Yesterday an article showed up in the Washington Post and was heavily commented on in Slashdot and the blogosphere about statements from a BellSouth executive indicating that certain web site owners may be able to pay for premium delivery of traffic from their site to end users.
William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.
Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth’s offering.
But Smith was quick to say that Internet service providers should not be able to block or discriminate against Web content or services by degrading their performance.
My promise to come up with some definition of what network neutrality means has not come to fruition, but I can tell you that this is definitely not an example of net neutrality. Despite Mr. Smiths comments to the contrary, offering a premium traffic delivery service is a de facto degrade the service of those not paying a premium. I can only assume that this premium traffic service is going to include some sort of congestion-management mechanism which will mark traffic from sites that do not pay for premium content as being discard-eligible. In other words, in Mr. Smiths example, a customer requesting a page from the Yahoo domain sharing a congested pipe with a customer accessing a page from a Google domain (say his next-door neighbor) will receive his page while the Google user will not.
Aside from my net-head influenced concerns about dumb networks treating all traffic equally, this moves the RBOC-owned ISPs further and further away from their common carrier commitments. That legal issue has the potential to cause the RBOCs some problems should a more activist FCC come into being.
I would be surprised, actually, if the market would support this, either. If BellSouth should move in this direction, you can bet every other RBOC, cable company and any ISP with any market share to throw around is going to demand similar payments. So the Yahoos, eBays and Googles of the world will be extorted (not an exaggeration in this instance) to pay for the premium delivery of their content. Fail to do so, and– uh-oh– all of a sudden all the traffic you offer up is discard eligible and may or may not make it to its destination.
It is very disturbing that Mr. Smith, CTO from BellSouth and AT&T (formerly SBC) CEO Ed Whitacre have made comments indicating plans to require content and application providers to pay for the carriage of their traffic above and beyond the payments they are already making for the bandwidth they purchase. This is looking more and more like a vertical power play on the part of the RBOCs to control not only the pipe but all traffic that moves across it. The timing of these statements so close to one another and the close relationship of AT&T to BellSouth (both share ownership of Cingular) make it so that I cant help but make one wonder if these comments arent coordinated. I guess well all wait to hear what Verizon or any of the major cable companies have to say on this topic.
