Hey Verizon, we’re not as stupid as you think we are

You may have noticed that I’ve been writing regularly on Net neutrality and the impending balkanization of the Internet. I had originally intended to depart from that topic this week, but then I noticed the comments made by Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam last week (read the full transcript).

He offers many highly concerning statements, but the one that leaps out first is that McAdam apparently believes that proponents of a neutral Internet do not know how ISPs manage their networks.

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“The carriers make money by transporting a lot of data,” McAdam said. “And spending a lot of time manipulating this, that accusation is by people that don’t really know how you manage a network like this. You don’t want to get into that sort of gameplaying.”

Actually, I think the opposite is true — a large number of proponents of a neutral Internet are Internet architects and network engineers themselves. These are people like myself, who have built multiple ISPs and large enterprise networks, and who know exactly how these networks are managed. We know exactly what can be done, and how it can be done, and we know that “gameplaying” is exactly what the big ISPs are after. They are looking to get paid on both ends of the data delivery chain, and they will play all the games they can to ensure that reality comes to pass.

McAdam then moves to a rather odious comparison of the Internet to health care:

You want to make sure that if somebody is going to have a heart attack, that gets to the head of the line, ahead of a grade schooler that is coming home to do their homework in the afternoon or watch TV. So I think that is coming to realization.

This is an obviously tortured overdramatization, comparing Internet access to someone’s impending death, yet somehow also involving a sweet, innocent schoolchild. I think what he’s trying to say here is that Verizon wants to give important traffic priority over other traffic. This is the very heart of the matter — that we restructure the Internet into tiers of speed, priority, and ultimately raw access.

On the face of it, this may not seem like a problem. After all, we do want someone who is having a heart attack to go to the head of the line. But there’s a very important difference here: What if the poor fellow having the heart attack hasn’t paid — or hasn’t paid enough to go to the head of the line? That is the revenue source that the big ISPs are looking for. That’s the extortion plan.

It’s absurd to think that any form of packet prioritization will save a life in the same way that emergency room triage works. That said, there are definitely ways that computer networks can be instrumental in saving lives, and the prioritization of data can play a large role in that. Take, for instance, surgeons operating remotely. Through the use of high-speed computer networks, a surgeon can operate on a patient who is many miles away. This is a perfect example of why QoS exists.

We certainly wouldn’t want someone playing World of Warcraft to cause high latency and disrupt the procedure. But that is not — and has never been — an issue: Telesurgery data passes through dedicated circuits; it does not commingle with Internet traffic. It would be unconscionable to do it any other way.

But this is what the ISPs want people to think — that they will be saving lives via such wholly altruistic endeavor.

McAdam went on to praise the Comcast-Netflix deal:

You saw the Netflix-Comcast deal this week which I think — or a couple weeks ago — which is smart because it positions them farther out into the network, so they are not congesting the core of the Internet. And there is some compensation going back and forth, so they recognize those that use a lot of bandwidth should contribute to that.

Comcast and Netflix weren’t congesting the core of the Internet. Rather, they were having congestion issues at several peering points with Cogent — not the same thing at all. Plain and simple, Comcast forced the Netflix deal through the leverage of its monopoly status. That’s not the way this should work, and it sets a dangerous precedent. I don’t necessarily fault Netflix for capitulating, as it was essentially forced to do so.

How should this work? In a competitive market, Comcast customers upset with Netflix performance would complain to Comcast. Comcast would then explore ways to keep its customers happy by expanding the bandwidth to support this changing workload. If Comcast did not make these changes, its customers would move to a provider that did not have issues with Netflix.

For Comcast, fixing the problem may indeed involve a direct connection to Netflix, as many other ISPs have already done through Netflix’s Open Connect program. This provides direct connections and local caching to reduce the impact of Netflix streams on peering connections. Those other ISPs participate without remuneration from Netflix because it reduces load on their network and keeps their customers happy.

That’s how things should have worked in this case. It’s how things have worked with other ISPs. However, because Comcast doesn’t have to worry much about losing customers, due to the dearth of broadband competition in most markets, it could sit by and let its customers complain, while Netflix twisted in the wind. Now Comcast is getting paid twice — by its customers and by Netflix — to deliver the same traffic. All it had to do was nothing.

The big ISPs won’t save any lives by prioritizing traffic and getting paid by both sides of a connection. They’ll just continue to do nothing, and let the Internet in the United States stagnate while they reap the financial rewards by being the gatekeepers of what should be a free and open network.

No matter which side of this argument you may be on — the side of higher regulation and common-carrier status, the side of fomenting legitimate competition in all markets, or a mixture of both — the merger of Comcast and Time Warner, and these comments by Verizon’s CEO, cannot be considered healthy for the Internet or for any entity besides these big ISPs.

This story, “Hey Verizon, we’re not as stupid as you think we are,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.