Just What Do They Mean by ‘Net Neutrality’?
On December 1, FCC Commission Chair Julius Genachowski made a speech announcing proposed rules through which the FCC proposed to establish “net neutrality.” There is much controversy about the rules and about “net neutrality” in general. The frustrating part: when you examine the arguments closely, it’s clear that no two commentators appear to be talking about the same thing.
So what does “net neutrality” mean?
To answer that question, first of all we need to understand a little bit about the Internet and how it works. (More technical readers can skip this section, or just amuse yourselves observing the simplifications and omissions I’m making to keep this reasonably concise.)
The Internet arose from ARPAnet, and ARPAnet arose as the answer to a very interesting question: how can you build a reliable communications network when your switching stations may, at any moment, turn into a very large, glowing hole in the ground? Traditional telephone networks — known as circuit-switching networks — wouldn’t do it: they depend on having telephone switches that make fixed connections for the duration of a call.
You can think about a circuit-switched network by thinking of the old switchboard telephone operators. When you made a call, your local operator takes a wire from your phone, and plugs it into the socket to send the call to another phone. You’re now connected, and the call works as long as the operator doesn’t unplug you again. When you made a long-distance call — and frighteningly, I still remember when long-distance calls were made this way — you got in touch with the local operator, who then used a separate line to talk to a long-distance operator, who talked to one or more other operators; when they had all talked it over, various plugs went into the appropriate sockets. The result was that there was literally a wire connection going from your phone to the person at the other end.
Of course, if something happened to any of the connections, from someone clumsily kicking out a plug to an atomic bomb going off in the neighborhood, you were cut off.
The ARPAnet was based on another idea, called packet-switching. Packet-switching works more like sending mail: your message is split up into separate packets, and each packet is sent on independently to its destination. Think of these packets like postcards: you want to send your new NaNoWriMo novel to your best friend, who will read it and praise it, making you feel ever so much better. So you split it up, putting the text onto postcards, and mail each postcard to your friend.
Now, the post office takes each card, sorts it, and sends it to a mail distribution center, which sends it to another center near your friend; from there it goes to the mail man letter carrier, who carries it to your friend’s house and drops it in the mud mailbox. Over time, you will get the whole novel, and if something happens to the distribution center in the middle, the Post Office simply re-routes the following postcards through another location. Other than some details, like what happens to a lost postcard (number them, and send a postcard back asking for copies of the missing pieces), this is basically how the whole Internet works.
In the ARPAnet, and later the Internet, all your data is broken into packets (postcards) with a destination address and a sender address. If someone blows up the Omaha switching center, messages are simply routed, say, to Fargo in its place. As far as the network is concerned, all it cares about are the addresses.
Which leads us to net neutrality (you thought I’d forgotten). The basic assumption about the Internet is that it doesn’t matter what the content parts of the packet are, just as a postman doesn’t care if you’ve written a letter in English, Swahili, Klingon, or a special code of your own invention. They just deliver to the address given.
But now, what if the Post Office had a special deal with Hallmark, so that if you were sending a Hallmark card, it got special treatment — or what if the Post Office decided that it was carrying too many Hallmark cards, so it set a limit that it would only let a letter carrier carry 100 cards a day? Obviously, this would mean that Hallmark was very much dependent on staying in the good graces of the Post Office, and should the Post Office decide to go into the card business themselves, Hallmark could be in real trouble.
If there is anything that we have come to know about the American spirit is that even the Federal Government cannot contain, restrain, or corrupt it. This regulation is the like the Balrog to Gandalf, and though it may drag the spirit of the Internet down, We The People will come out on the other side, more powerful and more empowered!
This used to be a fun world to live in.
So now I should, for the sake of ‘net neutrality,’ write my thoughts both in English and Ebonics, pro-Israel and StormFronter, and as Tea Party supporter and as a Marxist. And, all this in one, short sentence, half of which from my suburban home and the rest from aunt’s cabin in the woods?
Life (or the Internet) is not supposed to be fair.
I do not want federal enforced neutrality of either kind. If Comcast wants to limit what comes through it’s servers (they are privately owned BTW) that is their business. It too many people are offended then Comcast loses business. If not, then what is the problem? Left to itself, the market will determine the best policy for business to take, whether the business likes it or not. Those that adapt succeed. Those that do not, fail.
It is none of the Government’s business.
Other than bandwidth allocation, they have no business regulating broadcast media either. Again, the market will decide.
