Does traffic shaping violate the principles of net neutrality?
That is a subject of discussion by some folks responding to a recent article by Michael Geist and follow-up from Mark Evans and Matt Roberts’ technical description of neutrality considerations in view of network capacity limitations.
Michael Geist follows up with a discussion of whether Rogers’ traffic shaping practices controvene some of the recent official definitional statements on net neutrality principles issued by different bodies. The Telecommmunications Policy Review Panel called for a net neutrality provision on the following terms:
The Telecommunications Act should be amended to confirm the right of Canadian consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice by means of all public telecommunications networks providing access to the Internet. This amendment should
- authorize the CRTC to administer and enforce these consumer access rights,
- take into account any reasonable technical constraints and efficiency considerations related to providing such access, and
- be subject to legal constraints on such access, such as those established in criminal, copyright and broadcasting laws.
I have not heard allegations of Rogers fully blocking access to lawful content or applications. Blocking is more severe than slowing or throttling certain classes of traffic. Matt Roberts’ piece speaks to the reasonableness of “technical constraints and efficiency considerations” that Rogers could point to. Would such a description be adequate under the intention of the TPR report? The TPR report did not suggest that all applications should be treated equally which, coupled with paragraph ‘b’, appears to open the door to traffic management.
Another definition examined in the Michael Geist discussion is the commitment set out by AT&T;/BellSouth as a condition for FCC approval of its merger:
AT&T;/BellSouth also commits that it will maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service. This commitment shall be satisfied by AT&T;/BellSouth’s agreement not to provide or to sell to Internet content, application, or service providers, including those affiliated with AT&T;/BellSouth, any service that privileges, degrades or prioritizes any packet transmitted over AT&T;/BellSouth’s wirelines broadband Internet access service based on its source, ownership or destination.
There are at least two important aspects to this commitment that merit a careful parsing of the second sentence. AT&T; agreed not to provide nor sell a specific type of QoS service to other parties. The ‘forbidden’ QoS service would be one that discriminates on the basis of source, ownership or destination.
Is traffic shaping of certain types of file transfer traffic in violation of this commitment? Such a practice does degrade and prioritize some packets, but I have not heard anything that suggests that there is a discrimination based on who generates the traffic (the source), who receives it (the destination) or the ownership whether it is the IP owner, the application owner or the file owner. As such, I don’t see how traffic shaping of a class of applications qualifies as a violation of this principle.
But if we look further at the AT&T; commitment to the FCC, even if a carrier does prioritize based on the source, ownership or destination, it appears to be OK. The commitment is that AT&T; will not sell such a prioritization service to other ISPs, application providers or content providers. I don’t see, at least in this paragraph, a commitment not to discriminate for its own network management purposes.
As such, there is nothing in this particular commitment that prevents AT&T; from degrading packets for whatever reasons it chooses or just because it happens to be a month with an ‘R’.
If Rogers is shaping classes of traffic, such as torrents or any other, as some of the allegations are asserting, it appears to be a legitimate network management activity under current and proposed regulations: under the TPR proposals; and, the neutrality commitments made by AT&T.;
As Spock would say, “The good of the many outweighs the good of the few.”
Update: [April 20, 2:50 pm]
A letter to the editor of the Toronto Star from Ken Engelhart of Rogers denies that Rogers is degrading encrypted traffic. The letter goes further and says that Rogers has not received any complaints to its customer service centre about alleged problems getting email from University of Ottawa, as claimed in the original article by Michael Geist.
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ATT, FCC, Rogers, TPR, Net Neutrality, Star Trek
