Ninjas, nerds and net neutrality

Having spent the summer in Silicon Valley, that glorious land of technowizardry, hybrid cars, unabashed liberalism and startup companies floating on the hopes and dreams of nerds and venture capitalists alike, I was shocked to find that almost no one at Princeton knows anything about the mysterious idea of "net neutrality."

To begin with, it's about the Internet. Princeton students basically live on the Internet. We communicate via email, AIM and Skype. We find information primarily by googling and searching Wikipedia, and we entrust our identities entirely to Facebook. Since the outcome of the net neutrality debate has the potential to radically alter the nature of the net, this is an issue you should definitely care about.

So, what is net neutrality? To be perfectly fair, it's a slogan. It's the battle cry of one side of a complicated debate. It's a shame that it's the name we're stuck with, but we are stuck with it.

The fight over net neutrality boils down to a conflict for control of the Internet. The net is a complicated thing, so I'll try to reduce things as much as possible. Basically, the Internet is a bunch of computers connected together by an army of magical super-fast ninjas.

Companies like Verizon, TimeWarner and Cisco breed, train and feed these ninjas. For all their hard work building their respective ninja armies, they would like to make more money. They can extract more cash by ordering their ninjas to operate in various clever and/or stealthy ways. Many Internet service providers (ISPs), for instance, would like to set up a tiered service and order their ninjas to run a little slower for lower tiers and a little faster for higher tiers.

Consumers are used to paying different prices for different levels of Internet service, so you might be wondering what's new about this idea. When you pay for home Internet, what you are actually paying for is the connection from your house to the nearest ninja station. Your connection might be dial up, cable or DSL, all of which have different speeds and command a different price. Once your Internet traffic reaches the ninjas, however, it's all the same to them. Think of them as indifferent warrior-couriers.

But ISPs would like more discriminating, lazier ninjas — ninjas that put in less effort for requests for lower tier web sites. Say AOL.com has some sort of arrangement with TimeWarner but PirateBay.org doesn't. Then, TimeWarner's ninjas could be told to field requests for PirateBay.org more slowly.

It's important to realize that a tiered structure will do nothing to speed up requests for upper-tier sites — ninjas can't run any faster than their maximum speed. Rather, TimeWarner's selectively sluggish ninjas simply slow down for lower-tier sites. Since most websites, especially smaller ones, can't afford partnerships with more than a few ISPs, a tiered structure amounts to lower quality of service for most sites on the Web and no real improvement for anyone. From my perspective as a user of the Internet — a pirate, if you will — this is a really bad thing.

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A tiered price structure would also significantly raise the cost of building an Internet business. As computer science professor Ed Felten told me, "the unique character of the Internet arose because anyone could set up a server and do what they wanted." It seems to me that, in introducing a tiered pricing structure, ISPs would be sacrificing the character of the Web as an open network bursting with innovation with no appreciable gain to Internet users.

And yet, it seems intuitively fair for a company to charge different prices for different levels of service, right? I mean, if Verizon put all this effort into building its ninja army, shouldn't it be allowed to set prices for levels of mercenary service? There is one little wrinkle in this argument: The U.S. government — and all of us by proxy — paid for the development of the Internet and its ninja infrastructure. Since we collectively financed the creation of the Internet infrastructure, it seems similarly intuitively fair for us to impose restrictions on how the net operates.

As is clear from the example of AOL.com, an ISP might want to extract some non-monetary value from its ninjas. TimeWarner has an interest in AOL.com since it owns it. TimeWarner also has a distinct disinterest in PirateBay.org, which people use to illegally download TimeWarner's intellectual property. Rather than impose a tiered structure, TimeWarner might just tell its ninjas to give PirateBay worse service.

Maybe you think this is fine; after all, people use PirateBay to illegally download copyrighted material. I don't agree, but ignore that for a moment. Consider the hypothetical case of Verizon and Skype instead. In addition to Internet service, Verizon sells phone service. When Verizon's Internet users use Skype to place phone calls, Skype is competing with Verizon — while actually using Verizon's resources. Verizon is probably not stoked about this.

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Skype, however, is highly reliant on ninja punctuality. If you're transmitting voice data over the Internet, all the messages need to get to the other end pretty quickly. If some pieces of your Skype call get transmitted too slowly, they will arrive too late to be heard. Most other Internet traffic is immune to late or jittery ninjas; when you're reading a website, you can wait a few seconds for it to load.

Verizon might intentionally make their ninjas jittery by instructing them to deliver random pieces of data late or out of order. This would have no effect on people's ability to browse the Web, but would be a huge problem for Skype users.

The lesson here is simple: ISPs can have a huge effect on particular Internet services without explicitly discriminating between types of traffic. Let's call this implicit discrimination. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to detect whether an ISP is playing this game. We would have no way of knowing if the jitteriness was natural, since there is always some, or manufactured by the ISP.

I mentioned earlier that "net neutrality" is a slogan. Net neutrality is the banner raised by people who are against ISP discrimination between types of Internet traffic, either explicitly or implicitly. While the anti-neutrality posse is composed mainly of companies, it also has a slogan in "hands off the Internet." Like all slogans, this one represents a pitiful oversimplification of the issue. Also, like most slogans, there is a real point behind this one.

It turns out that when we actually sit down and try to regulate the Internet we always get into trouble. It's really hard to capture the intuitive idea of neutrality in a rule without straight jacketing ISPs or writing a worthless law. "It's one thing to say we've got a problem; it's quite another to say we think government can solve it," Felten told me.

So both sides have good points. Campaigning for moderation is awkward. No one stops to read the rest of a picket sign if it starts with "Our position is nuanced." Nonetheless, I can't help but think that nothing we do will be better than the status quo. The Internet works. Really well. Legislating it will probably screw it up. So will discriminating.

Whatever your thoughts on the issue, it is clearly an important one. The net neutrality debate, to invoke Felten again, is "one of the most important questions in cultural policy." As I'm sure Princeton students realize, "the network will become our main mode of communication." You should definitely care about what kind of network it is.