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A network-neutral approach to Net neutrality - March 16, 2008

One of the more important but often overlooked aspects of the debate over ISPs' network management practices is the degree to which it is really an argument about network architecture. Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent traffic under certain conditions, for instance, was a response to the cable operator's reliance on shared connections. Because up to 500 households can share a single connection to the Internet under Comcast's node-based architecture, the heavy consumption of bandwidth by one household can directly affect the network's performance for others. Thus, Comcast's throttling of less-widely used but bandwidth-heavy applications such as BitTorrent.

You can argue over whether Comcast's technical methods are appropriate--sending forged packets to trick P2P-connected computers to interrupt their communication--but the bottom line is that, but for Comcast's shared-network architecture, we probably wouldn't be arguing about it at all.

That point was underscored last week, when researchers from Verizon presented results from early tests of a new kind of P2P protocol developed by the P4P Working Group, an offshoot of the Distributed Computing Industry Assn. First discussed here in January, the P4P initiative is based on the work of researchers at Yale University, who discovered that, by knowing the topography of a network, P2P systems could contain much of data traffic they generate within the same edge network.

In the results of the trials revealed last week by Verizon, for example, 58% of the traffic generated by a P2P request came from nearby Verizon customers, compared to an average of 6.3% without using the P4P protocol. That greatly reduced the inter-connect charges Verizon incurred for carrying the traffic, and thus reduced its overall network costs. As a bonus, it also increased download speeds for P2P users by as much as 60%.

Yet while P4P technology may work for Verizon, whose biggest problem with P2P traffic is the inter-connect charges it creates, it would actually make the problem worse for Comcast. Comcast's local network is already over-burdened by internal P2P traffic; making it carry more of the burden would be crippling. It's throttling method, in fact, is specifically designed to shunt P2P traffic off onto neighboring networks, by forcing requesting computers from outside its network to go hunting elsewhere for a source of supply, thus reducing the amount of upstream bandwidth used by Comcast's subscribers.

By and large, Net neutrality proponents have praised Verizon's if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em approach while excoriating Comcast. But the differences in their approaches are largely dictated by differences in their network architecture rather than any difference in their views. In its filing in the FCC's investigation of Comcast, in fact, Verizon expressly defends Comcast's approach as a "necessary" and "reasonable" response to the challenges of handling P2P traffic efficiently.

The challenge for policy makes is to craft a response that isn't similarly limited to specific network architectures, but establishes broad principles of openness and neutrality that are consistent and benefit consumers irrespective of the type of ISP they use.
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