Net Neutrality - The Contradictions Won't Be Noted By The Uninformed

While I enjoy the political debates about a number of issues regarding culture and society, nothing pisses me off more than does a person who seeks to make technology a matter of "social justice" and yet proves that they don't know what they are talking about as they make contradictory statements.   Most of the man's contradictory comments in the video will fly over your heads.

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The thing that I dislike most about the drive for "Net Neutrality" is that this concept morphs into anything that the proponent wants it to be at the time of the debate at hand. We can wash all of these point claims away and conclude that effectively "Net Neutrality" is a drive for the government to maintain a strong regulatory hand over the carriers that are involved in our Internet communications.

The subject of the "Democracy Now" interview is about the news that Google is in negotiations with Verizon Communications to offer high speed access to its content. In the vernacular of the "Net Neutrality" bigots Google will be preferred over some of the other content providers that are available on the net. As users realize that "Google is faster" they will be inclined to go to this site over the slower competitors.

1) This is foolish logic. Take away these latest negotiations between the two companies and it has always been the case that the bandwidth of the access circuit purchased by the CONTENT PROVIDER dictates the number of concurrent users and the type of media that is able to be downloaded (ie: HD video streams).

I do not know all of the details of the Google/Verizon negotiations but I suspect that they are working on enabling high speed links from Google's data centers throughout the nation and Verizon's Internet backbone nodes.

2) The activists opposition to these high speed links flies in the face of the long held talking points which criticize Internet backbone carriers for failing to upgrade their networks as promised in the "Telecommunications Act of 1996".

Presently Tier 1 and Tier 2 carriers form a number of PRIVATE interconnections beyond the several public interconnection points which are often congested. The only difference in this case is that Google is one distinct content provider and thus this private link into Verizon has their own traffic rather than an aggregation of traffic from other content providers via an open link.

The activists need to make up their minds. Do they want a fast Internet for the masses or do they want the government to micromanage the architecture.

3) The claim that carriers would "slow down" Internet traffic as they prefer others does not seem logical. First of all let me distinguish traffic for wireless Internet devices versus those for general wired broadband links. With a limited amount of spectrum to share amongst its subscribers wireless carriers had better do what is called "traffic shaping" lest they experience performance problems. Wireless networks have all of their data traffic aggregated through 4 to 8 data centers around the nation so this is possible for them to regulate the speed of traffic.

When it comes to the general Internet - the claim of purposefully slowing down traffic does not hold water. As carriers upgrade their Internet trunks to 40Gb per second speeds they seek to do as little packet inspection on these ultra high speed switches as possible. They forward traffic as fast as possible as their only function. Even at the network distribution points they would have to build upon a substantial distributed infrastructure to "suppress" lower value content providers. I can see no business reason as to why they would want to invest these billions of dollars at the network edge for the punitive reasons that the Internet activists give. It makes no sense.

4) Other nations have higher speed wireless networks. Again he doesn't realize the irony in his statement. First - there is a limited amount of wireless spectrum available. We have 4 large wireless carriers in each market in America. They each have their own networks and have leased spectrum from the FCC. The speed of a wireless data link is a function of the amount of spectrum that is available to a specific cell tower in an area, the number of concurrent users and the technology that is deployed (ie: LTE or HSPA or EVDO). Ironically the Democracy Now guest attacks the USA for limited competitive choices yet the fact that we have 4 or more wireless competitors in each market serves as a potential cap on the amount of spectrum that is available to one company.

We can judge the veracity of these attacks and claims by making note of which countries are rolling out the new 4G technologies - (LTE and WiMax - note some people don't consider WiMax as 4G). While they are always seeking to indict the American Internet and wireless infrastructure as "slow" due to the greed and lack of regulation upon the companies - the truth is so frequently the opposite. The United States will be the first nation to have a large scale nation-wide LTE network. This will be deployed in spectrum that was cleared out with the reassignment of 700Mhz spectrum.

I get the sense that the critics are nothing more than agents that are used to counterbalance the interests of the carriers. They don't need to be accurate. They only need to be perpetually UNSATISFIED, thus provoking the government to keep their watchful eye on the industry.

Funny how AT&T and Verizon battle each other on which is faster and more pervasive in its coverage. How does this competition line up with the "technology social justice" people's claims that BOTH are lying to us as they drag their feet in making upgrades?

Clearly they don't know what they are talking about.