An interesting Net Neutrality micro-debate has surfaced surrounding Akamai and whether Akamai’s services are a violation of Net Neutrality principles. This argument, produced by an influential Internet law professor, was used to illustrate that the Internet has never been neutral.
Net Neutrality, especially when you get into the technical minutia of the debate, can be a dense and difficult concept, and often advocates have to fall back on an I-know-a-violation-when-I-see-it argument. Too often this observation comes after a perceived breach of consumer trust and rights as a proof of concept.
Tim Lee, though, does a good job of putting Net Neutrality in the simplest of terms:
“Network neutrality is about the routing of packets. A network is neutral if it faithfully transmits information from one end of the network to the other and doesn’t discriminate among packets based on their contents. Neutrality is, in other words, about the behavior of the routers that move packets around the network.”
It’s about other things, too, but that’s about as succinct an answer for a difficult concept you’ll find. It’s also about not allowing network providers to interfere with the information flow across the network, which is something ISP consumers expect, and not allowing them to create faster highways for the highest bidders, effectively creating entry barriers for low budget newcomers to the online market.
This is where the Akamai distinction comes in. Akamai provides a caching and redirection service for clients in order to speed up load times and relieve congestion on the network. According to Net Neutrality opponents, this amounts to (perhaps only at its semantic base) not just a tiered network – where a client pays for speedier delivery – but also an interference with or manipulation of data.
The problem, says University of Pennsylvania law professor Christopher Yoo (the Net Neutrality antithesis to Columbia’s Timothy Wu), lies with redirecting a requested URL to a cached version on an Akamai server:
“The problem is that content delivery networks violate network neutrality. Not only does URL redirection violate the end-to-end argument by introducing intelligence into the core of the network; the fact that content delivery networks are commercial entities means that their benefits are available only to those entities willing to pay for their services.”
Lee isn’t sure that argument holds water:
“This might be a violation of some extremely broad version of network neutrality, and there’s certainly reason to worry that an overzealous future FCC might start trying to regulate the relationship between ISPs and Akamai. But Akamai is not, as Yoo would have it, evidence that the Internet is already non-neutral.”
Lee also agues that Akamai works at the application level, like the Web or email, by adding servers near the end user to increase efficiency for the end user, and not at the network level.
Other distinctions include that redirection to mirrored content is not interference with access to that content and there is no intelligence involved in the process. It is not an ISP double-dipping by creating chokepoints and effectively walling off content for reasons that suit their purposes.
Net Neutrality would mandate that ISPs provide the access for a fair price and then get out of the way. Improving the efficiency and speed with which people (the ISP customers) can find and disseminate information is not a violation of Net Neutrality principles. Favoring Yahoo over Google and purposefully making one search engine faster while degrading the other, would be a violation.