This started off as a comment to Trump and his FCC lackey, Ajit Pai, just blundered into a very big net neutrality fight but it grew to a diary… There is more to the story.
The fact that the states, California in particular, are moving forward is good news at many levels. Given that we’ve had to re-visit the issue yet again, it gives us an opportunity to refine what it is we really want when we declare for “Net Neutrality”.
The ISPs in question only really control the “last mile”. Comcast and Verizon are typical. They have a network in your home town and my home town and may own some long haul links but they usually “peer” with the big long-haul networks like MCI, Level 3 etc. to connect those networks to the rest of the world. That is one of the beauties in the Internet design. You don’t need to build out the whole net everywhere on your own, you just need to connect, “peer” with other nets. And, of course, Google, Yahoo! (until Verizon bought them), Amazon, and the thousands of hosting services that provide “power, ping, and pipe” for the rest (including the Kos) don’t directly connect to any of these “last mile” ISPs . The Tier 1 networks, like MCI, are not going to get into the fast lane/slow lane business because not only is it really hard to do at that level but there is nothing in it for them. This has implications for how big a cowpie Ajit has voluntarily and publicly jumped into.
Given what I just described, the only place Verizon can try this stupid idea is in the “last mile”, i.e. the fiber or coax line coming into your or my house from their local “head end”. That is the only place where there is knowledge of who is at the end-point (you the customer who’s not paid up). Once you get above that local ISP network, all the big long haul guys know is that there is a connection and packets transiting from Verizon to somewhere else. They have no way of knowing whether the Verizon address is residential or “business class”. It gets worse given that even Verizon “peers” with multiple next-level providers and packets can come from anywhere. It is only in that last mile where everything comes together and there is the hardware to do the kind of deep packet inspection, aka snooping, to make the fast/slow work. They have to know that a) you are a Verizon customer, b) you didn’t pay for special Netflix, and c) Netflix is what you are trying to access. Once your connection exits the Verizon building, no one else knows that information. Even for traffic going the other way where Verizon can detect that it is Netflix at their border, they can still only mess things up for Verizon customers. For example, both Comcast and Frontier (FIOS) serve my neighborhood. Both local networks peer into the ‘net with the same long haul providers serving our metro area. Nobody at that level is going to piss off FIOS users like me to help Verizon, if for no other reason than my ISP will just start re-routing around the congestion just like we designed the network to do. Read Vint Cerf’s and Tim Berners-Lee’s letter for the details. Also follow the link to their 43 page FCC comment.
What this all means is this. Comcast and Verizon are local ISP providers which the states and municipalities have jurisdiction over. If CA says no, they cannot throttle the “last mile” and their stirring the pot with Ajit is all for naught. In fact, they have pissed off the local folks who granted their local license. They could awakened municipalities to consider simply kicking them out of town and even running the lSP themselves. That is already happening in places like Santa Cruz, CA where the county and Cruzio are partnering in bringing fiber to the neighborhoods.
My personal take is that Comcast et al are still thinking of themselves as cable TV companies. Back in the good old days of Gun Smoke and Bonanza, nobody died if Hoss was off the air for a while. Life was simple and Comcast could have crappy service and get away with it because they were Title I “Information Services”, i.e. little more than one of many “definitions” in the FCC’s enabling law. Cable TV, like AOL or CompuServe (remember them?) were businesses that used communications technologies to provide a convenient service but never provided anything that anyone really needed. When the technology of Internet protocols over cable networks came along, they thought, “Hey, here is another thing like TV that we can make some money on.” But once they stepped into AT&T’s turf and offered phone service, they discovered that people have a very different attitude when they pick up their phone and don’t get dial-tone. AT&T understands dial-tone because the regulators have made life very hard on them when it wasn’t there. AT&T and other telecom services have been defined as Title II “common carriers” for a reason since 1934. They understand that not only do they have to provide equal service to everyone but that service must be reliable. Your local phone company has banks of batteries just for that very purpose, when the lights go out. That, BTW, is why your cable/fiber provided phone has a UPS (battery backup) in your house. It is there because of the regulatory requirement of providing dial-tone no-matter-what. With the conversion of the telephone network to Internet technology, both AT&T and the “cable companies” started to look a lot alike and cable companies got into the telecom, i.e. phone, business. In that world, the phone must work. We are now at the stage in Internet usage where what we demanded of phone companies now applies to Internet service. In fact, the old circuit-switched plain-old-telephone-service (POTS) is long gone, long ago transformed into one of many Internet protocol based services on top of an Internet technology based network. Even conventional “cable TV” is an Internet based service. For example, our Frontier FIOS TV box may have HDMI and coax connectors on the back but on the front end, it is using the same Internet protocols and is just another node on my home network just like my smart phone, tablet, and PC and shares the same fiber. Even Comcast’s TV is a layered service.