“This, then, is the question I think everyone must ask when discussing net neutrality: do we mean the content-neutral, don’t read-the-postcards net neutrality of the first kind? Or the “fair access” net neutrality of the second kind?”
In the end, it doesn’t matter what we the consumers mean by net neutrality, but what the regulators determine what net neutrality is. If they succeed in getting the power to regulate the internet, the regulators will probably throw a bone in the form of trying to ensure that ISPs don’t try to discriminate on content delivery (though I don’t know how they will accomplish this), but in the end what they really want is the means with which to control the type of information that is being delivered.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/12/06/fcc-commissioners-demand-authority-over-campaign-financing-free-internet/
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/132389-powell-copps-could-blow-things-up-for-obama-
Those two links above show that one of the commissioners, Michael Copp, thinks “net neutrality” is fairness of information delivered, not about treating content delivered equally.
For the net neuts, be careful what you wish for; you may just get it.
i think it means to neutralize dissident. (read stop you).
Regards
Yeah, like Sharpton wants to ‘neutralize” Rush.
The whole thing is a power grab. Although we are just beginning to hear about it, it has been going on for a few years, gradually, but happening.\
It’s like we live in an alternate universe and the aliens are trying to take over….
Vendors of Internet access and Internet-related devices have for a while wanted to charge customers for the level of service they purchase, according to gigabytes transmitted per unit time or guaranteed speed of transmission. Indeed, several IP-control protocols, including QoS (quality of service) and RSVP (reservation protocol) have been developed, and embedded in Internet routers, specifically to make this possible. Yet another meaning of “net neutrality” is to forbid such differential pricing – that is, to make it a matter of law that all Internet traffic of any kind must be treated uniformly, without discrimination according to volume or transmission rate, by any entity involved in transmission or routing. Such “customer-neutral” net neutrality would put the brakes on the development of ever faster and ever more capacious Net technology, by killing the profit incentive.
Francis, you have a point there, although I don’t recall anyone who has actually suggested that. (Feel free to feed me a link, I’d be interested.) Certainly, things like video-on-demand, VoIP, and and teleoperation require some confidence in the quality of service; RSVP and DiffServ approaches will, I’m sure, get into the net.
I don’t think any attempt to prevent that would last — people would have to be massively overprovisioned, and price and really before you know if,the FCC is getting calls again.
I’d worry more about schemes in which, for example, Netflix couldn’t get a reservation if Comcast traffic were high, but Disney could.
You don’t have to hypothesize. The subsidy that printed matter gets is a perfect example of postal non-neutrality.
Snork, that’s not completely true. First of all, both the second-class rate for magazines and the bulk-mail rate are quantity discounts that require the mailers to do special things. Magazines and newspapers must be delivered presorted to a central mail facility, and bulk mail isn’t just presorted, it can’t be different below the level of a carrier route — the ValuPak you get is the same one every other Occupant on your letter-carrier’s route gets.
The second point I guess is something that I wasn’t clear about in the example: what if Hallmark got one rate, and a limit, but Blue Mountain Arts (source of the independent wealth of of my Congressman, Jared Polis) got a much better, more advantageous one?
What If?….that’s easy…..Jarid Polis gets reelected.
So it’s a form or corporatism, like Obamanition loves and promotes. I am not surprised he is pushing it since it give government control and he can protect certain businesses that tow his line or just plain old nanny-state control. Current trend is food. Now it’s information and data. I also see it as a further attempt to protect entities that are failing or losing ratings. Again, corporatism and a left hand governement bailout, and it implies.
Exactly. Grabbing power then ‘giving’ breaks to select favorites.
We know what the marxist totalitarians mean by neutrality: they mean neutering dissent.
They know that their gramscian-maoist style “long march” through the media – that has brought them to control 90% of the old media – has become useless because of Internet. Therefore they resort to their second style, the Pol Pot Stalin style, and they try to smash Freedom by ukase.
They will fail miserably, as they always fail in all their plans, but it will cost us another long fight.
But all this is good, because the totalitarians keep showing their true colors.
And Americans don’t like the color of dictatorship, not a bit.
They are also talking about silencing Rush and Glenn.
I wanna see that.
We will have instantly 30 millions activists self-organized and highly motivated, the liberals will disappear for generations, possibly forever.
I am inclined to think that Savage must be taken seriously: liberalism appears to be a severe mental disorder.
