Non-Neutral Network (Part 3 of a Multi-Part Series)

So we've talked a little about the policy debate around net neutrality and a little about how the Internet works today, but what would a non-neutral network policy involve? Primarily 3 things: Quality of Service, Traffic Shaping, and Pricing Models.

Quality of Service: Historically the Internet operating on peering agreements between ISPs that utilized a "best efforts" agreement. In other words and ISP would agree to process the traffic from another network with its best effort, and, when all ISPs did this, the Internet operated fairly smoothly. In a non-neutral network world, these best efforts would be replaced by service level agreements and contracts. And, perhaps more importantly, ISPs would discriminate against certain traffic. This would inevitably lead to a tiered internet where an ISPs' preferred customers/partners received priority treatment of their packets and non-preferred customers/partners traffic was moved more slowly across the network.

Traffic Shaping: Traffic shaping goes hand-in-hand with Quality of Service. It is basically defined as any action to delay traffic moving across a network. It's really a tool to manage bandwidth. As traffic enters a network, the network can stall it (add latency) to free up space on the network and improve the overall flow or stream of data. Of course this greatly impacts the owner of the stalled traffic.

Pricing Models: Having a non-neutral network could allow for a plethora of pricing models. Currently ISPs generally charge the consumer on a per month, unlimited use, bandwidth constrained rate. (i.e. I pay X dollars a month and I get a 10Mbs connection - I can use it as often or as rarely as suits me, I can use it only to send emails, or I can watch Netflix and the price remains the same). In the future ISPs have talked about two-sided pricing where both the consumer (me) and the content provider (e.g. Netflix) are both charged when I access Netflix's content. They've also discussed tiered pricing based on service levels for both sides. A Non-neutral network allows for more creative pricing and might help ISPs better manage their cost/revenue models.

In my next post we'll examine an argument against net neutrality.

Good Talk,
Tom