Rank Disappointment
April 9th, 2008 by caaronWe’re No. 4! We’re No. 4! USA! USA! USA!
Today’s New York Times touts a study that offers a new spin on America’s digital decline. While every other recent study shows the United States falling further behind the rest of the world, a new Global Information Technology Report claims “the Internet infrastructure of the United States is one of the world’s best and getting better.”
What good news — especially for the nation’s cable and phone companies – to hear that America has returned to its rightful place as a world Internet leader without changing a thing or, you know, having a national broadband policy. Take that, Chicken Little.
But before you pop the champagne, you might want to look at where this boost in the international broadband rankings came from. We didn’t want to read through the whole thing either. But fortunately Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner, a guy who lives for footnotes, has already sifted through the fine print.
Details, Details
Take Appendix A of the study — “Technical composition and computation of the Networked Readiness Index 2007–2008.” That’s a long way of saying “this is how we measured.” And it turns out that Insead, the Paris business school that did the study for the World Economic Forum, relied on 68 factors to gauge “national network readiness.”
However, Turner points out, only four of these factors have anything to do with residential use of broadband — high-speed monthly broadband subscriptions, lowest cost of broadband, broadband Internet subscribers, and Internet bandwidth. Unfortunately, as so many other studies have shown, these four areas are not our strong points.
But we kick butt in the other categories. Yes, there is a high availability of venture capital. Yes, there is freedom of the press. Yes, our patent laws are vigorous in their protection of intellectual property. Yes, there are a large number of research scientists and engineers working at well-funded academic institutions. Yes, we have a robust business sector that uses personal computers and mobile phones. Yes, many governmental agencies have an online presence.
These are the precise factors that make the United States such a global economic powerhouse — and these very factors are exactly why we expect to be doing so much better on measures of broadband deployment, adoption and quality. But we’re not.
We Are (Behind) the World
In fact, in this race we’re getting lapped by South Korea, France, Qatar and all the rest.
Consumers in these countries pay less for broadband connections that are much faster than we have here. That’s because they have policies that foster more choice and innovation. Meanwhile, our phone and cable companies spend their money lobbying to kill competition and Net Neutrality, instead of investing in new networks.
What we really need instead of more excuses and fuzzy math is some national leadership to tackle the digital divide and bring the benefits of an open Internet to all Americans. That’s something everyone could cheer.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:26 am
Other truly “connected” nations, such as Japan, are taking measures to deal with abuses of the Internet via P2P. If we want to encourage the investment we need to catch up — or in fact any sort of capital investment in our Internet at all — we must do the same. Who will want to be an ISP at all if there is massive regulation that prevents ISPs from breaking even? How can we advance broadband deployment when the Vuze and Free Press petitions, if granted, would cause small and rural ISPs to go belly up, cutting off rural customers? “Save the Internet” must consider very carefully the potential consequences of its actions and make sure that it is lobbying for the right things. Currently, its agenda would not save the Internet at all; it would harm it.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
How is using a P2P application over the Internet abuse? We are entitled to use the Internet for whatever we want (as long as it is legal of course) and P2P is not illegal. If there are slowdowns, then ISPs need to expand capacity. Comcast throttling BitTorrent traffic and using their saddlebags full of money to pay lobbyists is not good at all. I understand the cable loop infrastructure is inherently limited but they should not use that as an excuse but rather as a motivation. Instead of paying lobbyists they should roll out fiber to replace their outmoded cable networks. There is no excuse for this.
However, I do understand your point about driving smaller ISPs out of business, and something needs to be done to prevent that. But letting this insanity continue cannot be it.
Thank you for posting a response and Thanks to everyone that read mine.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
CONFUSING WHAT’S LEGAL with WHAT’S COMPETITIVE and NEUTRAL, then CONFUSING BOTH WITH WHAT CAUSES CONGESTION
Managing network congestion has little to do with managing the property rights of content and everything to do with managing the administrative assignment of bandwidth. Confusing the two results in false claims to undermine net neutrality and the competition it enables.
Enforcing property rights associated with P2P traffic does not interfere with, depend on or affect in any way the concurrent enforcement of net neutrality which enables neutral competition over a broadband network.
George Ou, in a March 26 filing before the FCC in Docket 07-52 on page 7, demonstrates perhaps unwittingly, how “weighted bandwidth” could be used as neutral management of P2P traffic should it exceed assigned bandwidth limits, in order to place P2P on a level playing field in terms of managing uniform data packets regardless of content.
