Out of Control

Network neutrality has a place in the discussion of P2P filtering, especially since net neutrality has become a sticking point in the Senate deregulation legislation and may result in the bill not making it to the floor by the time Congress adjourns. Without network neutrality, the argument goes, service providers will be able to block access to any site they chose.

But if the Culver City situation is any indicator, it could be just the opposite. Neutral networks will have a difficult time supporting P2P. Ironically, it will be municipal networks, which usually pledge open access and neutrality, who will be the first to find that they can’t do both. P2P applications can account for up to 50 percent of traffic at any given time, say network engineers. This stands to make matters extremely awkward for municipal broadband proponents, who also tend to be network neutrality proponents. Just check out the routine comments by Esme Vos and Harold Feld.

P2P leaves Internet service providers, whether they are commercial or municipal, with two choices: manage it with traffic partitioning and prioritization, or filter it. A network neutrality law would prohibit the former and could likely require the latter.

If you want to see the magnitude of the problem P2P already has unleashed on commercial networks, just Google “P2P and bandwidth management.”

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to a paper by P-Cube, a Cisco Systems subsidiary that sells a bandwidth management platform that lets ISPs classify applications, guarantee service performance and charge for multiple IP services without costly infrastructure upgrades (this likely would be illegal under network neutrality).

“Due to the unique and aggressive usage of network resources by Peer-to-Peer technologies, network usage patterns are changing and provisioned capacity is no longer sufficient. Extensive use of Peer-to-Peer file exchange causes network congestion and performance deterioration, and ultimately leads to customer dissatisfaction and churn.”

Here’s a quote from a paper by CacheLogic, another supplier of bandwidth management platforms to ISPs:

“Peer-to-Peer impacts Service Providers in three key areas: increasing transit bandwidth costs that, due to existing pricing models, cannot easily be passed onto consumers; secondly it results in an increase associated infrastructure costs, caused by high Peer-to-Peer traffic volumes and, specifically, the symmetrical (equal upstream/downstream) nature of Peer-to-Peer. Thirdly, Service Providers experience a net result of increased congestion, which if not addressed, is likely to result in increased subscriber churn.

In considering these factors, some Service Providers may suggest that the most obvious solution is to simply block or, at least, restrict Peer-to-Peer traffic across the network. However, such action is likely to result in alienating existing subscribers and limit growth in a market that is seeing Service Providers fighting for market share. There are a number of commercial and technical solutions available to Service Providers to help manage the impact of Peer-to-Peer file sharing.”

Now let’s turn to material from Audible Magic, which supplied the content filtering platform to Culver City and makes no secret of its aim to tap what it sees as a growing market for censorship tools (no other way to put it) on the part of municipal systems. Note the introduction of value judgments on content.

“On commercial ISP networks peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing traffic can account for over half of all network bandwidth usage. Often, the transfers include large, copyrighted multimedia files such as videos and music, with a large proportion being sexually explicit in nature.

“For municipal governments deploying public wireless networks, this traffic is problematic for a number of reasons. First, a single P2P user downloading a movie can ‘crowd out’ and slow down legitimate traffic such as email or web browsing. Secondly, municipalities must invest administrative resources to meet their legal responsibilities as a network service provider under Federal copyright law, including identifying and notifying users who are infringing copyrights. Lastly, the use of government-funded networks for the transfer of sexually explicit materials, some being illegal content such as child pornography, is especially problematic from a policy and public relations point of view.”

So Culver City, with the help of its main vendor, is trying to mask a quality problem first by censoring the Internet, then justifying that censorship by demonizing P2P.

Is P2P used to violate copyrights? Yes, but then so are numerous PC programs. Is P2P used to exchange child pornography? Yes, but so is email (and snail mail for that matter!). We don’t ban entire applications and technologies because they can be used to facilitate illegal behavior. Instead we focus on enforcement of existing laws against piracy and child porn, just as we deal with drunk driving by prosecuting intoxicated motorists, not by banning cars.

But that reasoning is being set aside here. That’s because the real motive for Culver City’s filtering decision isn’t cracking down on child porn, it’s alleviating bandwidth congestion that has made its “free” network all but unusable. To set its conscience at ease, it is choosing an easy target. But since, by its own admission, kiddie porn and illegal file sharing make up only a portion of the content they are blocking, at the end of the day, it comes down to Culver City officials making a subjective decision over what is or isn’t “legitimate content.” Since the idea of municipal broadband was first floated, libertarians have said an inherent danger would be that government operations would eventually censor access. Well, it’s started.

Since along with the belief that government should regulate every business (broadband, energy, transportation), 21st century liberals have embraced nanny state doctrine that government should legislate every part of our lives (what we should eat, where we should shop, how we should raise our kids), I predict that the Left will make an uneasy compromise with municipal broadband filtering, even as they rail for the network neutrality policies that make it necessary. They will say that municipal networks wouldn’t be viable without some sort of limits on bandwidth use, and they may be right. But that begs the question as to why have them at all, not to mention negating any previous assertion about the government’s ability to do broadband better than private industry.