Paul's Comments

I want to discuss this issue because I believe the whole point is being spun on both sides, because I think it's been getting more heat than light.

I'd like to define a few terms first so my positions may be understood.

A "transit provider" is whoever supplies a connection and you pay them. In the communications world, we often have "peerage" in which you and someone else send so much traffic between each other that it's usually symmetrical, it's hard to say which is using the other more, so both of you agree to carry traffic to and from customers on each other's network without either of you paying the other, and just call it a wash.

A "content provider" is someone who carries messages on their facilities for display or production. A TV station, a newspaper or a website are content providers. You're reading this on one right now, i.e. this website.

The whole issue of network neutrality came up because of transit providers sometimes doing unannounced changes to their networks to discourage or deny certain traffic either because they didn't like it, because they offered something competitive to that traffic and wanted people to use their offering, or because they were also a content provider and wanted to direct customers to their competing offerings.

Any content provider has the absolute right to pick and choose to whom they want to provide content. I don't allow spammers on my blog. Newspapers don't have to carry opinions or ads they don't want to. A cable company carries whatever non-local channels it wants or the customers ask for. (There are certain rules regarding copyright licensing that require carriage of local stations in some cases; I don't want to muddy the water here.) With one exception a TV station can refuse any advertising it wants to.

But a transit provider is supposed to be a neutral delivery system for content. It should also not change any content it delivers or decide what content you can access.

Comcast, Time-Warner Cable, Dish Network, Verizon FIOS or DirecTV can choose whether or not it will carry Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN or the Weather Channel in its capacity as a content provider having limited channel space. It does not have to carry them, but once it decides to do so it becomes a transit provider and should carry them to whoever orders the class of service that carries it. And absent some advertised limits it should neither prohibit them from reaching their customers nor stop customers from consuming it.

If someone wants to watch Fox News 24/7 on his cable or satellite service he should be allowed to do so, the cable company should not be able to say after they've watched it for 12 hours that they need to switch to MSNBC, either because they've watched too much of Fox News or because he should watch their offering. (Comcast is trying to buy NBC Universal which means I believe it will own MSNBC and thus be competing with Fox News.)

This is not a First Amendment issue. I am not saying they should have to carry any channel. But if they do offer it they should be "an honest broker" and act as a neutral transit provider.

In the case of the Internet, all sites are the same and all locations are the same. In this respect, an Internet Service Provider is a transit provider and should provide all customers access to all facilities on the same terms and conditions as anyone else.

I don't think we want Verizon to say you can't dial up Comcast and use their network to order phone service from them, nor have Comcast, if you get phone service from them, forbid you to call Dish Network over their phone lines. We should be able to expect a transit provider such as a telephone company or VOIP provider to route all calls without discrimination, even if it's to or from a competitor.

By the way, this is more or less the reason we have direct-dial service. Mr. Strowger, an undertaker, was concerned that the operators at the telephone company were diverting calls from his mortuary to a competitor's. He was so concerned he sat down and invented the direct-dial telephone switch from which all switch fabric we have now is derived. Because a mortician didn't want the telephone company to play favorites at the expense of his business, all of us can call anyone we want directly.

The non-discriminatory requirement on carriage by a transit provider is especially important in cases where the provider of transit is effectively the only provider available, often because they got a franchise to provide service in an area, often obtaining what has been an exclusive franchise. If I'm at a bus stop, I expect the bus will stop, pick me up, allow me to move to the place for wheelchairs, and as long as I behave myself, take me along the route and let me off at the appropriate stop. (If I wasn't handicapped I'd be giving the example of standing at the stop, taking a seat or standing, then getting off.)

I hate to raise the issue because it sounds cheesy but I'll use it anyway. I'm not sure what your opinion of what happened to Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat to a white man was, but I think it is instructive. She wasn't being ejected, just asked to move. But I think most people feel it was unreasonable for her transit provider to effectively downgrade her service because some other customer wanted it.

Downgrading or especially denying service when you're a monopoly transit provider effectively strands someone. I think if someone is acting as a transit provider they should provide equal and non-discriminatory service to all customers and to all providers. If I want to watch CNN or the Cartoon Network or the History Channel, I should be allowed to do so and not told to switch. If our example customer chooses to watch Fox News and never even know of the existence of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC he should be entitled to do so.

If I want to use any specific website or any specific protocol on my Internet connection I should be allowed to do so since I presume my Internet provider acts as a transit provider.

The often mis-raised issue is that if it is mandated by the government it is an issue of free speech, and I disagree. This is not the sort of situation where a content provider is being asked to carry a message they disagree with. Nobody is asking Verizon to allow someone to put things up on their websites or to otherwise host content they don't want to. What the whole idea here is, since you sell me transit, I should be able to use it as I see fit as long as I behave. As long as my conduct doesn't interfere with other people's use and doesn't violate someone else's rights, a transit provider should do just that, provide transit.

This whole issue got started when Comcast started interfering in people's use of BitTorrent, a file sharing protocol which has both legitimate and (depending on your opinions) illicit uses. Yes, it can be used to pirate motion pictures. But it also can be used to quickly distribute CD and DVD images of legal Linux distributions.

