Akamai either owns the lines on the "superfast superclean superhighway" (Joel's words) between the Akamai nodes, or they have purchased preferential traffic treatment from someone who owns those lines.
"superfast superclean superhighway" means "we have a private network." There's nothing special going on. Call up your telco and say you want a 10 gigabit connection from new york to LA and they'll be happy to oblige.
Just because two computers in the world are talking doesn't mean they use the big-i Internet.
Such a purchased private network is what I meant by "owns the lines" (even if in practice such connections are rented from telcos).
Which leads me back to my main point: why should 'neutrality' regulations care whether a telco offers a 10 gbps dedicated line, or preferential routing for 10 gbps worth of traffic on their shared lines?
And if the motivation for buying either of those is the exact same value -- snappier service for your end users -- that Akamai sells, why is Akamai's service celebrated, but alternate services based on traffic shaping considered a 'neutrality' violation?
Because when your local ISP does it, they are abusing their monopoly.
If it was actually an open market with real competition, then I wouldn't care about net neutrality, because there would be plenty of options for non-broken internet access. However, if I can only get access through one or two providers, then those providers have an incentive to extort money out of websites by threatening to degrade access to their sites.
I think the real fix to the net neutrality problem is to open up local access so that the phone/cable company only provides the wire, and an unlimited number of ISPs compete to provide the net access. The phone/cable company probably shouldn't be allowed to provide the internet access, since they will inevitably abuse their monopoly (and necessary monopolies should be kept as limited as possible).
Agreed 100% that local competition is the best fix, either by enforced sharing of the scarce last-hop wires, or introduction of new paths (new wires or wireless technology).
Enforced 'neutrality' could push real competition further away, by limiting the kinds of offerings and profits that attract new entrants.
Also, for a sense of proportion: even though local access in the US is usually a cable/dsl duopoly, and total speeds lag some other national markets, prices continue to fall and speeds continue to increase. No last-mile ISP has 'extorted' websites with threats of degraded access.
So there's no urgent need for legislators and regulators to start dictating how service is delivered, as if there will never be competition. If they want to help, they should adopt policies that spur new entrants, not tie the hands of current providers.
Historically we've had real neutrality without any regulation. In the last few years the local monopolies have made a number of moves to turn that neutrality off, and in some cases there have been serious abuses; and they've also started trying to persuade politicians that neutrality is a bad idea. Regulation that maintains the status quo of network neutrality is going to be a lot easier to achieve than regulation repeal to strip local phone and cable providers of their legal regulated monopolies.
...is almost always a bad idea. We need new services, new investment, new entrants.
Opnnness can defend itself -- it got this far. If any of the alleged 'abuses' truly became 'serious' that would give a marketing coup to competitors and spur to new entrants.
The idea that regulating the existing monopolies is 'easier to achieve' than true competition is a self-fulfilling prophecy. New regulations entrench present-day services, and flatter regulators into thinking only they, and not competition, can protect customers.
If a shortage of competition is the real problem -- and it is -- policies should address that, not enshrine the current lack of competition in regulations.
Does RON == Resilient Overlay Networks? And do you think Akamai's selling points and pricing indicate they're improving end-to-end peformance without buying any special paths?
Yes and yes. My understanding of Akamai's philosophy is cheap redundant hardware plus cheap (often free) redundant dumb bandwidth plus genius software.
