‘Net Neutrality’: Ignore at your own risk

'Net Neutrality': Ignore at your own risk

by: Mike Himowitz

Tech writers live by analogy, so I'll start today's column with one about a hypothetical bedroom community called HomeTown.

It's a great place to live, but most of its residents work 20 miles away in the bustling metropolis of JobVille.

To keep providing schools, parks and paved streets, the government of HomeTown wants people to work there, as well as live there. That way it would get a share of the taxes from the kind of offices, stores and factories that make JobVille so successful.

The traditional way to do this is by making the town more attractive to business. But that's not enough for the mean-spirited HomeTown fathers. They want to make it harder for HomeTown residents to find jobs elsewhere, too. So they put 10 mph speed limits on all the roads to JobVille and other towns - and no speed limits on the roads to work sites in HomeTown. They call this "reasonable traffic management."

Many heavy users of Comcast's Internet service are complaining about precisely this kind of "speed discrimination" on their own roads. Along with others worried about the future of the Net, they gathered at an unusual Federal Communications Commission hearing at Harvard University this week.

The official subject was the boring euphemism "Net Neutrality," but it's one of the hottest issues in cyberspace today - and a topic you ignore at your peril.

The complainers were Comcast customers who like to trade videos online with a peer-to-peer file-sharing system called BitTorrent and similar software from other organizations. If you're over 30, you probably haven't heard of BitTorrent, but it's one reason why the hard drives of the young these days are crammed full of movies - mostly pirated and some only a few days out of theaters.

Unlike digital music - which requires just three megabytes of data to be transmitted for the average album track - even well-compressed movies require hundreds of megabytes, or even gigabytes of information. Transmitting that information over the Internet requires a lot of network bandwidth.

BitTorrent spreads out this load by splitting the job among multiple PCs that may be thousands of miles apart, but there's no doubt it takes a lot of network resources to download a movie.

That said, there's no proof that these downloaders have really inconvenienced other users or clogged up Comcast's operations. But the cable and Internet provider persists in slowing down the traffic of customers using BitTorrent and similar services. Since all data moves in little packets of ones and zeros, this involved Comcast doing a lot of sniffing around in its customers' private transmissions.

This is typical of the way Comcast operates.

From time to time The Sun and other papers have run articles about Comcast warning some local customer that he's exceeding his bandwidth limit. But when the customer asks what that limit is, Comcast won't say. It just cuts off his service.

Why? Because if we all know what the limit is, we'll all use as much as we're allowed and the network will get all clogged up. This is patently ridiculous; if this kind of conduct were universally true, there wouldn't be a buffet restaurant left in business.

The BitTorrent case goes a step further because Comcast applied its slowdown to an entire class of net traffic. Now you may not have a lot of sympathy for a bunch of video pirates, but some of these folks are actually using the service legitimately.

And consider this - if you're a Comcast customer, you may get its video-on-demand service. But it's quite possible - and a handful of sites are already doing it - to deliver video over the Net. What if Comcast decides to slow down the video service you want to buy in order to keep the bandwidth for its own video service? Remember, everything travels over the same pipes to your house.

Right now, we all pay the same amount for the same classes of Comcast service under the theory that the service provider should be "neutral" about what passes over the network, assuming that it's not illegal.

To purists, the Internet is just a highway system whose builders shouldn't care whether a tractor-trailer hauling food belongs to Safeway or Giant or Wegmans - or whether the truck is full of corn flakes or bananas. We're all subject to the same speed limit.

Not so fast, says Comcast. The company says it has the right to take actions that amount to "reasonable network management" to keep up network speed for the rest of its users. That's all it was doing by slowing down BitTorrent traffic - making sure other customers had enough bandwidth.

From the tenor of the questioning Monday, it didn't sound as if FCC members were persuaded. But the issue is likely to drag on as Comcast Corp., AT&T Inc. and other providers decide they have the absolute right to slow down some users and speed up others - for whatever reason.

Want an even more chilling example of what happens when a network stops being neutral? In September, Verizon Wireless refused to let NARAL, the national abortion rights group, send text messages to members who subscribed to NARAL's news alert service.

Verizon's rationale: It has the right to prohibit services that "promote an agenda or distribute content that, in its discretion, may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users."

Well, George W. Bush may be unsavory to me, and Hillary Clinton may be unsavory to you, but does that give your cell phone carrier the right to prohibit political speech or text it doesn't like over airwaves that you and I own?

Seeing a public relations disaster looming, Verizon backed off quickly and NARAL's messages went through to it's subscribers. But you can see where the notion of a non-neutral or proprietary network can lead - regardless of who owns it.

Democrats are likely to push Net Neutrality legislation in Congress next year if the FCC doesn't act soon. This is an issue you should be concerned about.

For a good look at the Net Neutrality side, visit www.savetheinternet.com. To hear from those who oppose Net Neutrality regulation, visit www.handsoff.org.

For a video of the FCC's hearing at Harvard, visit www.fcc.gov and look for the En Banc Hearing on Broadband Network Management Practices.

View the original article here: http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-himowitz0228,0,6223673.story