I need to find some time to respond to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s defense of packet-drop in some detail, but for now it’s sufficient to note that they refuse to admit that Layer Two networks have traffic problems.
The last Register piece has some people at the Net Neutrality Squad excited, most notably Bob Frankston, who says: “a great engineer questions the constraints and gets fired because the constraints serve a policy need higher than mere science or reality.” Far be it for me to let “mere reality” bias my perspective.
The folks at Public Knowledge and Open Left (Matt Stoller) are up in arms about the success of Connect Kentucky, a perfectly benign public interest bringing broadband to the rural residents of the namesake state. The fuss is explained by Dr. Robert Atkinson. It illustrates the principle that no good deed should go unpunished.
Scott Cleland has a fascinating piece on the parallels between process scheduling in operating systems and packet scheduling in cloud computing that’s amazingly insightful. Scott’s not a software engineer, but he thinks like one of us.
Andrew Odlyzko’s latest paper on net neutrality is severely flawed, with significant errors of fact. It needs a serious examination, but nobody’s happy with it on either side of the debate.
Tim Swanson has an interesting piece on the economics of networking on the Ludwig Mises web site that’s fine reading. Market solutions to these problems are always preferable.
Ok, back to work.