Verizon’s chief technologist took a swipe at Net neutrality advocates on Tuesday, saying the concept has become overly politicized and important engineering details have been overlooked in Washington debates.
“We need to guard against turning technical and business decisions into political decisions,” Verizon’s Richard Lynch said at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s technology policy conference here.
Lynch gave the example of a customer placing a call using a voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, service that relies on time-sensitive packets. Unless a continuous stream of VoIP packets arrives, the call quality can suffer or even become incomprehensible.
How to accomplish that in a congested network? The answer may include delaying peer-to-peer transfers. “For me as a carrier, I need to satisfy the VoIP customer–whether it’s mine or someone else’s is irrelevant here–by delivering those packets in a timely fashion,” Lynch said. “That may mean that for economic reasons, within the network, to keep the cost reasonable to keep the price reasonable, that I need to slow down (what’s not) a time-sensitive file.”
Some people hearing this “get all incensed and they accuse me of violating things I didn’t even know that I could violate,” he said. Customers who are “doing a P2P download or e-mail, they aren’t going to see that 22-millisecond delay. And yet that’s the kind of thing that seems to (cause) paranoia.”
Joe Waz, Comcast’s senior vice president for external affairs, said the arguments of Net neutrality proponents–presumably meaning groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge–were “absurd.”
“The issue was an engineering issue,” Waz said in a panel discussion following Lynch’s speech. He added that critics claimed Comcast was trying to disadvantage P2P video to benefit its own video offerings–but they never explained “why we wouldn’t interfere with streaming video” from sites like YouTube that could be handled better.
Read the full story in CNET News here.
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