[Update 2011-04-02] I found out after I originally wrote this that Blizzard Entertainment uses the BitTorrent protocol to distribute upgrades to some of its games; while I'm not sure if they use it to upgrade World of Warcraft they do use it for some of their other offerings. In fact, some people are upset because Bell Canada got the Canadian Radio and Telephone Commission (CRTC) to allow them to increase fees charged to resellers of DSL (as well as direct customers), customers either had unlimited service or had limits similar to Comcast at 250GB a month; now customers are only going to be able to get about 25 GB of data a month and will have to pay an extra $1 a month per GB of traffic; with some of Blizzard's downloads exceeding 1.5 GB it doesn't take much to blow through a 25GB monthly usage cap that offers no protection against overusage.

Oh yeah, that's another thing, you can't even buy a way to protect against overage. You can't get warnings you're amount to use too much, you can't buy protection against overage, and you have to depend on them that the amount they claim you're using is correct, and when it's in their advantage to overbill people where they can't even know they've been overbilled (does your router have any way to count the amount of traffic you've sent and received over the Internet? Mine does not), the temptation to do that anyway is there.

This is basically an attempt to kill NetFlix's streaming video service, because the added overhead cost of a gigabyte of data - about an hour's worth of television - over the network is about 1c and charging $1 for it makes streaming large amounts of data basically unaffordable. So, of course, it encourages people to use Bell's cable service or its pay-per-view services which compete against NetFlix. I mean, why pay Bell an extra $20 or more a month to get cable when you can subscribe to unlimited video rentals from NetFlix if you already have Internet service?

While they are within their rights to do this, the basically naked greed of this over a connection they basically now have for no extra cost and has been amortized over perhaps as long as 100 years, that they originally got through being a protected monopoly, has so upset people that the CRTC has put the proposal on hold for the moment. [End Update]

Comcast didn't like the amount of traffic BitTorrent generated, and
started secretly sabotaging people's sessions. Using packet managing,
they would interfere with connections, reset connections and throttle
traffic. But the most serious issue was that they did not tell anyone
they were going to do this, did it surreptitiously, and until the
Associated Press had someone use sophisticated tools to prove what
they were up to, lied about it and said they weren't doing it.

Basically the whole point started because, in essence, Comcast was
defrauding its customers. I note that because of this, Comcast now
explicitly states in its published terms and conditions that you have
a limit of 250 GB per month for a residential Internet account and if
you go above that limit you are subject to a higher rate.

I think the idea of easements in land is instructive. If I purchase a
piece of property and it's completely surrounded by someone else's
property, they can't simply say "Go buy an aircraft and build an
airstrip or helipad on your land," they have to allow me a means to
get on and off my property, the means being access through their
property, the access being called an easement.

If you live in an exclusive beach area, your ownership ends at the
mean high-tide mark. This allows two things: for other people to have
access to the beach, and for other property owners whose property
might only be accessible from the beach to have access to their
property without trespassing on yours.

If you lived on an island that had a single road over a bridge, you
would expect the road operator to act as a transit provider. If you
order a pizza from Dominoes, they don't say that it's lousy pizza and
refuse to let their vehicles across, or charge them more because Papa
Johns has paid a fee to ensure it gets priority treatment for its
deliveries, or shunt your order to Pizza Hut because the bridge owner
owns the local franchise. You would expect that any automobile or
delivery vehicle less than the weight limit of the bridge would be
admitted on the same terms as any other. Whether that bridge and road
was owned by a private company or a government entity.

[Update 2011-04-02] I didn't think about this one: if you're using the bridge every day, and it's a toll bridge, you should pay $1.00 or $1.50 per crossing or whatever it is. If you're crossing the bridge 30 times a day, the price should be $1 or $1.50 per crossing and shouldn't be jacked up to $10 per crossing after the first 20 crossings on the presumption because you use the bridge more you should see your rates upped. In fact, typically heavy or commercial users can buy reduced price crossings.

They don't advertise it and you can't buy them at the toll booths any more, but travelers in the Baltimore area, who are heavy users, can purchase ticket books where the usual $1.50 per crossing drops to 10c, it makes the EasyPass electronic system and its pitiful discount look like gouging by comparison (plus you don't have to fight them over errors to your account and your trips can't be tracked through tickets the way they can be on EasyPass). And the ticket books are transferable to a different vehicle of the same class; commercial users have one kind and cars have another. You can't remove tickets from the book, the collector at the booth has to do that, but anyone who has a booklet can use them. Commercial shippers who use the Port of Baltimore buy so many ticket books they'll have them in stacks in their offices so the drivers can just grab or return them when they finish their shifts. It makes trips basically cheap enough that even if you only use 1/4 of all the tickets before they expire it's worth buying a book.

If I purchase a bus pass, I pay an amount based on the typical estimated usage, which for most people is a trip to and from work 10 times a week, and in fact, is discounted a little below that to recognize the time value of money, e.g. the bus company gets the entire amount of the pass in advance. So if I'm using that bus pass 5 times a day, 7 days a week, I don't pay anything extra. Nor do they hit me with usage caps or implement high usage surcharges whether I'd pay for each trip or use a pass. [End Update]

And that is what I think Net Neutrality is. That when you get service
from a transit provider they treat all traffic equally. No more, no
less. If someone wants higher bandwidth or other features you're free
to order it. But you allow me to use whatever I ordered, I can use
any service even if it competes with something you offer, you don't
restrict my use up to my permitted bandwidth, and you don't sabotage
my traffic.