Net Neutrality Will Require Us to Shine the Light on Internet Providers

A neutral Internet—one where Internet service providers (ISPs) can’t unfairly limit our access to parts of the Net, create special fast lanes for some services, or otherwise handle data in non-neutral ways—will require more than just rules that prohibit bad conduct. We’re also going to need real transparency.

Transparency is the crucial first step toward meaningful network neutrality. Without a detailed and substantive window into how providers are managing their networks, users will be unable to determine the reason why some webpages are slow to load. New services that hope to reach those users will have a harder time figuring out if there is some artificial barrier in place, and competitors won’t know whether and how they can offer better options (assuming some kind of competitive environment exists).

Fortunately, the FCC realizes how important transparency will be in ensuring a neutral Net. A key section of the network neutrality proposal released by the FCC last month asks for comments on how the agency should require Internet providers to disclose how they manage traffic over their networks. Here are some initial thoughts.

Today, we’re in the dark

The FCC’s current transparency requirements are too vague to catch most of the harms of non-neutral behavior. At the moment the only thing an ISP has to do to be “transparent” by FCC standards is “publicly disclose accurate information regarding the network management practices, performance, and commercial terms of its broadband Internet access services.”

For most Internet providers this means a quick paragraph or two on their website describing at a very high level how they deal with congestion, and perhaps some statistics about how close their advertised speeds are to the true speeds users experience.

In order to generate these statistics, many of the largest ISPs take part in an FCC study called Measuring Broadband America. This ongoing study uses third-party white boxes (router-like devices that users plug into their home Internet connections) distributed to volunteers across the country to measure broadband speeds. The study averages data about download and upload speed and latency over the period of a month. (Latency is the time it takes for a packet of data to travel from one point on the network to another.)

Unfortunately, Measuring Broadband America, in its current form, can’t detect most of the harms of non-neutral network practices. That’s because most of its tests only measure the speed of a connection to artificial testing servers, not connections to popular websites that people normally access in the course of their browsing. Current testing would never capture, for example, the recent problems with slow Netflix download speeds for Comcast and Verizon subscribers.

The only current test that does measure how long it takes to access popular websites isn’t very rigorous and is limited to webpage loading time, not capturing other essential factors that indicate forms of ISP misbehavior, like application-specific traffic discrimination or content modification.

We need more sunshine

If the FCC plans to issue net neutrality rules that actually make a difference, the agency needs to expand on its transparency requirements and demand that ISPs disclose more details about the management of their networks.

More specifically, in addition to measuring download and upload speed and latency, ISPs should also disclose statistics on jitter, uptime, packet loss, and packet corruption, among other details. Here’s what those terms mean:

• Jitter is the variability in the latency of packets, i.e., how much the delay between a packet being sent from its source and being received at its destination changes over time. Low jitter is important for applications like VoIP and video-chat, because if packets take different lengths of time to travel, the resulting audio or video stream can appear jumpy.

• Uptime is the percentage of time a user’s Internet connection is actually available. Uptime is important because even if your connection is ridiculously fast, it’s not very useful if it’s down most of the time.

• Packet loss is the percentage of packets that never make it to their destination, usually as a result of being dropped <