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April 22, 2006
Network Neutrality: Perspectives from Developed and Developing Nations
Live from the Access to Knowledge (A2K) conference, Yale; Moderated by Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Speakers:
Susan Crawford, Cardozo Law Center
Michael Geist, University of Ottawa
Caio Pereira, FGV, Sao Paolo
Seán Ó Siochrú, Nexus/CRIS Campaign
Mike Godwin's intro:
To what extent is network neutrality a missing piece to the a2k discussion? Telecom policy often doesn't get talked about; instead it's IP discussions.
Technologies of freedom by Ithiel De Sola Pool predicted how computer networks would be central to freedom and democracy. In the US, you have freedom of speech and freedom of the press - the govt doesn't discriminate against content. There's also common carriage - the telecom carriers not discriminating against content. If Pool were still alive, I think he'd also identify a third principal - network neutrality.
Neutrality as to applications - allowing everyone, whether you're a company or an individual, to develop and run any type of application that leads to the creation and dissemination of knowledge. To do this, you need equal access to telecom infrastructure.
There's almost no distinction between the north and south regarding network neutrality - there's no settled paradigm yet. There is a debate going on, though not everyone's sure what they're debating about. The division is between those who want a simple, open, neutral network, and those who believe telecom providers need greater financial incentive to innovate, so they should be allowed to tier services and discriminate towards more profitable content.
Michael Geist:
Are all bits equal? Equal treatment of bits so that the market determines winners without limitation of access. Often called the end-to-end (e2e) principle. Non interference allows for innovation at the edges and mitigates the limited competition for consumer high speed access.
The two-tiered internet and VoIP. Shaw charging at $10 premium surcharge; videoton calls Skype a parasite; Madison River ordered by FCC to stop blocking competing VoIP services; Panama and Egypt blocking VoIP to maintain monopolies. (and others, too!)
Content blocked: Telus blocked Voices for Change website in July - it was a union site. Additional 600 sites blocked because they blocked the IP address hosting all of them; full communities lose access to sites. If you ask telco lawyers, no one new where the state of the law was, but Telus was entitled to take steps to block content. This has led to a major backlash.
Traffic shaping: Rogers Cable acknowledged that it prioritizes some content and applications over others; they get more bandwidth. Lower prioritization to file sharing, podcasting, video blogging.
Public vs. private internet: Verizon's FIOS service delivers high def tv plus web content for those people willing to pay. Everyone else gets slower public Internet. They have exclusive deals with companies like Disney and EA Sports. They're proud of these deals but they're open only to those who can afford to pay for them, creating a new digital divide.
Website premiums (access tiering). BellSouth speculates about charging sites to access their customers or prioritizing some sites over others. Verizon raises similar noise about two-tiered Internet.
Policy Questions:
- Legal protection from Internet tiering?
- Is tiering even needed for network buildout?
- Is this a north-south issue?
From a legal protection perspective, customer tiering exists today - dialup, broadband, wireless, etc. Access tiering raises serious competition and innovation issues.
Canadian telecom policy review panel:
Called for the right of Canadians to access content of their choice and online applications by means of all public telecommunications providers.
Incentives: there's lots of rhetoric, but little evidence that tiering needed for network builds. Technical costs may outweight benefits from some potential actions. Raises issue of municipal and public networks to ensure greater access and competition.
North v. South: Common issue. Developing countries may be impacted more, since VoIP offers tremendous opportunity there.
Susan Crawford:
This is almost like a religious conflict; two sides that barely even know how to communicate with each other without getting angry.
The Bellhead perspective: hardware and software are intertwined; network optimized for particular service; Internet is the last mile; carrier gets paid for the communications it carries; Internet doesn't work because there's no guarantee of service; services keep us safe - close relations with law enforcement.
The Nethead perspective: Network delivers packets; it's independent of applications. The best network is a dumb network, with endpoints doing all the work. Security becomes the responsibility of the users. The internet is all about standards and relationships.
The conflict between these philosophies is like the conflict between evolution and intelligent design. Totally different world views.
VoIP is now 3.5% of phone usage in the US, or nearly four million households, as of January 2006. The cost of phone service is going down to zero. Telcos become content providers to survive.