This is an argument for net neutrality, not against it as implied by Ou. The problem is not the P2P traffic itself. The problem is the absence of assigned and enforced bandwidth limits, which are then exploited by network providers to “manage” congestion on a discriminatory, non-neutral, non-competitive basis.
The reason Japan and Korea are so far ahead of U.S. broadband in speed and penetration respectively is because they understood and kept separate the objective of encouraging competition over a broadband network versus providing the underlying network itself in non-competitive conditions necessary to achieve efficiency.
Whether Japan “throttles” P2P use on grounds of enforcing property rights and undermines net neutrality in the process - if that’s the case - is entirely irrelevant to whether P2P use can be conducted neutrally on a level playing field with other use in terms of assigned and available bandwidth in conjunction with the “reasonable network management” of congestion.
For a clear, ongoing discussion of this issue from opposing perspectives of various experts with details, see:
Current P2P Arguments Before the FCC
If this link doesn’t work, just go to wetmachine.com
April 11th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
piropeople13:
P2P applications abuse the network because they violate the terms of the user’s contract, set up servers for third party on the network (often for illegally copied or just plain illegal material) without permission, shift costs to the ISP without compensation (and multiply them, often by a factor of 100 or more, in the process), and seize priority over other traffic which is time-sensitive. Throttling BitTorrent and other P2P traffic is actually a gentler approach than most ISPs can afford to take; the majority of them prohibit it altogether.
Also, while limitations in the local loop may be a concern in some cases, actual experience in other countries (e.g. Japan) has shown that simply increasing the capacity of the local loop does not help. P2P will quickly saturate the additional capacity, driving total network usage up to about 70-80% (the danger point).
In the case of our ISP, and many others, the local loop isn’t an issue. We have enough capacity to deliver the service we promise to every customer. However, they can’t consume more resources than they are paying for, or we are out of business. And P2P does exactly that. If we were forced not to throttle or block P2P, we’d have to close our doors.
Finally, your comment about Comcast “using saddlebags full of money to pay lobbyists” suggests that you may be angry at or resent Comcast. That anger may be perfectly justifiable, but don’t let it misguide you into advocating bad or harmful policies. Throttling of P2P is a necessary part of good network management; without it, independent ISPs would simply have to shut down. And guess who you’d be left with? The telco/cable duopoly.
P.S. — I actually wish that Comcast were paying some good lobbyists to make a better case for it. The fact is that their PR and lobbying have been so totally inept that I can’t believe that they are spending much, if anything on it. Or if they are, they sure aren’t getting their money’s worth. They’re letting even the most obviously incorrect arguments get by without a response, and that’s inexcusable. Little guys like me shouldn’t have to fight their battles.
Barry:
What you may not understand about George Ou’s comments is that the TCP/IP protocol, which runs the Internet, does not allow for the “weighted” approach he describes. In fact, BitTorrent intentionally games the system, giving itself priority over other traffic even though bulk data transfers should have lower priority, by exploiting flaws in the way TCP manages traffic. This degrades time-critical services such as voice over IP (VoIP), harming the quality of the provider’s service. It also grabs more than its share of other network resources — including the tables in the router which manage connections.
In reality, the only way to prevent P2P from degrading the network is to hold it back. That is, if you do not prohibit it altogether, as most ISPs do (though enforcement is spotty).
April 11th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
When VOIP is a “time-sensitive-critical” service to be protected from “lower-priority bulk” traffic such as P2P which can cause congestion, the result is two levels of bandwidth service quality.
One level is dedicated, always-on, firm, uncongested premium service, specifically protected from interruption via displacement by other “less critical” services at a lower quality level.
For networks which already experience daily peak slowdowns from congestion, this is the practical result - “VOIP” and anything else that uses the premium tier at one level, combined with the larger use of “less critical” bandwidth at the lower level.
Net neutrality does not prevent or discourage in any way the offer or provision of different levels of service quality by bandwidth tier.
Instead, it would only require, for example, that one VOIP service cannot be favored over another in terms of prices and TOS that incurs a competitive disadvantage to either. Likewise, any other service capable of using the same bandwidth should have access to the same prices and TOS, regardless of content, VOIP or otherwise.
This principle would also apply to P2P use when it uses individual connection bandwidth capacity no different than any other use, and no more than the “up to” maximum at which it was sold, regardless of whether the connection is acting as a virtual server to upload or download content.
This is fundamentally different than asserting that the multiple, simultaneous use of many connections in this manner can overwhelm a network with congestion. If that’s the case, either the connection capacity should be downgraded or the network capacity should be upgraded for all bandwidth use under uniform prices and TOS - not just P2P use, which would be a “non-neutral” downgrade or upgrade that favors particular content.
