Steve Hochschild, Product Manager at NetQoS:

Why isn't this comparable to express mail vs. priority mail from the post office? As we say in racing, "speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?" Vendors pay for shelf space at the HEB, do we want the government to ban the equivalent payment for placement on the Internet?

And aren't the ISPs already doing bandwidth shaping? I know my upload speed is less than my download speed - which affects me as I have torrents running 24/7 to add more (legal bootleg) concerts to my Grateful Dead collection.

For what it's worth, Amazon, Google, eBay, and Yahoo are all quite similar in their use of bandwidth - very little streaming, and (other than YouTube/Google Video), nearly all traffic from these guys is a browser page at a time, isn't it? They hardly represent a cross section of internet companies. What do ESPN and CBS Sports and Apple and other big stream vendors think about this issue?

I believe this is about bandwidth and application QoS, and the old school, low bandwidth, incumbent huge corporate vendors such as eBay, Yahoo, Google, and Amazon are seeking governmental regulation to forestall the new trends towards interesting, exciting new streamed content from new entrants into the marketplace.

The US Postal Service is a monopoly, mandated by law, and the second largest employer in this country besides Wal-Mart. Mail delivery is artificially limited to a single supplier, and that creates no drive for efficiency based on a fear of competition.

On the other hand, package delivery is quite competitive, and we are offered a wide choice in costs and services - what is wrong with that? Why can't we have the same choice in ISP pricing? One person just wants infrequent, small, bursty service to get their email and browse, where another wants a whole movie streamed to them - you think they should each pay Time Warner the same? I don't understand that…

Paying for placement is now a basic merchandising fundamental. It wasn't always. Forgive an old man's war story:

Some friends and I once were hired by a beverage company to write an app that drew a customized picture on a plotter of the back side of the cooler in each convenience store that each route driver serviced. In this picture, we drew little identifiable six-packs on the shelves, and the company's products were front and center. Each route driver was given a stack of these customized 'cooler maps' and thumbtacks. They were told to post them inside their customers' coolers, where the convenience store cashier would then presumably follow the diagram and restock the customer's brand on the center shelves.

There are studies that show that 80% of men aged 21 to 25 open the cooler door with their right hand and grab the first six-pack that falls under their left hand, regardless of brand.

This was a phenomenal success, and sales boomed. Nowadays, shelving fees are an important revenue source for retailers.

Net Neutrality proponents are worried about businesses using QoS policies on the public internet to provide an anti-competitive advantage. My response is that I am far more worried about the consequence of government regulation of our industry than I am of the possibility of ISP shenanigans. If Time Warner takes away something I care about, I'll sign up with AT&T.

If I cared about movies, and AT&T positioned themselves as the fastest movie providers, I would like to pay them more, unless the government prevented AT&T and I from making that deal. I do not think we need any laws to prevent ISPs with ulterior motives to slow down the bandwidth of their competitors. I don't think this is a problem now and I don't think it ever will be one.

My understanding of the issue is that today, ISPs treat every bit equally, (theoretically anyway - I still try to cloak my Grateful Dead torrents,) and that what they are proposing to do is to offer better service to vendors who are willing to pay for it.

And I am in favor of that, because it will provide a better user experience, more varied content, and new ways to make money.

Manish Chacko, Systems Engineering Manager at NetQoS:

This [the rejection of the Net Neutrality bill] was by no means a surprise. The backers of Net Neutrality, - Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo - may be big companies, but the telecom guys that opposed it were much bigger.

In any case, leaving technical matters to politicians will always be a win-lose situation. Sadly, the general public is usually the loser, and the richer companies the winners.

This is not about bandwidth or like Steve points out above, ESPN and CBS would be the ones backing an end to net neutrality. I suspect that different rates for different websites would be based (partially) on total volume of data shipped back and forth. And as you know, Amazon, Google, eBay and yahoo do quite a bit of that.

The end of Net Neutrality will force the consumer to indirectly pay more for the services offered by companies that choose to use services that pay extra for better priority communication.

Brian Boyko, New Media Communications Specialist at NetQoS:

The end of Net Neutrality gives an ISP carte blanche to throttle down Internet speeds for sites and users. Essentially, it would result in a big QoS policy for the public Internet. We all know what happens to low priority packets on private networks - they get throttled back.

The Internet has been very innovative partially because it has been a very level playing field - this is why entrepreneurs are constantly attracted to it. You may not have the marketing budget of a Google or a Microsoft, but you can still guarantee that your site will show up in any home that searches for it and knows your URL.

