In our globalized, post-industrial world, a single Canadian company can shape the Internet experience for 20 percent of the world's wireline broadband users. Sandvine makes deep packet inspection hardware that can identify and then block, shape, degrade, fold, spindle, or mutilate user traffic coming from particular applications such as Skype or BitTorrent clients. The 160 worldwide ISPs who use the company's products love this particular capability so much that a full 90 percent of them employ it to "manage" their networks in a discriminatory way.

According to the company, these 160 ISPs serve 20 percent of the world's wireline broadband connections. If 90 percent of the ISPs shape traffic by application, Sandvine equipment alone may be responsible for the application-specific discrimination that 18 percent of world wireline broadband users face—and that figure says nothing about all the other ISPs who use similar products from other vendors. If you thought that network neutrality was some kind of default position for the worldwide Internet, think again.

Let's innovate



In Sandvine's view, the only appropriate way to handle traffic shaping is to not regulate it—though governments can step in after the fact if there are egregious attacks on competition.

Sandvine made its revelations in a recent filing to Canadian regulators (read them all) as part of that country's ongoing network management proceeding. In essence, telecoms regulator CRTC wants to know whether Canada needs network neutrality guidelines. Final comments were due last week, and Sandvine took the opportunity to point out that discriminatory traffic shaping is already hugely popular around the world. Everybody's doing it!

"As a result of the different demands placed on a network by various applications and the differences in subscribers’ expectations of service quality between applications, most of Sandvine’s customers have adopted some form of application-specific ITMPs [Internet traffic management]," wrote the company.

And don't think it's not happening in the US, either, despite the smackdown Comcast received last year from the FCC for just this sort of behavior. "Sandvine estimates that approximately 90% of its 160 customers, which span 70 countries, use some form of application-specific traffic management policies, including most of its customers in the United States." If Canadian ISPs weren't able to use the same tools everyone else used, they might be at a disadvantage.

In Sandvine's view, the only appropriate way to handle traffic shaping is to not regulate it—though governments can step in after the fact if there are egregious attacks on competition. Why can't minimal upfront regulation work? Because ISPs must be able to innovate. "Nobody predicted the impact of P2P filesharing before it occurred," says the company's filing. "What kinds of demands will the mass adoption of applications like High-definition YouTube and Slingbox, which 'slings' TV signals to fixed line and wireless Internet devices, place upon the network? And what policies will be best to deal with them? We don’t yet know. Again, experimentation will be required."

The obvious rejoinder to this is: no one knows, but it doesn't matter. Limit people's Internet usage when necessary in a nondiscriminatory way and let them choose what applications to run and when to run them. Congestion can be alleviated by 1) building out capacity, 2) using data caps, and 3) throttling heavy users at peak times without regard to their content or applications. These are the steps taken by Comcast in response to the FCC, and they've led to few complaints.

Even Sandvine admits that nondiscriminatory throttling and user control are the future. "As a future step we see subscribers choosing their own ITMP traffic priorities; however, commercialization of this solution is still in progress. Halting this roadmap through a guideline that precluded application-specific policies would have a chilling effect on innovation and the future quality of the Internet experience for Canadian users." Good for them, though that last bit doesn't make much sense; such a policy would quite obviously spur the innovation in subscriber-oriented throttling choices that Sandvine says it is already working on.

Not everyone is down with the customer-focused approach, however. Bell Canada reminded the CRTC of its own (largely toothless) proposed guidelines for traffic shaping. These would allow ISPs like Bell to "take into account the real time vs. non-real time nature of applications (e.g. gaming vs. downloads)," which is just a way of saying that ISPs should have the right to decide if that Linux .iso you're downloading is something that you need immediately or if you can wait a while on it.

Consumer groups are outraged at these kinds of proposals, of course, and so is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the country's public broadcaster. In its own comments last week, the CBC argues that traffic shaping really is about "innovation"—but innovation at the edges.

"CBC/Radio-Canada believes the debate surrounding P2P provides the best argument for prohibiting any type of protocol-specific traffic management," says the filing. "It would be profoundly bad public policy to permit ISPs to constrain innovation by way of shortsighted traffic management targeted at today or tomorrow’s 'problem child.' All traffic management practices should be protocol agnostic."

Sandvine thinks that's "laughable."