Network Ports, Archly

Let’s revisit that Network Neutrality thing again, shall we?

Kottke finds Craig Newmark making an analogy (of a non-neutral network):

“Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away.”

Cooking-show-host Julian Sanchez responds,

Yes, what a topsy-turvy, dystopian sci-fi world this is, where large companies pay for what we might call “additional phone lines” while customers of a small business might attempt to call in, only to encounter some kind of “busy signal.” Clearly an existential threat to democracy.

And the comments are worth reading too, because (a) there aren’t too many of them, and (b) they feature an Officer of the Grammar.peace facing off against Cory Doctorow.

So I confess, I’m sorta still up in the air on this one.  Newmark’s one of the good guys in all this, but (let’s be honest) he does also have a vested interest.  I think I would make two points in all of this.

First, I think that Cory Doctorow’s comment is typical of the way that a lot of people on the pro-neutrality side tend to talk about things — I’m no fan of the few Boston companies that have provided internet service for me over the years (Verizon and Comcast), but using phrases like “bribery” and “protection money” and “discriminatory network” don’t really induce me to take the opposite side either.

My second point is a thought experiment — imagine a situation in which the tables are turned around.  Imagine that we have some federal regulation in place that requires all ISPs to provide at least baseline access to all network destinations.  But now my ISP (Comcast, for instance) sends a technician to my house and installs a new, second line to my cable-modem.  In addition to my normal network useage, now some of my network traffic can be routed over this new superfast-superspecial line.    And maybe, for whatever reason, Comcast wants to sell that bandwidth to certain internet content providers — for a fee, whenever I am requesting content from websites A, B, and C, if the owners of A have paid Comcast for the specialcable routing, their content will be delivered to my computer over that line.  It will appear to me that A’s content loads faster than B or C, even though (ideally) all three websites have equal bandwidth at their end of The Pipes.

Is that a state-of-affairs that we want to regulate?  Should that particular situation be peculiarly addressed by legislation, and restricted or made-illegal a priori?

It seems to me, without taking a stance on the network neutrality issue as a whole, that the ideal state for me as a consumer would be one of fluidity and full-information.  In other words, I would like to see laws passed that require whatever service provider I use to make available to me the relative priorities of all content that I could request over their system.  If they’re making provider-specific choices, fine — just let me see what they are.  Furthermore, I want more fluid service contracts — it should be legally required that service contracts be short, and that it be very easy to switch to a competing provider.

If those two desires were met, I’d be a lot more sanguine about the possibility of a non-neutral net.

Also, Kriston, if you happen to read this — whose analogy were you saying didn’t match Newmark’s?  Doctorow’s analogy, or Sanchez’s?