El Reg notes that Google has now said it will give users the tools to see if bandwidth is being throttled:
We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they're not happy with what they're getting - that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco.
If the country doesn't have neutral networks, Whitt contends, innovation stagnates among application developers. And he believes that individual consumers - as well as Washington policy makers - should join the fight for such neutrality.
Which always brings me to the bigger question of "what do we mean by Net Neutrality"?
By this, if we mean that we should not constrain one particular bit over another because we don't like what it does, I'm all for it - that bit of "all bits are Free" I get.
If we mean that all services should have equal opportunity to access the 'Net, and ditto all users, then I'm your man for that bit of the Free Net.
If it means that all bits are free, as in not priced, then the Tragedy of the Commons leaps to mind - for those not familiar with this effect, it is this - imagine a patch of common land, where all herders have rights to graze their animals:
The herders are assumed to wish to maximize their yield, and so will increase their herd size whenever possible. The utility of each additional animal has both a positive and negative component:
Positive: the herder receives all of the proceeds from each additional animal.
Negative: the pasture is slightly degraded by each additional animal.
Crucially, the division of these costs and benefits is unequal: the individual herder gains all of the advantage, but the disadvantage is shared among all herders using the pasture. Consequently, for an individual herder weighing these, the rational course of action is to add an extra animal. And another, and another. However, since all herders reach the same rational conclusion, overgrazing and degradation of the pasture is its long-term fate. Nonetheless, the rational response for an individual remains the same at every stage, since the gain is always greater to each herder than the individual share of the distributed cost. The overgrazing cost here is an example of an externality.
In 'Netland this means video (and usually P2P video) - video users consume a LOT more bandwidth than non video users. In essence the majority of 'Net users today do not use video heavily, so are subsidising those few who do. But where the rubber hits the road is when the total demand for the bandwidth starts to come to the point where the pipes are nearly full, and someone needs to pay for the upgrade.
Who pays - why, the ISPs and Telcos of course, say the Net Neutrality crowd.
Except (i)...imagine you are running an ISP and find you have to spend billions to upgrade your pipe just so a fairly small number of superusers can carry on pumping moving pictures around at no extra costs to themselves..... and that that small number will continue to grow as there is no penalty to them doing so. Infinite demand, infinite cost, very finite revenues.
Except (ii) Those pipes aren't commons - they are owned by private operators, and those operators have 2 choices - (i) make a profit or (ii) go out of business. And their obligations to shareholders says the latter is to be prevented.
Ergo, there are only two realistic options - prices must go up, or over-users must be throttled.
Now its easy to see why Google doesn't want this to happen - the economics of YouTube and other new high volume services are based on this subsidy of the bandwidth rich by the bandwidth poor. To be fair, till now ISPs haven't helped themselves as they have flat priced bits while the pipes were empty, thus setting expectations. But is this sustainable - can you go on adding traffic to increasingly constrained pipes and expect the owners to upgrade at no benefit to themselves? If they remain private companies, the answer is no. And one can look hard at the Net Neutrality argument and say that one "gets" the argument for
freedom of all bits, but not for
free as in zero cost bits. Different issues.
It is for this reason we suspect / believe the Net Neutrality argument, to be credible going forward, needs to purge itself of the "Freeconomic" element of its thinking, as that is not sustainable as demand rises. In nearly every constrained resource in history, typically at some point there is a payment system implemented for use made - or else it tends, as Jared Diamond notes, to
collapse for all:
He cites five factors that often contribute to a collapse, but shows how the one factor that all had in common was mismanagement of natural resources.
Natural being common, mismanagement being unsustainable use...which, in our case, is bandwidth.
