Pipes, The CRTC, Mexican Donkey Porn and UBB
February 20, 2011 | 2 Comments
What a couple of weeks. The CRTC casually announced that they would allow usage-based billing (UBB). Within days hundreds of thousands of Canadians signed a petition (even apathetic people like me-more on this later). Then Tony Clement’s twitter feed took charge and said that the decision would be reversed:
So what’s going on here? Do Canadians deserve unlimited internet at a flat fee? Is that possible or desirable? What are people really griping about?
1. Unlimited Access
To cut to the chase, Canadians are never going to get unlimited bandwidth at a high speed for a low fixed price. The reasons are an interesting combination of technical, social and economic factors.
Let’s start with the technical. When you use your internet, you don’t really have a direct connection to the Internet. Rather, all the people in your building or area are grouped into a unit and you share a connection to the Internet. This mechanism, whereby multiple people share a connection, is what keeps costs down (if everyone needed their own power plant, we’d all be living by candlelight). But it also introduces a new point of failure into the system: if someone hogs the shared connection, you can’t get on the web.
When the web was mostly used for sharing images and text it was pretty difficult for someone to hog the connection. There are only so many pictures you can look at and words you can read. But then, the world changed. Online video exploded after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and widespread broadband access led to the proliferation of torrents (peer to peer file sharing).
The Internet is opaque and it’s difficult to get detailed analysis of what type of data is being sent over it. However, some folks in Germany did some analysis back in 2009 and they found that over 50% of total traffic was peer-to-peer traffic: basically file sharing via torrents.
Now, this does not mean that over 50% of people are using torrents to share files. These numbers are aggregate traffic numbers, not a per-user analysis. If someone uses BitTorrent to download a 1080p Mexican donkey porn video they consume an enormous amount of bandwidth. The file is probably 2 gigabytes in size; for perspective, an email is about 20 kilobytes in size. That’s a difference of 100,000. It’s conceivable that some of your neighbours are using 100x as much bandwidth as you.
Part of the reason why this can occur is that your local Internet access connection is a shared good that no who uses actually owns. This is like the old ‘tragedy of the commons‘ where farmers share a field and everyone has the incentive to try and put one more sheep than everyone else on the field. If the farmers can’t punish any individual farmer for putting too many sheep on the field, the field is eventually ruined.
We don’t see too many starving sheep farmers these days because society found a couple of solutions to the problem. One is social pressure, whereby if someone abuses the commons they get called out – for instance, everyone scowls at the bad farmer as he walks around town; surprisingly, this works really well. The other is called ‘tit-for-tat‘ where everyone mimics the bad farmer’s action (i.e., everyone adds more sheep, even though it hurts everyone) until the original offender stops and then everyone stops.
Neither of these solutions really work with your friendly neighbourhood donkey porn aficionado. You have no way of knowing who on your connection is using up all the bandwidth. It’s likely just a few percent of all users; if you randomly picked 10 people you probably wouldn’t find an offender. Moreover, you can’t create a feedback loop to them: if you use up more bandwidth, they won’t necessarily know that it’s you doing so; they might think it’s a technical issue somewhere else on the Internet.
So, what can we do? One option is to throttle the amount of peer-to-peer data. However, this is not a desirable solution as the bedrock of the Internet is that all data is equal. As soon as some data is considered ‘more important’ than others we end up with very poor unintended consequences. For instance, Skype uses peer-to-peer data to send video calls; I don’t want to lose the ability to talk to my distant family members simply because my local cable provider thinks I’m downloading torrents. Do you trust your internet provider to properly inspect and regulate every packet of data that goes across their network?
Another option is to start sharing details of individuals’ internet usage. But this is a huge invasion of our privacy. Additionally, I’d argue that the social ties amongst people who share an internet access connection aren’t strong enough to create those feedback loops to shame offenders. When you’re farming, you all meet on the commons daily; I have no idea who the person three doors away from me in my condo is.
That leaves us with a simpler option: billing caps. If people want to use lots of bandwidth, they have to pay.
And that, in a nutshell, is why you are never going to have unlimited, high-speed internet access.
2. The Petition
So, if usage-based billing is so logical, why did a few hundred thousand people – including yours truly – sign a petition?
Because usage-based billing is just one part of the complex issue of Internet access and Canadians should be legitimately fretting over their access.
Let’s go back to the discussion above. Think of your shared Internet access connection as a pipe. If it’s full, then you can put more water in the pipe and there are no problems. However, once the pipe is full, any more water backs up the pipe and you have to either get a bigger pipe or reduce the amount of water going into the pipe.
Canadians are frustrated because they don’t really know big the pipes are. They’ve been told how much they can put in the pipe (their internet caps) but they don’t know if the pipe is near full or pretty empty. This has big implications because if they go over their caps they pay a lot of money – and if no new pipe is required that’s 100% profit for the pipe owner.
High profits for pipe owners would be fine if Canadians believe that there was a chance that new entrants would come in the market and build more pipes, but that’s not going to happen. No one is going to start a new cable or telephone business in Canada any time soon so Canadians are pissed off that they might be stuck indefinitely paying higher prices.
Moreover, we’re jealously looking at our neighbours’ shiny, new low-cost pipes. Hong Kong just built out 1 gigabyte per second symmetric internet access: that’s about 100-10,000x faster than what I get in Vancouver and it costs 50% of what I pay. I know that Hong Kong is a small, dense area, but how come we can’t get anything like this in our downtown urban centers?
Canadians are also savvy enough to know that the future means more water. As we move to a cloud-based world where the Internet serves up more and more stuff – streaming videos from NetFlix or Apple, high resolution photos of our friends on Facebook, video lectures from MIT or the Khan Academy and video chats with distant relatives on Skype or Facetime – we want to know that our network providers are going to be ready to help us with this.
Unfortunately, we see every signal that they’re not. Rogers reduced it’s caps shortly before NetFlix’s streaming service came to Canada: are we really supposed to believe that it suddenly became more expensive for them to operate their pipes at exactly that moment?
Similarly, if a Canadian watches a movie on the web, they pay for both the movie and the bandwidth (the size of the file that is the movie counts against their cap). However, if they order that same movie – for the same or lower price – through the video on demand service from their internet provider, they only pay for the movie. The bandwidth does not count against their cap. That doesn’t seem right to most people and allows our providers to artificially increase the cost of innovative, new web-based services.
And this is why Canadians are mad. Each of us as individuals has little or no power to affect change at our local cable or telephone company. We gave the telephone and cable companies mini-monopolies to provide their services, allowed them to rip up our roads and drill holes in the side of our houses. We made them for-profit companies and allowed them to provide all sorts of services that maximize their profits, even if it’s at our expense.
However, we created the CRTC to regulate the market on our behalf. We expect the CRTC to understand all the issues underlying internet access and come up with the right set of economic incentives to make the market work and ensure that Canadians get the fastest, most reliable, cheapest broadband internet access possible and with enough bandwidth to deal with today’s and tomorrow’s needs.
Right now we don’t feel like anyone at the CRTC is really thinking this through. So bring on more simple petitions. We want to be heard.
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2 Responses to “Pipes, The CRTC, Mexican Donkey Porn and UBB”
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February 20th, 2011 @ 7:47 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lindsay Fashion, The Commons. The Commons said: We've got a new post!: Pipes, The CRTC, Mexican Donkey … http://thecommons-ccd.com/2011/02/pipes-the-crtc-mexican-donkey-porn-and-ubb/ ubb [...]
May 25th, 2012 @ 2:01 pm
Wow that was odd. I just wrote an incredibly long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t appear. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyhow, just wanted to say fantastic blog!
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