For users of Twitter, this will come as no surprise, but the service has massive capacity issues. The text message based social network (for lack of a better description) crashes more frequently than a drunk teenager with an eye patch. It has become almost comical that a significant volume of the chatter about Twitter relates to its failings.
Word out of Twitter yesterday was their more “popular” users were fuqing it up for everybody else. Anytime someone with 25,000 plus followers and 21,000 followees sends a message, it craps out their database. This has led to more than a few helpful suggestions for them to redesign their backend to better manage the load.
Ironically, this is the perfect illustration for the problem with Net Neutrality. Here you have a service with no management at all, and a very few large scale users are screwing it up for everybody else. They’re sucking up all the available capacity and the guy with a small handful of followers is unable to reach them.
An unmanaged service becomes a free for all where a small minority can consume the available capacity. A managed service creates a situation where the consumption of some users is restricted for the benefit of the wider audience. In this case, the Twitter community is clamoring for management of the backend to produce a better front-end experience.
It very clearly demonstrates the net neutrality problem – how do you balance a system to provide the best possible experience for the broadest possible audience? With Twitter users the demand is for better load management. With net neutrality proponents the demand is for no management (or worse, a government defined management plan).
I think it’s funny that many of the Twitter users are likely the same people calling for net neut, yet they don’t see the irony in their conflicting positions.
So let me see if I get this right. Twitter’s speed in growth was due in part to the ‘unmanaged’ nature of our current internet.
And the cure for Twitter’s challenges, the ones created by its popularity, the popularity created in part from the unmanaged nature of the internet, is to…’manage’ the internet.
Aha.
So if this year’s Indy 500 car has a wreck in the future…it’s because it’s driven too fast. And we’ll have to slow them down a bit…Yeah, makes sense.
Other than the snark, I like your blog, your tweets and you have a point. But the solution isn’t to kill the goose that laid this golden egg for us all.
And no, I can’t use any more metaphors in this comment.
That’s a false analogy. Twitter’s problem’s (as described by them, not me) have to do with certain heavy consumption users who are bringing the system to a crawl for the rest of its users. I didn’t offer that explanation. They did.
Similarly, heavy consumption users are causing problems on bandwidth constrained networks run by ISPs. With Twitter people generally suggest the addition of what additional capacity they can provide combined with the steps they’re taking to manage the impact of heavy users.
That same approach taken by ISPs is met with derision.
Ummm…no. Net neutrality is not now and has never been about bandwidth limitations on ISP clients. It’s about equal access to content from different providers. Let’s say I make a bunch of online videos (which I do). Now let’s say that Brighthouse, the local cable TV monopoly and cable Internet supplier, decides to start throttling downloads from Blip.tv or Vimeo.com, where I host most of my videos, but does not throttle videos coming from Viacom-owned websites.
Whether Viacom gets preferential treatment because it is a major “content partner” in Brighthouse-land or because Viacom pays Brighthouse a fee for better video delivery doesn’t matter. Either way, small-time video producers get hurt while Viacom does not.
When ISPs want to duck responsibility for porn or other distasteful content that might flow through their wires or fiber, they loudly proclaim their status as common carriers and yell about how that status protects them from liability for noxious material they just happen to deliver, the same way a voice phone carrier can’t be held responsible for a conversation during which a murder plot is hatched.
But now, at the same time, your friendly local ISP wants to be able to deliver different kinds of content to you at different speeds, based either on the ISP’s business connections with certain content providers or on payments to them by selected content providers for a higher level of service than others get.
At the same time, on the other end, we ISP *customers* are paying for access to the content we choose, whether it’s the latest Fox News update, NYTimes online, KungFuQuip.com or even my own Roblimo.com.
The only real whining about throttling at the consumer end of the pipe has been over some ISPs (notably Comcast) advertising unlimited bandwidth and neither delivering on that promise nor telling their customers how much bandwidth they are really allowed to use before they are “capped” or “throttled.”
If ISPs clearly told customers, “You get blah-blah GB per month, and you pay $X per GB over that” or honestly offered different plans for different usage levels at different prices, no one could or would complain about client-end bandwidth caps. (Indeed, this kind of tiered pricing scheme was the norm back in dialup days.)
But please do not confuse false advertising by ISPs with Net Neutrality. They are two separate issues.
Actually, the leading proponents of net neutality (namely Free Press and the Save the Internet gang) have changed the definition of net neutrality freely to use whatever argument they can to make a point. That specifically includes throttling bandwidth.
From Save the Internet’s website:
From Free Press’ site:
Regulating speed and prioritizing traffic is necessary to manage a network. When you talk about preventing “providers from speeding up or slowing down web content”, you’re talking about managing networks.
With regard to your video, have you ever wondered why just a few short years ago, a thumbnail video caused massive buffering problems yet today you can stream almost full screen video with very little buffering? It’s only partly because of increased bandwidth but largely due to prioritization by ISPs of video traffic.
ISPs figured out that their customers would have a better experience if that streaming video didn’t stutter every few seconds, and they prioritized video. Same with VOIP traffic.
Now you’ve got a whole lot of people clamoring for that management to end and for every bit to be treated alike.
