US Network neutrality solution
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
Network neutrality in the US is a ridiculous issue. Today (10. July 2008) there is network neutrality in the United States, meaning that telecommunications companies don’t offer different rates to web users based on type of online content or service type; however, there are no clear legal restrictions against this and things might change.
I wrote down my notes on a solution that will help to keep the American network freedom.
It’s ridiculous that American citizens have even to worry about this issue.
Just to worry Americans less, I wrote down my notes on a technical solution that will help to keep the current status quo of the American network freedom.
I’d imagine that this will be something integrated as an Firefox/Opera/IE7 add-on that seamlessly integrates with the browser. User won’t even recognize that the add-on is in use.
Behind the scenes:
- Browser add-on will get a proxy server assigned based on the load-balancing algorithm with each request
- Add-on will hook up into the navigation bar, ensuring that each request is send to the user’s original ISP first
- If the content is blocked (404, or redirect detection), or there is a speed limitation (network speedtest), add-on will request the proxy to check that the content is truly there
- If the content exists the Proxy server will request the content on the user’s behalf and feed it to the client
- Bandwidth of proxies and the infrastructure maintenance will be quite expensive
- We could save money on the infrastructure maintenance by open-sourcing it
- The bandwidth costs could be partially covered by blocking the bandwidth expensive graphical banner ads on the sites, replacing it with fast-loading relevant text links. A lot of work has been done on the ad detection already, so it looks doable. Content providers might not like it though.
Proxies are used in China, where CISCO blocked a reasonable part of the network. I’ve read it works, unless you’ll get caught.
Anyway, shouldn’t this two-tiered service be impossible just form the market-driven economy point of view? Would you buy a castrated internet connection? No way. Those ISPs that won’t provide full access are out of business via competition that gives its users the full online freedom.
If the American market is not competitive enough… we’ll have some fun with the above.
So what do you think?
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