Net neutrality basically says, these are the legally acceptable network protocols and architectures. It inevitably requires a specific technical definition of acceptable traffic patterns and network uses, either by Congress or by case law.
So much of what we think about neutrality is based on a hand-wavy assumption of natural monopolies, that our current lack of last-mile competition is inevitable. At different times, we thought the same of package delivery, voice calling, sending messages. The things that obviated them were not obvious, a la “faster horses”.
Thought about this way, neutrality legislation actually locks in the incumbents’ current arrangements instead of opening them to (so far unimagined) asymmetric competition.
No, net neutrality is just a restatement of the End to End principle - network intelligence should be kept at the hosts. The only things routers should be doing are forwarding packets based on daddr, and dropping packets when queues are full (and I guess egress filtering these days).
Having said that, I'm sure that any FCC-created net neutrality would devolve into blessing specific protocols, defining protected classes of businesses, specifically excepting p2p, etc.
So are you saying you think no legislation can help here, or do you think there is something that can enforce e2e but it just wouldn't get through in practice without dinging certain use cases?
In general, I don't think legislation ever helps. The political meat grinder perverts a grassroots call for sanity into more red tape that supports the incumbents' status quo. Keep in mind that the large companies you might be tempted to say would support net neutrality are actually incumbents and would love to keep competition from springing up, especially if they were based on compelling non-http technologies.
If you think otherwise, please take my first point and run with it. I personally think the only way forward is to get more encrypted peer-talking traffic-indistinguishable apps into more people's day-to-day use. Then there's an actual market demand for real Internet access.
agree. while people may sometimes have valid concerns, its the chain of reasoning that leads to proposed ways of addressing those concerns that often isn't grounded in realistic economics.
So much of what we think about neutrality is based on a hand-wavy assumption of natural monopolies, that our current lack of last-mile competition is inevitable. At different times, we thought the same of package delivery, voice calling, sending messages. The things that obviated them were not obvious, a la “faster horses”.
Thought about this way, neutrality legislation actually locks in the incumbents’ current arrangements instead of opening them to (so far unimagined) asymmetric competition.