Tomorrow there will be a vote on some potential network neutrality regulations.  The agenda, according to the FCC, will include the following:

Open Internet Order: An Order adopting basic rules of the road to preserve the open Internet as a platform for innovation, investment, competition, and free expression. These rules would protect consumers' and innovators' right to know basic information about broadband service, right to send and receive lawful Internet traffic, and right to a level playing field, while providing broadband Internet access providers with the flexibility to reasonably manage their networks.

This is very vague, so I don't know exactly how detailed these discussions will be.  If you choose to keep reading this article, be prepared that this is ALL my opinion (not the company that I work for, etc.).  So, shield your eyes if you want!

Even in light of recent issues that might be viewed by some as a net neutrality problems and new services that will make it easier for ISPs to throttle, block, and charge for certain types of content, I haven't really seen a compelling reason for any government regulation.

Quite simply, if your ISP wants to block content, ports, protocols, or throttle certain types of traffic, I believe they have the right to do so.  It's a free country.  You, as the customer, also have every right to complain about it, and ultimately cancel your service.  If that's the only service in the area (which is starting to be hard to believe with all the wireless services available, these days), then move, or deal with it.

Now, to step back a little bit, other than blocking new inbound connections to TCP/80 and throttling peer-to-peer traffic, are there any ISPs out there today in the United States that are charging extra for so-called Facebook (I say so-called because with CDNs, anycasting, and GSLB on complex sites like Facebook, it may be difficult to classify all Facebook traffic vs. advertisments or other third party media) traffic?  Ok, how about blocking traffic to all search engines besides Yahoo! and Google?  Ok, well, how about intentionally slowing down YouTube traffic?  None?

Well, that last point can be a little more complex, since some might argue that (if you read the link above) Comcast is intentionally throttling content that transits their peering with Tata.  If Twitter traffic is engineered (think BGP attributes like AS_PATH prepending, MEDs, LOCAL_PREF etc.) to traverse the Comcast/Tata link, is it considered throttling?  Intentionally throttling?  Well, maybe, but it doesn't really discriminate on exact content.

I do think that ISPs need to present the customer with exactly how they're blocking and throttling content.  Maybe this requires some legislation, but honestly there may be cases where this isn't appropriate (for the customer or the ISP).  It's difficult to predict how laws will impact things down the road.

Also, I think residential ISPs should probably change their model and charge for raw bandwidth, and I think they should have started it from day one.  Your tier 1 and other large Internet backbones do it (Cogent, Level3, etc.), today, so why isn't that passed onto the residential subscribers?  If you only use 10MB (ok, maybe proxy ARPs themselves amount to more than that, but anyway..) of traffic per month, why should you have to pay the same as the power user across the block who chews up 80GB per month?  Why is consumption-based billing (CBB) so evil?  And, if the ISP wants to charge an obscene amount for real unlimited traffic volume, then they should be able to (but guys, unlimited is unlimited, don't say unlimited and then unplug subscribers after they hit the imaginary 250GB cap).

Now, I digress, but start thinking about network neutrality and carrier grate NATs (CGNs).  When the remaining /8s are handed out to the RIRs, and then the RIRs run out of blocks to give out to residential ISPs, customers are going to start receiving RFC 1918 addresses (NET-10, most likely) on their CPE interfaces.  Yep, this means no more public IPs.  IPv4 traffic from the customers' RFC 1918 addresses will be translated to public IPv4 addresses at hub sites or head ends (whatever you want to call it - POPs).  Will network neutrality make this illegal, because ISPs are intentionally blocking inbound traffic to all TCP and UDP ports on the customers' CPE?  Uh, well, there's no way around it with many-to-one NAT.  Just think about it, it can get pretty ridiculous.

Also, if you want a quick summary of my views on blocking, limiting, etc. please check out my comment on Ian Gulliver's Net Neutrality? blog entry.

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