The Tiered Internet

I’ve been reading through an essay by Doc Searls entitled “Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes“. It addresses a set of issues that have been bugging me for a while.

We need to stress how the pipe-centric view of the world is responsible for the crippled and asymmetrical “consumer” service the carriers call “broadband”. By restricting upstream use of the Net and biasing service to downstream “content delivery”, the carriers have effectively outlawed personal and small business enterprise on the Net.

Firstly, I pay a monthly fee for my pipe to the internet. I do not pay for value-added services from my internet service provider. As far as I am concerned, they provide infastructure only. The real value comes not from them (or the other telecommunications or media giants), but from works published by other end points on the network.

Like most ISPs with outward-facing buisness models, mine assumes that its customers are consumers first. Thus, while several different price plans are provided that I can pick from, giving some semblence of “choice”, they don’t provide what I really want. (Nor does anyone else around here, so recommendations to “switch” are utterly useless.) All “plans” provide unmetered (in terms of volume) bandwidth, at asymetrical data rates. Meaning, as a duitiful consumer, I can consume information, services, or content with far more efficiency than I can publish that information.

I prefer to have symmetric rates, or asymmetric tipping in the opposite direction, because it’s better to give than recieve. I think that this concept of unapproved, unsanction, unexploitable personal publishing is the antithesis to the large media conglomorates’ entrenched buisness model.

Please note, this is not a technical last-mile problem. My ISP uses Motorola’s wireless Canopy platform, which can provide 20 meg symmetrical service over the last mile. Their least throttled package has a 300 kbps upstream. Some DSL providers provide up to 800 kbps.

The tiered internet seeks to tip this scale even further off balance, giving priority to traffic bought by protection money from big companies. They aim to charge the requesting endpoint, and the requested endpoint, for the same piece of traffic.

That is like a cab service providing “quick and effective service” to customers of a buisness only if that buisness pays for priority service. This practice is commonly known as extortion, and is generally frowned upon.

What ISPs fail to realize is that they are in the buisness of providing a mechanism for people to interchange ideas at the end-points of the network. They are the road, not the destination. And they need the destinations to exist for this buisness model to work.

It would be a brave, dramatic, and infinatly appropriate for large network end-points {Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon} ignore the ISP’s demands. If their traffic is subsequently throttled, they are in a perfect position to inform their customers (which also happen to be customers of the misbehaving ISP) of the reason for poor performance, be it by text on a website, or header clip on a VoIP call. Given a suitable alternative, and adequate education, many customers would immediatly jump ship.

The top-down, sanctioned distribution from the media cartels is destroying our internet.