Over lunch, my friend complained that mobile app developers are silently using his mobile data when he's not even using the app. That's a pet peeve of mine!
As a quick review of what's happening in the mobile ether, see this Washington Post article, appropriately titled "While you're asleep, your iphone stays busy". These apps are sending data about you to home base continuously. In a single week, the reporter found over 5,000 active trackers on his iphone. What was not mentioned: each tracker was using his mobile data while he was asleep.
My mobile subscription plan is tiered. If I go over 2 gigabytes a month, the mobile operator charges me by the pound for incremental usage, and those charges are designed to be exorbitant - in order to create an incentive to buy into the next higher tier.
Notice how the app developer made decisions that can cause users to send more money to mobile operators. The flow of money through the app ecosystem is complex: the users typically do not pay app developers directly. (Some apps, like Netflix, are exceptions as they charge users subscription fees.) Most apps make money through advertising, and it is believed that ad revenues can be lifted by omnipresent data collection about users. The telcos who run the networks sit between app developers and users, collecting broadband access fees from users, an indirect way in which we pay for apps. The telcos also charge app developers bandwidth fees since they need access to the pipes to reach users.
This three-way relationship has become troubled in recent years, as manifested in the "net neutrality" controversy, which pits pipe operators (cable companies, phone operators, etc.) against content providers (Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc.) In 2015, the FCC under Obama sided with big tech, who advocates net neutrality. Then, in 2018, the Trump administration repealed the Obama-era regulation, to the delight of telcos. In the U.S., this issue is still very much alive.
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I'm staying neutral because net neutrality is a battle between two groups of powerful companies - tech and telecoms. To understand what's going on, let's flash back to the beginnings of the commercial Internet.
At the start, both groups had their interests aligned. They understood that the fixed-fee plan for Internet access is the key to unlocking the potential of the World Wide Web. When the benefits of the Internet were not yet clear to everyone, charging by the pound of data transferred would abort adoption. One should be clear about this -- the fixed fee plan has never been egalitarian; it is well known that a small percent of "hogs" account for 90% of total bandwidth usage. In effect, most users are subsidizing the few bandwidth hogs.
Eventually, the pipe providers discovered that they got the short end of the stick. As the Internet technologies advanced, applications started gobbling up more and more bandwidth. Streaming video, such as popularized by Netflix and Youtube, uses massively more bandwidth than emails and simple webpages. Internet phone calls require synchronizing the traffic, which adds to the complexity of traffic management. To maintain service levels, the telcos must invest heavily in new pipes, new equipment, new software, etc.
The adoption of fixed-fee plans constrains the telcos from receiving additional revenues to cover those costs. Thus, they are mad. They want the app and content developers to share the growing costs.
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The telcos demanded that Internet traffic be differentiated. The cost of provisioning a video stream is much higher than the cost of sending an email. The email is a tiny file, maybe a few kilobytes while a video stream can be over 1 gigabytes (1 GB = 1 million kb). We can generally tolerate waits of seconds or minutes for emails to arrive but when video data are delayed, we complain about buffering. Emails can arrive out of sequence but the next section of video can't be shown until the previous section has arrived. The telcos thus want to charge more money to deliver video streams compared to emails.
Notably, the telcos made a calculation here. They chose not to raise this money from their subscribers (not yet, more to come). Instead, they turn to their other source of income: big tech - those businesses that fill the pipes with content and apps. These developers reach their users through the telcos' pipes, and pay telcos for bandwidth.
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Tech companies are understandably pushing back against the telecoms. Consumers love the "free" phone calls and video streaming that is "free" or much cheaper than cable TV. The push to differentiate Internet traffic directly impacts the profit margins. To fight back, the big players banded together and coined the principle of "net neutrality".
The "net neutrality" principle is to demand that all types of Internet traffic be treated the same. The principle appeals to our notion of equal and fair treatment but note that fairness is applied to inanimate, manufactured objects ("bits" of data) that could not sense "fair" rather than people with feelings. The parties injured by the alleged lack of fairness are the tech giants, not users (not yet, more to come).
Net neutrality also appeals to nostalgia. In the beginning, the Internet revolution succeeded because of its single-minded pursuit of turning everything into "bits". Theoretically, emails, videos, images, voice, etc. can all be converted into streams of 1s and 0s and pushed through networks of pipes regardless of their aggregated identities. This tactic vastly simplifies all communications technologies, and dominated in applications that are low bandwidth, and asynchronous.
Over time, Internet technologies encroached into voice and video applications. It is not really the case that technically, all traffic can be treated the same, that is to say, anonymously, not knowing its type. So if "neutrality" means equal treatment, big tech is demanding equal treatment when it comes to bandwidth pricing but not when it comes to service level -- the tech giants are not saying they'd accept the same quality of service for video and voice as for emails!
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The reason why I'm staying neutral in this debate is because as users, we are in a loss-loss situation. It doesn't matter who wins in this net neutrality debate between two gigantic, highly profitable industries. One side will end up losing revenues to the other side. The losing side will then try to recoup their lost revenues by making users pay more. If the cable company lost, then the cable broadband rates would go up even more. If net neutrality lost, then the Netflix subscription fee would eventually go up.
Net neutrality will not be neutral to consumer pocketbooks.
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