The FCC is finally going to publish its net neutrality ruling (some time in the next couple of months), and while the move isn’t going to change a darn thing in ISP behavior (people have been complying anyway), it will open the door for a flood of appeals of the ruling. It’s also likely that Republicans will try to get it overturned through legislation, though most everyone believes that a bill like that wouldn’t pass the Senate at this point.
I’m on the fence with this bill. Most of it is reasonable; non-discrimination of traffic based on website or traffic type. Where I’m not sure is in the fact that the rules appear to bar “pay for priority” services where the paying party is the content provider. The FCC has said that this would put smaller players in the market at a disadvantage, and I believe that the problem is that smaller players aren’t likely to have free access to content to distribute under such agreements. What the order really does is make over-the-Internet delivery of something that requires some QoS less attractive, because it would force the user to accept best-efforts delivery or elect to pay themselves. I also think, based on my own (unsuccessful) attempt in the 1990s to develop pan-ISP standards for QoS-based peering, that there is little chance for customer-pays services developing that cross ISP boundaries. Content providers would have some leverage there. So I think the FCC’s rule here could hurt—but where my waffling comes in is that it probably won’t. There is little chance of content being delivered end-to-end anyway; the CDN is on the rise.
In any event, the Order will soon be tested, not on grounds of reasonability of its measures (the FCC is the “Court of Fact” in communications issues) but on jurisdiction. At least one Court of Appeals has already said the FCC lacked the jurisdiction to enforce neutrality; does it have the jurisdiction to impose this order, then? We’ll see.
Cisco held its investor meeting yesterday, and the Street view of the event was considerably more favorable than its view of rival Juniper. The analysts appear to agree with Cisco’s Chambers when he says that Juniper is “vulnerable”. My readers know that I wrote about this Cisco view some time back. Cisco says this is because Juniper is spread too thinly between service provider and enterprise. Along the way, Chambers indicated that Cisco would be taking an edgier position against HP, and acknowledged that Huawei was a strong competitor.
So what’s really going on here? Is Cisco going to give us the networking equivalent of the negative ad campaign, and if so, why? Negative ads are designed not to influence voters but to disgust them, to keep the dangerous unaligned out of the polling places so your party hacks matter more. Keeping the buyer out of the market is exactly what Cisco is risking here, and why take that risk? It could be because Cisco is hoping to make something happen, and they want Juniper in particular to be on the defensive.
Juniper is a habitual counter-puncher; they have let Cisco set the stage time after time and boxed against the Cisco initiatives. The fact that Cisco thinks Juniper is spread too thin almost invites everyone to believe that Juniper might “un-spread” itself, and that could only come by reducing its enterprise commitments—Juniper depends too much on the service provider side. If that’s what Cisco wants, then it wants it because Juniper’s upcoming QFabric might be harmful to Cisco’s data center and content strategy. If Juniper responds to Cisco as usual, by simply rebutting the comments Cisco makes, then Cisco will control the market dialog. If you want Juniper to talk about something, attack them there and they’ll help you drag the issue around the media circuit. If you don’t want something discussed, then just stay mum; Juniper will not raise the issue either. So for Juniper here, the right answer is to forget what Cisco is saying and focus on what Cisco doesn’t want Juniper to talk about.