Tom Evslin answers my questions
I left some questions for Tom Evslin on the talk he gave today at Berkman on neutrality regulations. Tom has a technical background, and while he’s not come out in favor of new regulations, he appears sympathetic to the arguments for them. Check his responses at Fractals of Change.
I post some reactions later, but suffice to say his first comment is the most interesting. It goes into what seems to me like a very gray area for end-to-end: selecting routes through the public Internet for low latency. In general, the end-to-end network structure doesn’t allow that as routes are supposed to be the network’s business. We need to understand that and what it implies.
UPDATE: I’ve responded to Tom’s take on “application neutrality”. He gave a VoIP service he started as an example of using “the stupid network” to accomplish different things than what its architects envisioned, but it seems to me it proves the opposite case: a multi-service network promotes innovation better than a single-service one does. My response is here.
PicoBusiness » Blog Archive » Net Neutrality:
August 8th, 2006 at 11:51 AM
[...] I’ve modified my stance on Net Neutrality some since I first wrote about it, although I still think that the people will win. But there’s an interesting debate between Tom Evslin and Richard Bennett on the topic. [...]
The Original Blog » Blog Archive » How to do VoIP over the Internet:
August 9th, 2006 at 3:17 PM
[...] Tom Evslin’s talk yesterday at the Berkman Center (download MP3 here) on net neutrality was interesting for a couple of reasons. I’m apparently Public Enemy Number 1 among the champions of freedom. No sooner did Tom mention my name (the first part of his talk was an attempt to rebut my concerns about the Snowe-Dorgan regulations) than some yahoo jumped up and started screaming that I’m nothing but a troll, not even an engineer, and just a puppet of the phone company. I believe said yahoo was David Isenberg, the creator of the “Stupid Network” meme and a genius at self-promotion. He interrupted Tom several more times with some fairly crazy ideas, and Tom finally had to shut him up. [...]