If you haven’t read Part I you can do so at https://blog.turnkeyinternet.net/ask-the-expert/net-neutrality-if-it-isnt-broken-dont-fix-it/

Let’s touch on traffic prioritization.  What’s one of the easiest things to delay in order to prioritize other traffic?  Email.  After all, email doesn’t need to stream all at once like a song or a movie so it seems like the easiest thing to delay while prioritizing other traffic.  Now, suppose that email is queued up all day long until, say, 3am in the morning when traffic flow is at its lowest.  At 3am, these email servers begin sending all the emails they’ve queued up all day long.  No problem, right?  Heck, it’s only email.  Hmm, suppose you emailed that signed contract for the proposal and it had to be accepted by 5pm the day before but your email got queued up in order to make way for traffic that had been prioritized over the delivery of your email.  Are you beginning to see where this is going?

People have been using applications like twitter to instantly reach multiple people at the same time.  Suppose a town is under siege by a group that is trying to take over the town.  Suppose those town folks are alerting other family members and friends about the invading troops’ whereabouts so they can keep their loved ones out of harm’s way.  For the sake of argument, let’s say that twitter does not pay traffic carriers extra money to prioritize their traffic.  What happens now?  If your home is about to be invaded in five minutes and the message warning you of the impending invasion is not sent to you until 15 or 20 minutes later – it’s too late.  I know this is an extreme example but prioritizing traffic could actually become a matter of life and death.

President Obama embraced, almost exactly, the comments I posted on the FCC website concerning this matter.  In fact, what he is proposing is so close to my comments that I’m sure they must have been passed along to him.  In short, my comments were to keep internet traffic neutral – nobody’s traffic gets prioritized.  If you are a content provider and you want your traffic prioritized, then setup your own network and allow people to buy bandwidth directly from you and only your content is delivered over your private bandwidth.  The issue is though, it’s not the content providers who are causing the ruckus, it is the traffic carriers who have brought this whole issue about. 

Where President Obama strayed from my comments was in recommending that the internet become regulated as a utility such as the phone companies.  Let me just say this… “Dear God, save us all.”  I used to own a VoIP company and the myriad of taxes, fees and surcharges on phone service staggers the mind.  Do NOT let this happen to internet services.  Basically 31%-35% of your phone bill is comprised of taxes, fees and surcharges.  The FCC says that it wants to regulate Internet companies under Title II so they can control it.  I guess they (the FCC) hasn’t figured out that they already regulate the internet and VoIP – no Title II regulations are needed.

I say that the content providers should not be charged just because people want to download data from them.  The charge for providing end users for the bandwidth they need, should come from the traffic carrier.  This would be a good thing because once the price of a traffic carrier gets too high, someone will step in with a less costly way to provide bandwidth.  It’s called good old fashioned competition.  The traffic carriers want to make the content providers look like the bad guys.  And, as if that isn’t bad enough, the traffic carriers are already double-dipping on the profits.  Anyone who is younger than 35 or perhaps 40, may not remember the days of completely free TV.  TV was free because the networks made their money from the advertising space that they sold.  Then along comes cable companies that charge end users a monthly fee for TV shows AND they are collecting all the revenues from the advertisers – man, talk about a cash cow – they’re getting paid on both sides and now they want to charge content providers too?????  Are you serious??  And remember, the content providers are already paying their hosting company for all the bandwidth they need.  Why should they have to pay again?  The traffic carriers have oversubscribed their networks and that is a problem solely created and owned by the traffic carriers, and the content providers should not be held responsible for the traffic carriers problem.  Let me offer an analogy .  Let’s use a different scenario where there are three parties in the same roles:

1. City water department – aka content provider (they provide water)
2. Building contractor who builds houses on a huge tract of land she/he owns – aka traffic carrier
3. End user – you and me who have bought homes from the building contractor

We purchased our homes and the contractor guarantees us 5 gallons per minute of water flow.  The contractor runs a six-inch main to serve the housing development.  The building contractor builds just enough homes so that the water flow to each house is 5 gallons per minute.  The problem is, the building contractor wants to make more money and so they overbuild the development and the water flow is now reduced to 2 gallons per minute just because there are too many homes using water at any given time.  So, the building contractor turns around and decides to charge the city water department a fee to prioritize water flow to certain homes, which of course will reduce water flow even further to homes that do not receive prioritized water flow.  The problem is not the city water department.  The city water department has more than enough capacity to serve all the homes in the development with 5 gallons per minute.  The problem is that the building contractor only put a six-inch main in and what is needed is a twentyfour-inch main.  This is not a home owner created problem nor is it a city water department created problem, the problem is the building contractor did not put in a large enough main pipe to feed all the customers.  And that is exactly what is happening with the flow of traffic on the internet.  The traffic carriers (building contractor) do not have the capacity to give the end users (home owners) all the bandwidth (water flow) that they guaranteed and the traffic carriers (building contractors) are turning around and charging the content providers (city water departments) a fee to prioritize their content (water flow).  The building contractors (traffic carriers) want to make the reduced water flow (bandwidth) appear to be a problem caused by the city water department (content provider).  And that is just not the case.

