Category: Net Neutrality

Stephen Colbert takes on Wikipedia again with this great clip on Wiki-lobbying. He exhorts fans to edit the Wikipedia entry on “Reality” to say “Reality has become a commodity” and sure enough they comply. Ironically, they’re fought off by Wikipedia Admin Raul654, one of the Google fan-boys who mangled the Network Neutrality entry to reflect a completely warped point of view.

Linklove to ValleyWag.

For today’s “compare and contrast” exercise look at the concise and clear Peter Huber explaining why net neutrality is a boon to lawyers:

The new Congress is determined to enact a “net neutrality” bill. Nobody yet knows what those two words mean. The new law won’t provide any intelligible answer, either. It will, however, put a real drag on new capital investment in faster digital pipes by making it illegal for many big companies to help pay for them, while leaving everyone guessing about the details for years. That last bit is great news for all the telecom lawyers (like me) who get paid far too much to make sense out of idiotic new laws like this one.

…with Visicalc Frankston’s vision of citizen net admins:

The Internet connection just carries raw bits. We get to decide what the bits mean. The carriers’ attempt to provide us with services over-defined and thus limited the solution. The results may seem counter-intuitive – by narrowly defining the allowable solutions the carriers’ effort failed. Instead those Internet packets gave us the opportunity to choose among any solutions including our own.

Today the gas and electric utilities deliver information via their web sites without having to make any special deals with the carriers. I use the term “carrier” but these companies are really in the business of providing services and deploy CFR only as a means of providing the services. The failure of the residential gateway highlights the sharp difference between the service culture and the Internet culture. Yet we still confuse the two.

Do you stop BitTorrent before picking up the VoIP phone? Then shame on you for discriminating, you control freak!

Check out Cringely on Google’s plans for world domination:

Google controls more network fiber than any other organization. This is not to say that Google OWNS all that fiber, just that they control it through agreements with network operators. I find two very interesting aspects to this story: 1) that Google has acquired — or even needs to acquire — so much bandwidth, and; 2) that they don’t own it, since probably the cheapest way to pick up that volume of fiber would be to simply buy out any number of backbone providers like Level 3 Communications.

The “do no evil” guys are a lot scarier than the telcos or Microsoft, as they have absolutely no conscience. You’ve been warned.

Of course, it’s likely that a company so full of itself and stocked with overly-narrow employees will blow up in a fairly spectacular way someplace between here and world domination. On the other hand, it may soon be too late to stop global warming or global Googling.

Public Knowledge intern Bill Herman has written a marvelous piece of propaganda for net neutrality regulations and managed to have it published in a law journal.

Herman argues, in essence, that the traditional Internet represents the last word on network architecture, and any attempt to improve it will necessarily result in the Lord smiting the American Economy with boils, plagues of locusts, and hordes of hungry millionaires unable to take their rightful place among the billionaires. It’s actually a fine example of the errors that will be made when questions of technical network architecture are decided by legal academics, regulators, interns, and other wannabes.

My short rebuttal: the traditional Internet doesn’t represent the last word in network architecture, it’s actually the first of a series of experiments that will need to be conducted to find the best way to design networks for multiple services. For essentially its entire life, the Internet has only been concerned with providing service to one type of application, the “careful file transfer”, hence it’s not needed to deal with the problems it faces today.

The Internet of the future will absorb the functions that have traditionally been provided by the telephone and cable TV networks, as well as functions that aren’t performed at all today (such as rapid service for massively multi-player on-line games.) In the course of this future development, network engineers need the same freedom to experiment that the original researchers had in the ARPANet and early Internet days.

It’s way too early in the game for government to begin mandating solutions to technical problems that are just now beginning to be researched.

If this paper gets any traction, I’ll do a more detailed critique of the mistaken assertions, shoddy reasoning, and unfortunate smears it contains.

One of the lamest forms of discourse is sliming your opponent as a stooge of capitalistic or other assumed-to-be-evil interests. Professors Farber, Katz, Yoo, and Faulhaber have been attacked as shills by Jeff Chester on account of their publishing a well-reasoned Op-Ed in the Washington Post opposing new Internet regulations:

Super cable monopoly Comcast hired UC Berkeley’s Katz in 2003 to produce research which placed the industry in favorable light. Comcast, of course, opposes network neutrality [I cover the role of Katz and other communications -academics-for -industry hire in my new book, btw]. Professor Yoo worked for the cable lobby NCTA last year to write a net neutrality study as well. Even Davd Farber should have disclosed he has spoken under the banner of the Verizon Foundation at Carnegie Mellon.

Note that Chester’s smear of Farber consists solely of the professor’s giving one of a series of lectures at his university sponsored by Verizon (UPDATE: Farber was not compensated for this lecture in any way. He frequently gives talks for no honorarium, even to Microsoft after testifying against them. Chester’s smear is asinine.)

