The problem with gazing out from the ivory towers of academia is that the real world is often out of focus, far beneath the gaze of the theoreticians.
Such is the case with some analyses of net neutrality. Andrew Odlyzko, of the School of Mathematics at University of Minnesota recently wrote a paper [
pdf] that started with a faulty premise:
What if you build it and they don’t come? That is what happened with the landline and underwater cables of the telecom bubble of a decade ago, and many other seemingly promising technologies. And that is almost bound to happen if net neutrality is blocked, and service providers do what they have been promising, namely build special facilities into their networks for streaming movies.
Internet video is nothing like the technology bubble of a decade ago. Building it and hoping they will come isn’t the problem here. Video traffic on the ‘net has already arrived.
Oh yeah.
Remember, the fact that traffic is already overwhelming some of the networks is the whole issue. The traffic on internet access and backbone networks has been growing, thanks to streaming media and file sharing and gaming, etc. This isn’t building a stadium in Iowa and hoping they will come. The league is a success; the stadium can’t handle all the fans and more games and concerts are getting booked and tickets keep getting getting printed. And there is a genuine shortage of real-time needs like food, beer and washrooms [your contributions to the metaphor are welcome].
Service providers are looking for ways to manage the quality of the user experience for all the wonderful applications and more that we haven’t even heard about yet.
Even the abstract for the paper seems fundamentally flawed.
What service providers publicly promise to do, if they are given complete control of their networks, is to build special facilities for streaming movies. But there are two fatal defects to that promise. One is that movies are unlikely to offer all that much revenue. The other is that delivering movies in real-time streaming mode is the wrong solution, expensive and unnecessary.
I could start with his suggestion that service providers don’t already have complete control of their networks, but I’ll let that comment go for today.
Real-time streaming may or may not may not be the right way to deliver movies, but it is hard to imagine another way to effectively deliver live action events like sports. Imagine, if you will, the appeal of each of us being able to choose which of the hundreds of cameras we want to follow at any given time from the Olympics. Sounds to me like a call for real time streaming.
The paper advocates use of “faster than real-time” techniques for video, suggesting that YouTube is a counter example for a statement attributed to John Chambers that transmitting video over the internet is “really, really, really difficult.” YouTube quality isn’t going to cut it for most of the content I want to see.
The key problem I have with his premise (“that delivering movies in real-time streaming mode is the wrong solution“) is that neither service providers nor academics will get to choose what the right solution is for delivering movies over the internet.
Users and entrepreneurs, small time innovators and the market-place will decide based on all sorts of factors. For someone advocating net neutrality, it is surprising to see Odlyzko suggesting that there should be a “right solution” for video delivery. Every solution that customers choose will be a right solution.
That perspective shows an affinity for centralized control of internet applications – which is antithetical to the concept of the internet’s open innovation.
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Andrew Odlyzko, net neutrality