Here’s the thing… Those of us that live the other side of the Atlantic live with 250ms latency every day, when we connect to services hosted in North America. I dare say the same is true for those on the other side of the Pacific. There’s not much getting around the speed of light.

Now, I’ll confess to not being the greatest of networking mavens, my networking startup and my various relationships with Network World notwithstanding. Truth be told, I dropped out of a physics major when the only uncompleted course was electronics lab. But before I dropped out, I did get the speed of light drilled into me. It’s 186,000 miles/second, aka 3 x 10^10 cm/sec. (“Not just a good idea; it’s the law!”). 186,000 miles, I’m quite convinced, is a lot more than 4 times the difference across the Atlantic Ocean. And the same remains true even when you knock off 50% or so because that light is traveling through glass rather than in a vacuum.

• Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC/AT&T, kicked things off in late 2005, arguing that he should be allowed to discriminate between, say, Google and Yahoo based on how much they paid him. He later backed down a bit, but many people are unconvinced as to his sincerity.
• Verizon said similar things around the same time.
• Om Malik made an early attempt to cover all sides of the issue, albeit with a pro-neutrality orientation.
• Jeremy Penston had an article last week arguing that bandwidth is NOT “effectively free,” at least for video.
• Scott Cleland says my thinking is “seriously flawed” because I think there’s any need for neutrality regulation. He thinks no logical case has been made for neutrality whatsoever. Perhaps we need need to spell it out for him in smaller words. Anyhow, his one-pager that is admittedly sponsored by the telecom vendors does a good job of smashing some net neutrality strawmen nobody was talking about anyway.
• Errata Security argues that network neutrality is unworkable on the backbone, and links to my article, which was only about network neutrality on the last mile.
• Richi Jennings argues that we don’t need tiering, because the speed of light has dropped from 300 million meters/second to a mere 80 million or so. Or maybe less. Or something like that … seriously, it seems that he doubts the value of super-high QOS, because latency is an inescapable fact of life.

Some of my own writings on the subject include:

• This post today separating the Internet into “Jeffersonet” and “Edisonet”, where Jeffersonet needs extreme net neutrality but Edisonet can and must endure tiered pricing. I’d have loved to get that point into the column, but there wasn’t room.
• This post today calling for extreme net neutrality specifically in the area of search.
• Two posts last June (with links to additional prior ones) spelling out the Tariff Rebate Passthrough idea. These cover mainly the same material as the column, but are part of group incorporating to some discussion of the idea last spring among a variety of commentators.

I’ll supply some outside links on the subject later on.

Net neutrality is both necessary and workable for what I call Jeffersonet, which comprises the “classical”, bandwidth-light parts of the Internet. Thus, it includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and just about every website created in the first 13 or so years of the Web. Jeffersonet is the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide. Any censorship of Jeffersonet – even if just of the self-interested large-enterprise commercial kind – would be a terrible loss. Net neutrality is workable for Jeffersonet because – well, because it’s already working just fine. Jeffersonet doesn’t need anything beyond current levels of bandwidth and reliability. So there’s no reason to mess with what’s working, other than simple profit-hungry greed.

Network neutrality opponents, however, point to evolving and future technologies, technically more demanding than what the current Internet can well support. Their uses are centered on what I call Edisonet – communication-rich applications such as entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings of all kinds. Reliable, tiered service is needed for these applications, and somebody has to pay for it. Even so – and this is a key point — the payment scheme should be as favorable to application-developer competition as possible.

If it were not for Edisonet, extreme net neutrality would be fairly harmless. If it were not for the huge public benefits of Jeffersonet, letting the telecom carriers have their way on non-neutral pricing wouldn’t be so bad. But given the presence of both, a middle course is needed. Fortunately, one is available that gives appropriate treatment to Jeffersonet and Edisonet alike, without giving tasks to regulatory agencies that are much different from the kinds they actually do a pretty good job of performing already. Tariff Rebate Passthrough shows the way.