Chester’s trick often works in a capitalist society because we’re awash in money and somebody’s always paying somebody else. Chester himself makes his living writing books and giving talks on the evils of capitalism, and apparently does pretty well at it. Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky are both multi-millionaires from that very same pursuit.

In the network neutrality debate, one could point out that Google employees give thousands of dollars to Moveon.org, a primary supporter of Save the Internet, or that the other primary supporter, Free Press, is financially supported by the Schuman Foundation headed by Bill Moyers, who’s paid $200,000 a year for this virtuous task. Moyers aired a program on PBS that was a naked advertisement for Free Press, and spoke at Free Press’ National Conference on Media Reform funded by multi-billionaire currency trader George Soros’ Open Society Institute. One might argue that Soros wants to weaken investigative journalism so he can engage in legally questionable currency raiding without restrictions, so he supports a cause that would erode the financial basis of real investigative journalism.

According to Jeff Chester’s analysis, that’s the only way to understand net neutrality: I’m following the money (and Speaking Truth to Power, dude!)

I don’t buy that, so I’ll have to follow the arguments and judge them on their merits.

Dave Farber, Michael Katz, Chris Yoo, and Gerald Faulhaber have a very concise and well-constructed Op-Ed in today’s WaPo on the downsides of net neutrality regulations:

The legislative proposals debated in the 109th Congress take a very different approach. They would impose far-reaching prohibitions affecting all broadband providers, regardless of whether they wielded monopoly power and without any analysis of whether the challenged practice actually harmed competition. If enacted, these proposals would threaten to restrict a wide range of innovative services without providing any compensating customer benefits.

Most of the people who’ve made substantial contributions to the Internet in the past are converging on this point of view: it’s harmful to make too many restrictions on the services the network provides to users and applications. Contrast this view, which is empirically provable, with the assertion on the other side that there are mystical and unprovable reasons to favor a dearth of network services. The evidence is all on the side of deregulation.

H/T to Verizon’s Policy Blog

Andrew Orlowski has some fun with the AT&T-Bell South merger:

In a decade, American consumers have seen the number of Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or Baby Bells, coalesce from six down to just three: the odd man out, Qwest, the RBOC which covers the sparsely populated Mountain states, is surely next on AT&T’s menu.

The extraordinary thing is that all this took place at a time in the wake of the fall out from the telecoms bubble. The Bells enjoyed little affection from the public in any case, long before Global Crossing and MCI. and with an unpopular Republican President, Democrats can have been expected to push a few populist buttons, and hear some bells.

What actually happened is that Whitacre got everything he wanted, but only thanks to the aid of The Democratic Party, most of whom aren’t aware how thoroughly they’ve been outwitted.

Now that’s style.

It’s certainly an interesting perspective. I’ve observed that AT&T played a game of misdirection last year in a more concrete way. While activists focused on video franchising and net neutrality in Washington, the phone company quietly got statewide franchising from the big state legislatures in California, New Jersey, and Michigan without much fanfare. That’s playing the system.

The fact that states can’t impose net neutrality obligations even if they want to is not small thing, either.

Google’s one patent on network Quality of Service, US Patent #7142536, isn’t very neutral:

The present invention provides efficient and effective quality of service for information that is time sensitive (e.g., real time data)…In one embodiment of the present invention time sensitive information is cut through routed on a virtual channel and pre-empts non time sensitive information. In one embodiment a communication path probe is cut through routed via intermediate network devices to establish a communication path before other information is communicated from a originating source to a final destination…

It’s also pretty incoherent as it doesn’t appear to work in any of the presented embodiments; dropping TCP packets because they’re too old doesn’t accomplish anything but a retransmission.

This neut debate is interesting, featuring Tod Cohen, George Gilder, Peter Huber, Lawrence Lessig, Paul McWilliams, and Andy Kessler at Gilder’s Telecosm Conference.

Lessig really stands out – he sounds like a twelve-year-old girl demanding an increase in her allowance, and the rest tell her to do her chores. That’s not much of an exaggeration. Gilder is also pretty incoherent, but the others have some interesting things to say.

And this talk between Ed Feigenbaum and Bob Kahn should open a few eyes. Kahn says he’s not interested in network neutrality (1:44 in), which to him is a destructive slogan. Networks are built on incremental improvements, and net neutrality stifles that growth. Here’s some quotes:

If it’s more efficient to do things inside the net than outside the net, I’m OK with that…Companies that make innovations should be able to control them…You really want to incentivize people to innovate…I’m totally opposed to mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net.

He says he doesn’t agree with his former assistant, Google’s Cerf, that innovation has to be pushed outside the net.

(Note: Bob Kahn is the guy who actually invented the Internet, not Al Gore, not Vint Cerf, not Jon Postel, not Bob Metcalfe, not Tim Berners-Lee. Bob Kahn invented the Internet and he’s against network neutrality. This will be on the test, so write it down.)