Category: Networks

Some interesting reading for you:

George Ou tells the story of the unfairness of TCP and offers some suggestions.

Adam Thierer takes on Jonathon Zittrain’s paen to programmability The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It.

And finally, Harold Feld explains the 700 MHz auction and what it does and doesn’t mean. Harold is a communist, but he’s a much smarter communist than his comrade Susan Crawford, who tries to read the same tea leaves and doesn’t say much.

Unsatisfied with the outcome of the FCC hearing on Comcast held in the maw of the Berkman Center, Kevin Martin turns to Larry Lessig for help: FCC Announces Stanford Hearing.

When you’re being investigated by Congress, anything to keep the eyes off the ball is helpful.

Seriously, this is happening is because the Commission lost the records of the Cambridge hearing; no, that’s not serious, but it might be.

Net Neutrality folks like to tout Japan as the model of a fine and healthy Internet access ecosystem, despite the VoIP blocking. They’re going to have a major fit when they learn P2P piracy is about to be banned in Japan:

The nation’s four Internet provider organizations have agreed to forcibly cut the Internet connection of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music, it was learned Friday.

The move aims to deal with the rise in illegal copying of music, gaming software and images that has resulted in huge infringements on the rights of copyright holders.

Resorting to cutting off the Internet connection of copyright violators has been considered before but never resorted to over fears the practice might involve violations of privacy rights and the freedom of use of telecommunications.

The Internet provider organizations have, however, judged it possible to disconnect specific users from the Internet or cancel provider contracts with them if they are identified as particularly flagrant transgressors in cooperation with copyright-related organizations, according to sources.

How can they do that, you ask? Well, it’s pretty easy. We can’t ban piracy in the US because critics can say “just upgrade the pipes like they’ve done in Japan and it’s not a problem.” That dodge obviously doesn’t fly over there.

Japan has a 100 Mb/s connection to the home that’s over 95% occupied at the busiest times of the time, a completely unacceptable situation. So they’re taking sensible action in the absence of a technical solution to bandwidth-hogging.

They’re not stupid, you see.

UPDATE: Count Sweden in as well:

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Swedish courts will soon be able to force the country’s Internet providers to produce information on suspected file-sharers in a move to crackdown on piracy, the culture and justice ministers said Friday.

File-sharing can be traced by tracking the IP addresses of the computers that download or distribute a file.

…along with France and the UK. I’m sensing a trend here, where Kevin Martin is the only opposition.

UPDATE 2: George Ou comments on the story.

Communications Daily did a good write-up of the ITIF’s Network Management Forum yesterday, where Brett Glass and I held forth with our views and recommendations about the Internet’s traffic glut. CD is a subscription-only publication, so I can’t link to the article, but here’s a little snippet where I pitched tiered service and Weighted Fair Queuing:

ISPs might reduce worries about competition and free speech raised by neutrality regulation supporters by putting management in consumers’ hands, Bennett said. A common argument for neutrality regulation says network management lets ISPs favor their services over competitors’. Bennett proposed letting consumers designate the services they want given the most bandwidth. Consumers would use their home gateway to assign VoIP, Bit-Torrent and other services to tiered subscription “buckets,” he said. Each bucket would offer an amount of time for each level of bandwidth, he said. A consumer wanting fast BitTorrent service could put it in the high-priority bucket and demote Web browser service to a low-priority bucket. If the bucket used up its high-priority minutes, the BitTorrent service would be “demoted” to a lower tier bucket, he said…

Adding bandwidth on networks won’t fix congestion woes, Bennett and Glass said, citing Japan. At 100 Mbps, Japan has some of the world’s largest pipes, but still faces significant congestion due to P2P networks, they said.

This is an example of solving a problem through technology rather than by regulation and law, and that’s what we do in networking.

Here’s the slides I showed at the ITIF in Washington, DC today.

The talk was well-received, if I do say so, especially the concept of ISPs selling buckets of packets at high and medium priority while allowing unlimited scavenger class for peer-to-peer.

Multichannel News has reported that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin made an exceptionally clueless remark about Comcast today:

Martin added that “two of the more troubling aspects” of the Comcast matter was that in his view Comcast at first denied the allegations, though he didn’t specify the nature of the allegations or the denials.

He said he was also troubled by allegations that Comcast altered certain user information in packets to effect a delay in peer-to-peer transmissions.

