Blog: Net Neutrality

I’ve been at Function Point for the better part of 5 years, although I wear many hats here at Function Point most of our clients will recognize me as the guy that winds up on the phone whenever anything QuickBooks related comes up. The Function Point system is built to encapsulate the time tracking and project management aspects of a Professional Services agency and to export relevant data to an Accounting System. My experience has been that creative agencies are better off managing invoicing/project management and accounting/payroll with separate applications. With QuickBooks being geared for Accountants and Bookkeepers we have a free hand to stream line Function Point for time tracking, tasking, estimating and detailed invoicing. Aside from work I like travel, watch movies and stay up to date on the political events around me. Take the recent news about a new U.S. policy on how the Internet works, I have been watching the issue media and I’ll do my best to explain what ‘Net Neutrality’ is without taking a political stance and hopefully without getting too technical.

First a quick explanation of what makes the Internet different then other communication systems. Take the example of how a voice message sent along a traditional phone system, the message will travel along one set route as one single piece of data. With the Internet the voice message will be broken into a million pieces (packets) by software and sent out along many paths to its destination where it is re-assembled by software again. An Internet transmission from New York to Los Angles can have part of the messaging routed through Canada, while another part of the message is routed through Texas while yet another part of the message was sent through Miami, and along each route the data can be in the hands of different telecommunications companies. Right now at every ‘intersection’ of the Internet ‘highway’ data packets are looked at by the Traffic Cops of the internet (routing servers) and are directed to which route has the least traffic. To do their job these traffic cops have to do nothing more then look at the “To Address” of the data packets, and that’s where Net Neutrality comes in.

With Net Neutrality the traffic cops will only be able to look at the ‘To Address’ and verify the content is legal. The telecoms want to look at more then the “To Address”, they want to know the computer program that Data Packet is for, i.e. is the Data Packet Voice(VOIP)/Video(YouTube)/Text etc. To understand why is the reason I explained how the Internet works first. With something like a text web page, if the page is broken up into thousands of packets and the packets arrive in a random order at their destination over a few seconds, the user will see the page load and the pieces will fill in as they come in from the Internet. With a voice or video transmission it becomes very important that the message comes in with the same order it left in, otherwise the message will be garbled. The telecoms want to look at the data type so then can send Voice an Video data packets with a higher priority then other data, or at least that’s their marketing position. Other companies like Google and Skype want to use the Internet to run their own phone companies over the Internet, they are afraid that Traffic Cops will be used to discriminate against the data packets sent by their programs because it competes with the core business of the telecoms. Telecoms control the traffic cops, without Net Neutrality they have a lot of control over how well every program that uses the Internet works.

Labels: Net Neutrality