Month: August 2006

Tom Evslin’s talk yesterday at the Harvard Law School’s 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.

I’ve been critical of Isenberg and this “stupid network” idea for at least three years, so this whole “tool of the Telcos” thing is actually quite hilarious. Am I an engineer? Well, I have a philosophy degree and some graduate work in network engineering, have my name on several networking standards and patents, have started, contributed to, and lead several networking vendor groups, and my job title has the word “engineer” in it, so I’d have to say actually, yes, I am an engineer. (I wonder how many engineers were in that audience.) As to the “troll” charge, that’s in the eye of the beholder. I don’t tend to follow the herd, if that’s what it means, but I believe I offer substantial arguments most of the time. I’d certainly compare the corpus of my engineering work to Isenberg’s any old time.

In the course of the talk, Tom maintained that his success with ITXC, the first VoIP wholesaler, proved that the Internet doesn’t need any special mechanisms to provide high-quality voice delivery. And indeed, this is sometimes true.

While the Internet is not a neutral network, having been designed to transfer files, at the margins it can do some real-time carriage, sometimes reliably, especially if only one or two companies are exploiting it. But according to ITXC’s own claims, the general user can’t do what they do, you need their patented BestValue Routing:

ITXC achieves high quality of service through the use of its patented BestValue Routing applications. These applications were specifically designed and developed by ITXC to deliver consistent, high quality call completion over the Internet. Without BestValue Routing applications, carrier class quality of service over the Internet would not be possible.

Using proprietary routing and re-routing algorithms, equipment placed throughout the Internet, and sophisticated network overview software, ITXC is able to maintain high quality on the public Internet.

The use of BestValue Routing applications differentiates ITXC from clearinghouses and telecom commodity brokers that are merely financial intermediaries between network providers. Committed to quality, ITXC does not treat its customers’ minutes as commodities, but instead as a precious resource.

And what happens to you if you try and use these special methods that put intelligence into the network? I’m very glad you asked:

PRINCETON, N.J. –(Business Wire)– May 7, 2004 — ITXC Corp. (NASDAQ:ITXC) today announced that it has filed a lawsuit against Acceris Communications Technologies, Inc. and Acceris Communications, Inc. for infringement of a number of ITXC’s patents relating to voice over internet protocol (“VoIP”) technology. The suit was commenced in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, and alleges infringement of five of ITXC’s United States Patents, numbers 5,889,774, 6,026,087, 6,404,864, 6,628,760 and 6,661,878, directed generally to the transmission of telephone calls over the Internet and the completion of telephone calls by switching them off the Internet and onto a public switched telephone network (PSTN).

That’s right, you’re busted. So don’t try this at home.

The Internet is not a neutral network, it was designed to do one thing well. We now know how to build networks capable of supporting more than one type of application well. So if you think the Internet generated great innovation, just imagine what you could get from four Internets in one. But we can’t deploy multi-services technology if the Snowe-Dorgan bill passes, and that’s why I fight it.

And yes, I also think David Isenberg is an asshole and a moron, so beating him is part of the fun, but only a small part.

UPDATE: Jim Lippard points out that Acceris fired the first shot to defend their patent on VoIP. Here’s that patent in all its glory.

Who knew that Markos’s man in Connecticutt, Ned Lamont, was an unreformed cable company monopolist?

Don’t take my word for it, it’s in the New York Times:

Mr. Lamont, a cable television executive, planned to visit election precincts in Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford, three cities where he is counting on a strong vote for his insurgent bid.

I don’t suppose the dude is excited about “net neutrality,” do you?

It’s going to be interesting to see how well the digital brownshirts do in expelling the DLC and thereby splitting the Democratic Party. Republicans are salivating for a Lamont victory, I can assure you.

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.

The Register has published a number of reader comments on the Net neutrality debacle, er, debate, one of whom takes me to task:

TCP/IP’s ‘end-to-end’ nature (what used to be called a “connectionless network layer”) – far from being the consensual fashion of the time – was ferociously denounced by communications experts. They basically said it was just the sort of rubbish you’d expect with a communication system invented by computer people: it obviously wouldn’t scale.

