Clogged Arteries, Broken Pipes and the Battle for the Internet
A Chicago Tribune article is making the rounds. “Videos have Net bursting at the seams,” it warns, conjuring images of a fat man in a too tight suit.
The ubiquity of video is fingered. There’s just too much of it, from cute kitties to rock concerts to experimental art. Some time soon, bandwidth demands will exceed capacity and the Internet will grind to a halt. Inoperable at worst. Sluggish at best.
“We don’t see anything catastrophic near term, but over the next few years there’s this fundamental wall we’re heading towards,” said Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications International Inc., one of the operators of the Internet backbones, which are the big pipes at the network’s center.
The problem, Poll said, is that traffic volumes are growing faster than computing power, meaning that engineers can no longer count on newer, faster computers to keep ahead of their capacity demands.
An unrelated New York Times article captures a bit of the bandwidth demands video makes.
Today, owing to the proliferation of large video files, video accounts for more than 60 percent of the traffic on the Internet, according to CacheLogic, a company in Cambridge, England, that sells “media delivery systems†to Internet service providers. “I imagine that within two years it will be 98 percent,†says Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Taken together, we’re told that bandwidth is a scarce resource that needs to be managed in some way so that the emails we send, along with videos we watch, the content feeds we subscribe to and the sites we log onto are all available in one way or another.
The telephone industry — led by the likes of AT&T, Verizon and Qwest among others — offered one solution to perceived network glut: create a tiered system where privileged content is pushed along, while other content queues up and eventually gets there.
The tiered network approach is roundly condemned by a wide ranging group of companies and interest groups. Google, Yahoo!, MoveOn.org, the National Rifle Association, the Christian Coalition and the ACLU: strange bedfellows, indeed. You’d be hardpressed to find another issue in the circular firing squad that serves as our national dialog that brings together such diversity.
Together, they’ve formed a coalition to prevent Congress from creating new telecommunications laws that don’t include “meaningful and enforceable network neutrality requirements.”
Which is well and good, but what does network neutrality mean?
Generally, that a broadband network is free from arbitrary restrictions on the content that passes through it (e.g., an audio file), and the type of equipment that can be attached to it (e.g., a computer).
Network neutrality proponents argue that tiered systems lead down a variety of slippery slopes, as well as drastically — if not radically — change the democratic, egalitarian foundation and nature of the Internet itself.
If telecoms create a tiered system of privileged content, they argue, a series of tolls like those on our highways will be created.
Content providers willing to pay — or having the ability to pay — will see their content rushed through. Those unwilling or unable to pay, will be directed down slower pipes. As telecoms increasingly gain revenue from the toll roads, resources will be directed to their upkeep while the non-toll network creaks, groans and suffers from inevitable wear, tear and deferred maintenance. The money simply isn’t there to incentivize its upkeep.
Further, if content can be privileged, it can also be discriminated against. It’s relatively easy to imagine a situation where a provider in New York City strikes a lucrative deal with a content provider for certain programming. Part of that deal gives the content provider’s programming super priority on the network, while also hindering, or refusing access to the content of one of its competitors.
Once network providers can privilege and discriminate based on economic arrangements, the argument continues, it’s not so far of a stretch to say that political, social, religious and a host of others seen and unforeseen factors could play into how content is treated on a tiered network. And this is why you have MoveOn and the Christian Coalition in bed together.
This is all fantasy, phone companies and their tiered system supporters argue.
If you take as given that network traffic is increasing, and will continue to increase to some future unsustainable point, telephone companies need the flexibility to adopt business strategies that lets them respond to the market need of increased bandwidth.
And once this is said, the food fight begins.
On one side you have those who say that if telephone companies did what they said they’d do back in the nineties, namely to build out promised fiberoptics networks, this problem wouldn’t exist in the first place.
On the other side, you have tiered services advocates saying that without preferencial content treatment, babies will die.
From here, arguments and accusations fly. Instead of listing them here, we recommend simply starting at the Wikepedia entry on network neutrality and following links to various pro and con arguments.
Before doing that, of course, ponder the video above. In it, Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia University and leading network neutrality advocate, Tim Karr, Campaign Director for SaveTheInternet.com and Kieth Clemens, General Counsel for Verizon, discuss and debate their respective positions before a rapt, sometimes raucus audience at a network neutraility event held by the New York County Lawyers’ Association in New York City.
Michael Cervieri is Executive Producer at ScribeMedia.Org.
Michael Cervieri is a ScribeLabs co-founder and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs where he teaches a course called Tubes, Code and Content. On Twitter, he's @bmunch.
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