On network neutrality

I'm not yet ready to jump on the bandwagon of people scurrying around demanding network neutrality when I'm guessing most of them don't really have any idea what it means. On the one hand, yes, the telcos are behaving like jackasses. I pay for broadband access on my end of your pipe, and Google pays for a fuckload of bandwidth on their end of the pipe, so you're getting revenue out of both sides. Quit yer goddamn bitching.

On the other hand, there are reasons and situations net neutrality is a bad thing from a technical point of view. See, this is how things work (listen up Senator Stevens):

Imagine a very strange world in which you can't actually move, but you're within shouting distance of all your friends. There are no telephones, radios, etc., so the only way to communicate is by shouting things at your friends and asking them to shout to their friends and so on until, eventually, the person you were trying to talk to hears your message (assume for a moment that people weren't retarded and that this wouldn't degenerate into an assinine game of telephone; assume everyone is attentive enough that they always pass the message on correctly). So, for instance, if I want to get a message to my good buddy Wilbur, I might first have to yell something to Pedro, who would yell at Rosario, who would yell at Gustav, who would finally yell at Wilbur. I don't know why Gustav knows Wilbur. I think they met in a chat room.

Anyway, this is all well and good. Except not everyone has an infinite capacity for messages. What happens if Pedro's trying to listen to a message from Muffy at the same time that I'm shouting at him? He can't listen to both. So, he has to ignore one. Since no one in their right mind listens to a woman named Muffy, he chooses to listen to me.

But, as we all know, not all messages are created equal. What if it happens to be the case that what I'm shouting is something along the lines of, "Hey Wilbur! I took a crap I'm really proud of! Want to see?" Moreover, what if Muffy's shouting, "Dear sweet baby Jesus! My infant is on fire! And being slowly devoured by a python!" You know what? Shallow, annoying bitch that Muffy is, and as amazing as that monstrous dump was, I think Muffy's message is more urgent.

...Which brings us back to the question of net neutrality. As things currently stand, the "people" (i.e., routers) inside the internet routing messages around are oblivious to what's actually in the messages and who they are coming from and going to. This is what neutrality is all about. The routers are neutral. They don't give a shit about the messages beyond the fact that they're messages.

The problem, as you saw in my oh so clever little metaphor, is that there are indeed times when it may be important to care about what's in the messages, who they're from, and where they're going. A simple example might be that it's more important for you to get the next video frame from video.google.com in the next few milliseconds than it is for Boris to tell Wilma Joe Shitforbrains in Idaho about discounted Cialis in a timely fashion.

That said, a) there's no guarantee that a free market will deliver you a morally optimal outcome (if Boris pays the router owner more, he may well get his Cialis offer delivered in preference to your video frame), and b) since a few companies own most of the internal routers on the internet, there's not a lot preventing them from jacking up their prices for essentially the same level of performance we get today.

So, I don't know. I think network neutrality as it's being talked about is too blunt a hammer. I think it may well end up being important for service providers to be able to strike contracts that allow certain kinds of traffic to be delivered preferentially to others. But by the same token, without some kind of regulation, you'll probably just see the telcos soaking content providers for as much as they can get away with, which is why people like Google and Microsoft are in favor of net neutrality.

Have we learned something today, children?