A reporter for The Hill asked the FCC Chairman an interesting question yesterday:

Asked if he needed more tools to enforce violations of the commission’s open Internet principles, Genachowski said the commission will speak up if it needs more authority.

“If we don’t, we will say so,” he said.

Seems like a sensible answer. See: Obama’s FCC to enforce ‘net neutrality’

If we have learned anything over the last 60 years with the growth of Big Brother known as the Govt, why do we continue to think that Congress can pass laws that will really solve any potential problems with the Internet.

We are generally proud of the fact that the Internet is the international source of continued growth and information exchange.  It is certainly in a much different form than it was even a few years ago.  The ability of larger and larger files to flow easily to flow through the internet has allowed the growth of video and other forms of communication.

There will always be those who choose to take advantage of perceived weeknesses in the system but they will quickly be found out and fenced off within the current framework of the Internet.

But anything the Govt does is usually at a minimum obsolescent if not obsolete by the time it can get enacted and implemented. 

Cell phone technology continues to expand at enormous rates, computer technology may have slowed down a little but does continue to expand.

Let the market police itself and let the 'survival of the fitest' resolve issues, not Congressional fiat.  Don't forget, some states still have laws against cohabitation which they cannot figure out how to get off the books.

All video is not created equal. The mechanisms for accelerating canned video are very different from those that accelerate live video. Canned content is duplicated on short-haul paths to the end user, and that's perfectly well understood.

Live video overcomes congestion by transcoding, which is to say by reducing the quality of the experience. There are applications such as telepresence where this approach essentially kills the app: telepresence needs high quality to create the lifelike experience.

Network providers can only assure quality up to the point where they hand their packets off to the ISP who has to deliver them. Some level of cooperation between the ISP and the network providers is necessary to get the most out of this final handoff.

Terry,

The way we (consumers) would like to have our video is on-demand, but we (especially men) also like to have our video flip instantly when we push the remote and we want it in High Definition if possible.  The problem with the first requirement is completely impractical with the second two requirements.

Broadcast TV video or IPTV doesn't use the Internet backbone.  The content is delivered locally and it is broadcast.  When you broadcast something, it's sent only once and received by many people at the same time.  On-demand video streaming content is unicast, and a separate copy of the video content is sent to every user even if the users are watching the exact same video and even if they're watching it at the same time.  That means for 100,000 viewers, unicasting takes 100,000 times more bandwidth than broadcast material.  If it's 1 million viewers, unicasting takes 1 million times more bandwidth over the core of the Internet.

That model simply doesn't scale and if you had the extra capacity, we would surely use it to bump up the bitrate and quality level of the content rather than squander it on unicasting.  So to fix this fundamental problem with unicasting, we have to use a caching mechanism that allows the content to only be sent once over the Internet, but delivered over private server capacity.  CDNs are the most successful form of caching and Akamai alone delivers as much as 20% of the entire Internet's traffic.  These are all commercial pay-for-use services.

CDNs have become the only mechanism for on-demand streaming video, and it's all private pay-for-use capacity (all Internet capacity is pay for use).  P2P can offset those costs to other people by using other people's bandwidth to deliver downloadable content, but it doesn't work for video streaming because it's download-before-you-view rather than view-as-you-download.

What Net Neutrality tries to do is enforce a model of the Internet that never existed.  Marky wants a model of the Internet that says everyone gets the same priority and bandwidth at the same price, and no one is allowed to have an exclusive advantage because that would be "discrimination".

But the answer to your question is no.  There isn't any alternative, unless you want to start a CDN business that gives away bandwidth for free.  Google sort of gives away bandwidth and server capacity for free when you put your videos on their YouTube servers, but they pay for it (even though they lose money) by overlaying ads on top and to the side of your video content.  That's not so bad considering the fact that anyone can deliver their videos to millions of viewers on-demand at 2.25 Mbps 720P quality.

Writing your Congressperson would be a good start. It would also be good to contact Congressman Markey and co-sponsor Anna Eshoo as well as the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, Rick Boucher (D, VA) or ranking member Cliff Stearns. Congress makes it pretty hard to email anyone but your own representative, unfortunately.

There will probably be several campaigns to push Congress one way or another before it's all over, of course. For the time being it might be worthwhile to explore ways the bill could be made better.

So Richard, for those of us who might think this bill needs to be reworked, what is the recourse -- writing to our Congressman?

I'm not sure what "net neutrality" means, so I can only comment in the context of the specific provisions of the bill in question. There's not much doubt that it intends to impose a new set of restrictions on broadband service providers, so there's no question of "doing away" with anything except the freedom that operators have today to make sensible business and technical decisions about the management of their networks, as well as the benefits that these practices have for consumers.

The example I provided is not a "content" application that can easily be accelerated by Akamai or Limelight's existing Content Delivery Networks, it's a real-time communication application that can only work if there's an unobstructed path between each sender and each receiver. This is the kind of application that TCP doesn't handle very well, but it's important in the big picture. Overall, interpersonal communication - voice and video conferencing - is the Killer App for networking, and content delivery is a distant second.

The Markey bill shackles communication apps and effectively privileges content apps; if there is a coherent definition of "net neutrality," this privileging has to be a part of it.

In engineering practice, we don't generally seek sub-optimal solutions. If accellerating the choke point in a large network system is the optimal solution technically and financially to solving the problem of high-bandwidth, low-delay communications applications, there shouldn't be arbitrary obstacles in law and regulation to taking that approach.

The collaborative structure of the Internet means that indendent services vendors and network operators have to work together to enable new, leading edge applications. I'd like for them to have the freedom to devise the solutions that have the greatest utility at the lowest cost.

Interesting analysis, Richard Bennett... I'm not being deliberately opaque or passive aggressive about this, but is your central contention that there's absolutely NO other way for high-quality or premium video services to thrive (i.e., carriers and ISPs make a profit) unless we do away with Net Neutrality?

This seems to be your central objection to the Markey legislation.

It's hard to believe carriers, ISPs and the many bright minds at Akamai, Limelight, and WebEx (and countless other tec vendors) have exhausted all the possibilities and/or are unwilling to invest more to add to capacity/bandwidth/redundancy to offer video the way they'd like on today's Internet backbone.