Richard Bennett

Jay Sulzberger is a loopy open-source advocate from New York and essentially a Marxist. His contribution about net neutrality to the FTC is about the funniest attempt at advocacy I’ve ever read. Here’s a little:

Now cable TV is not the Internet, but most speakers at the FTC’s workshop spoke of the Net in ways that treated it as if it were just a form of interactive TV, with some extra special services bundled with interactive TV, “web viewing”, email, and doubtfully, voice over IP.

Questions around building another, perhaps several other, cable TV networks, are not part of the issue of Network Neutrality, because the Net is not TV of any kind.

Use of the word “broadband” to mean both the Net and cable TV helps perpetuate the fundamental confusion.

He goes on to throw a lot of dirt at a “duopoly” and tout the wonders of the Quote of the Day port. How this guy manages to feed himself on a regular basis is a complete mystery to me, but David Weinberger calls his rant “lucid.” Clearly, that’s a relative term.

Sulzberger is confused about the scope of net neutrality in particular and broadband regulation generally. When AT&T said Google wasn’t going to be allowed to use its pipes for free, the issue under discussion was IPTV, a broadband service that is perhaps easily confused with Internet subscriber service, but not actually identical. IPTV runs alongside voice and Internet subscriber services on residential broadband networks, but not through the Internet service. AT&T couldn’t care less about messing with QOTD, but they’re very serious about making money from IPTV.

Misguided and nonsensical ravings of this type aren’t really helping anybody, but they’re never going to stop. The Jay Sulzbergers and David Weinbergers of this world need to believe that an evil conspiracy is out to shut down QOTD, and no amount of rational argument will persuade them otherwise.

The new net neutrality paper from Florida U. is absolutely hilarious:

Whether to legislate to maintain “net neutrality”, the current status quo of prohibiting broadband service providers from charging online websites for preferential access to their residential and commercial customers, has become a subject under fierce debate. We develop a stylized game-theoretic model to address two critical issues of the net neutrality: (1) who are gainers and losers of abandoning net neutrality, and (2) will broadband service providers have greater incentive to expand their capacity without net neutrality.

We find that if the principle of net neutrality is abandoned, the broadband service provider definitely stands to gain from the arrangement, as a result of extracting the preferential access fees from the content providers. The content providers are thus left worse off, mirroring the stances of the two sides in the debate. Depending on parameter values in our framework, consumer surplus either does not change or is higher, and in the latter case, while a majority of consumers are better off, a minority of them is left worse off with larger wait times to access their preferred content. The social welfare increases when compared to the baseline case under net neutrality when one content provider pays for preferential treatment, but remains unchanged when both content providers pay. We also find that the incentive for the broadband service provider to expand under net neutrality is unambiguously higher than under the no net neutrality regime. This goes against the assertion of the broadband service providers that under net neutrality, they have limited incentive to expand.

Aside from their use of pidgin English (“the current status quo of prohibiting…from charging”, “critical issues of the net neutrality,” “has become a subject under fierce debate,” “a majority are better off, a minority is worse off”) the authors embarrass themselves with a wholly nonsensical definition of the terms of the debate. As Scott Cleland points out, if net neutrality really were the status quo, legislation would not be needed simply to preserve it.

In fact, net neutrality legislation seeks to create a new status quo where light users of Internet subscription services are required to subsidize heavy users, and where telecommunications companies would be prohibited from offering non-Internet-based IPTV services unless competitors could access their private IPTV facilities for free (where “free” means for no additional charge beyond what they pay for Internet service today.)

Verizon and AT&T offer IPTV services today, so this is clearly not a question of preserving the status quo.

The professors jump through hoops in order to “prove” that light users should be required to subsidize heavy users, and then baldly assert that the only difference between 10 Megabit Ethernet on fiber (10Base-FL [sic]) and Gigabit Ethernet is at the transceiver level. No dudes, not even close: system interfaces, buses, and MAC controllers have to be re-engineered to run faster, and distances suffer.

