Verizon exec: Some Net neutrality fans suffer from 'paranoia'
Verizon CTO Richard Lynch tells conference attendees that engineers, not lobbyists or interest groups, should be making decisions on how to manage broadband networks. He says some Net neutrality advocates hear of a 22-millisecond delay and get a case of 'paranoia.'
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/News.com)ASPEN, Colo.--Verizon's chief technologist took a swipe at Net neutrality advocates on Tuesday, saying the concept has become overly politicized and important engineering details have been overlooked in Washington debates.
"We need to guard against turning technical and business decisions into political decisions," Verizon's Richard Lynch said at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's technology policy conference here.
Lynch gave the example of a customer placing a call using a voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, service that relies on time-sensitive packets. Unless a continuous stream of VoIP packets arrives, the call quality can suffer or even become incomprehensible.
How to accomplish that in a congested network? The answer may include delaying peer-to-peer transfers. "For me as a carrier, I need to satisfy the VoIP customer--whether it's mine or someone else's is irrelevant here--by delivering those packets in a timely fashion," Lynch said. "That may mean that for economic reasons, within the network, to keep the cost reasonable to keep the price reasonable, that I need to slow down (what's not) a time-sensitive file."
Some people hearing this "get all incensed and they accuse me of violating things I didn't even know that I could violate," he said. Customers who are "doing a P2P download or e-mail, they aren't going to see that 22-millisecond delay. And yet that's the kind of thing that seems to (cause) paranoia."
A Verizon representative told us after the talk that the company is not prioritizing VoIP over peer-to-peer traffic, and that Lynch was speaking generally about approaches to the problem of congestion that all broadband providers face. Verizon has stressed that it spends over $16 billion a year on adding greater capacity to its network and says it is working collaboratively with peer-to-peer companies through the P4P working group to "maximize networks for consumers."
Lynch's remarks come weeks after the Federal Communications Commission ruled against Comcast for adopting the same general sort of network management practices. By a narrow 3-2 vote, the FCC handed Comcast a cease-and-desist order telling it not to interfere with BitTorrent transfers, even though the company had already ceased the practice back in March.
What may strike an outside observer as bizarre is that the FCC votes for an order before it's actually written. The order is still being drafted, and the text of the document will eventually be released. (One source in a position to know said that the dissenting FCC commissioners still haven't been given the text.)
Taking the measure of Net neutrality
Joe Waz, Comcast's senior vice president for external affairs, said the arguments of Net neutrality proponents--presumably meaning groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge--were "absurd."
"The issue was an engineering issue," Waz said in a panel discussion following Lynch's speech. He added that critics claimed Comcast was trying to disadvantage P2P video to benefit its own video offerings--but they never explained "why we wouldn't interfere with streaming video" from sites like YouTube that could be handled better.
Robert McDowell, one of the two dissenting FCC commissioners, said there were "evidentiary jurisprudence" problems with the agency's ruling. In part, McDowell said, "there were a couple of unsigned declarations" that the FCC relied on.
"Governments need to make sure they have a very thorough record," he said. "The FCC of late has not been doing that."
Kathleen Abernathy, a former FCC commissioner and now a partner at the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, agreed that the term Net neutrality made little sense. (Abernathy is also a director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a free-market group that has been a critic of the concept.)
"It was such a great phrase that it's morphed into more than what it really is," Abernathy said. "You have to peel it back and ask, 'What do you really mean?'"
Both Comcast and Verizon said that engineers, not lawyers and lobbyists, should be making network management decisions. "I do get very, very concerned that the people who are taking things like deep packet inspection and making it a horrible thing need to look at it from an engineer's viewpoint," Lynch said.
On a related note, Lynch said that Verizon was trying to work cooperatively with large content holders--the very ones that said Monday they wanted broadband providers to filter their networks--and wanted them to "feel comfortable that their content will be dealt with in the way they truly believe it should be."
But he stopped short of saying Verizon would actively monitor its customers' online activities to detect copyright violations. "I can't tell you that I will police for you," he said. "I don't think it would be appropriate for me to do that...(We want) to stay on the right side of the privacy position that we've taken as a company."
AT&T, by contrast, said in January that it was testing technology to spot piratical activity. On Monday, we asked the company about its current plans. (We asked: "Can you confirm that AT&T is not monitoring and has no plans to monitor its customers' traffic or other online activities to detect possible copyright infringements?")
Spokesman Michael Balmoris replied in a way that didn't exactly answer the question: "We have said that we are working with some in the content industry with the goal of encouraging the legal downloads of movies, TV shows, and other entertainment and content--we want our customers to access any legal content they want. In addition, let's set the record straight: we have not said that we are going to filter our customers traffic to detect possible copyright violations."
Updated at 11 p.m. PT with subsequent comments from a Verizon representative.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan.
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Net Neutrality IS a great idea because it prevents companies from spying on people for no reason on a daily basis. If they really think someone is sharing something illegal or sharing something illegally (not the same thing), then get a court order to monitor those people's internet traffic.
As to the 'bandwidth hog' thing that they keep bringing up..... there is no such thing, in all honesty. Each month, I use 100GB's of traffic at least. I have NEVER heard any complaints from Comcast, though that might be because I have relatives who work for Comcast and worked for them for a short time myself.
With the oil companies they told the public how merging would allow them to become more efficient and hold down prices. They closed refineries that would now be great to have on line but the public and the regulators bought their line hook and sinker. Then it was the bank megamergers to create efficiencies and provide more diverse offerings. In reality it created great wealth for a few and put the public in a position of bailing out the banks.
