One of the key concepts in yesterday’s opening session at the CRTC’s network management hearings was Sandvine’s statement that an unmanaged network is not neutral. I preferred that quote to a Commissioner comment about drowning cats.
Since the transcripts are not yet available, let me paraphrase: In the early days of the internet, all participants had similar, shared interests in the operation of the network. That is not the case today, where some actors placed their selfish interests ahead of the common good of all users and all applications.
So managing traffic restores the balance of neutrality.
John Lawford, representing a variety of consumers groups in the hearings, is quoted asking rhetorically:
If three per cent is causing a problem, how finely tuned is your network?
But as I mentioned last week, peer-to-peer doesn’t require a high percentage of capacity consumption to have its bad behaviour impact the network.
Picture a wide-load truck driving down the highway blocking all the lanes. The truck isn’t using a significant percentage of the road’s capacity; it doesn’t represent a measurable amount of total traffic.
You can follow the hearings with live audio from the CRTC website, or for play-by-play, check out the National Post live blog.