Justin Wickett

10/28/06

Duke 2010

Network Neutrality

In today’s world, people rely on the ability to upload and download from the vast and diverse array of content found on the Internet in order to accomplish their day-to-day tasks. Most could not imagine living their life without a reliable and efficient way to access the information they desire. Network neutrality, which is based on the principle that all traffic over the network gets routed with equal priority, threatens what the users of today’s Internet think of as essential and have become accustomed to. As the Internet continues to grow and expand, more Internet Service Providers from all across the world will have a chance to decide how they choose to manage the traffic that passes through their copper or fiber. The concept of network neutrality does more harm than good by limiting growth and experimentation, forcing our networks today to resort to an archaic form of traffic management, and by requiring inefficient government cooperation across the globe to define the standards by which packets will be routed in order to meet the requirements imposed by network neutrality.

While network neutrality remains unimplemented, ISPs have several options when it comes to prioritizing packets to best serve their clientele. With protocols such as HTTPS that incorporate SSL and TLS encryption, prioritizing packets based on their content is extremely difficult and certainly not effective. If ISPs were able to prioritize traffic over their network based on the protocols that the packets used, the result would be more efficient routing of content. A likely scenario that demonstrates the importance of packet prioritization involves a network set up for a customer service department, which primarily relies on a Voice Over Internet Protocol service, but also contains a web server. On a network were all traffic is routed equally, packets using the RTP protocol for VOIP and the HTTP/TCP protocol are both handled the same way. If a hacker wanted to disrupt the calls from the customer service department, he or she could easily flood the network by sending HTTP/TCP traffic to the web server, which would result in poor MOS (Mean Opinion Score) and an increased likelihood of VOIP call drops. However, if that last hop did implement some sort of packet prioritization, the router could ensure that the RTP traffic was efficiently routed and the HTTP/TCP traffic was properly delayed. Furthermore, if the routers on this example network were able to prioritize the upstream and downstream traffic from the gateway hosted by the VOIP service provider that was connected to the POTS network or PSTN, the example network would be even more efficient.

Without network neutrality, ISPs can implement different methods of packet prioritization to fine tune and allow their network segment to operate at its maximum speed. Because many Layer 7 applications use the same Layer 4 transport protocols, traffic may be prioritized when it shouldn’t be, which could lead to serious slowdowns. To prevent this from happening, the ability to prioritize traffic based on IP address would limit the amount of unwanted prioritized packets that are flowing through the network. As networks begin to handle a wider variety of traffic, effective packet routing becomes a challenge. On a neutral network, where the router lacks the “intelligence” to forward packets based on their priority flags, applications relying on rapid flow of data become vulnerable to disruption. The idea of routing packets without providing QoS is now considered to be an archaic form of communication, since ARP, SNMP, ICMP, etc… traffic would cause major network slowdowns. By implementing network neutrality, the use of VLANs, which rely on IEEE802.1Q to diminish the broadcast domain by splitting up a physical network into multiple logical networks, would no longer be allowed, since they prevent the flow of certain types of traffic that were originally deemed for the entire network to receive. By empowering ISPs with the ability to prioritize incoming and outgoing packets from a certain IP address, VOIP and other applications that rely on a central gateway for processing will work seamlessly. It is in the ISPs best interest to choose which IP addresses or protocols receive priority in order to keep their customer base satisfied.

One of the amazing aspects about the expansion of the Internet in developing countries is that the new ISPs being formed will have a chance to create their own unique business model based on how they choose to route traffic. With network neutrality implemented, innovation and diversity is kept to a minimum. The new foreign ISPs will not be able to prioritize the traffic that provides the most benefit to their local customer base. As remote surgery, IPTV, and VOIP become more useable and practical, network neutrality remains a barrier to future progress. By allowing ISPs to prioritize traffic by type or destination, these remarkable advances will be available even where bandwidth is scarce. By getting rid of network neutrality, ISPs will become empowered with the ability to control their own network and what types of traffic get priority. This does not mean that they should block off certain types of traffic, nor should they throttle packet flow. It simply means if a prioritized packet is encountered, it gets bumped to the beginning of the queue to ensure rapid delivery. If no prioritized packets are present on the network, then traffic flows as usual at the fastest possible rate. This would ensure that not only would the customers of these new developing countries have access most of the time to a fast network for web browsing and downloading content, but should someone need to use a service that requires prioritized traffic, their data will flow efficiently and uninterrupted. By applying modern day techniques such as link fragmentation and interleaving, as well as policy based routing, all of which violate the principles established by network neutrality, services such as VOIP and IPTV can enjoy fast reliable connections. Because these new ISPs want to generate as much revenue as possible while appealing to the largest group of people, they will be able to properly define the principles and limits concerning network throughput management in their own unique ways, without the fear of restrictions imposed by the government, as long as the content traversing their copper or fiber is legal.

In order to ensure the continuation of a free Internet, the ideology behind network neutrality should be avoided and government imposed limitations on how ISPs choose to route their traffic should be kept to a minimum. Freedom is what drives and allows the Internet to expand, and as governments impose restrictions and limit ISPs, the ISPs’ ability to provide for and serve the people is diminished. Network neutrality and other network limitations are impossible to implement on a wide scale over the Internet, which spans so many different countries and jurisdictions, because different governments have different interpretations and views concerning the principles by which the ISPs should abide. Because the Internet requires international cooperation to be a success, governments who implement legislation to constrain market behavior in the Internet service industry impose restrictions on their local ISPs and impede the expansion of the Internet and all of its diverse services within their country’s borders. Due to the fact that the Internet is constantly undergoing rapid change and evolving to meet people’s current needs, it does not make sense for governments to impose limits on ISPs that are trying best to serve the local population by forcing them to handle all data with the same urgency. Should governments act unwisely and implement network neutrality among other restrictions on ISPs, services such as Voice Over Internet Protocol, Television over Internet Protocol, and many others would not stand a chance, and the local population would not get to enjoy and take advantage of what the rest of the world was benefiting from.

While network neutrality seems like a fair and logical idea, it in fact prevents the innovations that users of the Internet have come to expect. Forcing all of the ISPs that serve as the glue to “blindly” route traffic without consideration of packet priority is virtually impossible and thus impractical, given the amount of government and ISP cooperation required. On top of that, even if network neutrality was implemented on a global scale, the hardware within the Internet would have to resort to ancient routing techniques that were abandoned in order to allow for services that require high-speed connections to operate efficiently. While widespread network neutrality would require a huge amount of effort to make a reality compared to that needed for individual ISPs to establish QoS, governments and ISPs who implemented it would be essentially cutting themselves off from the future of VOIP, IPTV, and all of the other innovative services that are reliant on rapid packet forwarding over the Internet. Because the Internet is continuously evolving and will always be changing, the idea of governments imposing legislation to place limits on ISPs for the most part is unwise and not practical, since governments will have to dedicate huge amounts of resources to enforce their restraints. As the Internet continues to grow and as more and more people gain access to the content distributed by their local ISPs, one can only hope that network neutrality and other laws limiting ISPs are never implemented in order to ensure the freedom provided by the Internet that we have come to be so dependant on.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.