The Internet has no backbone. Let’s get that out of the way right now. If you want to think about it in terms of anatomy, you’re better off thinking about squids or octopi, although those aren’t very good either since there is a central point of “intelligence” in both of those cases. You may be wondering why I’m starting off with such a strong statement, especially without clearly coming up with an apt analogy to replace the backbone one. Let me back up.
I was invited to discuss the concept of Net Neutrality and the recent ruling by a court striking it down. The invitation came from the local television station WCAX by way of Champlain College. You can watch the brief interview at this link. Net Neutrality is the idea that all traffic that flows across the Internet should be treated equally. What this means is that providers can’t discriminate between one type of application traffic and another. In reality, the Internet Protocol (IP) is designed to do just this and providers have been using one form of it or another for years. They prioritize or may prioritize one type of traffic over another, depending on a variety of factors including customers paying them. Some applications like Skype or Vonage or even Netflix and Amazon Streaming are very time sensitive. It may be helpful to have traffic from those applications get a higher priority over, say, search requests to Google.
What happened, though, and has been happening is that providers like Comcast have been blocking peer to peer file sharing services like BitTorrents. Before that, it was the file sharing networks behind Limewire and Kazaa. As I said, this has been going on for years. In 2010, our friends at the Federal Candy Company (FCC) decided to actually pass a regulation requiring that providers don’t prefer any application traffic over another. Later, they decided to go after Comcast for blocking file sharing traffic. File sharing traffic has a couple of concerns that are attached to it. The first is the bandwidth that it uses as people are not only downloading but also uploading. The second is that in many cases, the files being shared violate copyright meaning the action is simply illegal. Comcast is less concerned with the legality of the action than they are with the fact that customers are passing a lot of traffic around.
This is where we circle back to the initial statement that the Internet has no backbone. The Internet is really a very large collection of networks that are connected together. How are they connected together? In some cases, smaller networks pay larger networks to connect with them. This is what we call transit where the smaller company pays the bigger company to carry traffic to other networks for them. If two network providers are roughly the same size, it makes sense for those two providers to just throw a network cable over a wall where they are both located and pass traffic back and forth without any payment involved. This assumes that the two providers are sending more or less the same amount of traffic to one another meaning that there is a benefit to both providers. In some cases, networks that have a lot of content providers like ESPN, Disney, CNN, Facebook or Twitter may find it helpful to connect directly to networks where there are a lot of eyeballs like Comcast or Charter. The provider that has content customers can tell those customers they can get to the eyeballs quickly by connecting directly with the eyeball networks. They get more customers that way.
We can take a look at something called a traceroute, that shows us the path through the Internet from one location to another. If we look closely at the output from the traceroute, we can see different networks that we pass through. In some cases, you may pass through multiple networks on your way from one to another. In that cases, the middle networks are being used as transit to get from one network to another. In the traceroute output below, we go through Comcast where we started from my laptop and then through Global Crossing (glbx), Hurricane Electric (he) and then to Teljet before getting to our target, which is the mail server at Champlain College.
3 te-5-4-ur01.williston.vt.boston.comcast.net (68.87.158.113) 95.746 ms 27.177 ms 24.429 ms
4 be-79-ar01.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net (68.85.162.45) 25.583 ms 21.388 ms 25.342 ms
5 he-2-8-0-0-cr01.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.93.185) 30.190 ms 100.740 ms 69.874 ms
6 * * 23.30.206.166 (23.30.206.166) 52.093 ms
7 po2-10g.ar8.nyc1.gblx.net (67.16.137.98) 50.148 ms 43.071 ms
te4-3-10g.ar8.nyc1.gblx.net (67.16.143.26) 57.416 ms
8 hurricane-electric-llc-new-york.tengigabitethernet1-3.ar5.nyc1.gblx.net (64.209.92.98) 70.405 ms 78.584 ms 57.481 ms
9 10ge3-1.core1.nyc6.he.net (184.105.222.82) 67.895 ms 57.869 ms 61.966 ms
10 teljet-longhaul-llc.10gigabitethernet1-3.core1.nyc6.he.net (216.66.30.118) 142.279 ms 170.087 ms 494.677 ms
11 v12.te-1-1.core1.burlvt.teljet.net (64.25.208.186) 55.829 ms 224.185 ms 64.438 ms
12 ppp-64-25-209-165.teljet.com (64.25.209.165) 74.102 ms 70.441 ms 80.518 ms
What does this have to do with Net Neutrality and networks like Comcast? If Comcast customers start to use a lot of traffic out of the Comcast network, it will start to look lopsided to the networks Comcast peers with. Once Comcast starts to send a lot of traffic out to other places in the world, they start being something other than a prized eyeball network. They start needing other network providers to pass traffic out to the rest of the world. They are no longer a peer, they are just another transit customer and that means they might need to start paying for their connections to other networks. It helps them keep their network costs down when they limit the amount of traffic you can send out. The same goes for providers like Verizon and Fairpoint who offer DSL. From a technical standpoint, there is no reason why you couldn’t have the same amount of bandwidth going out as going in, but it’s more beneficial for your provider if you are simply an eyeball. They can sell your eyeballs to other providers to get free connections to the rest of the world.
Another problem is that the Internet is changing. Services available today like Netflix, Amazon, Skype and even making use of Apple products require a lot of bandwidth. The world is moving to the cloud and the cloud requires that you have a lot of readily available bandwidth. In the early days of consumer-based service providers you had companies like AOL, CompuServe, NetZero and several others that offered Internet access to people. These companies were in the business of providing Internet access and in many cases that’s all they did. Now, the cable companies in the US have captured a huge share of the consumer market for Internet access. Services like YouTube, Netflix and many others use a lot of bandwidth. These services are in competition with the core business of your provider — providing televisual services to you. Charging you a lot of money for television and hardware and other similar services related to cable television is how these companies make a lot of money. Internet access doesn’t make them nearly as much. Once they start to lose customers of their cable services to Internet-based services like Netflix, YouTube and Hulu, they will need to make more money from their Internet services.
The same is true of a company like Verizon. Verizon makes money from offering phone services. When you start making use of services like Vonage, MagicJack and Skype, not to mention Google Hangouts and other similar services, you start to cut into the revenue stream the company makes from their telephone services. Again, you aren’t paying much for Internet access. Certainly not enough to offset the revenue they make from their telephone services.
We’re back to Net Neutrality. When these companies reach the breaking point where they are making less money from their cash cow businesses, they will need a way to offset that. Without a rule to keep providers from discriminating over traffic, these providers can start blocking their competing services and then forcing you to pay higher rates to get those services back. Net Neutrality keeps the playing field level but it does even more than that. In many if not most cases, you don’t have much of a choice for an Internet provider because cable companies have monopolies in their service areas and they managed to squeeze their competition out. I say cable providers but in some cases it’s companies like Verizon and AT&T offering television services over fiber. Without any other place to go, customers will be forced to pay the higher rates to continue their streaming services. Either that or the companies like Netflix will be forced to pay for the eyeballs and they will pass that cost along to their customers.
Is Net Neutrality an important concept? Yes, it is. We run the risk of continuing to marginalize a service that is opening up the world for a lot of people. When people have to pay a lot of money for Internet service, they will drop to lower levels which will prevent companies from developing better services because they won’t have customers that can make use of them. This is the fear that led to Net Neutrality. Congress won’t regulate in part because the cable companies have lobbyists with deep pockets and a lot of influence. The courts say the FCC can’t because it oversteps its boundaries. That doesn’t leave anyone who may be able to protect customers and ensure the Internet is a place for innovation and progress.