The end of Net Neutrality will change all that. Instead of letting a technically and user-experience-wise superior product (like Google) compete with an established, money-rich company (like Yahoo,) the "pure capitalism" model of the Web will suddenly begin to look more like the oligarchies and monopolies that are more established in other areas of business.

That said, I have absolutely no problem with an "Internet 3" that business could use for high-bandwidth B2B transactions such as videoconferencing, or an "Internet 4" for high speed gaming - and if AT&T or Time Warner want to start one, more power to them. But this really should be kept off the main public Internet lines.

In a private network, QoS policies are a very good thing because they allow a minimum quality of service to the end-user. Of course, that is because the company owns both the service on the network and employs all the end-users on it - in short, the company makes the decisions about QoS policies in order to better suit the company's goals. On the other hand, QoS policies on the public internet would be determined by the ISPs, not the service (which is something like Google) or the consumers. These ISPs have less interest in providing the best end-user experience for their customers - who are often vendor-locked or in a monopoly situation. Even in a metropolitan area like Austin, there are only three major broadband providers, and many of us can only get two - or even one - in their homes.

Net Neutrality allows end-users and content providers to run the applications of their choice - choice which will be taken away (or, at least, charged a premium for) if ISPs have their way.

This is not about bandwidth because end users already pay more for increased bandwidth to ISPs, and services already pay more for increased bandwidth.

What ISPs want by ending Net Neutrality is to A) "Triple-dip" into the revenue stream by charging for prioritized packets. B) Throttle competitive services. For example, if Time Warner, who relies quite a bit on television advertising revenue, movies, and music, could throttle bandwidth to YouTube, and P2P applications it most likely would - not because of copyright concerns, but because these represent competition. (To put it another way, Time Warner probably doesn't care that you're watching CNN on the 'net. Time Warner probably worries that you're watching Rocketboom and finding it a better news source than CNN.) AT&T would almost certainly like to throttle Vonage. AOL (also part of Time Warner) might block off any IM protocol that wasn't AOL Instant Messenger.

Essentially, the end of Net Neutrality would give ISPs the ability to discriminate against content based on its source. The Net has been a democratization of ideas because of Net Neutrality - from a business perspective; it has fostered innovation by fostering competition.

Jim McQuaid, Senior Product Manager at NetQoS:

As I understand it the issue isn't QoS primarily. It's about making content providers pay more. I pay to have something called "Internet access" and I expect to be able to do more or less anything one can do on the internet, access any service or site, within the limits of the bandwidth I have paid for. I don't pay extra to use Google. Net Neutrality has to do primarily with the content provider side. I'm a busy web site and I paid for a T3 and necessary services to get internet access for my business. Now the service provider wants me to pay extra on top of that bandwidth charge... for what? For the right to NOT be the guy put at the bottom of the QoS list.

The guilty secret of QoS is this: somebody wins and somebody waits. ISPs want to change the level playing field, "best effort" aspect of basic IP (internet protocol) to something that allows them to charge more for transporting the bits they already are transporting. It's basically charging both ends, not just the sender or receiver for the same thing. Ultimately, it's imposing a policy on top of the basic function of IP. And, as in politics, when policies are imposed there are winners and losers.

Chris Selvaggi, Senior Software Engineer at NetQoS:

Personally, I'm not ready to accept the seemingly dire predictions being made (by either side). Sure, there could be a change in internet performance but it would help to see it quantified. Are we talking 85 msec latency instead of 75 msec? Or 150 msec instead of 75? Are we talking 0.25% loss instead of 0.05% loss? For which applications: HTTP, SMTP/POP3, VoIP, VPN? Some dumb questions... how would an ISP impose a non-network neutrality scheme? It sounds like it's not by using QoS bits in the IP header but rather by somehow looking at the source/destination IP addresses? For example, if Address X is on the good list, put packet in front of queue; otherwise put at back of queue. Also, where would the new scheme be imposed? There are many service and network providers between me and Amazon, Google, etc. Is the scheme being imposed at my local Time Warner franchise? Or at or more of the network providers in the core - or both? How are the Akamai's of the world impacted by this? Don't they exist to spread content around the world to improve performance? Seems like it's a win-win for them. On the other hand, what does it mean for NetQoS? Wouldn't SuperAgent show exactly what happens when a non-neutral packet routing scheme was imposed? Presumably you'd see your network response time increase, or retransmissions time increase because of an increased packet loss. You'd also see which applications were really impacted - like streaming apps and VoIP. If a "content provider" is really concerned about changes in the network then they'd better be monitoring their performance.

