I am curious as to what the powers that be are thinking in regard to net neutrality.

To use an analogy to the transportation system, the current internet is like a railroad network. Freight trains are loaded with containers destined for delivery to end users. When the train pulls into a railyard, the containers are picked up from one train and moved onto another train heading towards the ultimate destination. Eventually the containers get to the proper destination but they don’t necessarily follow the quickest, most direct path. The tracks are owned by various companies and those companies probably own the railyards their tracks lead to. (But they can’t own the content that is carried by the railroad, which is where the analogy breaks down.)

The railyard protocols determine which containers get handled and in which order they are handled. The new net neutrality rules seem to be allowing the railyards to revise their protocols to let some container shippers to pay for priority handling. They may even establish separate railroads just for the priority traffic and let the existing infrastructure muddle along, just like AT&T did with the telecommunications network in the post-war period.

This is a hard one to address. On one hand, the networks cost money to build, the routers that can handle the traffic cost money to install, the features cost money as well. If a service provider requires lots of bandwidth capacity and router ports, the user should be paying an appropriate cost. The service provider also needs to increase the bandwidth capacity interior to the network to handle the increased usage. So they should be charging the source provider enough to cover the bandwidth and equipment costs generated.

Most of the new internet services seem to be streaming video related. and with streaming video speed and order of the incoming info containers is important. If you could let your computer collect the entire stream of video before displaying it then it wouldn’t be an issue. But a lot of those video providers don’t want to let you have the entire video at one time. Why, you may pirate the video; shame on you. So they need to have your videos delivered piecemeal but in an evenly streamed manner. To get this requires using the prioritization flags in the Internet Protocol. And who should get those flags? The ones that pay for them.

What should not be allowed to happen is getting someone’s container dropped completely, based on either originating address or destination address. The ISPs have already been guilty of this (e.g. the early VOIP services) and will probably bend any new FCC rules to continue being guilty of this in the future.

The internet is a network of networks. The backbone networks connect to edge networks or other backbone networks to facilitate the movement of those information containers.  An intranet may be considered a single network managed and operated by a single entity.  As an example, the Verizon backbone network connects to the European backbone, to the Canadian backbone, to the AT&T backbone, to the Comcast edge network, to the Time Warner edge network, to the Verizon edge network, etc. (I am using edge network to describe the networks that connect to the users, both senders and receivers. Unless you are going right around the corner you will probably traverse a backbone network to connect with someone on the web.)

In my example I used the Verizon backbone network and noted that it is connected to the Verizon edge network. And in reality the two networks may not be distinguishable as far as routers or links are concerned. For Verizon it may all be one intranet. The edge network delivers content to the end users and receives content from content sources. Will Verizon provide better packet handling for its customers than it will for content coming from the internet?

Internet Protocols are developed and managed by the IETF.  It seems to me that government internet regulators should be ensuring that ISPs are following the internet protocols fairly, especially on the backbone portions of the internet. And I think the backbone portion should be regulated as common carriers.  The edge networks I reserve judgement on.