Historical notes on the names: Obviously, Jeffersonet and Edisonet are named after Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison respectively. Jefferson famously opined that newspapers were more important to good government than the institutions of government himself. He also donated the beginning of the collection that became the Library of Congress, founded the University of Virginia, and sponsored the Lewis and Clark expeditions. Today’s Internet – its flaws notwithstanding — would surely fill him with the utmost delight.

Thomas Edison, of course, was a prolific inventor, and heavily involved in founding the whole electric utility industry. He created home and business conveniences and necessities as, ultimately, complete geographically dispersed systems. In some ways, his inventions are most significant for how they have contributed to leisure, from the phonograph to the electric light that let people read easily after their work was done. Today’s Internet would surely delight him too, but he would also be busily focused on future enhancements in entertainment and other areas.

His basic thesis is that political bloggers feel so driven to just write that they eventually lose touch with logic, and that this plays in to the general paranoid theme in political discourse. (For some reason, he identifies paranoia uniquely with Americans, but let’s overlook that piece of silliness.) In particular, he thinks the pro-net-neutrality arguments are extremist, even as he correctly points out that the bill being rammed through Congress in their despite is horrifically anti-competitive.

• Pricing of internet services to consumers will be based wholly on technical characteristics such as volume and quality of service, and not on the identity of the information provider, the content of the information, or the equipment (hardware or software) used by the consumer to consume it. (Actually, the telecom providers may yelp at the “hardware” clause.)
• Pricing of “last-mile” delivery to information providers will be based on those same factors only, and be in the form of standard per-byte tariffs only. Pricing will not discriminate in any way among information providers, nor among types of application.
• Telecom service vendors can’t charge two parties for delivering the same byte.

I think that’s it. Maybe I’m missing something – I’m surely no regulatory lawyer – but those three provisions seem to incorporate the essence, and the benefits, of Tariff Rebate Passthrough.

• All-inclusive flat rate for everything. If that’s the pricing scheme, extreme net neutrality has won, TRP is moot, and the discussion is over.
• Flat rate plus price-per-unit. Analogies can be found in the telephony sphere (long distance, text messaging, etc.) This is the simple case for TRP, which I’ve already discussed previously.
• Flat rate for base service plus fixed number of units; additional price-per-unit thereafter. This is the current US cellular service model, and the most important one for TRP to replicate. An example might be “$50 per month, which includes unlimited ordinary service and 10 gigabytes of high-QOS service, plus $1 per gigabyte over that.*” The problem with simple-minded TRP is that ESPN.com rebating the whole $1/gigabyte for the consumer might be oversubsidy; with all those free bundled bytes, the rebate might not be WORTH $1/gig to Joe Sportsfan. But there’s an easy solution: Let the ISP set a price** for the plan (the aforementioned $50 plus $1/gig), and also set a “buyout” tariff (say, $0.40 per gig). As long as the pricing is wholly based on QOS and not on the identity of the information provider, the dangers of net non-neutrality are averted.
• Channel-based pricing. The whole point of the net neutrality debate is that telecom companies should not be allowed to charge for “Yahoo” the way cable providers now charge for “ESPN.” But there’s nothing in TRP that keeps Yahoo from charging its own subscription rates – just as it does today for many premium offerings, and just as AOL does today for its whole bundled service. So I don’t see this as a big loss.

*I haven’t checked those numbers to see if they make sense. They’re just examples.

**Subject to the usual kinds of regulation stemming from the monopoly/oligopoly status of last-mile providers.

What kinds of price structure does Tariff Rebate Passthrough not allow for? Mainly, discriminatory connection-based pricing is sharply reduced. E.g., “friends and family” calling plans, “free calls but only to other subscribers to our service,” etc. might be hard to replicate under TRP. But I think TRP leaves plenty of other pricing options for service providers to still make money hand over fist.