‘Best-Effort Service’ Not FCC’s Aim in Neutrality Work, Peha Says

“So much of the public dialogue on the Internet is conducted by cheerleaders” that looming problems are ignored, said Richard Bennett, an ITIF research fellow who was one of the developers of the Ethernet hub standard. The number of routes available over the Internet is “growing at an alarming rate,” threatening the reliability of high-speed service, and the prevalence of “private peering” -- exchange points away from the public Internet -- makes estimating traffic growth difficult, he said.

Charles Jackson, a former staffer at both the House Communications Subcommittee and FCC Common Carrier Bureau, ridiculed an argument by Free Press that giving some packets priority slows others. “Letting an ambulance go past a bunch of commuters is uneconomic,” too, he said, and Vonage’s VoIP needs low latency more than BitTorrent does. When mobile voice networks aren’t swamped, their “leftover headroom” can be made available to data networks, but only if network operators can treat packets differently, Jackson said. Rules would encourage operators to “partition” their networks, since they won’t be able to manage applications that violate a bandwidth “honor code,” he said.

Mozilla’s Firefox browser offers a much higher default setting than other applications for simultaneous server connections and lets users set an even higher number manually, in contrast to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Jackson said. The dig came days after Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker and CEO John Lilly published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal supporting an extension of neutrality rules to wireless networks. Mozilla couldn’t provide comment by our deadline. Jackson later said the setting is available in other browsers and he wasn’t “trying to attack anybody.” A longtime third-party add-on for IE gives users access to what’s called a pipelining setting. Bennett said later the server-connections issue was “a bug” that will be discussed at the next Internet Engineering Task Force meeting.

“We were very bad at predicting what would happen” in the Internet’s early days, said Dave Farber of Carnegie Mellon University, whose research led to the first distributed computer system. But new optical “interconnects” on computer chips becoming available will make it easier to design “endless multicore devices” and lead to a “revamp” of networking, with the IETF taking the lead, he said: “We don’t want to preempt” the work of an unusually successful standards organization. “Technical talent in government is in short supply,” said Farber, who once held Peha’s position at the FCC. “You need a crew of people who understand technology” and can make “judgment calls” on matters such as spectrum policy. Farber said terms in the FCC’s rulemaking such as “reasonable” and “appropriate” worry him. Commission lawyers “can argue that point till the cows come home,” inhibiting the work of protocol designers afraid of running afoul of the FCC, he said.

Peha stressed that the commission had set only “high- level goals” that, though “concrete,” don’t predetermine any rules. “A number of security issues are not getting easier,” he said, suggesting that botnets could become much worse when fiber-to-the-home becomes standard: “Think of how much fun that will be.” Peha, on leave from Carnegie Mellon’s engineering and public policy faculty, agreed that BitTorrent can take bandwidth from applications with more immediate needs. He said the FCC wants to “build in flexibility” for network operators.

Peha took issue with the claim that the FCC is on a path to require “best-effort service” across the Internet. Bennett said neutrality could have the effect of enshrining current limitations on consumer Internet access accounts. Service-level agreements, in contrast, allow guaranteed service quality to holders of business accounts and lets them prioritize protocols. Giving consumers this freedom could let them subscribe to “over-the-top” services, challenging voice and video service incumbents, he said. The effect is “180 degrees opposite of the intention.” A policy that encourages innovation at both the Internet core and the edge is possible, Peha said. “They're not directly at odds.” The FCC’s proposed rules wouldn’t require best-effort service or drop the current exceptions for reasonable network management and managed services, he said. But no technology can “algorithmically determine what rules mean,” Farber said, recommending that the FCC keep its current practice of investigating alleged violations of its Internet principles. “I'm not saying ’trust me,'” Peha replied. The rulemaking is “an open process,” he said. “It’s a data-driven process. So far I think all the signs are good.”

Bennett said the “direction” of the rulemaking suggests that the FCC wants to block “the very means by which you can provide” a service that prioritizes packets: Deep-packet inspection. But that kind of analysis of content “shouldn’t be too scary,” considering that the early protocols running over the Internet were explicitly identified in each packet header, he said. And it’s the only way that consumers could direct their ISP to prioritize some applications, such as for online gaming. Jackson said prioritization at users’ initiative wouldn’t be attractive, since it would require far more “interaction” with Internet settings than consumers have been willing to take part in.

A staffer for Rep. Charles Dent, R-Pa., asked about the timing of the rulemaking. The process has been going on for years, Peha said, and parts of the National Broadband Plan concern neutrality. There have been “some cases” of companies clearly violating the FCC’s principles. A “profit-seeking company” would be negligent if it didn’t try to maximize profits, he said. “If they're given a green light” to discriminate “you're going to see them” do that. But there have been only a few cases and they were “rapidly resolved,” Farber said. Many big companies, including IBM, Intel and Google, have long been guided by principles other than profit, he said. Peha replied that Comcast’s slowing BitTorrent traffic went on for a long time. Jackson pointed to an interesting coincidence in the Comcast-BitTorrent affair. Vonage had been sending “lots of nasty lawyer letters” to Comcast in previous years, complaining that other users’ applications on the cable network were degrading VoIP service, he said. “Those letters quit coming” after Comcast took action against BitTorrent, Jackson said, suggesting that Comcast acted in the interest of a direct voice competitor.

Jim Partridge of NCTA asked whether content delivery networks such as Akamai should be subject to the FCC’s fifth principle of nondiscrimination, since they're “picking winners and losers.” That made Farber laugh heartily. Bennett said the delivery networks actually help reduce Internet congestion by keeping traffic near end users. The popularity of the networks underscores that the Internet is “not a level playing field.”