As for your argument that “no one could or would complain about client-end bandwidth caps”, well, you got that wrong too. When Time Warner announced it was going to try exactly what you proposed, here was the reaction from none lass than Mashable:
You may see net neutrality as about nothing more than equal access, but those fighting this battle the hardest are fighting it about any ISP having any control over the networks they’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars building.
Before you accuse anyone of false advertising, and before you attack my arguments, you should spend a few minutes educating yourself.
It’s your site, so you have a right to insult me if I put a comment on it that disagrees with something you say. I’ve been working on Slashdot for just sort of 10 years, so I’m used to being told I know nothing about anything.
Please note that I was using the original EFF + “bills in Congress” definition of Net Neutrality, not whatever new restrictions a few fringies want to tack on to the concept.
As far as video delivery — and please excuse my ignorance here, because I’ve only been studying and reporting on this area for about 15 years — I thought the main reason Internet video delivery has gotten better/faster/cheaper was the development of better codecs and wrappers for them. A 1280X720 (hi-def) video encoded as Flash with H.264 has a smaller file size than an old-fashioned 320X240 streaming Real video of the same length encoded in VP3.
Video codec advances in the last five years have been amazing. Sorenson… then Sorenson 3 and VP6… now Xvid and H.264, not necessarily in a Flash wrapper, are giving us near-DVD quality in comparatively small files that can be delivered in near-realtime over DSL lines. I gape in wonder at the improvements I’ve seen since I produced my first (Real) online video back in 1994. I understand the technology behind it, but it is still a wonder, just as it is a marvel that I now personally own more computer power than the entire U.S. government did when I graduated from high school in 1970.
Another major change in video delivery is that hardly anyone really “streams” video any more. By (technical) definition a “stream” requires a nearly-constant, direct 1:1 connection between the server and the client.
Flash, in contrast, uses progressive download as its primary delivery mechanism. That is, the packets hit your computer (the client) just like any other set of packets, not necessarily in serial order, and are re-assembled by your Flash or flv player into a coherent, watchable video.
As far as false advertising: When a company advertises an “unlimited” service, then later says they didn’t really mean unlimited but X Gigabytes, I’d call that false advertising, although I accept the fact that you may think this is a legitimate business practice — and yes, there are people out there who expect to get unlimited bandwidth without actually paying for it, too, who are just as silly as ISPs that cap bandwidth — without saying what that cap *is* — while claiming they are providing unlimited service.
People like me, who understand that there is no free lunch, but also want to get honest value for our money, seem to be getting drowned out by the loudest people on both ends of this controversy.
I will now go spend a few minutes educating myself, per your wise advice.
My intent was not to be insulting, so I apologize if you took it that way. Given your obvious long standing interest in the issue, I retract my comment that you may be arguing from a position of little knowledge. I argue these issues with people quite frequently and most do. I should not assume anyone is in that crowd until they prove it.
To directly address your points, I would hardly count Free Press as a “fringie”. I suspect Gigi Sohn and Ben Scott would quibble with the distinction as well. They have been among the loudest and most strident advocates for net neutrality.
As for the “bills in Congress” definition, I’d ask that you go back to the link I provided to LightReading’s article on Ron Wyden’s bill. It specifically adopts the “treat all bits alike” argument and suggests it be enshrined in law. This is, very specifically, a bill in Congress – not the fancy of a fringie.
As I argued, net neutrality as a term has been co-opted and bastardized. Assemble a panel of 12 active proponents and ask them for their definition. You’ll likely get 14 or 16 different takes on it – treat all bits equally, no fast lane for hire, no blocking traffic, no slowing traffic… The list goes on.
Just this morning I received yet another article that ran in both an online and a print outlet that repeats the same “treat all bits alike” mantra and argues that net neutrality has always been the law of the land. The latter claim made despite the fact that cable internet never had to live under common carrier. At the time it was revoked, cable was the lionshare of broadband connections in the US – a number that began to equalize only after the telcos were freed of that burden.
But this is exactly the problem with trying to legislate a generic concept to apply to a wide variety of network management principle and practices, or to a wide array of business models.
One size fits all rarely works.
Some have suggested that this is a problem not of Internet regulation, but one of extending offline business regulations regarding anti-competitive practices to cover the online world. If the FTC, which already has jurisdiction over anti-competitive acts were given specific jurisdiction over the same on the Internet, that may better address the problem.
Will that solution ever fly in DC when battling kingdoms at the FCC and FTC will each try to protect their turf? What about the Chairmen of the Judiciary or Commerce/Energy & Commerce committees battling for their committees to have domain over these new regulations?
Can a government solution be the answer when government has proven itself unable to handle even basic problems the people have?
I don’t disagree with your concern’s about Internet content, I just have concerns that people are putting their faith in people and institutions that have more interest in acting for acting’s sake so they can get on TV back home. They have not shown a great tendency to get things right, so why give them another opportunity to get it wrong?
With regard to video, I’m not familiar enough with specific codecs to address that. I am, however, aware of the network management practices at ISPs. They have spent great energy to prioritize video and voice content to ensure consistent quality of service.
Every day packets are prioritized so consumers get a good connection. I assure you that there are many people who have no knowledge of technology who would take us to a lowest common denominator for speed and quality just because it sounds “fair”.