There’s trouble in broadband paradise. It’s not lack of competition; it’s not cost of deployment. It’s not even the usual regulatory stuff, the endless bickering between RBOCs and interexchange carriers that we’re all frankly sick of hearing. It’s us.
When Napster spawned the free-music movement, it gave the world a tempting model: You get what you want. Most people up to that point would have said that copying music for distribution to others was a copyright violation, but with Napster you weren’t really copying the music, you were just sharing it . . . right?
Napster has had its own largely legal challenges since then, but sharing is still alive in the form of peering. With Napster, there was a central place where people downloaded and stored material they wanted to share. With peering, what they want to share is in their own computers. People’s systems discover one another, and so far this form of personal exchange of media has managed to weather most legal challenges. Some call it a gift-based, as opposed to exchange-based, economy.
Cable companies have found that peering is killing some cable broadband spans. Hundreds or thousands of customers are stalled in their e-mail and Web surfing because peering users saturate the relatively low-speed uplink into the network. The problem in some areas is so acute that the cable guys have started monitoring network traffic patterns and shutting off so-called abusive use. Vendors have taken an interest in the traffic-monitoring business, and Cisco’s P-Cube acquisition likely is directed primarily at this application. But how much money will be diverted from improving cable broadband overall if cable companies have to funnel investment into protecting users from one another?
Peering also is at the heart of the angst content owners share regarding digital rights. If someone who subscribes to a hot feature film shares it with anyone who can peer with him, sales of the film might fall sharply. This could be a disaster because video content sales is supposed to be the killer application for high-speed broadband service. Pull video out of the mix and the “network of the future” could be so revenue-starved it becomes the equivalent of tin cans and string.
But do we want a gift-based economy? There’s no real answer to that question, because we’re not trying to answer it. The FCC, in a recent provisional view on whether call monitoring applies to VoIP, justified its “yes” decision by some very convoluted telephone-service-based logic. Why justify new-age regulatory policy on a vision of the public network that literally goes back to the early 1900s? Because we don’t have a better one – nothing since then has recognized broadband, digital media, digital rights management, peering or anything else.
There’s a widespread view that keeping the Internet free of regulation is going to advance it faster. It’s a nice vision, but there are issues with it, such as peering and digital content. We all live in one world, digitally or otherwise, and our actions create our environment. There is no such thing as unregulated public networking – CAN-SPAM, telemarketing legislation and stalking laws have shown that. There is such a thing as public networking regulated by default, and that’s the choice we’ve really made when we dodge the political furor of Internet regulation.
What are the boundaries of fair use with content? Can we all publish a singer’s voice under our own label because we’ve snuck a recording out of a concert? What are the limits of reasonable traffic on a residential broadband connection? Eventually, at great cost to us all, the marketplace probably will settle on something. That’s a lousy, inefficient way to address issues that literally might hold the keys to networking’s future.
Today’s market lessons are clear. Try as we might, we won’t get an unregulated Internet – we’ll either have one that’s regulated in an enlightened way, balancing everyone’s rights to media, bandwidth and profit, or one that’s regulated by accident based on antiquated laws. Which choice do you think is best?