Lance Brown, Network Consultant, NetQoS:

Look at how the Internet was formed. You have companies that are each connecting their network to others. The Internet for all intents and purposes is just an addressing scheme; or as Joel [Trammell, CEO of NetQoS] would say, autonomous systems. AT&T has their network which they make available for its clients so that they can connect to others. Others can either be on the AT&T network or on another ISP. With that said, we can move on to why this is such a hot topic.

Ed Whitacre (CEO of AT&T) has made some statements that were directed to Google, YouTube (before Google purchased them), Vonage, Skype and other high profile and high usage sites/providers. Verizon and Comcast are vocal too, but Ed is the most outspoken. So outspoken on the topic, he had to pay for it with the BellSouth merger and put "Net Neutrality" in the backseat for a little bit. It was either no merger or eat his words… for now.

One ISP already uses a product to throttle Vonage traffic. Packeteer and Blue Coat make appliances that can do that. Some ISP's have even used Blue Coat and Finjan proxy products to completely block traffic to VoIP providers. While the Packeteer product is marketed to provide QoS, it can be used to block traffic as well.

Whether or not ISPs would throttle competing traffic, they certainly have a motive to do so even within the limited VoIP sphere. Comcast and Time Warner both offer a VoIP service. Time Warner wants $39.95 (unlimited) per month for their VoIP offering. Vonage starts at $14.99 and costs $24.99 for unlimited calling; that is almost $15 cheaper. AT&T has their VoIP offering as well, $19.99 and $24.99 for the unlimited. Comcast charges $42.95 for their unlimited plan. As you can see, they (Comcast and Time Warner) are not price competitive at all to Vonage (or even AT&T.)

Today you have ISP's degrading and blocking such content. It's not that it might happen, it does.

Back to Ed Whitacre; he has made numerous statements about a few companies using large amounts of bandwidth on his network. He wants these companies to pay for the bandwidth they use to offset the cost associated with ever expanding their network. Google was mentioned for a few reasons.

The first being that Google is not a customer of AT&T (which I'm sure AT&T would like to change.) If Google bought multiple OC-12 or OC-48 circuits from AT&T, would Ed have a problem if they used those pipes to fullest extent? The answer is no. With Google not being a customer of AT&T, how would AT&T go about charging them? There is no agreement. Could AT&T degrade access to Google? Sure, but at what cost? AT&T is partnered with Yahoo through AT&T Yahoo DSL service. It could be viewed as AT&T abusing their power to become/maintain a monopoly.

Secondly, is Google using large amounts of bandwidth across the AT&T network - or are the customers/users of AT&T requesting large amounts of data from Google? The answer is quite obvious; users are requesting all that data. So if AT&T can't afford to expand their network at the pace required, then they need to charge their customers more for their use. If they do that, customers will leave, so the easier way is to get Google to pay in some way. If Google doesn't pay, what happens? Some Google users will leave and some advertisers will as well.

The bigger issue is what happens if Google or any company has to pay to ride the network of an ISP other than the one they currently pay for. How do they know the bill is accurate? What keeps an ISP from inflating the amount of traffic they said they delivered? What about spare machines that do nothing more than access sites on other networks but have low priority so they don't interfere with real user traffic? How does a company budget for this? If you have a full DS-3, you know what you pay each month. If AT&T, Level 3, Sprint, Verizon, etc. can all send you a bill, how do you determine what to budget for? Having circuits to various ISP's is not the answer. It will also put some ISP's out of business - some companies will want to have a circuit to the ISP most of the customers will be on just to minimize the unknown expenditures.

You have Verizon with their FiOS and taking fiber to the house. AT&T (including Bellsouth) are doing fiber to the neighborhood. AT&T and Verizon are getting into the TV market as the revenue in local and long distance is falling. If they want to survive they need to adapt. Leveraging their infrastructure to provide new services is what they plan on doing. If they can sell you phone (mobile and landline), TV programming and Internet and they own it all, they can recoup that money and keep the competition away. Companies like Vonage wouldn't be able to get their foot in the door.

If you look at DSL offerings, you get a price break if you have landline service. If you don't want it, you pay a few bucks less per month than what the landline and DSL service combined would run. What is the purpose of this - except to keep Vonage and Skype away? Right now you have AT&T partnered with Dish and Verizon partnered with DirecTV. What do you think will happen when they start offering TV service in areas where customers have signed up for satellite service through them? They will be convinced to move over.

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