Verizon exec: Some Net neutrality fans suffer from 'paranoia'

[Brian Warkoczeski]

Verizon exec: Some Net neutrality fans suffer from 'paranoia'

August 19, 2008

By Declan McCullagh, www.cnet.com

ASPEN, Colo.--Verizon's chief technologist took a swipe at Net 
neutrality advocates on Tuesday, saying the concept has become overly 
politicized and important engineering details have been overlooked in 
Washington debates.

"We need to guard against turning technical and business decisions into 
political decisions," Verizon's Richard Lynch said at the Progress and 
Freedom Foundation's technology policy conference here.

Lynch gave the example of a customer placing a call using a voice over 
Internet Protocol, or VoIP, service that relies on time-sensitive 
packets. Unless a continuous stream of VoIP packets arrives, the call 
quality can suffer or even become incomprehensible.

How to accomplish that in a congested network? The answer may include 
delaying peer-to-peer transfers. "For me as a carrier, I need to satisfy 
the VoIP customer--whether it's mine or someone else's is irrelevant 
here--by delivering those packets in a timely fashion," Lynch said. 
"That may mean that for economic reasons, within the network, to keep 
the cost reasonable to keep the price reasonable, that I need to slow 
down (what's not) a time-sensitive file."

Some people hearing this "get all incensed and they accuse me of 
violating things I didn't even know that I could violate," he said. 
Customers who are "doing a P2P download or e-mail, they aren't going to 
see that 22-millisecond delay. And yet that's the kind of thing that 
seems to (cause) paranoia."

A Verizon representative told us after the talk that the company is not 
prioritizing VoIP over peer-to-peer traffic, and that Lynch was speaking 
generally about approaches to the problem of congestion that all 
broadband providers face. Verizon has stressed that it spends over $16 
billion a year on adding greater capacity to its network and says it is 
working collaboratively with peer-to-peer companies through the P4P 
working group to "maximize networks for consumers."

Lynch's remarks come weeks after the Federal Communications Commission 
ruled against Comcast for adopting the same general sort of network 
management practices. By a narrow 3-2 vote, the FCC handed Comcast a 
cease-and-desist order telling it not to interfere with BitTorrent 
transfers, even though the company had already ceased the practice back 
in March.

What may strike an outside observer as bizarre is that the FCC votes for 
an order before it's actually written. The order is still being drafted, 
and the text of the document will eventually be released. (One source in 
a position to know said that the dissenting FCC commissioners still 
haven't been given the text.)

Taking the measure of Net neutrality

Joe Waz, Comcast's senior vice president for external affairs, said the 
arguments of Net neutrality proponents--presumably meaning groups like 
Free Press and Public Knowledge--were "absurd."

"The issue was an engineering issue," Waz said in a panel discussion 
following Lynch's speech. He added that critics claimed Comcast was 
trying to disadvantage P2P video to benefit its own video offerings--but 
they never explained "why we wouldn't interfere with streaming video" 
from sites like YouTube that could be handled better.

Robert McDowell, one of the two dissenting FCC commissioners, said there 
were "evidentiary jurisprudence" problems with the agency's ruling. In 
part, McDowell said, "there were a couple of unsigned declarations" that 
the FCC relied on.

"Governments need to make sure they have a very thorough record," he 
said. "The FCC of late has not been doing that."

Kathleen Abernathy, a former FCC commissioner and now a partner at the 
law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, agreed that the term Net 
neutrality made little sense. (Abernathy is also a director of the 
Progress and Freedom Foundation, a free-market group that has been a 
critic of the concept.)

"It was such a great phrase that it's morphed into more than what it 
really is," Abernathy said. "You have to peel it back and ask, 'What do 
you really mean?'"

Both Comcast and Verizon said that engineers, not lawyers and lobbyists, 
should be making network management decisions. "I do get very, very 
concerned that the people who are taking things like deep packet 
inspection and making it a horrible thing need to look at it from an 
engineer's viewpoint," Lynch said.

On a related note, Lynch said that Verizon was trying to work 
cooperatively with large content holders--the very ones that said Monday 
they wanted broadband providers to filter their networks--and wanted 
them to "feel comfortable that their content will be dealt with in the 
way they truly believe it should be."

But he stopped short of saying Verizon would actively monitor its 
customers' online activities to detect copyright violations. "I can't 
tell you that I will police for you," he said. "I don't think it would 
be appropriate for me to do that...(We want) to stay on the right side 
of the privacy position that we've taken as a company."

AT&T, by contrast, said in January that it was testing technology to 
spot piratical activity. On Monday, we asked the company about its 
current plans. (We asked: "Can you confirm that AT&T is not monitoring 
and has no plans to monitor its customers' traffic or other online 
activities to detect possible copyright infringements?")

Spokesman Michael Balmoris replied in a way that didn't exactly answer 
the question: "We have said that we are working with some in the content 
industry with the goal of encouraging the legal downloads of movies, TV 
shows, and other entertainment and content--we want our customers to 
access any legal content they want. In addition, let's set the record 
straight: we have not said that we are going to filter our customers 
traffic to detect possible copyright violations."

Updated at 11 p.m. PT with subsequent comments from a Verizon 
representative.