We’ve previously observed that Sir Timmy has taken a very nuanced approach to net neutrality by endorsing the concept but defining it in a way that differs radically from the actual legislation. He continued that approach in a Congressional hearing today, speaking platitudes about a content-neutral Web but refusing to endorse any bill:

Although he has previously voiced support for Net neutrality, Berners-Lee on Thursday stopped short of taking a position on the various bills on that topic proposed in Congress in the past year.

“I can say I feel that a nondiscriminatory Internet is very important for a society based on the World Wide Web,” he said. “I think that the communications medium is so important to society that we have to give it a special treatment.”

Proponents of Net neutrality define the concept as prohibiting network operators, such as Verizon and Comcast, from being allowed to charge content companies like Google and Amazon.com extra fees for prioritization. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), who arranged the hearing, was among the chief sponsors of a legislative proposal last year that would put that mandate into law.

Perhaps in a nod to the issue’s divisiveness, with Republicans tending to reject the idea of new laws, Markey on Thursday issued a disclaimer to his colleagues. “Before end of year, we’re going to hear from all sides on that issue so that everyone’s perspective is heard,” he said.

What we have here is a man who stumbled into a fight and now wants to get out of the middle of it without offending anyone. He knows that the content of the Markey bill is ridiculous, (and I know that he knows this because I brought it to his attention personally.) But to support peace and freedom is to support net neutrality, so he can’t say that he’s against it.

It’s my personal opinion that Lee took a position without fully understanding it. That probably sounds weird to anybody who doesn’t live packets and breath routes, but the fact is that Sir Tim’s expertise is in a wholly different part of the Internet than the part that’s affected by forwarding priorities, peering arrangements, and packet queues.

He’s an application guy, and his deal is images, fonts, links, document styles, and data types. In fact, the design of his invention, HTTP 1.0, was naive about Internet traffic. It insisted on chunking information up into tiny pieces roughly one third the optimum size for Internet traffic management, and by slowing them down immensely by not using TCP sockets correctly (every object had its own socket, and hence suffered from Slow Start.) No traffic guy would make such a mistake, and the folks who came behind cleaned up the mess. So here’s a guy trying to do the right thing and largely failing because he moved too soon and can’t admit he made a mistake.

Bob Kahn did it the right way: he sat back and listened until he understood what the debate was about, and then came down on the right side of the question, against the new regulations. That’s the kind of guy who invents an Internet.

Many of the Internet’s great heroes have turned out to be one-trick ponies. There are some guys, like Kahn, David Clark, Van Jacobsen, and Jon Postel, who managed to make important contributions year after year. Clark was the main author of the “End to End Arguments in System Design” paper, but he was also one of the main men behind DiffServ, twenty years later. And then you have guys who pop up once with a good idea but never have another one, and that makes me wonder if the idea was really original.

I think the serial innovators are the ones to heed.

Now TV viewers have a choice of cable providers in a few markets, thanks to the roll-out of the AT&T Lightspeed project, sold as “U-verse:

AT&T’s advanced broadband services – voice, high-speed data and video – are sold under the “U-verse” brand name. The service is currently available in 13 markets in five states. Lightspeed was announced at a splashy press conference in late 2004. At the time, AT&T said it expected to spend $4 billion to $6 billion to make a menu of broadband services available to 18 million homes by the end of 2007.

AT&T started making some revisions to its targets in 2005. One called for Lightspeed to reach 18 million homes by 2008, giving itself a one-year extension on that total. In a recent 10-K filing, AT&T again revised its plan, raising the 2008 goal to 19 million households. In that filing, AT&T says nothing about the original 2007 targets.

The San Antonio-based communications giant has also updated its cost estimate. AT&T now says its spending on Lightspeed from 2006 through 2008 will add up to $4.6 billion. The total expenditure from 2004 through 2008: $5.1 billion.