Further, to assert that P2P uses more than the “up to” bandwidth that is sold and paid for is either confusing the obvious shortage of peak network capacity available compared to the larger sum of oversold, individual, maximum connection bandwidth, or it ignores currently available means to restrict individual bandwidth use above the “up to” limit.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Barry:
You claim to be an economist, so perhaps you’ll be able to understand what I’m saying when I explain that that the cost of providing service to a user depends on more than an “up to” limit. It also depend upon the duty cycle — the amount of time data is being transferred at that limit. P2P operates constantly — even when the user isn’t at the PC — and thus has to be throttled or prohibited altogether to prevent costs from going through the roof. What’s more, P2P is being used as a way of dumping the content providers’ costs on the ISP without compensation. Essentially, what P2P does is set up a server on the ISP’s network for use by the content provider. This not only transfers the costs which should rightfully be borne by the content provider to the ISP — it also multiplies them in the process because ISPs pay more for bandwidth than a content provider does with a co-located server. I think you’ll agree that this is unfair — and it’s also prohibited by the user’s contract with the ISP.
You must also understand that BitTorrent and other P2P programs exploit weaknesses in the TCP/IP protocol — the protocol on which the Internet runs — to give themselves priority over other traffic, no matter how the ISP tries to prioritize it. Those weaknesses are inherent in the design of TCP/IP, and were never adequately addressed. There were some attempts to work around the problem by attempting to get computers to engage in “good behavior” — and in fact computer software was written to do this.
Alas, this approach only worked in the early days, when the Internet (then the ARPAnet) was a cooperative research environment. On today’s Internet, P2P applications bypass the “good behavior mechanisms so as to seize resources for themselves. (In fact, the original author of BitTorrent has boasted about his software’s ability to do just that.) Since we can’t change the Internet protocols very easily at this point (there are too many existing systems out there), all we can do is detect and block the bad behavior. And this means blocking or throttling P2P.
This doesn’t make the Internet non-neutral; in fact, it KEEPS it neutral by preventing rogue software from exploiting weaknesses in the technology. It’s not some diabolical plot, or we wouldn’t be engaging in it. (It’s our mission to connect people to the Internet, and we’ve been doing it at slave wages for 15 years.)
What puzzles me, in particular, is why all of this fuss is being raised about P2P when P2P is not necessary for the delivery of ANY content or service. Anything you can get via P2P can also be delivered without it. So, claims that throttling P2P are obviously fallacious. Why do you continue to make such claims? They hurt the credibility of your other arguments.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Oops; typo above. I wrote:
“So, claims that throttling P2P are obviously fallacious.”
I should have written:
“So, claims that throttling P2P somehow harms free speech are obviously fallacious.”
April 13th, 2008 at 10:46 am
HAND WAVING, INTENTIONS AND PROMISES OF WHAT’S “FAIR” AND “GOOD BEHAVIOR” DO NOT CONSTITUTE COMPETITION
When a provider’s contract places limits on whether and how one connection on the edge of a network can exchange content with other connections, that already indicates market power in the absence of competitive alternatives.
The provider is attempting to sell more than uniform units of bandwidth independent of content, instead tying the bandwidth to particular uses of the bandwidth through non-neutral restrictions on its use at the connection level.
In a competitive market for bandwidth as a commodity, anyone uphappy with this arrangement would simply find a provider who offers bandwidth not forceably packaged or bundled with particular content in this fashion.
An analogy would be an electric company which prevents the use of electric hair dryers as “electric hogs” rather than placing uniform prices and TOS on the use of kilowatts and kilowatt-hours for all consumers (a “neutral” condition imposed in the absence of competition for distributional electric grids, which are a necessary monopoly in order to achieve efficiency)
When some of today’s electric consumers set up windmills and solar devices to sell electricity back into the grid, that’s similar to a P2P user setting up “servers” on end use connections. The electric utility doesn’t claim it’s “invaded” by windmills and solar panels, at least not any more - it simply treats it as uniform flows of kilowatts and kilwatt-hours when the meter is run backwards, like corresponding uniform bandwidth in terms of Mbs or GB volume.
To claim that P2P uses in excess of the “up to” amount of bandwidth sold is equivalent to an electric company complaining that customers are exceeding the units of kilowatts sold and purchased.