The first remark is spot-on, as Comcast clearly hurt itself by denying it was shaping traffic, but the second remark is clueless. Martin confuses the RST bit in the TCP header with “user information” when in fact it’s nothing of the kind. As RFC 3168 says, it’s a control bit:

There exist some middleboxes (firewalls, load balancers, or intrusion detection systems) in the Internet that either drop a TCP SYN packet configured to negotiate ECN, or respond with a RST. This document specifies procedures that TCP implementations may use to provide robust connectivity even in the presence of such equipment. – p. 4

I understand that Martin is a political creature and not an engineer, but is it too much to ask the head of the FCC to understand the difference between “user information” and network control?

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this guy needs to get over his blind hatred of cable companies. I don’t care if the cable guy ran over his dog, he needs to bring a little balance to his job.

Next Wednesday, March 12, Brett Glass and I will be speaking on network management at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation‘s office in Washington, DC.

For me, this will be an opportunity to develop some of the points I raised but didn’t have time to flesh out at the FCC hearing at Harvard, such as per-user fairness, Quality of Service tagging, and the role of back-pressure in the IETF model of congestion management. Most of the heavy lifting on traffic management is done inside ISP broadband networks today, and the Internet protocols have some unfortunate side effects when layered on top of them.

I’ll also explain the consequences of applying Free Press’ “Deadwood System” to modern broadband networks and contrast it with a practical alternative.

Next on the speaking agenda is an appearance at Supernova 2008, one of the premier events at the intersection of networking and public policy. I’d like to speak at Dave Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect, but he’s not real thrilled about the idea. Isenberg trashed me in absentia during a talk Tom Evslin made at the Berkman Center a while back, and I’d like equal time to respond.

UPDATE: Mr. Isenberg has offered me free registration to F2C. That’s not as good as a place at the table, but it’s a start. I should point out that his conference is highly-regarded by people who agree with his “stupid network” formulation as well as by those who don’t. We all want our networking experience to be as free from barriers as possible, we just disagree on which barriers are most significant. In Isenberg’s world, the carriers are the problem because they want to squeeze every last penny out of their customers; in mine, the biggest barrier is the unbridled appetite for network bandwidth of about 1% of the people who share wires with me. His concern is theoretical, while mine is real.

Check The Register for my write-up of the FCC hearing.

Testifying as an expert witness on bandwidth management at the FCC’s field hearing in snowy Cambridge this Monday was a heady experience. The hearing took place in a cramped corner of the Harvard Law School, a building that was already decorated with pickets, banners, and reporters when I arrived. Gingerly stepping through the snow in my California sailing shoes enabled me to avoid the protesters and find my way into the hallowed Ames courtroom. The room itself was full of buzz, and packed with a heavily Comcast-friendly crowd thanks to the cable giant’s exploitation of the first-come, first-seated rule. Comcast had gamed the hearing’s seating rules, hiring place-holders.

The composition of the crowd wasn’t apparent until Comcast VP David Cohen got an overly enthusiastic round of applause at the end of his prepared remarks, but pretty much only then. They didn’t hiss and boo – unlike the free-speech-loving neutralitarians who replaced them. I was invited to present an afternoon session.

It gets better, as I propose a decision-making framework.

Here’s your announcement on the FCC hearing in Boston this Monday.

11:00 a.m. Welcome/Opening Remarks

11:45 a.m. Technology Demonstration – Gilles BianRosa, Chief Executive Officer, Vuze, Inc.

12:00 p.m. Panel Discussion 1: Policy Perspectives

* Marvin Ammori, General Counsel, Free Press

* Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School

* The Honorable Daniel E. Bosley, State Representative, Massachusetts

* David L. Cohen, Executive Vice President, Comcast Corporation

* The Honorable Tom Tauke, Executive Vice President – Public Affairs, Policy and Communications, Verizon Communications

* Timothy Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

* Christopher S. Yoo, Professor of Law and Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, University of Pennsylvania Law School

1:30 Lunch break

2:15 Panel Discussion 2: Technological Perspectives

* Daniel Weitzner, Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Decentralized Information Group

* Richard Bennett, Network Architect

* David Clark, Senior Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

* Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer, BitTorrent

* David P. Reed, Adjunct Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab

* Scott Smyers, Senior Vice President, Network & Systems Architecture Division, Sony Electronics Inc.

3:45 p.m. Closing Remarks

4:00 p.m. Adjournment