Out of Control

In a perfect world, an article such as this would end discussion of network neutrality, simply because it bursts all the credibility of Google’s argument that net neutrality is needed to preserve the Internet opportunities for individuals and small businesses. Please note the quote from Brian Reid, a former Google executive who is now a director of engineering at the Internet Systems Consortium—a prime example of the “smaller” player--who says “Google wants to raise the barriers to entry by competitors by making baseline service very expensive.”

Google, on the other hand, is telling Congress and the American people that without network neutrality, cable and telephone companies will dominate the Internet. Funny thing is, in the New York Times article, the cable and phone companies aren’t even mentioned. Moreover, while the phone companies have candidly stated that they intend to seek revenue opportunities through a tiered Internet, Google, as the article reports, has been extremely secretive how it plans leverage the $1.5 billion in capital expenditures it’s made, some of it in facilities such as the one in The Dalles. Google has gone as far as having city officials to sign confidentiality agreements.

But let’s look at this in the context of the central network neutrality tenets: that all information should be treated the same way as it crosses the network; that no network operator should be able to charge more for prioritization of data or applications; that no company should be able to offer a level of quality of service to one that is not offered to all.

The justification for this supporting these tenets is the assumption that network owners—AT&T, Comcast, et al.-- have an infrastructure monopoly on the Internet. How can this be true when, together, Google and Microsoft own more than 650,000 Internet servers? Within five years they will own more than a million between them. Add Yahoo, eBay and Amazon and you have an enormous amount of Web applications, services and network power concentrated among a small number of hands.

Google and the other companies in the server segment want Congress and the public only to see the carrier segment. But if we are going to crack the policy nut, we need to look at the server segment and the carrier segments together as parts of a larger Internet whole. Although the carrier segment may be just as concentrated, when viewed alongside the titans that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have become, they are in a position to balance the distribution of power among the major Internet players, not exploit it.

Network neutrality proponents place great emphasis on how well it has served the Internet until now. “Save the Internet” is the rallying cry of MoveOn.org and its eponymous web site.

“The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services,” declared Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s pioneers and now chief Internet evangelist for Google Inc. in written testimony to Congress.

That indeed is true. But with all due respect to Cerf, it is foolish to believe that when one company places 450,000 servers on the Internet, which Google has done, it will not profoundly affect those “architectural characteristics.” The Internet MoveOn.org wants to "save" no longer exists. Google and its competitors already have fundamentally changed it.

From the New York Times, it’s easy to infer that Google in the next few years will have more than a million servers on the Web. Microsoft, with 200,000 today, says it plans to have 800,000 by 2011. As democratic as the Internet has been until now, can its information democracy be maintained when a handful of companies control several million servers after having made it illegal to control or partition the bandwidth those servers consume? Grasp this idea and you see how network neutrality would be a government-sponsored effort to tilt the entire Internet economy in favor of a small group of very big applications and e-commerce companies.

“Enshrining a rule that broadly permits network operators to discriminate in favor of certain kinds of services and to potentially interfere with others would place broadband operators in control of online activity,” Cerf wrote.

As opposed to whom? That’s the question Cerf leaves unanswered. He wants us to assume it’s the average user or Web site owner. But here’s another way of looking at it: In a network neutral world, where best effort is the rule, the advantage belongs to the party who can shove as much information down the network as possible. Against these parties, the only check are the broadband network operators, who have the ability to manage and prioritize bandwidth. They can create “toll lanes” that can manage partition and accommodate the sheer volume of sophisticated applications from these millions of servers so they don’t interfere with traffic from everyday web sites that will continue to thrive within the paramters of today's best effort transmission. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

In fact, a policy that allows the law of supply and demand to develop for bandwidth is the best way of preserving the Internet as we know it, because it would force Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to pay their way. Prohibiting tiered prioritization, on the other hand, would give them free reign to use their immense server resources to take as much bandwidth as they want with no concern as to the cost or the affect on the network.

To my blogger associates and friends who support network neutrality in the name of democracy: think long and hard about the small businesses and minority voices you aim to protect. For that matter, how will your own Web resources stack up against one million Google servers worldwide? Then ask yourselves what chance your data has against the combined power of a million servers when no Internet gatekeeping, partitioning or tiered bandwidth management is allowed.

To our elected officials: Ask Google questions about its business plans and their billion-dollar Internet investments. Treat the new Internet elite with the same skepticism as you do the old line carriers. No matter where today’s Internet players came from, they are all part of a single supply chain, and each is looking for a leg up. This process rightfully belongs in the marketplace, which has done a superb job in spurring the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web right up to this day. Calls for network neutrality need to be recognized for what they are: regulatory gamesmanship at the highest level.