Net Neutrality at Westminster
An interesting meeting on Network Neutrality at the the Digital Economy All-Party Parliamentary Group last night. Despite the wide range of speakers, there was a remarkable level of agreement that:
- The term “Network Neutrality” has too many definitions to be useful – “Open Internet” is preferable;
- All connections must provide access to the Open Internet, described elsewhere by the Minister, Ed Vaizey, as providing access to all legal content, not discriminating against competitors, and having documented traffic management practices;
- Traffic management to protect scarce bandwidth, to protect against security threats or to provide for different protocols is acceptable;
- Charging users and/or service providers for premium services (e.g. guaranteed bandwidth or quality of service) is acceptable;
- Clear information for users and easy switching between providers are necessary if market forces are to work to ensure the Open Internet continues to be available. Neither of these exists at the moment (it was suggested that only switching banks is harder than switching ISPs!), though there are promising developments in both information (Broadband Stakeholders Group) and switching (Ofcom);
The only real point of difference was whether market forces and self-regulation will be sufficient to protect the Open Internet, or whether some form of intervention by regulators or legislators will be needed (everyone felt this would be a bad thing!). There are clearly economic pressures in both directions – if ISPs make more money from premium services they may allocate bandwidth to those and reduce their Open Internet provision, but on the other hand the Open Internet is likely to be where new services arise that encourage users to buy more bandwidth in future. At present those pressures seem to lead to different behaviour by mobile and fixed-line providers, so it is not clear which will prevail in the long run. It was noted both market and technology are changing rapidly, so regulators may need to intervene quickly if the trend turns against the Open Internet. However most speakers felt that the new European Telecoms Directive’s provisions on Network Neutrality provided sufficient tools to allow that.
“Charging users and/or service providers for premium services (e.g. guaranteed bandwidth or quality of service) is acceptable;”
Its the above statement which i have trouble with. The internet was designed to treat traffic equally in most cases. So the only way to provide ‘premium services’ is to degrade others.
If MySpace was paying for a premium service, would we have ever seen Facebook?
I think the hope is that premium services can be provided (in a self-funding way) in addition to the best efforts “Open Internet” service, rather than taking resources from it. Personally I’m not sure whether we even know how to define the level at which failing to upgrade the best efforts service over time would count as degrading it, let alone which tool (regulation, self-regulation, market) is the right way to ensure that doesn’t happen!
The MySpace/Facebook point is well made (interesting to see today that Microsoft are complaining about Google to the European Court!). The counter-argument that those in favour of “premium” would make is that unless more money can be found somewhere, the rate of investment in bandwidth won’t keep up with the rate of investment in services and the current (contended) best efforts network will come to a grinding halt – still treating all packets equally, of course
And rich providers are already paying for premium access to customers, by using CDNs such as Akamai – is that unfair and does NN mean we should we ban it too?
I hope you’ll gather that while I am sure that there is something that needs to be protected, I’m still very unsure what the right way is to do it. But it seems a fascinating and important discussion, so I’m planning to keep an eye on it.