Om and Niall have posted a podcast where they express the thought that eventually the access providers will give preferential treatment to their traffic compared to others. Om suggests that while explicit degradation of others’ traffic will face political scrutiny, preferential treatment will not raise an eyebrow. He also indicates that this will happen within 12 to 18 months and cautions content providers to develop a strategy to handle the effects this will have on their service.
It is likely that access providers will indeed give preferential treatment to their traffic; but I am not sure about the predicted effect. Even though Quality of Service and prioritizing traffic have been talked about for a long time, the empirical data seems to suggest that congestion is not an issue in the core. So if the ISPs indeed give only preferential treatment (as opposed to blocking traffic from competitors) and a user is only accessing “open” data, then that user should not observe any change in the level of quality. Even those who access both sets of data will not see much difference as long as the amount of bandwidth consumed by the “protected” services do not exceed a reasonable fraction of the available bandwidth. This is not a big problem because it is strictly decided by each individual user and not by the ISP. In other words, preferential treatment of itself does not harm anyone. But that is not what the executives from ISP companies seem to suggest; they want to extract equal flesh from even those who are willing to abide by “best effort” service. Even though the advocates of Net Neutrality may not make it explicit, their demands are only in reference to best effort service.
I have a related thought. Net neutrality and best effort service are necessary and sufficient conditions for realizing the benefits of The Long Tail. If I am a producer in The Long Tail, the content I generate can be consumed using best effort service and my customers have unimpeded access to the net, then I am OK. Conversely, if either the application requires some special delivery service or special business relationship with the ISP is needed, then by definition The Long Tail is not viable. So if you are a believer of The Long Tail phenomenon, then you should demand Net Neutrality from the ISPs.
Posted by aswath at December 28, 2005 05:05 PM