The telecommunications companies are now and have been about limiting our choices and allowing those who can pay more get "premium" services. Of course, the "premium" services will be the standard choices of today. The cycles will continue until the public wise up.
Really?
Lobbyists and Network Neutrality Proponents aren't the people behind Sandvine, which blocked all P2P uploads regardless of network congestion. So don't blame them for taking DPI and turning it into something horrible, network hardware vendors and service providers did that all by themselves.
Groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge and thousands of network neutrality supporters drug it out from secrecy into the light of day.
"And they would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling fans of a free and open Internet."
Robb Topolski
The reason that Comcast was taken to court is because all of the evidence said that they were deliberately slowing, blocking and packet hacking torrents on their network. When they were first called on this behavior they denied that it was actually being done.When they were called before a jury they then admitted that they prioritized certain traffic. The media, and possibly comcast had a hand in it, made the claim that everyone who uses bittorrent is a criminal so they shouldn't be taking up other people's bandwidth.
If it were merely an issue for engineers then Comcast never would have been taken to court in the first place.
That's absolutely false. Engineers are the last people who should be MAKING network management decisions. They should be the people who IMPLEMENTING network management decisions... decisions that should absolutely be made with the input of lawyers and lobbyists. Engineers do not know legal statutes or precedence. Engineers do not know or represent the customer's best interests. And, like any profitable profession, most engineers will do whatever they can to make their job as easy as possible. Network management policy is both a legal and ethical question that engineers are wholly unqualified to answer.
Wish I could be in Aspen to hear more, but then so would we all, eh?
That is why we need to have smart government regulation.
The CTO of Verizon doesn't appear to address the difference between smart regulation and complete, unfettered, free-markets, and is no less mindless of the lessons of Enron.
Or perhaps he too, is greedy and wantonly monopolistic in thinking?
the big problem is cable companies have oversold their bandwidth and try to screw their customers all the time. you don't have to believe me. just try to get an on-demand HD movie from your cable company at 8 o'clock on a friday night. it isn't going to happen; you'll probably have to wait till 10:30 to order the movie. and some or at least one on the 'free' hd channels with low ratings will be down like clockwork during primetime so the operators have more bandwidth to play with. these guys aren't fooling anybody, they need to squeeze bandwidth somewhere and pinching at peer-to-peer networks is the most politically vulnerable target because there's no big company at the end of the line to sue them for denial of service. it is the net equivalent of hiring an immigrant for a dangerous job because you know he has fewer recourses to complain. it's just sleezy.
The doublespeak is claming that P2P isn't time sensitive or that they will stop with P2P. I want the best quality from my VoIP, but I also want the best quality download speeds. This doesn't help me as a customer. The ISPs just want to ruin one service I pay for to fix another. Either way I'm getting screwed. Also, a 22 millisecond delay? Anyone that has had their bandwidth throttled can tell you about their 22 millisecond delays. It's easy to make your case with fake numbers.
So, he's not helping anyone. However, what Verizon would be doing is killing the little guy's chance. Once the ISPs get to decide then the big shot's services will always be more important than yours. The Little guy would never be able to compete with that. What if you wanted to invent a new service to compete with VoIP? Well, you can't. They're slowing your service down 22 milliseconds a packet so their service sounds great, but yours sounds like crap.
The problem is bandwidth. America is severely behind some other countries in broadband deployment. The ISPs make billions of dollars, but they don't build more? They know there is more money in choosing what services get deployed over a scarce resource then there is in meeting the actual broadband demand. It's a fraud it's a fraud it's a fraud a billion times over and they know it. Anyone in that room when he said it should have just told him to shove it and walked out.
The funny thing is that he calls me paranoid. I support NN because I'm worried that companies will start deciding some services are more important than others just because they say so. Then he says, well I'm going to do exactly what you're afraid of so there's absolutely no reason for you to be paranoid about it. LOL. That's the best doublespeak I've heard all day I think. That deserves a round of applause.
If you provide bandwidth then "provide" bandwidth. It should not matter what it is used for. People probably would not miss homeless people if you shot then in the head, but that doesn't mean thats how you solve homelessness.
Right on! Thanks for posting.
to No Man:
With respect, I believe that you are wrong. Engineers ought to be making Engineering decisions. The problem many ISPs are facing is that the MBAs have stopped listening to their Engineers and are listening to sales people, instead. Rather then getting an engineered solution to their specific problem, they get an off-the-shelf solution from some DPI appliance vendor.
Network Engineers in the telecommunications industry ought to know the laws that apply to their jobs. They make 6 figures for a reason. But more and more, engineers are being ignored by executives.
Robb Topolski
And to think I switched back to Verizon. Gack.
"No Man" couldn't be more wrong in his assertions.
The fact is there is not enough bandwidth; it's limited resource. By artificially forcing things, there will be even less bandwidth as the market is taken out of the equation. Then, the lobbyists and lawyers will be the single most important part of the decision process.
People complain about Verizon and Comcast, but you can say goodbye to many startups as soon as the lawyers have more clout than the market. Small guys will be kept out because they don't have the lobbying budgets that the big guys do.
As with almost everything that "liberals" come up with, Net Neutrality will end up having the oppoiste effects as what they state they'll be.
Just remember, "Net Neutrality = many more lawyers and lobbyists, not better service".