Indeed, there have always been protocol wars, and they’re generally pitted computer people against networking people. The TCP Internet was a radical departure from networking principles as they were understood in the 1970s, and it turns out most of the criticisms from networking people were sound. The TCP Internet is great for handling one type of traffic – store and forward file transfers – and not so great for handling other types of traffic, such as real-time voice and video. As the latter is now more important than the former, the Internet needs to be tweaked again, and not for the first time.

Read the comments at The Reg, some are quite interesting.

Declan McCullagh reports that the telecom and video franchising reform may hit the floor very soon:

Reports are circulating that Sen. Ted Stevens, the Republican champion of a bill to rewrite telecommunications laws, is trying to hold a vote on it this week.

That would be pretty keen, but Google is fighting hard for a subsidy.

Net Neutrality, as conceived in the Snowe-Dorgan bill and similar measures, is a subsidy to large bandwidth consumers such as Google and Yahoo. This is not to say to that these companies don’t pay anything for Internet bandwidth today as much as it is to point out that whatever they pay (and it’s far below market rates that you and I pay) doesn’t cover Quality of Service. Let me back up a little and explain what this is about.

The Telcos – principally Verizon, but to a much lesser extent AT&T and Bell South – are in the process of transitioning from old-fashioned DSL to systems that will enable them to offer cable-rivaling triple-play service. This means TV, phone, and Internet over a common wire. This can be done as the cable companies have done it, by partitioning the cable into slices of frequency for the different services, it can be done using strict time-division multiplexing a la the old days, or even better, by running IP across the entire bandwidth of the cable and segregating services with packet priorities. The latter means is the best way because it means in principle that you can use your entire cable for Internet downloads when you aren’t using higher-priority services.

The natural assumption is that they would be entitled to charge fees based on the service level a customer chooses, just the cable company does today. I can buy phone, TV, and Internet from Comcast separately or together. If the technology that Comcast uses to segregate these services changes, the economics don’t, inherently, so they should be allowed to continue pricing these services separately even if they’re all delivered over some form of Internet Protocol.

Google doesn’t think so, because they want their video and phone service to perform just as well as Comcast’s or Verizon’s without their having to pay anything more than base level Internet connection service prices.

So net neutrality amounts to this: even though Comcast or Verizon may charge their customers more for TV and phone service than they do for basic Internet service, Google should never have to pay more than a basic Internet connection fee for accessing Comcast customers at the highest level of service. Google wants to pay for basic cable and get HBO for free.

That’s what “net neutrality” really means. Mike McCurry wrote an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun that expresses this idea in a less-than-clear fashion, implying that Google doesn’t even pay for a basic cable, and the boyz at Techdirt whacked him around for it:

[McCurry’s] written up an editorial for the Baltimore Sun that doesn’t bother to mention his lobbying duties, or who has funded them. McCurry tries to make it seem as though the whole net neutrality thing is simply a ploy by Google to get “free” bandwidth. He notes, derisively, that “a $117 billion company like Google wants legislation that would drive Internet prices higher.” Of course, he doesn’t happen to mention that his viewpoint is funded by AT&T, who at close of business on Monday appears to be worth (oh, look at that) $117 billion as well.

Leaving aside the “grass-roots purity” angle, which is silly in a fight where Google’s side is represented by paid bloggers at Save the Internet, Techdirt has at best a technical point, not a substantial one. Google is seeking a subsidy, make no mistake about it.

And if that subsidy becomes law, we can more or less forget about any significant upgrades in the last mile, because there will be nobody to pay for them.

UPDATE: For the record, here’s the relevant part of Snowe-Dorgan:

(5) only prioritize content, applications, or services accessed by a user that is made available via the Internet within the network of such broadband service provider based on the type of content, applications, or services and the level of service purchased by the user, without charge for such prioritization;

Emphasis added.