The area of net neutrality is getting much discussion these days, and everyone has an opinion. Everyone wants to affix blame for the problems, and that may be fine, but blame must be assessed correctly, and put at the feet of the right people.

One person that might be dangerous, both because his opinions are wrong, and the fact that he is getting lots of ‘airtime’ is Dave Caputo, the CEO of a company called Sandvine.

from Ars Technica

Sandvine creates deep packet inspection (DPI) gear that is used by ISPs like Comcast to inspect and sometimes throttle Internet traffic, and the company has been the target of a fair amount of online ire for its work. But CEO Dave Caputo says that it’s all one big misunderstanding; what he really wants to do with his company is focus on “improving the quality of the experience of the Internet and trying to make the world a better place.”

Caputo made the remarks in an interview with the CBC’s Peter Nowak, and it’s worth reading in full. Apart from one odd interlude where Caputo suggests that those who favor network neutrality laws also want to destroy copyright, it’s an interesting conversation that largely circles around a single point: ISP overselling.

So rather than blame the users, lets lay the blame where it belongs, with the ISPs who oversell ,and have been making lots of money on infrastructure that was paid for years ago, and should be updated anyway.

Like operators of other networks (road, airlines, etc.), just about every ISP in the world attempts to sell bandwidth to users on the assumption that it will not be used 24/7.  In fact, it can’t be used continuously at top speed because the ISP lacks a connection to the Internet that can handle simultaneous full-speed traffic from all users. (We’ve noted before that the Internet backbone has plenty of room at the moment; it’s last-mile providers and their networks that are experiencing congestion issues.)

It is amazing to hear this, as other reports state that the problem is the back bone, and needs updating – either way, the infrastructure is in need, and the problem is that the ISPs are wanting to soak the users, when in fact those very same users have paid many times over for the upgrades.  All the time that people were paying around $20 dollars per month for dial-up, the ISPs should have been putting that money in accounts reserved for upgrades. Now that most have moved to broadband, they want to take advantage of the plan that was offered – all you can eat access. That was the promise that was given by the ISPs to gain lots of user dollars, it is now time to keep to their part of the bargain.

As Sandvine puts in it a white paper on net neutrality (”A Broadband Wild West?”), “This over-subscription model is observed regularly in our modern life.  For example, with water supply—everyone has experienced a hot-water scalding when another household member flushes the toilet.  This is a graphic example of the water supply unable to fulfill the simultaneous demands of different users.” (Note to whichever Sandvine employee wrote this: please contact a professional plumber. This should not, in fact, be happening, and your scalded back will thank me for making you fix the problem.)

As the author points out, this is a bad example.

When people are presented with this fact, one common response is to call the ISPs thieving bastards who should “give me what I’ve paid for.” ISPs are quite careful not to promise the speeds they advertise, though, and this response generally misses the fact that dedicated bandwidth would cost far more than people currently pay.

This realization often leads to the second response, which is, “Give me some way to pay for the bandwidth I actually want to use, don’t just hobble certain applications or block encrypted traffic or reset my BitTorrent transfers.” This in turn usually spawns a debate about metered Internet access, which is complicated by the fact that it seems ultra-fair, on one level, but it would also likely stymie the development of new, high-bandwidth services.

This should not be a problem with unlimited access, all that is needed is a quick trip to the dictionary, to refresh the memories of the ISPs. And should that not work, the companies trying to push content could simply pay for the users extra bandwidth – but that assumes that the first, and best, plan has not worked.

For instance, I’ve become a helpless devotee of Hell’s Kitchen on Hulu, the NBC/FOX joint online venture; it’s so bad that I don’t even know when the show actually airs. But if I paid by the gigabyte for an unthrottled, uncensored connection, I’d find out when Hell’s Kitchen aired on TV, watch it then, and stop watching Hulu. No big deal, except that by not watching Hulu, I wouldn’t have discovered the flawed but still-fascinating show Startup Junkies, and I wouldn’t be contributing to the on-demand video revolution.

Net neutrality is “laughable”

What Caputo seems to think he’s doing with Sandvine is enabling “all-you-can-eat” models at reasonable prices. People who argue for network neutrality are “painting the service providers into a corner,” he says in the interview. “If all packets are created equal then it’s equal utility and we should be charging on a per-packet basis, and I don’t think anybody wants to go there.”

Perhaps this could be like other things, where we honor current agreements, and latecomers are under their own agreements – all sorts of companies do this, why should ISPs be any different?

Without traffic management, especially of P2P, the idea is that prices would either go up or congestion might reach truly terrible new heights, and Caputo believes that most users would rather just throttle P2P; let it work, but slowly and in the background, so that ISPs don’t need to make expensive infrastructure improvements and everyone can continue eating at the buffet for $30 or $40 a month. We might also see tiers emerge that allow P2P users free rein for, say $70 a month, while non-P2P users could keep paying lower prices. Caputo insists, “it’s going to be laughable in the next two or three years that people used to say all packets should be treated equally.”

Again we are back to faulty reasoning. It also shows that there needs to be more, not less competition. For instance, if you like McDonald’s burgers, but the price of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is too much to take, you can go to Burger King or Jack in the Box, and get a good, and almost equivalent burger. If everyone felt the same, because the price went up on the QPC for no apparent reason, McDonalds would soon get the picture, and reduce the price to reasonable levels. The fact that McDs had to buy new grills would have little to do with it, you would not stand for them raising prices for a new grill, as you would expect the profits from all of the previous QPCs sold should have paid for necessary maintenance and upgrades. If it did not, the company would not survive (forgive me here, for this analogy, we are assuming that McDs sells little other than QPCs)

Of course, it’s probably no accident that Caputo’s vision of a tiered Internet where throttlers are the good guys just happens to need his products in every network. And while his vision has a compelling logic too it, it’s a logic that only makes sense in a truly competitive environment where ISPs can’t simply install such tools as a way to artificially hike per-bit prices and pick “winners and losers” on the ‘Net.

Yes, self-interest tends to cloud judgement.

But Caputo didn’t get into the DPI business because he loved controversy; he did it because real-time traffic identification was a “cool” problem to solve. “We’re going to attack a problem where we can’t imagine there’s a more difficult problem,” he said of setting up Sandvine. “I take nothing away from rocket scientists or biologists who are trying to cure cancer, but in our domain we really couldn’t think of a more difficult problem, and that really excited us.”

This is the problem with many voices in this debate. Self-interest, bad logic, and superficial reasoning will not get us anywhere, it only makes clear choices impossible.

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