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[ NNSquad ] Re: Google response to WSJ 12/15/08 "Fast Track on the Web" story

There's some careless assertions in Georges post. First, content caching is not the ultimate anything; just a stopgap. Moore's law will accelerate the backbone with faster routers and media, whereas company-specific co-located servers will always have an overhead. Even if the co-lo server storage was free, the cost of a Chennai staff to manage the extra data copy is pretty well fixed, and eventually a faster backbone would make it uneconomical. Like all forms of caching, progress will either obsolete it or commoditize it. This day will come a lot faster if U.S. providers realize they are not going to make a killing holding people's content hostage with QoS schemes.

Also "Network prioritization is designed for a totally different purpose but people confuse it for a content delivery mechanism when it isn't." is misleading. Network prioritization has a lot of flavors, and some can be a great content delivery accelerator. The duopoly shows every sign that they will use it this way as soon as they can get away with it.

And jumping ahead, I see someone's still floating the argument that NN is bad for Jitter. I spent most of 2007 working on a VoIP analysis device (Packet Island) and the vast majority of VoIP jitter problems we saw were caused by crappy local ISP networks - too many hops and route flap between the phone and the backbone. The biggest ISPs are the worst. The backbone itself is fine. NN won't hurt jitter.

Despite this, I'm inclined to agree with George that minor legislation is not the answer - Congress is clueless and the Duopoly PR machine is too good at muddying the water for a serious policy debate. Ultimately it will have to be a tightly regulated public utility; with a strict cap on profits. Only by stripping off the profit motive can the net stay free.

-JB-

George Ou wrote: 
Now you know why every Net Neutrality bill ever proposed all specifically
target broadband and they don't apply to the type of non-neutral advantages
that large dotcom companies can buy.

Content caching [usually in the form of Content Delivery Networks (CDN)] is
ultimate fast track mechanism for content distribution. Content caching is
the only model that supports on-demand high quality video, not P2P or
network prioritization. Content caching shows why the Internet never has
and never will be equal. The Internet is only equal to those who can buy
the same infrastructure but it's never been equal to everyone at any price.
Richard Bennett also debunks this myth that everything has to be equal here
http://bennett.com/blog/2008/12/google-gambles-in-casablanca/.



Network prioritization is designed for a totally different purpose but
people confuse it for a content delivery mechanism when it isn't. Network
prioritization ensures that a network can support multiple applications as
well as possible. That means bandwidth should be intelligently prioritized
in favor of interactive applications with low duty cycles over background
applications with non-stop usage. That means background applications aren't
affected in terms of average bandwidth but the interactive application
improves substantially. This does not conflict with the purpose of protocol
agnostic network management which is designed to ensure equitable
distribution of bandwidth between customers of the same broadband service
tier. This system relies on a priority budget system to prevent users and
application developers from abusing the system by labeling every packet as
top priority.

The other purpose of network prioritization is to mitigate jitter (large
spikes in packet delay) which can even occur at very low network utilization
levels. To fix this, we have to deliver the packets out-of-order such that
the network toggles between packets of different applications at a higher
rate which prevents real-time applications from timing out. Some will
consider this "cutting in line" but it isn't because some applications pack
the line with 10 to 100 times more packets and a smart network will quickly
alternate between the different applications to prevent starvation. 

I cover this in my new report on network management released last Thursday.
http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=205



The problem with Net Neutrality legislation is that they either try to ban
network prioritization outright (Wyden bill in 2006) or they try to prohibit
differentiated pricing and give everyone priority regardless of source
(Snowe/Dorgan and Markey in 2006).  The anti-tiering legislation effectively
breaks prioritization because if every packet is prioritized, then no one is
prioritized.  If we can't look at the source of the packets, we can't
determine whether people have exceeded their budgets and it's impossible to
enforce a fair prioritization scheme.  If we can't have differentiated
pricing, then there's no effective way we can give people a priority budget
which means there's no way to enforce a fair and meaningful prioritization
scheme.  The end result is that all the Net Neutrality proposals make it
impossible to have a network prioritization system which makes broadband a
less useful network that multitasks poorly.



George Ou

-----Original Message-----
From: nnsquad-bounces+george_ou=lanarchitect.net@nnsquad.org
[mailto:nnsquad-bounces+george_ou=lanarchitect.net@nnsquad.org] On Behalf Of
Lauren Weinstein
Sent: Sunday, December 14, 2008 9:52 PM
To: nnsquad@nnsquad.org
Cc: lauren@vortex.com
Subject: [ NNSquad ] Google response to WSJ 12/15/08 "Fast Track on the Web"
story


Google response to WSJ 12/15/08 "Fast Track on the Web" story

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/net-neutrality-and-benefits-o
f-caching.html

--Lauren--
NNSquad Moderator