A peripheral but related issue here is the maddening amount of video and audio content that is displayed on websites.  How many times have you gone to a website and an advertisement begins to automatically play?  Also, how many times do you visit a site and want to read the story but there is no text, just a video?  That drives me nuts.  All I want to do is read the story, I do not want to watch a video.  Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent.

Let’s reiterate:

1. Leave the internet as it is
2. Do not regulate it like telephone companies are regulated unless you want to see prices increase due to fees, taxes and surcharges
3. Leave the FCC in charge of the internet and VoIP

End of story, it truly IS that simple.

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Part I: Definition of net neutrality; definition of parties involved; examination of parties’ roles; detrimental to new business development

Net neutrality, as defined by the Federal Communications Commission is: “The ‘Open Internet’ is the Internet as we know it. It’s open because it uses free, publicly available standards that anyone can access and build to, and it treats all traffic that flows across the network in roughly the same way. The principle of the Open Internet is sometimes referred to as “net neutrality.” Under this principle, consumers can make their own choices about what applications and services to use and are free to decide what lawful content they want to access, create, or share with others. This openness promotes competition and enables investment and innovation.”

 

There are basically only three parties to the whole internet/net neutrality equation:

1. Retail Traffic carriers: such as cable companies, phone companies, satellite companies, etc.
2. Content providers: such as Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Spotify, etc.
3. End users: you and me

 

The whole net neutrality issue has come about because the traffic carriers, want to charge content providers a fee for “fast lane” service to deliver their content to the end users.

 

So what’s wrong with this picture?  Here’s what’s wrong with it…. You and I pay a monthly fee to a traffic carrier for X amount of bandwidth.  You and I want to watch a movie or listen to a song from a content provider.  Hey, we have paid a fee for our bandwidth so we rightfully expect to be able to utilize that bandwidth whenever we want to.  The problem is, the traffic carriers have oversubscribed their networks.  Let’s say a traffic carrier serves a neighborhood of 1000 homes and they give each home 5Mbps of bandwidth and, the total bandwidth that the traffic carrier can carry on their main circuit to that neighborhood is 500Mbps.  This means that if 100 homes are utilizing the full 5Mbps of bandwidth they have paid for, the other 900 homes will have no bandwidth and won’t be able to use the internet.  Now, bear in mind that this is the theoretical limit.  Since data is moved in bits and pieces, all 1000 homes in the neighborhood would have at least some access to the net but if everyone maxed their connection at the same time, everyone’s connection would slow to a crawl since the maximum available bandwidth in this example is only 500Mbps.  The traffic carriers are gambling that only a certain percentage of the end users will be online at any given point in time and that only a certain percentage of end users will be using the maximum bandwidth that they have paid for at any given point in time.  Quite frankly, that’s a workable model and one that has prevailed over time.  The problem is – what if all the end users want to use their fully allotted bandwidth all at the same time? If that happens, then the traffic carriers cannot provide what the end users have paid for because they don’t have that much bandwidth.  This is known as oversubscribing your network.

So, what the traffic carriers want to do is to charge the content providers in order to give the content providers’ data, priority over other types of traffic.  This is completely wrong because the content providers host their servers at a data center (or multiple data centers) and they are already paying the data centers for all the bandwidth they need.  It is the traffic carriers who have oversubscribed their networks and yet it’s the traffic carriers who want to charge the content providers.

The content providers are not the problem.  The content providers have paid their hosting company(ies) for ample bandwidth to move their data to the end users.  It is the traffic carriers who have oversubscribed their networks that are causing the issue.  So, the traffic carriers want to charge the content providers to prioritize their traffic.  Which raises another question… if the content providers’ traffic is prioritized over other traffic, then what does that do to your VoIP phone service, or the content you’re trying to get from a company that doesn’t pay to have their traffic prioritized, or your email?  What needs to happen here is there should be no charge to the content provider.  The traffic carriers need to increase their overall capacity so that the end users can download whatever they want whenever they want it at the maximum speed that they have paid the traffic carrier for.

Think about this… if your next-door-neighbor downloads content from a content provider who has paid the traffic carrier a fee to prioritize their traffic and you are downloading something from a content provider who has *not* paid an additional fee to the traffic carrier, you could see your download slow to a crawl while the traffic carrier prioritizes the traffic of the paying content provider over that of the traffic from a nonpaying content provider.  Under this scenario, you, and the content provider you are using, are both being penalized so the traffic carrier can prioritize the data of the paying content provider.

If traffic carriers are allowed to charge content providers to prioritize their traffic, that may become an insurmountable barrier to countless new businesses that could potentially exist.  Think of it this way… suppose content providers have to pay traffic carriers to carry their traffic – in this scenario, what happens when someone comes up with a new idea, like youtube?  Can you imagine a couple kids in a garage that come up with a great idea but next to no one can download the content because the kids are running a startup and they don’t have the type of cash needed to pay traffic carriers to prioritize their content??  Think about how that will stifle competition and not allow for the latest and greatest ideas to get out to the public.

 

This will be a multiple part series since there is so much ground to cover on this topic.  Stay tuned for more.

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