Could Edge-Caching Violate Net Neutrality?
December 18th, 2008 | by bballou | Published in Future of the Internet | 5 Comments
Note: Brendan Ballou is solely responsible for the content of this article. It is not necessarily endorsed by Professor Zittrain
Our little corner of the blogosphere has been lit on fire by the recent article in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Google was coming out against Net Neutrality. Now, there are plenty of problems with this article. Contra WSJ, to quote David Isenberg:
“Google’s edge caching isn’t new or evil
Lessig didn’t shift gears on NN
Microsoft and Yahoo have been off the NN bandwagon since 2006
The Obama team still supports NN
Amazon’s Kindle support is consistent with its NN support”
This is all more or less true (I think Lessig would himself agree that his opinions about net neutrality have evolved). However, none of this says that Google isn’t violating the principle of net neutrality. Let’s use Google’s own summary of the idea, that broadband providers “should not be allowed to prioritize traffic based on the source, ownership or destination of the content.” Strictly speaking, this does seem to conflict with Google’s OpenEdge program. The program aims to cache Google’s search and video content on servers within network operators’ facilities. Such deals would save bandwidth for the network operators and increase access speeds for broadband customers. Such deals would also give Google a distinct advantage over its search and video competitors. Says one of the commenters on David Isenberg’s above-referenced blog:
“The plan is for Google to install equipment that will bypass the public Internet and ensure that their content, e.g. YouTube, will be delivered to ISP customers faster and more reliably than competing services such as Netflix Instant Watch that depend on the public Internet for delivery. If there weren’t a performance advantage, there would be no reason to do this.
“Whether this violates [network neutrality] depends on whose definition you take, and from what era. Current Lessig says it’s fine as long as any (rich) company has access to the [cable operator], but historical Lessig said such arrangements (“access tiering”) are not fine because only a few large players can enjoy their benefits.”
Now, this might not be bad. It might not hurt innovation. It might not be evil. But it certainly violates net neutrality, if we define the principle strictly as bit-by-bit non-discrimination. That said, such a violation might not be such a big deal. Instead of asking whether this deal prioritizes certain services or content over other services or content, let’s ask whether this deal promotes users’ autonomy and generative capacity. Long-term, those seem to be the questions that matter.
Finally, at the risk of burying the lede, let me add that before publishing this post I asked JZ’s thoughts on the matter. Here’s what he wrote:
“I don’t see this as a gotcha moment, but it’s a useful pointer to a larger debate about the role of intermediaries like Akamai, which make high-bandwidth streaming work better for its customers thanks to similar arrangements. Akamai and deals like the ones Google seek might be helpful to the Net because they ease the pressure for more formal, network-embedded discrimination, since big content providers can have their needs met with what amounts to an endpoint kludge. And so long as the network itself isn’t discriminating, P2P provides a neat form of easy high-bandwidth distribution within the reach of any content provider — so long as the material in question is popular enough for enough P2P users to seed it. But at its extreme, if one imagines a public Net with no further buildout and a migration of most content to edge staging points by those who can afford it, the rise of bandwidth arbitragers isn’t good. I’m not currently that worried about this scenario because the bottlenecks in bandwidth turn out to be towards the edges rather than in the middle of the network.”
December 18th, 2008 at 2:43 pm (#)
Net neutrality in the sense of prohibiting anti-competitive behaviour is probably good for us all. This is appropriately enforced at law.
Net neutrality in the sense of ensuring that all bits are created equal is an absurdity. I want an internet designed by engineers, not by lawyers and anthropologists.
Plenty of people do edge caching. It’s a sensible development of the web architecture. It’s by no means exclusive to big companies, either: you can buy edge-service from Amazon as part of their cloud computing and storage offering. I don’t doubt that as cloud models take hold, we’ll see more and more such `kludges’ take hold, to borrow JZ’s term. Perhaps at that point some people will sit down and design the next generation of protocols which take account of this. We’ll probably end up with an internet with all sorts of internal services. Whether or not that is a good thing is an engineering matter only.
December 25th, 2008 at 6:29 am (#)
[...] have been in smoldering slow burn mode on a couple points, and Brendan Ballou’s piece in JZ’s blog fanned the smoke to light . . . so here [...]
December 29th, 2008 at 3:11 am (#)
Minor error in the links provided to the WSJ article and Isenberg’s article. Take out that last quotation mark and it’ll work. Same error made in both hyperlinks.
January 8th, 2009 at 2:04 pm (#)
Hi,
an article on safer internet protocol published at TechnologyReview.com
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/21922/?a=f
Best regards
Adam
August 26th, 2009 at 12:47 pm (#)
Network neutrality allows users to be be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. I think it is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do.