Silicon Valley’s newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, runs an Op-Ed of mine on the net neutrality circus today:
The circus is coming to Stanford University. The network neutrality circus, that is, which makes cable companies the whipping boys for underlying flaws in the design of the Internet.
Go to the paper to read the whole thing. It runs counter-point to a piece that was written by a PR firm employed by E-Bay’s Skype subsidiary, and reads like it. The agency buried their lede in the fourth graf:
Cable companies that bring Internet connectivity to our homes should not be the gatekeepers making decisions about which Internet sites people see. Not only is this bad for consumers, it’s bad for businesses, especially in Silicon Valley, the home of innovation and venture capital.
Just the same old blah blah, gatekeeper, blah blah consumer, blah blah innovation, from two years ago when all that language was fresh a little less stale. If anyone believes carriers profit by preventing people from visiting web sites, drop me a note so I can lease you the Bay Bridge (I’ve already sold the Golden Gate to a company that thinks its VoIP product can thrive on unmanaged networks.)
Thank you for writing what may be the first intelligent piece on this subject I have yet to encounter.
I operate a small ISP on the coast of North Carolina – I understand the challenges of “net neutrality.” If I’m “neutral”, a tiny number of my customers can make the rest unhappy. One sentence in your piece spells out the simple technical and economic reality of the entire subject:
“Peer-to-peer applications are designed to consume a disproportionate share of network bandwidth, so carriers have to limit their traffic to provide good service to most of their other users.”
My TOS don’t allow residential customers to operate a server. When a P2P application takes over their computer, thats what they become.
I’m sorry that 95% of the writing on this sees this as some form of censorship. It isn’t. I really don’t care what my customers read or visit (in fact in my network, I intentionally don’t even know). I have to care about bandwidth consumed however. An ISP is a large shared network. Network management requires one to enforce what our moms all taught us – share.
Thank you again.
Maybe it’s because I am not on either of the very polarized sides, but caught in the crossfire between them, that the press barely covered my comments at the event. Or maybe it was because I only had enough time to make about half of the points I wanted to make. But see the URL http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html for the take of an independent ISP — one who cares about consumer choice and free speech — on the issues in this debate.
Richard:
Great article. You made a lot of points in a few paragraphs.
Too bad the Mercury News makes it so darn difficult to get past their registration and authentication. There’s some kind of Microsoft Passport server in the way, I think. I did manage to get to your article as a registered user and invoking their site search facility. The URL of the article as I read it is:
http://www.mercurynews.com//ci_8955737?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com
I’ll post the original, pre-edited draft, it’s much better.