Comments Elsewhere

Craig:

I’m just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your technology frightens and confuses me! So help out my primitive mind here: how, exactly, does a content provider pay a carrier company for “access to the customers,” except by paying the carrier company for the use of its bandwidth? Isn’t the use of their bandwidth precisely how Internet providers provide “access to their customers”?

Also, suppose you have the following network path:

Craig pays Nicenet for Internet access. Rad pays Scumnet for Internet access. Nicenet and Scumnet have a contractual agreement to exchange data with each other, but the agreement doesn’t specify any particular “neutrality” requirement on what each does with the packets from the other.

Now, suppose Craig wants to send data to Rad. The data goes onto Nicenet’s lines, and thence to the exchange with Scumnet. Nicenet is providing the use of its pipes to Craig, which is what Craig’s paid them to do. Craig, however, has not paid anything to Scumnet for the use of their pipes. So, Scumnet, for whatever reason, says that they won’t deliver the packets to Rad unless Craig pays them for the use of their pipes.

Now, this may very well be a foolish demand by Scumnet. But since Craig never paid them for the use of their pipes, and since Nicenet and Scumnet never made an agreement about Craig’s packets in particular, I can’t see where the “double-dipping” occurs. Where was the first “dip”? Help me out here.

Incidentally, just to be clear, I think that nearly every proposed application of non-neutrality, with the possible exception of simple tiered service, is a foolish and destructive way to run a network, and I agree with you that “Dropping neutrality also adds technical complexity to the network while lowering the value of the network to the consumer.” What I disagree with is the suggestion that it’s the government’s job to make sure that computer networks are run well. They have neither the knowledge, the virtue, nor — most importantly — the right to make those decisions.

Finally, nothing in my remarks is intended to defend the telcos, cable companies, and other government-backed oligopolists in the Internet business. They can all go hang for all I care. All that I’m suggesting is that the right way to deal with this problem is to lobby against government-imposed barriers to entry in telecommunications infrastructure, not to add yet one more government regulation in the attempt to calculate the “right” way to run an Internet service.