We're back to net neutrality being a big thing again. It seems to come and go depending on how bored people get with other issues.
Before I go any further, I want to point out that I am completely in favor of net neutrality. I am in no way defending Comcast's right to screw up my Netflix for bargaining purposes.
However, writing a law that guarantees net neutrality is not as simple as many seem to think. In fact, a poorly written law could actually make the situation worse.
I'm not a politician because I'm not a masochist. I'm a technologist, but I've frequently been involved in the development of policy, so I have some idea of how wrong things can go. There are a number of ways that a net neutrality law could make things worse, but there's one example that's pretty easy to explain.
The whole idea of net neutrality is that all data flowing on the network should be treated equally. The problem arises in the fact that it's impractical to treat all data equally.
Let's take an internet movie vs. an internet phone call. For our purposes, we don't care which companies are providing the service.
If the movie and the phone call are using the network at the same time and between the two of them, they are exceeding the available bandwidth, what should happen? Most people out there screaming for net neutrality will comment that both services should suffer equally -- that's fair, right?
Most folks with a technical background understand that's not the case. In the case of the internet movie, the design of movies is such that your device has downloaded several seconds, or possibly even minutes, ahead of what you're watching. In the event that the data transfer is interrupted temporarily, the movie will continue playing without interruption.
However, an internet phone call is real time. Even the most minor of network problems will garble the sound and/or introduce delay or echo into the conversation. (and when I say minor, I'm talking about an interruption lasting less than 1/2 second) An interruption of more than a few seconds will cause the call to be unusable, and quite likely result in a dropped call.
It's not so much that the result is different between the two, but the severity required to cause the result. In the worst case, the internet movie will also get dropped, but it would take several seconds or even minutes before the viewer would even notice, and even then it might just freeze the video for a short time before resuming.
In the case of the phone, a problem lasting even a fraction of a second will disrupt the call, and it won't take minutes of interruption for the call to get dropped.
So, any network administrator knows to prioritize voice traffic over everything else. In fact, a lot of network hardware does this by default these days.
Imagine the shitty quality of internet phone calls that would result if companies were legally required to treat all traffic the same? Remember when cell calls used to drop all the time? We'd be back to that.
It's not that net neutrality is a bad idea. It's just that it has to be legislated carefully to avoid making the problem worse.
