To get good technical arguments why we should not have NN laws you have to understand how the internet works and how economics works. Both fields of study are, unfortunately, very much beyond the experience of most internet folks… even very technical ones. Understanding how TCP works on a high level is not going to really help you much in understanding why NN is just silly.

Plus “Network Nuetrality” is really very poorly defined. Its one of those things terms that is designed to really confound the issue and be all things to all people. Political types understand very deeply the idea that people only hear what they want to hear. If NN sounds good to you then you will automatically filter out things you don’t like and if NN sounds bad to you then you will automatically filter out things you like.

Just like how you like the idea of having a nice internet connection, and NN is for you having a nice internet connection, so you filtered out all ideas that NN is 100% about implementing government laws on ISPs. All you have to do is read the books published on the subject… at the very core of NN debate is the concept that you cannot trust major corporations and that you need governmental intervention to protect people from their greed.

To understand why NN is stupid you have to understand how the the internet, on the physical layer, operates.

The original design created a series of “tier”s: you have backbone providers (tier one), regional carriers (tier two) and then ISPs (tier three). The major backbone providers ran the main internet networks…. they provided services that spanned around the entire USA and even around the entire globe. The tier two folks would purchase bandwidth from the backbone providers then run various data connections (like a T1 or T3 line or whatever) out to various cities. ISPs would then purchase the bandwidth from them, pay for a connection to their local offices, then provide networking services to businesses and individuals through phone lines and dedicated data connections.

Anybody who takes networking class would be aware of these sort of relationships. It is clean, logical, and well designed. It also kept control of the internet in the hands of the major backbone providers and this is how they wanted it kept.

Over time the ISPs and teir two folks became increasingly dissatisfied with the level of service and costs that the backbone providers provided.

If I am trying to send traffic to another ISP that is in the next county or the next state then why does it make sense to keep paying the backbone provider when I can set up my own connection and get internet connection to them at cost instead of having my profits drain into the back bone providers?

So that is were you had peering relationships. ISPs and teir two folks just started making their own connections to everybody else instead of relying on the backbone providers. Then you have the ISPs getting larger and setting up their own dedicated networks and pushing the higher levels out of the market more and more.

So now instead of being forced to send network bandwidth over the backbone providers you can send bandwidth from ISP to ISP to ISP directly or a whole host of other possibilities. Each with their own set of costs, bandwidth, latency, and technical issues.

There has been a huge number of disputes and in fighting over who should pay for what.

This is, needless to say, insanely complicated. Different routes involve different relationships, different contracts, different costs at different times of day, etc etc.

And this has also gone into providing faster and faster connections at lower costs with a massive increase in reliability. Efficiency is up and costs are down and we have to thank economics and private enterprise.

Right now I have a 16Mb/s connection to the internet for 30 dollars a month. (promotional price). A few years back I was looking at getting a dedicated T1… that would of cost between 700-1300 dollars a month at 1/16th the performance.

Then on top of that we have different types of networking.

Lets say you have bittorrent running for downloading bulk movies. Your looking at moving between 700 (low quality) to 8GB (high quality movie) of data over the lifetime of that download.

versus

A VoIP connection that is running 16Kb/s per second and will maybe only move 10-20 MB over the life of the conversation.

Would you be happy if your BT download was running at 30Kb/s?
Would you be happy if your VoIP connection had a quarter of a second delay that would shoot up to 2 or 3 seconds and had a lot of missing words?
Would you be angry if the BT download connections took 2-3 seconds to build if you could get the connections at 16Mb/s?
Would you be happy if your VoIP connection had 30Mb/s of excess bandwidth even if your only going to use 1/5th of one percent of it?

With all sorts of different ways and different costs of shoving data around on the internet it make sense that the ISPs and other network providers will be making trade offs in latency vs bandwidth vs costs based on what type of data and the quality of service demanded of different types of protocols.

All network neutrality laws will do is just institutionalize one specific way to route traffic on the internet regardless of efficiency or cost or any innovations in routing technology or peering relationships.

A damn shame, because I *still* haven’t seen a good argument against NN.

And I very much appreciate your footnoting. (As surely most readers do.) Not only does it point me to stuff I’ve missed, but revisiting old arguments in a new light helps one see the consistency and development of these ideas. And it is indeed a lot of work: thanks.

The links are not mandatory. They are optional in case you didn’t get that.

It is indeed obscene. Unfortunately a lot of people fall for it, because they’ve no clear idea of what a right is and they believe that rights are “granted” by the government.