Ed Felten — the Princeton engineering prof who led the effort to crack the Secure Digital Music Initiative and did yeoman work on the Sony BMG DRM fiasco — has published a fast, ten-page white-paper on the complexities of Network Neutrality. Ed describes the many ways in which Neutrality is hard to enforce, and the ways in which tiered, discriminatory service is likely to have grave outcomes:
Suppose we discover that customers of TelCo, a residential ISP, are having trouble
using the VoipCo Internet phone service, because of jitter problems. What might be
causing this? One possibility is that TelCo is using delay discrimination, either minimal
or non-minimal, with the goal of causing this problem. Many people would want rules
against this kind of behavior.Another possibility is that TelCo isn't trying to cause problems for VoipCo users, and
in fact TelCo's management of its network is completely reasonable and
nondiscriminatory, but for reasons beyond TelCo's control its network happens to have
higher jitter than other networks have. Perhaps the jitter problems are temporary. In this
case, most people would agree that net neutrality rules shouldn't punish TelCo for
something that isn't really its fault.The most challenging possibility, from a policy standpoint, is that TelCo didn't take
any obvious steps to cause the problem but is happy that it exists, and is subtly managing
its network in a way that fosters jitter. Network management is complicated, and many
management decisions could impact jitter one way or the other. A network provider who
wants to cause high jitter can do so, and might have pretextual excuses for all of the steps
it takes. Can regulators distinguish this kind of stratagem from the case of fair and
justified engineering decisions that happen to cause a little temporary jitter?
