The un-national

For a quick introduction to the issue of network neutrality, the Economist is as good as any:

FOR a subject that arouses such strong passions, “network neutrality” is fiendishly difficult to pin down. Ask five geeks and you may well be given six definitions of it. The basic concept sounds simple enough: that the internet’s pipes should show no favours and blindly deliver packets of data from one place to another regardless of their origin, destination or contents. But the devil is in the detail. What happens for instance if some people want to pay for their data to go faster, or if others hog all the bandwidth? And it does not help that both political proponents and opponents of this undefinable thing claim they are fighting to defend free speech and innovation.

Indeed, recent articles from geeks such as Cory Doctorow and Robert Cringley confirm that views on network neutrality can differ.

Like most infrastructure, the internet was built with the ideal of improving communication; and the world wide web was a further improvement for human communication on top of that. Business rewards the labours of those who successfully use the internet in some innovative way. And usually the law and regulatory bodies help to protect consumers from novel abuses.

This is a similar setup to older networks like roads, power or postal services. Indeed if you buy a shiny new internet device on Amazon, you will be using these venerable services to get delivery of your new toy. Most regulatory arguments concerning the internet and how it is delivered look similar to the well worn issues of road pricing, electricity companies also selling gas, or first class and second class post. But your new toy will still get to you eventually, and probably work first time.

But there is a difference. The internet cannot naturally be restrained by national boundaries, yet is too personal to be governed by global rules. China tries to create a China only internet - a brave but ultimately losing battle. And while everyone benefits from American west coast innovation, very few are interested in American east coast regulation.

This leaves everyone with the feeling that the internet is somehow an untamable Wild West where normal boundaries and etiquette are not applicable. A gambling site can sit in a low governance country while taking money from punters in high governance nations. Inconvenient spam hits you, shot from the autonomous revolvers of shady cowboys. Material considered private, copyright or secret travels about unhindered.

The response to this is where stakeholder communities start to split. Some consider the internet as a new way of doing the same old things, and some consider it as a new thing that old ways need to take into account. Some of this difference in thinking was starkly revealed by the attempt to close down Wikileaks. The US administration tried to deal with the personalities, tried to cut off the flow of money, and tried to use political influence. For their part, Wikileaks supporters just altered the topology of the internet to go around the obstacles.

But threats to the neutrality of the internet are more likely to come from the telecoms companies that provide the service to the customer. With the attempt to "add value", the owners of the "dumb pipes" may well be encouraged to allow premium users to get a faster service.

There is no question that if I opt to pay for private medical insurance, I will inevitably weaken the existing public health provision because of my economic signalling that the market picks up and inevitably acknowledges. There is now a little more money available that could go to medical research ready to relieve my ills, and therefore a little less incentive to research those things that maybe of more interest to the rest of mankind. Hence I help create a two tier health service.

Most offerings on the web are direct to any user irrespective of nationality, and have very little or no research costs. This makes the internet even more sensitive to tiering. At least a business can choose to send its outgoing mail by first class, but a startup company can do nothing if its services are put on a "slower" lane by the customer's Internet Service Provider (ISP).

If an ISP simply adds a surcharge to your bill to discourage, or cash in on certain behaviour, neutrality is not really breached. The market will either support ISPs that try this, or not. Unlike throttling, the user cannot be bamboozled as they will see a higher bill after they were streaming video all night. New services will only suffer if they force users to suck up excessive bandwidth.

The idea that one provider will favour their own services by throttling others is something that has been seen plenty of times elsewhere and I am confident standards bodies will easily stamp that out.

I don't know whether the Post Office recognises that a letter addressed to London posted with a 1st class stamp in Germany should be delivered in the UK as first class. I don't know, but I'm sure someone does. There is a similar quality of service issue when one network hands its packets to another. And they work it out.

This leaves us with several ways to look at the internet when thinking about how problems will be solved: It is un-national (as are many of its builders); problems associated with it are usually similar to problems associated with other networks; but solutions to those problems may not look like old familiar solutions.

Dump

The inability of much of the media to engage with anything not involving personalities can be crippling. None of the essays on "Who is Obama?" have helped us understand the man's actions in office. His personal story as a "transformational" figure is largely - figurative. He plays basketball. He bombs Afghanistan. Yes He Can. And by asking the same question of the man most associated with Wikileaks, "Who is Julian Assange?" again the media stares at the epicenter and ignores the blast.

Wikileaks, the controversial "document dump", has angered a number of governments. In response to the recent release of diplomatic cables, the US government has tried to wrench the site off the web. In their turn, sections of the internet community have tried to circumvent this. As it happens, rerouting information is something that the internet was built for, and it is slightly depressing that these basic tenets have not been understood by the nation that largely created the system in the first place. As a secondary effect, the private enabling companies that seem to have acted as government proxies may also be widely criticized.

That the community has not sought to ask questions about the politics of Wikileaks itself or the nature of the current leaks isn't some type of mass naivety. The first responsibility is to reverse the vandalism (The #imwikileaks tag shows this effect). The veracity of the information - not that that has been doubted - is a lower order problem, and a lower priority. If a film has unappealing scenes in it, you don't destroy the cinemas showing it. And you certainly don't threaten to kill the distributors.

There are serious discussions to be had on whether public information can be stolen by the public. But too much is made of the quality of this type of secrecy. While adult society requires secrecy to function, government secrecy is purely tactical and not sacrosanct. We are not talking about your father not being your father. This is about the analysis of partial information in the absence of trust. You keep your cards close to your chest, you make your play and move on. It is quite clear that diplomatic opinion was "secret" to hundreds of people; at some point the wild eyed might refer to that as a conspiracy. In playing the spying game, lives are routinely put at risk. Wikileaks can take on the responsibility for considering the consequences - but they are the whistle, not the blower. They can never get this entirely right.

This "internet community" I mention are simply those likely to value the internet as a structure over the concerns about what it is carrying. Similarly, I don't believe that traffic accidents invalidate the need for roads and transportation. To prevent the internet from becoming subject to the whims of national government, people need to state openly whether they will protect the messenger from the reactions to an unpleasant message.