[273] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Detecting and Proving Network Neutrality Violations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Sat Sep 15 20:53:46 2007
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Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 17:18:51 -0700
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[ Forwarded from PFIR list, since privacy concerns
ultimately can be tightly related to various network
neutrality issues. -- Lauren ]
Detecting and Proving Network Neutrality Violations
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000292.html
Greetings. In a blog posting earlier today ("Are You Being Cheated
by Digital Cable?" - http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000291.html ),
I noted how cable companies can (and do, for various reasons) send
customers analog television channels that are masquerading as
digital service tier channels, and how difficult it can be to
definitively prove this, to get anyone at these firms to admit
what's going on, or to correct the situation.
You probably already knew where I'm headed with this. Most of these
same cable firms are also major ISPs these days, that millions of
people depend on for their Internet service.
The anti-network-neutrality camp, ranging from cable firms to
telephone companies, DOJ, FTC, and others, repeatedly recite the
tired assertion that there's no evidence of a problem, so there's no
need for neutrality regulations.
But setting aside for the moment arguments about the advisability of
"preemptive strikes" to avoid problems before they occur, let's ask
a much more fundamental question.
Do we currently have the tools and algorithms to detect and
demonstrate serious network neutrality violations by ISPs, in a
manner that would lead to such violations being actionable and
correctable? Or could neutrality violations be slipped into the
network just like analog cable channels that pretend to be digital?
ISPs simply blocking sites would be quickly detected and likely to
generate high-level complaints quickly, but what of more subtle
approaches like "traffic shaping" -- that if used aggressively and
inappropriately could certainly be defined as anti-neutrality
mechanisms? Would the average ISP subscriber of cable Internet or a
telco DSL Internet service have any obvious way to detect whether
the slow throughput they were getting with particular sites was just
an ordinary result of heavy Internet traffic, vs. their ISP
purposely relegating the competitions' packets to the back of the
bus, so to speak?
And if a customer did suspect that something nefarious was taking
place in this regard, how could they prove it? Calling tier one
customer support with suspicions alone is unlikely to do more than
waste your time and send your blood pressure sky high.
Without an appropriately broad infrastructure to collect and process
metrics associated with network neutrality, it is difficult to
understand how anyone can reasonably assert that we would know if
and when violations were taking place -- even today.
Solving this dilemma is not a minor undertaking. It may be possible
to approach this problem on a highly distributed basis, e.g. through
processes running on large numbers of cooperating user PCs to help
detect conditions that could be indicative of neutrality violations.
Another approach would be for a very large network entity (on the
scale of, say, Google) to devote some resources to such metrics and
analysis. Most likely some combination of both approaches would be
the optimum path.
Without mechanisms and procedures along these lines of some sort, it
is nonsensical for anyone to assert that we would necessarily know
when neutrality violations were taking place, much less have an
effective chain of authority for reporting such violations and
obtaining timely amelioration.
More resources need to be put into this research area now, along
with creating carefully defined structures to use the fruits of that
research in a practical way to help keep the ISPs on the straight
and narrow.
Not even the anti-neutrality folks should be able to logically argue
against what might be termed a "trust, but verify" approach.
Right?
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
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