John Horrigan: 45 percent of Internet users say they use the Net to make major life decisions - illnesses, education, etc.
In the US, we have policy that is deeply political, deeply shortsighted, and driven by incumbents of various kinds.
BrandX - cable deregulated. DSL order - also deregulated.
Whitacre: How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them.... Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"
Telcos say we need quality of service guarantees to fix a broken internet. We need to ID packets and monetize the last mile to recoup investment. No other network operates neutrally, so why should we? If it becomes a monopoly, deal with it then, but don't tell us in advance how to build our network. That's un-American.
What passes for broadband in the US is "the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world," says Thomas Bleha in Foreign Affairs.
A developing nations issue. What do you do with an incumbent telco? Lay your own fiber, and work around the incumbent, like India's Andhra Pradesh or Amsterdam; try a microinvestment strategy.
What to do with bandwidth issues? She was told while visiting England: "Only sending email, so quality of service controls make sense for access to other applications." What are you going to do, prevent poor people from accessing movies?
The mobile Internet: the real opportunity. That's where we're gonna see enormous use; tiny screens will be where it takes place, not desktops.
Threats: Telecom policy becoming all communications policy; choice of viewpoint becomes critical; the ability to attach devices without permission, launch apps without permission, etc.
The Bellheads are seeking new laws, new asymmetry of information.
"This is an improper use of Internet technology."
Caio Pereira:
Net Neutrality from a Brazilian perspective, a middle-income developing country.
In developing countries, demand is lower, lots of concentration.
Consequences:
In an a2k framework, net neutrality should be a goal for developing countries. Tradeoffs should be taken seriously - they're often context specific. There needs to be transparency about bandwidth management in a context of scarcity, and detailed discussions about different types of discrimination and their impact on access to knowledge.
In Brazil:
Connectivity over the wires
- stagnation of fixed switched telephony - 40 mil lines
- slow growth of wired broadband access, concentrated in dsl rather than cable
Connectivity over the airwaves
The growth of fixed lines is stagnant, while mobile phones is up to 90 million lines - a major explosion
Around 3.5 mil cable subscribes - stagnant since 2000. But 90% of households have broadcast.
Around 3.5 mil broadband connections, mostly DSL.
Key networks to expand access: mobile networks, DTV transition. One key issue is net neutrality - walled gardens in mobile networks, while DTV is still strictly controlled by broadcasters. The political economy is behind access through these networks.
Seán Ó Siochrú on lowcost bandwidth for poor communities:
The principles underlying net neutrality are important, but they bare little relevance to the realities of developing countries.
We should talk either about net neutrality in rich countries or access to low-cost bandwidth in poor countries. But not both. The south is not on the same trajectory.
ICTs in poor countries: Specific form of liberalization has failed poor communities. Problems: vertically integrated operators; gsm and cdma are too expensive; weak regulatory rules; rural bandwidth mainly from VSAT; Africa pays twice as much for data flows (coming and going); fiber, where it exists, is underused.
International bandwidth. The sorry experience of the SAT3 trunk cable in West Africa. Owners are trying to protect their own interests, so there's been little impact on bandwidth costs. Some have switched back to VSAT because it's gotten so bad. Will the EASSy trunk cable be the same in east Africa? It's also owned by incumbent operators, so it might lead to the same failed outcome. But they're making lots of promises since they're now laying the cable, and APC and Infodev are pressuring them to make the cable open access - bandwidth made available to all at transparent, affordable prices - that it's a public good. The solution might be to get the world bank, EU and ADB to pay for the lot, in trust for countries. But probably no one will do it. It'll only cost them $200 million. But it's probably not politically feasible.
National backbones with a pro-poor open access approach. Open access as a solution - a potential to leverage public assets for open access. It needs strong, capable regulators, discriminating in favor of poor areas, supporting universal access funds.
At the local level, wireless IP technologies come of age, via low-cost multimedia ICTs as an alternative to switched voice and data communications. There's a potential for empowerment: scalable, easily built and maintained, used in public areas, based on a bottom-up logic of community owned, community driven networks. See http://www.propoor-ict.net.
Posted by acarvin at April 22, 2006 1:04 PM
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