You are the first person I have seen who has made such claims. Who is lumping the “digital divide” rhetoric into this debate? I have seen no major player on the left try this yet as part of their main thrust on network neutrality.
So, who is doing this? How about a few links?
Mike T, click on the two links that I’ve provided and then go from there. Since “net neutrality” is a vague concept (what does it mean to be “neutral” anyway?) it is up to people to define it. And, as we’ve seen throughout history, people give different definitions to things that are intentionally vague.
Try clicking on some of the links contained in the story as well, or simply Google Julius Genachowski, or Henry Waxman’s ideas on this. Perhaps you should check one of Chris’s links as well. The FCC is making a naked power grab here.
Patrick
The original Obama administration proposals were much more intrusive than what we know of the new proposal — “what we know” because, oddly, the proposed rules haven’t been made public.
Who is doing this? How about the Democratic majority on the FCC, including Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn?
Copps wants the authority to enforce campaign-finance reform (usually the purview of the FEC), and also the authority to order music stations to broadcast news shows, and for networks to give up 25% of prime-time air to locally-produced shows. A naked power grab for Commissar Copps, at the uncompensated expense of Internet providers. Commissar Clyburn merely wants the FCC to force those providers to ‘give’ free internet to one and all.
That sounds intrusive – well, autocratic – enough to raise a few hackles about the smokescreen of ‘neutrality’. Note Al Sharpton’s demand to the FCC to get Rush Limbaugh off the airwaves. Here’s your link:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/12/06/sharpton_going_to_fcc_limbaugh_doesnt_have_right_to_use_public_airwaves.html
The NPRM is dated October 22, 2009. That appears to refer to Charlie Martin’s reference to the ‘original’ proposals: The original Obama administration proposals were much more intrusive than what we know of the new proposal
The ‘new proposal’ post-dates COMCAST CORPORATION,PETITIONER v. FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION AND UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, RESPONDENTS –
NBC UNIVERSAL, ET AL., INTERVENORS , dated April 6, 2010. the court’s decision raises serious questions about the FCC’s ability to create regulations in areas where its authority is not spelled out in law.
We might wonder if the current FCC rush to ‘regulate’, via those yet-unpublic rules, isn’t a last-minute attempt to plant some politically biased mandates before the new House of Reps spells out in law some new authorities, and prohibitions, very distasteful to Commissars Copps and Clyburn.
Mike, the quickest source might be this Duke Law Journal review. Also see this and this[PDF}.
Mike T:
Get off your preachy, lazy butt and do your own research. It’s there. You seem to be of the ilk that you are right until some “underling” runs around to get the facts to you.
DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. MAYBE YOU WILL BELIEVE THE TRUTH.
Now, now. It was a fair criticism. I’ve been interested in this stuff for a couple of years, and spaced out a reference on something I subconsciously thought was common knowledge. It’s entirely correct for him to ask for a link.
Yes, but is it a “neutral” link?
Ironic, since not a single technical detail in the article was new to me. It was entirely a reaction to the ethnic/racial angle. I’ve probably forgotten more about network neutrality than you’ve ever understood, and in no discussion that I’ve seen yet has the left made that attack.
Just one more link to help you out:
http://dailycaller.com/2010/12/08/meet-the-fcc-commissioner-who-wants-to-control-the-news/
That’s clearly not true, Mike, since you weren’t aware of the attempts to factor “fairness” into “neutrality”. I suppose you could quibble that that isn’t a technical detail, but then neutrality of the second kind is inherently a political issue, not a technical issue.
“Based on Genachowski’s speech, the new rules sound reasonably benign — which, to a cynic like me, immediately leads to a second question: why aren’t the new rules being published?”
They were published. From http://www.openinternet.gov:
To launch the rulemaking process, the Commission adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, often referred to as the “open Internet NPRM.”
The NPRM is available for download here:
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-09-93A1.pdf
Aaron, I believe that’s the original FCC proposal, not the one Genachowski mentioned. Notice in his speech of December 1, he says “Yesterday, I circulated to my colleagues draft rules of the road to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet.” [Emphasis mine.] Your PDF is dated 22 October.
Yeah I noticed the date shortly after I posted. Then I took a second look and saw that it’s from October, 2009. Good grief.
No worries — I saw your note below only after I’d responded, or I wouldn’t have bothered.
