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Net Neutrality – A Good Thing?
The ongoing debate concerning the future of the internet and Net Neutrality seems to be heating up and has landed squarely on the shoulders of the United States Congress.
The two sides of this battle have taken their stances and are prepared to fight their position. The Save the Internet Coalition has banded together to argue that if rules are not put in place to prevent preferential treatment of traffic by service providers all users will suffer. They contend that the government must create rules and restrictions that prevent service providers (particularly the larger ones) from blocking or providing preferential treatment to any traffic. The concern is that the large providers like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T will use their size advantage to create a monopoly similar to Microsoft with Internet Explorer. The Hands Off the Internet Coalition believes that no regulation is best. Their stance is that we should maintain the current status quo and allow service providers to develop new technology. Utilizing the existing pipes and providing things like QoS will allow the evolution of the Internet and enable new technologies like IP TV and Video on Demand.
Inevitably the future of the Internet will soon be decided by lawmakers. Is Net Neutrality good for the Internet? Should the government put regulations in place to ensure the availability of services for all without regard to new technology development? Or should the large service providers be potentially allowed to decide what sites we surf based on their own capital gain and business model?
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Net Neutrality will reduce government regulation by bitswapper :: NR5 :: Show
Or at least, its the best bet so far at keeping government regulation to a minimum. Without 'net neutrality' safeguards in place, it will be possible to prioritize emergency VOIP calls. People are already musing about how to make the Internet critical-ready and if ISPs start offering QoS/Diffserv, they won't be able to deny prioritized 911 service to VOIP customers. There are already so many people using VOIP from competing service providers, any notion of slowing down competing VOIP traffic could be a ticket to jail. Further, I can't see how any politician would risk allowing anything to impeded emergency VOIP traffic. Who would want to be characterized as having voted in favor of slowing down the 911 VOIP call that might have stopped a terrorist?
Once the QoS/Diffserv cat is out of the bag, excessive government regulation will follow, to make sure emergency traffic gets tagged and queued properly everywhere. Keep the Internet 'neutral', and its plausible to say that the Internet isn't a good place for emergency traffic, which it isn't. Of course, keeping the Internet neutral won't guarantee that the government won't try to use its regulatory power to try and make the Internet ready for an emergency, but it's probably the best idea so far at keeping the government at bay on the Internet.
As for how feasible it is to implement Qos/Diffserve across the Internet, it isn't. The best any big content provider like Disney, for example, can hope for is inconsistent improvement, on a good day. And, if someone like Disney shells out hundred of thousands to have their video prioritized, they'll be sure to measure how much of an improvement they get, and exercises SLA rebate clauses if the improved speed comes up short (and it will). They'll get some improvement, but not much and not consistently. It's really going to be up to last mile ISPs, where traffic loads are more variable and the most fan-out occurs as to how well diffserv tagged packets get prioritized. Every time a packet crosses a provider boundary, its a gamble as to how much difference QoS/Diffserv will make in delivery acceleration.
If ISPs and telcos need more money to improve their infrastructure, why not charge more for providing service, instead of smoke/mirror Diffserv? The only other possibility is that they just want to block new things and other VOIP providers, and then offer their own version of those new things, be it VOIP or something else. I think they were traumatized by how fast the googles and yahoos of the world built up financial steam, and they want to be the next google or yahoo, and stop any new ones from starting up.