We’ve stamped out paid prioritization and settlement on the Internet, right? Well, the Internet is not our only consumeristic IP network. In fact, more and more traffic we think of as “Internet” traffic is carried on something else, something I’ll call the “Undernet”. Is this development good or bad, a threat to us or a major benefit? Who is doing it, and why? Let’s take a look, starting with a story from Light Reading.
The Light Reading story is about Akamai expanding its own fiber deployment. Akamai, of course, is a content delivery network (CDN) provider, and while everyone doesn’t realize it, the majority of video traffic likely rides on CDNs. In fact, what we call “the Internet” is a kind of composed interface to a complex multi-layered structure, and it only looks like a single network. CDNs have changed the Internet, and they may be only the tip of the iceberg.
The “original” Internet was a single network, and for quite a while (until the ‘90s, in fact) we really did have an “Internet backbone” and access links to it. That’s still sort-of-in-place, but CDNs changed the structure, most dramatically when video content became the dominant type of traffic.
The problem with backbone structures is that they have to carry the sum of all the traffic, and they introduce latency and reliability/QoS issues. If all the stuff we consumed on the Internet was random, there might not be much of an option. Grab a page here and another there, some images, and a video or a song, and you get traffic. The reality is that most of what we do on the Internet is what others do too, and that means that it’s often more efficient to store or “cache” material in places close to the users of the content. Video in particular, of course, because a smallish number of videos make up a lot of the content accessed by users. That’s what gave rise to CDNs.
A CDN provider will provide content storage at places where there’s a lot of content demand, like major metro areas, and connect or “peer” with the access ISPs there. That reduces the handling needed to give someone their content, and that improves the experience. There are dozens of CDN providers who offer content caching services, but many companies who deliver video are now doing their own CDN caching too.
And so are search companies like Google. Google’s network is so extensive that it actually duplicates a lot of the Internet itself, which is why Google can often deliver a stored copy of a website if the site itself is offline. Google has used technologies like SDN more extensively in their own network than network operators and ISPs have, and Google’s network is among the most efficient in traffic handling. Google’s network caches content, but it also supports delivery of Google services, and that’s where CDNs blur with “parallel Internets”.
The cloud providers are the coming force in creating these parallel Internets. Most public cloud access is via the Internet, and cloud providers who have a favored on-ramp to their cloud from the major areas that access it have an asset that could differentiate them from competitors. It’s very likely that eventually every major public cloud provider will have direct parallel-Internet connectivity to all their major market areas, and of course between all their own data centers.
Is this sort of thing good for us, the users of the Internet and cloud services? It is in the sense that it significantly improves our Internet experience. Content, particularly video content, would suffer major QoS issues without having all that direct fiber. But is it bad for “the Internet” as a conceptual network? That’s harder to say.
It’s easier to say why we don’t have all this parallel fiber being deployed as a part of the Internet. The reason is 1) that “the Internet” isn’t a single network but a bunch of interconnected providers, and 2) that there’s no real settlement for Internet traffic, meaning people don’t get paid to carry it. You have to pay to ride on a CDN, or build one yourself. Therefore, people build CDNs. Profit begats investment.
There have been concerns about what having an incentive to build expressways in parallel with the Internet, making the “old” version something like local roads. The regulatory requirements on these parallel networks are minimal, and of course they’re even less on “private” parallel networks built by cloud companies, search providers, or even content providers. The existence of parallel networks that are paid priority traffic paths also works against the view that any form of paid prioritization hurts the little guy. In fact, that whole argument on paid prioritization could be mooted by these parallel networks.
Then there’s privacy and security. Do parallel-path Internet alternatives have any rights to your information? Are Internet protections (whatever they are in a given national administration) protecting you on these networks? You don’t even know when you’re using one, so self-insurance here is a non-starter.
I’ve been a proponent of settlement among ISPs for literally decades, and a proponent of paid prioritization as well. It’s unrealistic to assume that if better QoS is valuable, someone won’t find a way to make money providing it. We have turned a blind eye to these parallel networks, and that’s fine except that we’re talking like we’re regulating the Internet to prevent something, when what we’re really doing is driving the “something” off the Internet proper, and dodging our regulatory attempts.
What kind of Internet would we have if settlement and paid prioritization made it profitable to create high-quality paths that combine to create the modern model of an “Internet backbone?” Would this have made content QoS more “populist” as regulatory proponents have argued? Would it have reduced profit-per-bit pressure on access ISPs? We’ll almost certainly never know. It’s likely too late to reverse the decisions of the past, even if we were to change the rules on settlement and prioritization. After all, we’ve changed them before, then changed them back…. Nobody would trust any position taken at this point.
What’s to come after the cloud providers build their backbones? Perhaps it’s the turn of the access ISPs, including mobile providers. We may have dozens of new parallel networks taking root as we speak, and I think that eventually we’ll have to reckon with the multiplication, both in terms of technology and in terms of regulations.