Verizon/Google — Proposal Allows For “Network Management”
The Veri-oogle proposal has named “network management” as the “UNE” of the Open Internet. While not surprising, it’s most certainly astounding to actually see it in print.
Network Management: Broadband Internet access service providers are permitted to engage in reasonable network management. Reasonable network management includes any technically sound practice: to reduce or mitigate the effects of congestion on its network; to ensure network security or integrity; to address traffic that is unwanted by or harmful to users, the provider’s network, or the Internet; to ensure service quality to a subscriber; to provide services or capabilities consistent with a consumer’s choices; that is consistent with the technical requirements, standards, or best practices adopted by an independent, widely-recognized Internet community governance initiative or standard-setting organization; to prioritize general classes or types of Internet traffic, based on latency; or otherwise to manage the daily operation of its network.
In other words, Internet access providers must provide open Internet access, and they can’t discriminate against Internet applications or “cause meaningful harm to competition or to users,” but they have the right to manage their network. Which leads us to an effectively similar conclusion as the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
I keep pointing to the ’96 Act, because it ran into the same obstacle — regulating and policing the internal operations of communications companies. This is a nearly impossible task that results in a sea of paper and seemingly endless lawsuits. By the time everything gets resolved, people have forgotten what the case was about.
And that’s the point about Network Management. Most people understand that service providers need to manage their networks. So it makes sense to give them the right to do so. But what isn’t clear is the boundary of this definition — what is network management? where does it start? and where does it end?
It may be one thing to downgrade the performance of peer-to-peer file sharing traffic in a local access network. But what about doing the same thing on the back end? What if some network traffic goes through a bottleneck — an under-sized port, perhaps? What about a preferred provider or CDN getting more-than-sufficient bandwidth on the backbone connection? These are all unknowns, and that’s the point.
The Veri-oogle (sorry, but the blogosphere already purposed Googlezon) proposal leaves a lot of wiggle room around network management. Because, even if the industry associations lock things down pretty tightly in a very short timeframe (that’s another discussion), what’s to say that private peering and other back-end tweaks under the guise of so-called “network management” won’t accomplish a similar outcome?
After all. Would this mean that the FCC would get involved when an ISP does a poor job of managing their network? Will managers be liable for doing their jobs poorly? Will being bad at configuring a router get you called in front of a Congressional committee?
These are questions that don’t yet have answers, and I don’t expect there to be answers for quite some time. As with the ’96 Act, the ambiguity and room for interpretation is enough to effectively quash the very objective of this proposal.
So while everyone else is telling you that — with Google and Verizon behind the effort — we now will have Network Neutrality and an Open Internet in perpetuity. I’ll say the exact opposite. This proposal is the death knell of the Open Internet. So much for that poor little shill who’s been paid by Google to say otherwise. Perhaps she doesn’t remember the ’96 Act…or how it turned out.