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.