When that happens, electric companies know that either the meter is broken or someone is stealing the electricity without paying for it and disconnect customers for the same. They don’t look out over the network grid and say, “all this congestion is caused by an invasion of illegal electric hair dryers and they must be treated separately”, i.e. in a non-neutral way, from all other electric use, i.e. the equivalent of broadband “content”.
Further, to claim that constant, continuous use of an “up to” connection somehow exceeds its cost or shifts costs errs on several points.
Under competition, there would be alternatives to whatever this means, i.e., somewhere would be a provider that offers dedicated bandwidth in “up to” limits, which means for example, that a 4Mbs connection could indeed produce over a 1,000 GBs/month without the provider claiming that such use “exceeds” 4Mbs and 1,000 GBs and therefore “shifts costs” and “violates” the contract.
No it doesn’t. And that’s the problem. Network providers are labeling such use as “bandwidth hogs” and “all you can eat consumers” and “contract violaters” in order to engage in the non-neutral, discriminatory control of content, when all they’d have to do in the so-called “competitive” market in which they claim to exist, is simply provide X service for Y price under Z conditions, which would include, for example, dedicated bandwith connections that really were accessible 24/7 for X Mbs limits as sold.
In contrast, providers revert to phony threats of “Gegabytes of mass destruction” mode when faced with these ordinary questions of business practices in competitive markets.
If P2P data packets are somehow technically dangerous or illegal in some way that other packets are not at the individual data packet level, then by all means eliminate it.
Meanwhile, what’s all the hand waving about? Is the bandwidth meter broken? Is the GB meter broken? Why are they secret? Can’t the individual violaters be disconnected? What does content have to do with the use of more or less Mps of bandwidth or volume of GBs, independent of how it uses TCP, and why is this fundamentally confused with congestion that results form all sources of peak use due to oversold capacity?
The answer is, most broadband bandwidth in most areas is not sold as a commodity under competitive conditions and requires net neutrality, like an electric grid, to result in comes similar to competition.
April 13th, 2008 at 11:41 am
You write:
“When a provider’s contract places limits on whether and how one connection on the edge of a network can exchange content with other connections, that already indicates market power in the absence of competitive alternatives.”
Oh, I see. And if the lease on my apartment says that I can’t turn it into a crack house, blare music that disturbs my neighbors at 3 AM, or burn the place down, that clearly indicates market power on the part of the landlord no matter how many other apartments are available.
Likewise, if I rent a car, a contract that says I have to return it by a certain date and can’t just total it without paying for it is obviously fundamentally wrong. I should be able to wreck it if I want to — or even drive it right through the rental car agency’s window!
Right.
The fact is that many services come with sensible terms of use and limits on their use, and Internet service is among them.
Some of your other remarks suggest that you think all Internet service should be metered by the bit. Have you ever talked to real world users about this? None of them want to be surprised by overage charges; they’ve had bad enough experiences with that on their cell phones already. And is it fair for a user to get hit with a sudden overage charge because Microsoft suddenly and without warning releases a 2 gigabyte “service pack” for Windows Vista? (Actually, 2 gigabytes probably wouldn’t be enough to fix all of the bugs and compatibility problems in Vista, but it’d be a start.) Want to pay more if you get a big antivirus update or a big update to Quicken or Quickbooks? Didn’t think so. So, like a rental car company, we don’t limit your mileage but impose reasonable restrictions on the use of our facilities. What we do is also analogous to an “all you can eat” buffet. The rules are simple: Take all you want, but you must eat all you take — and you may NOT smuggle food out of the buffet to third parties who haven’t paid. (That’s what P2P does; it takes the ISP’s bandwidth for the benefit of third parties.) Flat rate pricing is fair, simple, and convenient — and, most importantly — CONSUMERS WANT IT and it saves them on their bills. The first provider to STOP providing flat rate pricing will go right out of business.
Let’s put it another way. My cost for backbone bandwidth is $100 per Mbps per month. (And that’s in the middle of the range; some of my colleagues can’t get it for less than $300 per Mbps per month.) Let’s suppose that I sell every user service at 1 Mbps, and each of those users is saturating his or her connection 24×7 (as P2P will do). That means that just the cost of the bandwidth for each user is $100 per month. And that doesn’t count overhead, salaries, tech support, maintenance and construction of our last mile infrastructure, et cetera. Would you, as a user, want to be forced to pay $125 to $140 per month for 1 Mbps service because that’s what the provider HAD to charge due to regulation? That’s what it would come down to if regulation is imposed that forces us not to offer economical grades of service on which P2P is prohibited. You appear to be lobbying for something that would impact consumers horribly, and so long as you do so they’d be insane to support you.