Net Neutrality & Throttling

Well, here goes my first blog post ever....

Net Neutrality has a lot of definitions, but when I talk about it, I mean the idea of passing data packets without a "gatekeeper" either blocking them or showing any preferential treatment. I think my opinion on the subject would probably become quickly apparent based on what I write. However, just to make sure there's no ambiguity, I'm in favor of it - with a caveat.

The caveat is that I have no problem with throttling of peer to peer sites (P2P) or BitTorrent networks. Yes, I know that there's legitimate uses of each, but we're all adults here. We all know that 99%+ is illegal. Come on - you want to watch The Dark Knight on your PC? You have to accept there's going to be blocking/throttling. Throttling essentially being when an ISP turns down the speed, either across the board or with selective types of packets (again, see P2P).

I don't care if it's Net Neutrality is accomplished through service guarantees or legislatively, but in my opinion the biggest threat it to free speech. Imagine if this became widespread practice.

Having said all that - on to recent news:
Google's made it no secret that they support having Net Neutrality written into law. Not surprisingly, it's not that they have altruistic intentions in mind, but their business is dependant on not having any Internet Service Providers slow traffic to or from their web pages. Hmmm... think Microsoft wouldn't mind slowing down Google a bit? How about a partnership between Microsoft and Comcast where MSN searches run faster? Don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this isn't exactly out of the realm of possibility.

Along those lines, I thought this was interesting - Google has announced that they are working on developing a "throttling detection tool". Presumably if users know their speed is being throttled, they'll be outraged with their ISP. I find this an interesting strategy at fighting back, should ISPs aggressively start throttling. I can imagine this working along the lines of multiple network speed tests to different sites. That could work for comparing one particular web site versus another, but at the same time there's a lot of variables on the speed that pages load. Should be interesting.

On a related throttling note...

In January, Time Warner announced it was going to test a tiered pricing for Internet service using a base rates with a cap of a certain number of gigabytes per month. If you go over your cap, then there's additional charges per every 5GB. I can't say I care for this, as if feels a little too much like mobile phone usage and guessing how many minutes you need in advance. In addition, I'll be very curious to see how the minimum tier prices compared to current "unlimited" pricing. My guess is that the lowest tier will be slightly cheaper than current prices, but the gigabyte cap will be too low for the average user. The average user level will be higher priced than you currently pay. This is conjecture at this point and I hope I'm wrong. (But I know I'm right.)

-Tom