Felten's paper on the complexities of Network Neutrality

Ed Felten -- the Princeton engineering prof who led the effort to crack the Secure Digital Music Initiative and did yeoman work on the Sony BMG DRM fiasco -- has published a fast, ten-page white-paper on the complexities of Network Neutrality. Ed describes the many ways in which Neutrality is hard to enforce, and the ways in which tiered, discriminatory service is likely to have grave outcomes:

Suppose we discover that customers of TelCo, a residential ISP, are having trouble using the VoipCo Internet phone service, because of jitter problems. What might be causing this? One possibility is that TelCo is using delay discrimination, either minimal or non-minimal, with the goal of causing this problem. Many people would want rules against this kind of behavior.

Another possibility is that TelCo isn't trying to cause problems for VoipCo users, and in fact TelCo's management of its network is completely reasonable and nondiscriminatory, but for reasons beyond TelCo's control its network happens to have higher jitter than other networks have. Perhaps the jitter problems are temporary. In this case, most people would agree that net neutrality rules shouldn't punish TelCo for something that isn't really its fault.

The most challenging possibility, from a policy standpoint, is that TelCo didn't take any obvious steps to cause the problem but is happy that it exists, and is subtly managing its network in a way that fosters jitter. Network management is complicated, and many management decisions could impact jitter one way or the other. A network provider who wants to cause high jitter can do so, and might have pretextual excuses for all of the steps it takes. Can regulators distinguish this kind of stratagem from the case of fair and justified engineering decisions that happen to cause a little temporary jitter?

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