Why It's Important To Be Neutral

In these fractious times, you get the headlines if you're for or against something, but one ISP executive who has always believed in internet individuality argues passionately for internet neutrality. He's part of a movement that's asking every ISP to sign up.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 21, 2005]

NYC Wireless, a non-profit group whose mission is the unwiring of New York City, has issued a challenge to ISPs. It wants ISPs to agree to the following four principles, posted by NYC Wireless board member Dustin Goodwin:

1. Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;
   
   
2. Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
   
   
3. Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; and
   
   
4. Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

So far, the challenge has been signed by one ISP. Joe Plotkin, director of marketing for New York City-based Bway.net, told us that he supports the principles that Goodwin posted in the challenge and did not co-write them, although he is also on the board of NYC Wireless.

Plotkin replied, on the NYC Wireless scorecard:

Bway.net, the independent ISP, wholeheartedly supports these 4 principles of Network Neutrality. Bway.net allows its customers to run any application or services they want on their broadband connections, connect servers or other devices—and even to share their bandwidth publicly. Additionally, Bway.net relies on unfettered access to the public network to provide **innovative services** not offered by the dominant telco or cable providers including symmetric DSL, AnonymousDSL (tm) and Naked ADSL.

Keep government out, keep innovation in
We found that Plotkin also advocates the wireless sharing of DSL connections, and gave a speech on the topic at ISPCON Spring 2003 called Why Free Wi-Fi? It's Good Business.

We pointed out to him that this position is unusual in the industry.

"I'm not advocating legislation here. We do control our own network. I'm just signing a pledge of how we're doing business. We have a right to throw people off the network for violating our Terms of Service, but since the early days of wireless, we were one of the first to allow our DSL customers to share their connections wirelessly. We get customers because of it. I think it's foolish of companies like Time Warner to prevent it because the more they do, the more customers I pick up."

The Bells' monopoly behavior was dramatically revealed (again) in a recent article in BusinessWeek called At SBC, It's All About "Scale and Scope" in which SBC CEO Ed Whitacre made his now-famous threat to Google:

Q: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?

A: How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

Plotkin says this is a direct result of the FCC's policy of allowing the re-monopolization of the phone system (as predicted last year by his friend Bruce Kushnick of TeleTruth in our article VoIP Battleground in RBOC Monopoly War).

"This is the phone system we have all paid for [through taxes and surcharges]. And if that's not bad enough, they're going to allow the Bells to be vertically integrated by buying AT&T and MCI, giving them a majority of the backhaul traffic in the U.S. We're supposed to have anti-trust laws in this nation. Everybody and the Bells espouse competition but the Bells prefer to operate a monopoly."

That's why there's so much concern about Whitacre's statement. "When Whitacre says he will extract money from Google, ignoring the fact that the internet was built on an open platform, he is assulating the benefits that we as a society have reaped and that American business has reaped. The internet was successful because it was a common platform that allowed everyone to interconnect with everyone else."

Of course, Plotkin says, the Bells have always operated with a monopoly mindset. "Look at what they did to the CLECs. If they had not been monopolists, they would have treated the CLECs as customers, instead of treating them as threats to their monopoly. They should have realized that everyone who gets DSL from Covad, as we do, is still paying for a local loop, as opposed to going to cable, where customers get everything including phone service."

He adds that the conditions the Bells demanded from the FCC in order to roll out fiber were extreme. We agree: see Triennial Review Part II: The FCC's Fiber Failure.

Visionaries ask for less regulation
Plotkin has just returned from Jeff Pulver's Peripheral Visionaries in Washington, D.C. He was particularly impressed by a high-powered panel of law professors.

"Susan Crawford is great on this issue," he says. We agree: see We, The Internet.

I don't want to see legislation," Plotkin says. "I don't know how to write it without preventing VoIP and other services. If they throw up new rules, are they going to allow me to defend my network? If I get an attack, I may need to close a specific port. I need to be allowed to do this."

The future is symmetrical
Since even before he joined Bway.net, Plotkin was an advocate of SDSL, an opponent of ADSL. Plotkin believes that companies selling ADSL want their customers to receive content but not to produce it.

Such cablecos, cellcos, and telcos fail to realize that all of the new business models require a real upload capability. "All of the value creation lately—eBay, Skype, blogs, camera phones—is about making the internet a participatory medium. It requires an upstream."

Crawford joined the board of ICANN, a ray of hope for this vision of the future. In a blog note posted shortly before she attended Peripheral Visionaries, she wrote:

It should be no more illegal to have an open wireless network in your house than to practice the piano with the windows open. And having an open wireless network can lead to a community mesh network and a host of devices that open immediately to others, connecting us to the world.

If that's not possible, then the second best solution is structural separation, paying off the carriers for their stranded costs and moving to open utility platforms.

Since this government won't give us structural separation, we will continue to argue for net neutrality—and argue that those ISPs whose practice fits the principles should say so on the website of NYC Wireless and on their own websites.

—End