One of the issues mentioned by Chairman Genachowski during this speech at Brookings a few weeks ago was network management. Here is what the Chairman said:
The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination -- stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications. . . This principle will not prevent broadband providers from reasonably managing their networks. During periods of network congestion, for example, it may be appropriate for providers to ensure that very heavy users do not crowd out everyone else. And this principle will not constrain efforts to ensure a safe, secure, and spam-free Internet experience, or to enforce the law. It is vital that illegal conduct be curtailed on the Internet.
The issue of network management in an era of growing traffic complexity, increased congestion and heightened security problems facing the Internet is very important. I have mentioned this before in one of my blog posts. But the Chairman went on to offer an additional principle that he said the Commission would adopt:
The sixth principle is a transparency principle -- stating that providers of broadband Internet access must be transparent about their network management practices. Why does the FCC need to adopt this principle? The Internet evolved through open standards. It was conceived as a tool whose user manual would be free and available to all. But new network management practices and technologies challenge this original understanding.
I’ve posted on this issue too and our industry has spent time trying to develop industry principles around transparency. I agree that improved transparency can help improve the way broadband connections work and give consumers more tools they can use to judge how well their provider is provisioning their service.
But while I agree with the need for enhanced transparency, I do believe that regulating around network management is not only not required it is fraught with dangers. Just a few weeks ago, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation had a seminar focused on network management that included the views of John Day and Bill Lehr of MIT and David Farber of Carnegie Mellon, an esteemed professor emeritus long involved with the Internet. One of the headlines that came out of the session was in the Washington Post : “Computer Science Professor, Former FCC Official Warns Against Net Neutrality” quoting Professor Farber.
Network management is one of my key concerns as well. I’ve written numerous posts on the issue but in recent years (and increasingly in the last few months), a number of experts have come out with papers and analyses that suggest the importance of network management. Many of them make the same point: there is a need for significant change and revision in the way the Internet handles congestion, deals with security problems, and ensures good quality for latency sensitive applications. Most of the engineers and experts making these points note that we face changes regarding the complexity, intensity and capacity demands of today’s Internet traffic that were simply not anticipated in years gone by. Many of them go on to note that experts at all levels – including ISPs and broadband providers – need to have the flexibility to be able to work things through without presumptive government rules that could significantly interfere with the work that needs to be done. A sample of the comments of these experts is enlightening:
Dave Farber, Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University with long involvement in the Internet’s design and development: “My general concern has to do with hazy definitions that people are using. Net neutrality is everything from sliced bread to pickles. And like ‘appropriate network management,’ that's a very hazy term and it's hard to define it more tightly. So you either end up in court cases or endless hearings at the FCC arguing over these definitions. . . But it's very hard to define these things. The problem here is everyone talks about reasonable network management, but if you look at it from a technical perspective, someone trying to build new ways of operating networks is going to sit there saying, "I wonder if this new brilliant idea is reasonable or not. And if I go through all the energy of implementing it and testing it, will someone in Washington say that that violates some reasonable network management criteria?"
Bill Lehr, research associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and David Clark, Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in a paper entitled “The Evolution of Internet Congestion”: “In this paper we do not offer a position on the merits of alternative traffic management practices. Our goal is instead to educate the wider community regarding some of the history of these issues within the technical community. Our assessment of this legacy and of more recent research efforts to characterize Internet traffic more carefully lead us to conclude that there is ample scope for useful innovation in ISP traffic management practices beyond TCP fairness. Consequently, we would caution against any regulatory policies that had the likely effect of enshrining TCP fairness and thereby limiting the scope of the Internet technical community's on-going experiments with how to best
manage best-effort traffic over medium (month or less) to short time-scale (seconds to minutes).”
Marjorie Blumenthal, Provost, Georgetown University, and David Clark, Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in a paper entitled “Rethinking the Design of the Internet: The End-to-End Arguments vs. the Brave New World”: “There is a tussle between spammers and those who would control them, between merchants who need to know who buyers are and buyers who use untraceable e-mail addresses, and between those who want to limit access to certain content and those who try to reach it. This pattern suggests that the balance of power among the players is not a winner-take-all outcome, but an evolving balance. It suggests that the outcome is not fixed by specific technical alternatives, but by the interplay of the many features and attributes of this very complex system. And it suggests that it is premature to predict the final form. What we can do now is push in ways that tend toward certain outcomes. We argue that the open, general nature of the Net, which derived from the end-to-end arguments, is a valuable characteristic that encourages innovation, and that this flexibility should be preserved.”
Farber, and Jerry Faulhaber, former FCC Chief Economist and Professor, the Wharton School in a paper entitled “INNOVATION IN THE WIRELESS ECOSYSTEM: A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC FRAMEWORK “: “Even worse, adopting “reasonable” network management as a rule introduces great uncertainly into the market; exactly what behaviors will incur the wrath of the regulator? Don’t know; we’ll punish you when we see it. If ever a policy was designed to increase cost, reduce customer choice, reduce incentives to innovate and reduce incentives for carriers to invest, this would be it.”
Michael Hanley, Professor, University College of London in a paper entitled “Why the Internet Only Just Works”: “To conclude, in many ways the Internet only just works. The number of ways in which it only just works seems to be increasing with time, as non-critical
problems build. The main question is whether it will take failures to cause these problems to be addressed, or whether they can start to be addressed before they need to be fixed in an ill co-ordinated last-minute rush.”
Christopher Yoo, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in a slide presentation entitled “Integrating Network Engineering into the Policy Debate”: This paper shows the flaws with simplistic visions of end-to-end and the importance of preserving room for experimentation . . . it underscores the importance of providing a structure that permits experimentation rather than finding the “right” answer.