This offering is the reason AT&T sought nationwide video franchising from Congress last year, only to lose after net neutrality activists twisted the product into a bizarre caricature. But that didn’t slow the phone company down, as states have proved willing to enact statewide video franchising measures that allow deployment as fast as AT&T can deliver it anyway.

So what is it about a second supplier of Triple-Play that’s so threatening to populist Democrats and consumer rights lobbyists? Nothing really, but they’ve been tripped-up by their own rhetoric. This service uses IPTV to deliver TV programming, and the consumer people have made the unfortunate mistake of believing that all network traffic framed in IP is “the Internet”. IPTV is a service that’s confined to a private network, and it never touches the public Internet. That’s annoying to Internet-based companies like Google and Netflix who want to compete with cable TV through these private networks as well, but not so understandable that the U-verse network should be opened up to them for free.

And that was the point that AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre was making when he said Google wouldn’t be using his pipes for free: Internet service, fine; IPTV service, not so fine.

Is that so hard to understand?

Scott Cleland mentions that His Eminence, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee will testify before Congressman Ed Markey’s House subcommittee on Telecommunications, the Internet, and Shameless Pandering to the Conspiracy Nuts Thursday. Markey has an ambitious agenda:

In a wide-ranging conversation yesterday, Markey laid out a broad telecom agenda that could pit him against the telephone and cable companies — expressing interest in “paranoia-inducing alternatives” like municipal broadband projects and wireless carriers that could pose a competitive threat to cable and telephone companies and push them to innovate.

He stressed that network neutrality — an initiative to ensure that the Internet does not become a two-tiered system in which some companies pay fees for priority access –will likely dominate the discussion over the next two years.

Innovations such as the Web browser, search engines, and the Internet did not emerge from large established companies, and forcing firms to pay more to reach users would stifle creativity, he said.

It’s a position that puts him at odds with major industry players.

Primarily, this position puts him at odds with reality. Was the Web browser actually an innovation that didn’t come from a large established company? Well, given the creation of a web by the interconnection of hyperlinks in documents on the Internet, the browser was more a requirement than an innovation, and hyperlinks were actually first implemented in research labs funded by large enterprises, many private and some public. The first web browser that was fully-functional was produced by Microsoft, so that’s one error. The first search engine that was worth spit was Alta Vista, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation, so that’s two. And the Internet itself was produced by contractors working for the biggest enterprise of all, the United States government, so there’s error number three.

And where did the key technologies upon which the Internet was based come from? The transistor, the high speed data link, the modem, the digital modem and the Unix operating system were all produced by researchers at Bell Labs, part of the world’s most evil monopoly, so oops again. And the personal computers that made the Internet necessary were created by IBM and Intel, using technologies developed by Xerox. So where is this yarn of the virtuous little guys innovating like crazy while the dinosaurs slept really coming from? It’s nothing more than a cheap fantasy.

Now I don’t really expect politicians to be historians of technology, and to actually understand the things they regulate. But they do have people on staff who are supposed to keep them from saying stupid things, and it’s abundantly clear that Markey’s aren’t cutting it.

The hearing will be a real knee-slapper if Markey’s people can’t keep his mouth in check, and history suggests they’re bound to fail.

But we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Neutrinos are touting two new drooling videos on the regulations they’re trying pass, one that makes Telcos out to be space aliens and the other that makes them out to be parasites on the networks they’ve built. And they’re getting rave reviews from the confidence men who’ve conjured the net neutrality issue out of thin air and the million morons who’ve been taken in by them. Here’s a little bit of an antidote:

I don’t know who produced it, but it’s sharp. The fundamental question you have to ask any neutrino who claims the Internet is under attack by Telcos who want to censor blogs is simply this: “Where’s the proof? Just because politicians and professional scare artists say something will happen some day doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

The reality is that phone companies want to compete with cable to bring TV Programming into your home. They make money from Internet access as well, and they want to sell that to you too, just as they always have. The only new issue is about TV, not the Internet.

Neutrinos try to make their case using videos and songs because it can’t be made in rational, clear, verifiable prose.

Net neutrality is a con game.