Google auctions its advertising, because it can. And that means that it can often extract more for a particular search term than it is worth ‘ hence its constantly rising revenues. Comcast would now like a piece of that action and after today’s appeal court decision sinks in that the FCC cannot regulate how Comcast manages its network, it will likely begin a similar auction process.
Sure a lot of calming of the waters has to happen first. ISPs everywhere have got to say things like, ‘The appeal court’s decision will have no impact on the experience of Internet users. Consumers are in the driver’s seat in today’s market-driven Internet ecosystem, and their interests remain fully protected.’
They have to say that to stave off the next inevitable Net Neutrality move, which might be to mobilize Congress to rush though a law change (perhaps as an accompaniment to the National Broadband Plan) which puts the Net Neutrality principles into a legal act.
Comcast has to convince the world at large, along with AT&T, Verizon and all the other cable companies, that it only wants to slow down the traffic of illicit file sharers who are using up all the internet’s traffic entirely on pirating video files.
Here is a list of ‘other’ things which this ruling might allow, which Comcast has to convince the world it would never consider.
It would for instance never auction off the fastest guaranteed delivery speeds between the search engines ‘ opting for an exclusive ‘fast lane’ service, and giving all the others second class service. By Second class it means throwing away packets that get in the way of the high paying packets.
It would also never dream of auctioning video file downloads ‘ for instance take a percentage of what Amazon charges for ebooks or what Apple charges for iTunes files or a percentage of Google’s advertising revenues for YouTube.
Comcast will definitely NOT want us to think that it will look at the Economic value of any given message, only its size, as an impediment for delivery. So just pirate video files, not a tax on Bloomberg investment packets which carry small amounts of key investment data.
Comcast must convince all of the US that if AT&T, in conjunction with Apple or anyone else for that matter, created an Over the Top video streaming service, which challenged its own Pay TV service, that it would never dream of allocating that a low level of priority in its traffic management policy.
Because once it has convinced everyone that the entire process can be forgotten about, it will have a duty to its shareholders to immediately see what it can get away with along all of these fronts and many more. And it won’t need to tell anyone about it, it will just appear to its customers that the internet access (or a rival service) is a bit slow. It won’t have to tell anyone or answer criticisms from the FCC, because a court has told the FCC that traffic management on the Comcast network is none of its business.
We were once visiting China and were told by superior Chinese technicians that the internet was slow and that only inside China was it really fast. Later it transpired that the way the authorities cut out bad news from outside China was to periodically squeeze shut the international gateway. But the Chinese people made up their own explanation and it was about their own superiority. The same explanation would work with Comcast customers ‘ services from Comcast would be lightning fast, but those from Apple, AT&T and Netflix and others would be slow and Comcast customers might easily interpret this as the inferiority of other services rather than the interference of Comcast, especially if Comcast encouraged them to.
Of course the actual ruling of the court was that the FCC had not gone to the trouble of proving that the issue was relevant to achieving its ‘statutorily mandated responsibilities.’ By this it meant that on this occasion the FCC had said that it could rule on issues outside of its usual jurisdiction, because it was important to things within its jurisdiction ‘ but it forgot that it had to provide proof that internet traffic was relevant to its usual business.
This means that the FCC can once again find a form of acceptable proof and once again order Comcast to change its internet traffic management policy.
Which is why Comcast must not provide the FCC with too much evidence that too much ‘traffic shaping’ is actually going on ‘ just file sharing being dumped on the back burner and surely everyone wants that.
Net neutrality is often talked about in terms of treating all sources and formats of internet traffic in the same way.
It is actually an interesting issue just how all forms of internet traffic can be treated equally anyway? What does that mean exactly if this is say an HTML page versus a video stream? Should they both be given the same bandwidth? i.e. enough for an HTML page to be delivered?
When a Quality of Service protocol is being used on an IPTV network to deliver TV, all non-real time packets are subordinate to video packets and are delayed, a process that often results in them being thrown away. Throw away an IP packet and the TCP part of the protocol will arrange for it to be sent again. Does this constitute a form of preference on one type of IP traffic over another? We would have thought so and yet that goes on all the time. Same with VoIP packets. So there’s traffic ‘management’ and ‘traffic management,’ and it’s hard to get down to precise definitions of what Net Neutrality would look like. IS it not artificially changing the order of packets? But then P2P and Bit Torrent networks would send so many MORE packets because it appears to be multiple concurrent file transmissions. If you were to treat that entire pirated video as ‘one’ customer of the network, instead of 20, then the management process would simply be unraveling the benefits of P2P, no more and that might become acceptable.
In the end, the political will of the moment has to be sensed by everyone involved, and then acted upon. No-one with heavy clout in Washington worries too much about Bit Torrent video sends, and so this set back for the FCC is probably acceptable. It picked the wrong fight to establish Net Neutrality over. But if it came to Netflix or Apple traffic being subverted, then Capitol Hill would have people from all walks of lobbying life knocking on all the right doors. It is this that keeps Comcast and others in check right now and that’s all, although there is a lot of rhetoric about competition keeping the internet safe.
However in the US, there has been so little competition in providing basic internet services that the country has fallen from number one to outside the top 20 countries in terms of broadband penetration. That doesn’t happen when you have genuine competition and the US RBOCs even managed to take 4 or 5 years off from investing in their networks to argue the toss with lawmakers before embarking on their current aggressive broadband acquisition paths. This type of decision mike lead to another 4 or 5 years being taken off form investment, why improve your networks if you have artificially created a situation where total traffic is going down, not up ‘ due to traffic shaping.
If it was not for the animosity between cable and telcos there would be no US broadband competition, and if they ever have any kind of accommodation, whether that is over broadband caps (the widescale introduction of bandwidth caps for instance which is happening now) or an agreement not to take triple play pricing below an unprofitable price, then what little competition there is would be over and the US broadband scene would once again stagnate while the companies made more profits.
Even now Comcast has the chance to free up huge swathes of bandwidth on its network ‘ both in its core, backhaul and access networks ‘ that it can potentially, on the back of this single legal outcome, savage its capex plans and drive up its share price. Now is that good for users? Well in the short term, if the Comcast network is less congested ‘ Yes. In the long term we are not so sure. Investment needs to continue.
We fully expect the FCC to take this decision on the chin, but to continue to push the belief that some form of Network Neutrality needs to be mandated and not left purely to competitive pressures. However, we suspect that the FCC will pick a different fight with which to make this happen, instead of backing up Bit Torrent users who are infecting the major networks.
We know for sure that under the current political environment, as soon as Comcast or anybody makes an approach to Google to ask for some of its money in order to speed up YouTube across its access network, then it will be splattered all over the pages of every major newspaper and back on the FCC agenda. Unless of course Google welcomes the approach (not likely, but possible). But if all round video packets just happen to do a bad job getting to Comcast customers, except when they belong to the TV Everywhere sites of Comcast itself, then who exactly could say for sure that this is happening? A customer that used to get superfast access to say Netflix movies on a different broadband line might feel they are slower through Comcast, but it would be tricky to make a case that video packets are being slowed down.
All we are absolutely sure of is that every major ISP in the US and in countries which tend to follow its legal lead, will be burning the midnight oil, trying to come up with strategies which put them at some advantage in how to manage or shape their IP traffic. The court may have single handedly saved an industry here ‘ the deep packet inspection and traffic shaping industry.
We can see why Google might believe that its only way to keep from increased traffic costs on the internet is to build part of the network for itself.