I would think that Lefties should be afraid of “fairness” in terms of content balance. Right now the Right has one TV network, while the Left has at least six. I don’t know if the Right has enough time available in their lives to equal the output of Huffington Post and associated NutRoots bloggers, what with Right Wingers needing to have real jobs to pay their bills.
But of course I forget, they will count on SEIU members working in the cubicles where governance interacts with Flyover Land deciding what is moderate and centrist mainstream thought and what is extremist and in need of balance.
Sorry, I think the link above is for an older version.
Real Net Neutrality is desirable. It simply says that carriers are providing bandwidth. What that bandwidth is used for is irrelevant and it should be up to the user to decide what it is for. I sure don’t want someone telling me I can’t dial my new internet-telephone somewhere. I don’t want some executive making decisions on which movie provider I can subscribe to.
That’s real net-neutrality.
What has happened is that a small group of leftists have seized the term and attempted to bastardize it for their own sick purposes. They want “net-fairness” –whatever that may mean. They wrap it up in the middle of “net-neutrality” and then we have a real problem on our hands.
This mugging of a reasonable and careful movement is nothing short of deceitful. When this mess is straightened out, these people deserve to be excoriated in the court of public opinion. I’d be more sanguine if these twits actually cared what the public thinks of them. But they don’t.
But Gork, why should the FCC be able to tell a company how to operate their own servers?
They are private companies that sell a service for a fee. If you or I do not like the way the service is provided, we are free to use another service. If your net phone provider has trouble with providing service due to Comcast, or one of their competitors policies, they will change providers in order to stay in business.
The Marxists will get their proverbial camel’s nose under the tent flap and then the under-defined “net neutrality” will mean whatever they want it to mean. Be prepared for government control of internet content. Marxists hate the freedom of the Internet. Non-marxist voices are proliferating. Can’t have that.
I guess it would be silly to ask for some cites of who is proposing a net neutrality that means “different ethnic groups have equal access — which would mean the government looking not just at the content of the messages, but the race of the person on the wire.” I haven’t seen that proposed anywhere. Except here, in the construction of straw men.
Wouldn’t be silly, but it would be redundant; see my answer to Mike in thread #9.
I’ve had the impression for a long time that the crowd over at the FCC (notably Genachowski & so called “diversity” czar Mark Lloyd, the guy with such high praise for Oogoe Chavez) has been all about some kind of liberal dream of a “fairness doctine” for the internet.
In typical liberal fashion, the language chosen to cloak their power grab (“net neutrality”) sounds all warm and fuzzy.
Honchos at the FCC may be currently pushing the envelope as they see their guru’s* power and influence beginning to wane.
(*The One™)
Excellent and very useful article, Charlie, on net neutrality whatever that means or may come to mean; they ain’t finished yet. The original version seems fairly innocuous but the subsequent proposals don’t. An underlying problem is the tendency to affix labels and then to include other and very different stuff within those labels. For example, over time the word “profiling” has come to mean very different things. We tend to accept the inclusion of concepts foreign to the original meanings as the same without noticing.
As to Commissioner Coops’ blather, a retired FCC attorney with whom I occasionally discuss FCC related matters and who pays more attention to what’s happening there than I now do assures me that it is pretty aberrational and unlikely to go far. I hope he is right. Remember that many years ago there was a campaign to eliminate the use for religious stations of frequencies reserved for non-commercial public broadcasting. There was much public concern that the FCC would actually do it, even though back then there was very little chance that it would. The FCC received more correspondence on that than on anything else in history, most of it in opposition to the campaign. The Commission found it necessary several times to issue public notices that it had no intention of doing anything of that sort; the correspondence continued to arrive in volume and to be ignored.
The situation is now a bit different and the ideological motivations for net neutrality of the second type seem more prevalent within the FCC than were those for killing off religious broadcasters. Each mutant form of net neutrality needs to be analyzed and I hope you will keep it up.
In May, the Federal Trade Commission tried to get into the act with Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism. That should fly about as well as a
winglesslame duck. Still, that sort of stuff has to be watched regardless of the agency involved and regardless of its statutory mandate, if any.Judge David S. Tatel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which hears most of the cases involving administrative agencies such as the FCC, FTC, EPA etc., cautioned them in October of last year that
Judge Tatel got it exactly right and is one of the better judges on the DC Circuit; there are others.
Lets simplify this.
FEDS, get your nose out of my private life!
Sending or receiving an email is not a commercial activity, so drop your sooo over-used commerce clause mantra.
Instead try living by your charter, i.e, 4th ammendment.