5:27 am
The best analogy is with railroads in the last part of the 19th Century. If one believes that Standard Oil should have been allowed to use sweetheart deals and other practices to put its competitors out of business, using the railroads as catspaws, then net neutrality is nothing worth fighting for. However, if one believes that transport and communications are choke points on an economy, and susceptible to monopolistic practices (which was the eventual decision of the country, after much experience in the matter), then the idea of a “common carrier” status for telecommunications is probably a good idea.
Given that telecommunications generally requires various applications of eminent domain to even exist in the first place (to say nothing of the vast public sums that have been spent on its development, I think that the burden of proof lands on those who try to justify something other than net neutrality. Simple tales about pizza delivery just don’t cut it.
14 Sandy // Mar 31, 2007 at 9:58 am
Julian, your understanding still misses the mark.
The telephone system has network neutrality built into it at the moment. So buying a toll-free number means that, no matter who your local telco is, you can call toll-free and get the same voice quality and chance of being connected as at another telco.
Outside of a few areas, however, there is almost no competition at the local telco level, and what competition there is is enforced by government fiat and assumes that the customer will have the same access to a dialtone if they wish to call Cavalier Telecom to change providers. If there weren’t network neutrality, calls from Verizon to Cingular/ATT would be restricted or blocked. So it wouldn’t matter if you wanted another provider, as your ability to sign up to that provider would depend on you finding a phone that could connect to them.
That isn’t something we’re used to. If you’re looking for a precedent, look to the online world before the internet, when you could choose among the walled-off options of GEnie, Prodigy, AOL, or CompuServe.
15 asg // Mar 31, 2007 at 8:23 pm
I love it when people preface points or answers with “um”. It’s such a great way of expressing disdain and imputing slowness without argument or demonstration.
16 Brian // Apr 1, 2007 at 11:14 am
Cory, what exactly makes you think that an ISP could get away with deliberately slowing content en route to the customer? That’s a “service” I certainly wouldn’t pay for. You’re assuming that there’s only one ISP out there and that everyone would have to kick it up to them to make sure their content gets distributed. However, there are many ISPs in the market and competition between them is what prevents scenarios like the one you describe from becoming reality.
17 Sandy // Apr 3, 2007 at 8:03 am
Brian, what makes you think that the local monopolies who provide broadband service won’t simply offer differing lists of fast versus slow service? If the number of competitors is effectively two in an area, it doesn’t take much collusion to prevent the choice of “none, thanks.”
Besides, your downstream ISP is dependent on the local monopoly who provides the links for DSL. There is no competing ISP for cable internet service. All other ISPs are dialup or satellite, which is expensive compared to the others.
18 Brian // Apr 3, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Sandy, it’s only a monopoly if one company is in control (you can’t really have two). Where I live we have basically two options for DSL and those same companies provide cable internet service as well. Both already have fast and slow services that they offer, e.g. 512kbps, 3Mbit, 6Mbit and so on. It seems to me that what you’re suggesting is ISPs will offer different quality services to consumers based on which sites they want to connect to at a faster rate. My impression was that the ISPs would be taking “bribes,” i.e. charging for better distribution, from website owners. Are you saying that ISPs will play both sides of the equation, i.e. charge a website for faster service and then charge the consumer to be able to receive that faster service for that specific site? Perhaps I misunderstand you.
19 Dan // Apr 4, 2007 at 2:28 pm
I don’t know about the technobabble and stuff, but personally I would like the success of a pizza business to be based on, you know, how good the pizza is. Not how many phone lines it can buy up. To me, that seems like a market failure ripe for government intervention.