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Mark Goldberg's blog, Telecom Trends, today featured a guest post by Queen's University student Alex Goldberg (relation?) about net neutrality on university campuses. The gist of the post is that some students are getting slow connections because other students are consuming bandwidth by downloading music and movies, and because capacity is limited, it's legit for the school to prioritize some types of content over others. Well I don't know whether Queen's actually does this or not, but I just found out that my school, the University of Ottawa, already shapes my traffic.
Interestingly, I learned about this fact earlier in the week while preparing for a course I teach about Digital Music. The course covers, among other things, the economic, legal, cultural and technological issues surrounding p2p downloading. Part of the pedagogy is to demonstrate how p2p works, in order to facilitate a more informed discussion of the topic. (Don't worry legal eagles: we just browse, we don't download. We're not breaking any laws and, more importantly, not consuming more than our fair share of capacity.) Turns out, though, that the in-class demo would've fallen flat. In my pre-class prep, I tried testing LimeWire, only to learn that I couldn't get much of a connection. It was simply too slow, so we couldn't do our little experiment effectively.
Some readers might realize that this seems to be Mr. Goldberg's point. That the solution to stave off frustration for students researching and writing term papers is to deprioritize p2p traffic. I guess my response is that it isn't easy to make these kinds of calls, and I certainly don't want my university network administrator, let alone a software program, making the tough decisions about what content I get fast access to and what I've got to wait for.
I wanted to use the p2p connection for pedagogical purposes. And while I admit I might be part of a freakish minority using p2p in this way, I can point to other problems caused by traffic shaping at universities. This week I'm teleconferencing the Digital Music course to students at the University of Puerto Rico. All of the video being piped back and forth between our schools is being recorded. These recordings will be archived and made available to students as torrents. Do my classes deserve to be deprioritized? More broadly, despite the fact that p2p is presently used mostly for sharing copyright-protected movies and music (which I don't condone, by the way), there are also many examples of legit p2p practices. And who knows how these technologies could potentially be used in the future? That is, only if they're not discriminated against.
I checked with my network people and was told that the distinctions made by the automated shaping software aren't exactly subtle, and the program isn't sophisticated enough to route me or my students around the roadblocks. Shaping traffic depends on sometimes inaccurate presumptions about the content being transmitted as well as subjective (or sometimes financially motivated) judgments about the relative importance of that content. While Mr. Goldberg suggests that prioritizing some types of content (i.e. academic materials, however that is defined) is especially appropriate on a university campus, I'd argue the exact opposite. Universities, even more than any other service providers, ought to be completely content agnostic. Campus networks, like classrooms, should be structured to maximize openness and encourage experimentation with new modes of sharing knowledge.
For now, though my network isn't neutral, at least it is comforting to know the network admins won't be weighing in on my tenure application.
UPDATE: There's a Globe story today highlighting how "Legit bittorrent users face traffic jam." The article points out that bittorrent is not only used for copyright infringement: "The service is also used by open-source software developers, university professors distributing class lectures and independent filmmakers looking for an audience for their films." Moreover, the article referenced a documentary called "On Piracy," which was made by a University of Ottawa student and is distributed via bittorrent. I'd like to consider recommending the film to my Digital Music students, but sadly, it is taking forever for me to download this from work. And even if I do assign the film, my students' homework is destined to be deprioritized.
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