[AusNOG] Fwd: [Internet Australia - members] Net neutrality

[ausftth at mail.com]

Vijay Sivaraman wrote:
> I would like to weigh in (as an academic) on the net neutrality discussion - we have recently authored a position paper that surveys perspectives from around the world.
> This is to appear in the ACM Computer Communications Review (CCR) journal in Jan 2016, and is freely available at: 
> http://www2.ee.unsw.edu.au/~vijay/pubs/jrnl/16ccr.pdf
> I am most welcome to any comments on our article, including pertinent things that we may have omitted, and your views on what we (the research community) can do 
> do shape the net neutrality debate in Australia.

What a terrible, sloppy paper. It states that CDNs are a form of prioritization and conflates CDNs with network neutrality violations. It also confuses congestion with quality and implies that peering is a form of prioritization.

The paper also presents value judgements without any corraborating research and takes an explicit non-network neutrality stance.

I do admire the level of out of touchedness with reality that leads the authors to surmise that the only reason consumers are against paid prioritization is due to the deals being stuck in backrooms.

The paper also posits a tragedy of commons by underinvestment in broadband networks unless network neutrality is abolished. This is an outlandish position to take given that it has been shown in the US that network neutrality legislation has had no effect on profitability or investment. The main observable effect has been that any lingering peering issues have been cleared up, which is a clear win.

The proposal in chapter 4 is beyond silly. The proposal only benefits the ISP by introducing a billing point for rent seeking. It's a losing proposition for the CSP and an unnecessary headache for the consumer. It's very much not a win-win-win, but a win-lose-lose proposition.

Furthermore there is no feasible way to implement the proposal in current access networks and the proposal assumes an ISP network without oversubscription, congestion or chokepoints. Any such network would immediately make the proposal redundant.

Also, do we really need to contribute to link rot and source obfuscation by using URL shorteners in academic papers?

I can only assume the writers have no real world network or industry experience. I do wonder where they get their funding from, tho.

In closing, this is not a research paper, it is an opinion piece. I can only recommend retracting the paper.

Jared