There's good discrimination and there's bad discrimination
By now you likely know about FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposal to turn current net neutrality guidelines into bona fide regulations. Genachowski has implied that net neutrality regulations would apply equally to both mobile and terrestrial broadband access networks, given that they are all “roads to the same place” – the Internet – which the chairman believes should remain open.
He has also proposed adding a rule that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications and another that mandates operators to remain “transparent” about their network management practices.
The entire proposal is to be presented to the FCC next month during a regularly scheduled notice of proposed rule making (NPRM).
There’s a fine line between the issues of network management, traffic discrimination and regulatory oversight.
We tend to bristle at the word “discrimination,” our knee-jerk reaction being that it must be something bad. On the other hand, different applications have diverse resource requirements pertaining to bandwidth, delay, packet loss and jitter. So some traffic flows must be treated differently from others – the very definition of “discrimination” – in order to keep each flow performing up to snuff.
To appropriately discriminate between application traffic, network operators use deep packet inspection (DPI)-based traffic management systems that allow them to apply certain treatments and policies to specific traffic flows. One such treatment might be to block certain traffic, for example. Another might be to give it consistent low priority.
This is where the rub comes. These policies might be completely legitimate. But once you deploy DPI-based traffic management – a necessity for converged networks carrying both latency-sensitive and best-effort traffic – that same tool can be applied to unfair discrimination against competitors’ traffic. What Chairman Genachowski advocates is for that particular type of discrimination to be illegal.
I would tend to agree. But my question has long been – and remains – who’s in charge of checking up on everyone? In other words, which agency is charged with tracking the operators’ network management practices, however “transparent” they might be?
If we need to create a committee or agency to track how every operator treats packets all day long, this could become a laborious and cost-prohibitive endeavor. It will be enlightening to hear any specifics about how the FCC intends to enforce neutrality practices next month.