Emergency services, businesses, government, and civic organizations of all sorts now have connections to and depend on their Internet connection for critical and, in many cases, life-or-death communications. In this space, there is no fooling around or cutting corners. It does not matter whether it is critical data or someone’s voice that is converted to data. It is all data and its reliable transmission is critical in a modern technological society.
The cable company may be able make lame excuses and slide by if Gramma can’t watch Days of Our Lives because they aren’t maintaining their network. You can see this attitude in Comcast’s silly commercials where they try and convince us that they will now show up on your time, not theirs as if they are just providing entertainment, not a critical communications service. But if Gramma’s phone or the Internet connection it uses does not work and she can’t call 911 for help or the Internet connection to the county’s Emergency Response Center drops out during an emergency, that same ISP may find that there are attorneys with real clout at their door who are not happy. They are playing at still being The Cable Guy when, in reality, they have, in their lust for profits, stumbled into being a common carrier. (This linked article is a good explanation. Note that the concept goes all the way back to the Middle Ages).
So where does that leave us? In simple terms, Comcast wants to have its cake and eat it too. This is a common attitude among the deregulation and privatization crowd. Somehow the rest of us are supposed to just accept these guys running amok in our economy for the sake of their sacred “free market”. But we as a nation long ago put regulations like Title II in place because companies wanted to be players and turn a profit in a service we all needed but were not willing to act in good faith and for the common good. I would like us to learn from our history and go farther than just “Net Neutrality”. This problem has deeper implications, especially as we become more dependent on a reliable Internet. In fact, an Internet that supplanted POTS phones as a critical service years ago.
I propose that any Internet based communications service that provides connectivity to the public be declared a “common carrier” as defined by Title II. Further, if the operators of that service have anything other than communications services, they should be required to divest themselves of either the communications service or the other product(s). We have been down this road before (1956 AT&T consent decree) and if it wasn’t for that breakup, most of what we know today as the Internet would not have been possible. We would still have dial, or at most, push-button phones. See The Unix revolution—thank you, Uncle Sam? If it was not for that action, my career in Internet systems and UNIX and later Linux systems development would not have happened. And if the government, yes the government, didn’t pay us to write that code, you would not be able to read this now or buy the book on Amazon. BTW, I had a PDP-11 like that too way back then when we were having fun developing the Internet.
To specifics. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and others are to be offered a choice: they can either be a common carrier and provide Internet communications services or they can be a “content provider”, i.e. Yahoo! or Verizon but not both. They either sell off their network or they sell off their “Internet experience” properties , i.e. “information services”. In other words, we must simply remove their temptation to leverage one to promote the other at our expense for their own selfish interest. As Vint Cerf et al note in their filing with the FCC, most of what has been “cable TV” is already moved off of “cable TV”. Let’s make it official. In addition, we should take the lesson of the consent decree and stop (and roll back) many of the mergers and consolidation of networks. The resilience of the Internet is based on its distributed and decentralized structure. Every service I worked for from AltaVista to Yahoo! and others peer with multiple long haul carriers. We don’t need to go back to the days of only one or two companies whose company wide screwups can bring down everything.
Ajit’s reasoning is that they need this to have the “incentive” to build out more network. If that were actually true, AT&T would have done it 40 years ago rather than fighting against the work we were doing. He is trying to peddle the fantasy that they would suddenly reverse decades of behavior just because… If Comcast loses interest in running a network, they can sell it off — or we, their customers and the states and municipalities who granted them their franchise can simply take it away and award it to someone else who will do the job.