[IP] more on Google and 'neutrality' hypocrisy
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brett Glass <brett@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 28, 2006 2:00:47 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Google and 'neutrality' hypocrisy
All:
The biggest problem with the issue of "net neutrality" is that most
measures that purport to prevent it have very bad unintended
consequences.
It's perfectly reasonable to prioritize traffic by type (for example,
Web traffic -- where people want to see results immediately -- over e-
mail, which can wait a few minutes and is mostly spam anyway). In
fact, it makes for happier users, since it takes their desires into
account. A "net neutrality" provision which prohibited this
prioritization would hurt our ISP's quality of service.
We also use "DNS blacklists" to reject 90% or more of all attempts to
send e-mail to our servers -- and thank Heaven we do, because those
servers and our users would otherwise be inundated with spam. This is
especially true with the advent of spamming "botnets." (We have
blocked spam from more than 20,000 unique IP addresses just this
week, and I'm sure that the spammers don't have that many legitimate
IP addresses, so they must be using "zombies.") If we don't recognize
a source of e-mail, we may throttle its transmissions to limit the
amount of spam it can send before we or our blacklist maintainers
recognize it as a spammer. Any provision which kept us from
throttling or blocking e-mail traffic from such sources would be folly.
It's also legitimate to de-prioritize bandwidth hogs. For example,
our system limits the total amount of our bandwidth which can be
consumed by ESPN, because users who leave their browsers on ESPN's
home page are (unknowingly) constantly downloading video and/or large
still images. What's more, they repeatedly download the same files
over and over again while prohibiting the browser from caching them
-- a huge waste. We throttle this not because it's ESPN in
particular, but because they are irresponsibly turning users'
browsers into bandwidth hogs. This slows the users' other work down,
too, by monopolizing their allocated bandwidth. (Yes, we have had
some of them complain that their connections were slow until they
shut down a browser that was pointed at ESPN.)
This is an example of a situation in which it's reasonable to
throttle some information sources for policy reasons. But note that
the policy is applied evenhandedly. Any site which exhibited the same
behavior is subject to the same restrictions. What's more, the user
experience -- even on that site -- isn't affected by the throttling.
What's NOT reasonable to throttle as an anti-competitive measure.
This would include situations where the ISP itself is a content
provider or where it receives payment by an information source's
competitor to de-prioritize that source. And the idea of "ransom"
should be altogether out.
--Brett Glass
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