Steve, the key piece you're missing here is that the major broadband
providers are both
- near-monopolies in their access areas
- content providers
Not a situation where market forces can work all that well.
Miles Fidelman
Naslund, Steve wrote:
Net Neutrality is really something that has me worried. I know there have to be some
ground rules, but I believe that government regulation of internet interconnection and
peering is a sure way to stagnate things. I have been in the business a long time and
remember how peering kind of evolved based on mutual benefit or some concept of
"doing the right thing". For example, at InterAccess Chicago, our peer policy
in the late 90s was pretty much the following.
1. Non-profits or educational institutions could private peer with us as long
as they bore the cost of the circuit. (this kind of connection was more
beneficial to them than us).
2. Comparable sized carriers got to peer with us, with each of us picking up
our portions of equipment and circuit cost since it was mutually beneficial.
3. We would peer with anyone at any NAP we had a mutual appearance in.
4. Larger network usual would not peer with smaller networks without some sort
of compensation.
Seemed to work pretty fair at the time and we managed the backbone by watching
customer traffic. If things got congested, you paid for or peered with whoever
you needed to in order to get acceptable performance for our customers. The
big guys did get to call the shots and made you pay but then again they
provided the largest fastest connections so I guess it was fair enough. It may
have been the wild west in some ways but at that time everyone needed to get
along because if your peering policies were unfair you would get universally
shunned and then you would have real problems. I hate that the network
operators now feel the need to ask the government to step in. When you ask for
that don't be surprised that the government creates a cumbersome mess and
disadvantages you in another way. The problem is that the gov does not react
at internet speed.
I remember the first unbundling agreements and trust me when I say that ourselves and the
ILEC both found the gov't rules to be nearly unworkable. We eventually started with the
telecom act framework that forced them to the table where they finally sat down with us
and said "Ok, Ok, what do you really need here" and we banged out a pretty good
interconnection agreement that was workable for both of us. Well, about as workable as
it gets with an ILEC.
I think what will really drive everything is the market forces. You either
provide what your end user wants or you go out of business. The customer could
care less who pays for what pieces or what is fair because in the end, their
service provider is the only one they will punish. If Netflix becomes
universally hard to connect to, then they will lose the customers. The
customer does not really care why your connectivity sucks, they just know that
it does and that if someone better comes along, they are gone.
Maybe something better would be some sort of industry group that you could
become a member of and that group could resolve peering disputes through some
kind of arbitration process. The benefit of being a member could be something
like the opportunity to peer with any other member on demand with some sort of
cost splitting arrangement. They would need something like a group wide
interconnection agreement. The responsibility would then be the industry and
not some appointed FCC working group that spends all of their time writing
convoluted gibberish. If the group was big enough and powerful enough, the
incentive to get on board would be huge.
Steven Naslund
Chicago IL
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
