Some Traffic Management Practices Are Unreasonable

As part of the wider debate over net neutrality, traffic management practices of Internet Service Providers have become an issue of public concern. The Federal Communications Commission has asked for public input on whether deep packet inspection and other traffic management practices are reasonable forms of network management. Little attention has been paid to this issue within the academic networking community, and most Internet policy researchers have recommended a case-by-case analysis. This paper proposes a framework for the classification of traffic management practices as reasonable or unreasonable. I suggest that whether a traffic management practice is reasonable largely rests on the answers to four questions regarding the techniques and practices used. Based on these questions, I propose a framework that classifies techniques as unreasonable if they are unreasonably anti-competitive, cause undue harm to consumers, or unreasonably impair free speech. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how some unreasonable traffic management practices can be more directly and transparently accomplished through alternative practices that would be classified as reasonable.