It is in the best interest of any broadband user who adheres to the law to see that other customers filling up the broadband pipe with infringing traffic are stymied; that leaves more pipe for the legal user. Have you ever streamed a movie or TV show through Netflix? Before the presentation begins, there’s a pause. That is Netflix determining how much downstream bandwidth you have available to you from your ISP. Once it determines that amount, it fills that path with the video, ensuring the maximum quality possible. With any ISP, but particularly with cable ISPs that have asynchronous upstream and downstream paths and shared neighborhood nodes, your consumer experience is directly related to Internet traffic.

This is important, because there are steps ISPs can take to reduce infringing traffic online. It’s important to do so in a way that respects consumer privacy, but as NBC Executive Vice President and General Counsel Rick Cotton pointed out recently in The Hill, network traffic management is already being done in a way respectful of consumer privacy.

As we have noted, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski made clear in Senate testimony and in the FCC’s own proposed rulemaking on net neutrality that ISPs have the right and should retain the right to block illegal traffic on their networks, and he is in line with the Obama Administration on this.

This makes sense; imagine a developer building a private road in a new neighborhood and being told by the local government that the developer could do nothing to stop drug dealers from parking on the street and conducting business transactions. Don’t you think that within a few weeks the road would be all but impassable due to parked cars and eager customers?

If you are paying an ISP for broadband in order to avoid paying creators for their works, then you’ll have an objection to network management that targets your behavior, behavior that not only violates the law but violates the very terms of service you agreed to when signing up for broadband. If you are a broadband customer who wants a robust experience and is in fact paying for creative works, you don’t want a neighbor gaming the system, taking up broadband capacity and forcing you to pay more for creative works because you are subsidizing your neighbor’s infringement.

In this scenario, present today online, the infringer wins twice and the honest customer loses twice. There is technology existing today that can help right this wrong. Note Mr. Cotton makes clear that many of those solutions do not involve filtering or inspecting packets, but that is one avenue an ISP can pursue. They have the legal and technological ability to do so now, and should that legal right continue, technology will continue to improve in ways that will further ensure consumer privacy while targeting infringement with even more efficiency.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 12:28 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under FCC, Obama, network neutrality, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.